Kodiilabs was founded in 2023 in Montreal, Canada, to build healthcare technology for markets where the industry’s assumptions break. We chose Côte d’Ivoire as the proving ground, deliberately: one of West Africa’s fastest-growing economies, Francophone, advancing fast, and still facing the hardest conditions a system can meet. No reliable network, no recent hardware, records systems that had never met a standard, and users the industry had never designed for. We spent two years there building Ayana, with a team of Ivorian developers we trained ourselves, at real wages and toward real engineering careers, and with government agencies, planning what healthcare there should become, not just shipping a product into it.

What we learned shipping in those conditions became a thesis: systems built where the assumptions break are better systems everywhere. AI came later, as a multiplier for a team that already knew how to ship, never a substitute for one. In 2026 we moved to Windsor, Ontario, and started applying the thesis beyond health: to agricultural traceability, to regulated data, to languages with no tooling. Every product in the studio runs on what those two years taught us.