Angani co-founder and CEO Phares Kariuki has been ousted and furious clients of the cloud hosting and back-up firm are threatening to sue Angani if the interruptions are not sorted.
Founded in 2013 by Phares Kariuki and Brian Mutia, Angani raised an indisclosed seed round led by Invested Development with participation from Africa’s Talking, Savannah Fund, and Africa Angels Network to get East African SME’s into the cloud.
The pay-as-you-go cloud service was steadily gaining traction in a market where hosting has been left to international players due to capacity and misinformation. Angani said it would use the money make hosting awesome by buying infrastructure in bulk, virtualizing it and lease it out for a reduced rate.
Turns out some sites are online while others are offline because of in-fighting from the two factions. Our friends at TechWeez and PropertyNinja are among those affected.
Angani is being run by COO Riyaz Bachani who was appointed by the firm in May last year. Bachani, an MIT trained engineer, is a former CTO at Wananchi and Kenya Data Networks and serves on the Technical Committee of the Kenya Internet Exchange Point among others.
Bachani is said to be on the good side of the investors while Kariuki is out and fighting the case in court according to a report by our friends at Kachwanya.com, “The CEO had been thrown out and the matter had been taken to court. Services are down due to the infighting between the two factions within the Angani Management team. Now this why I am annoyed with the whole situation. If you are hosting with Angani then you should know that downtime is probably caused by the wrangles and not something which is beyond their control.”
The report adds that the two original founders still have log in details of the system or part of it and that’s why some services are up while some others are down. We have contacted the parties and will be back with a full story.
My wife, an ICT/Telecoms lawyer is ready to sue Angani if service is not restored in the next 24hrs, contact me if you are affected.
— Tom Makau (@tommakau) November 5, 2015
No one is convincing me to host anything locally again, ever!!!! I lost data and they are dodgy about recovery. https://t.co/HG8IE2CzA2 — Tom Makau (@tommakau) November 5, 2015
Angani was heading in the right direction…at a point a thought it was the model on how to run a start-up…well, that was then
— Kachwanya (@kachwanya) November 5, 2015
