Henon EdTech is an education technology company I co-founded, now Ethiopia's integrated education technology platform. We started from a picture that bothered us: teachers spending more time on paper records than on teaching, principals buried in ledger books with no real view of their own school, and parents completely in the dark, with no notice when a child didn't show up, no way to check fees, and no connection to the classroom.

Our answer was to give every school a complete digital operating system: fee collection, academics, attendance, parent communication, and student records in one place, built for Ethiopian schools. After three years of building quietly, we announced the company publicly in August 2026.

Scale

• 1000+ schools onboarded across Ethiopia
• 416,000+ students on the platform
• 392,000+ parents connected to their children's education
• 3 bank partners: CBE, Wegagen Bank, and Lion Bank
• ETB 8 billion+ in school fee transactions processed through the platform

I wear many hats at Henon: I build the games and the LMS backend, represent the company to international partners, drive our AI direction, and grow the engineering team.

Engineering

2D Games for Adaptive Learning

I design and build the web-based 2D vector games at the heart of Henon's gamified learning experience. Instead of static lessons, students learn by playing, and the games respond to how each student performs:

• Interactive 2D games built for the browser, covering curriculum content as play
• Game mechanics wired into the adaptive engine, so difficulty and content adjust to each student's level in real time
• Assessments embedded inside gameplay, turning practice and testing into something students actually want to do
• Lightweight vector rendering so games run smoothly on the low-end devices common in classrooms

LMS Backend: Built Solo

I architected and developed the entire backend of the learning management system on my own, the platform behind online classes, assignments, quizzes, and multimedia lessons:

• Full API powering courses, lessons, assignments, quizzes, and student progress tracking
• The data layer that feeds the adaptive system: capturing student performance and serving personalized content back
• Multi-role access for students, teachers, and administrators
• Designed to hold up at scale: the platform serves tens of thousands of students at 99.9% uptime

International Partnerships

I'm the face of Henon in its collaborations with international companies, leading the outreach, video-conference negotiations, and integration work that bring world-class content to Ethiopian classrooms:

• Britannica: negotiated with their team to bring Britannica's encyclopedic content into Henon's platform
• PhET Simulations (University of Colorado Boulder): partnered to integrate their interactive science and math simulations, so students in grades 6-12 learn by experimenting rather than memorizing
• Lesan AI: collaborating to use their Ethiopian-tailored AI models, giving our students an AI that actually understands Ethiopia's local languages
• hihilulu: partnering to bring their Chinese-learning platform to Henon, ahead of Ethiopia's move to roll out Chinese language education nationwide

AI Direction

AI at Henon:

• Designed the AI-powered adaptive learning system that personalizes content per student
• Push the whole team to embrace AI in their daily workflow
• Research and evaluate AI model pricing to keep our costs sustainable at scale

Leadership & Team Building

• Scout talented students from universities, bring them in as interns, and supervise them until they grow into full Henon engineers, a pipeline that has sharpened my leadership as much as their skills
• Known internally as the person who finds creative, low-cost engineering paths to capabilities that would normally demand serious funding

Operations

• Manage the company's online payments, including our AI service subscriptions
• Supervise the release pipeline for the Henon mobile app on Google Play