Richard Ruoro

I got my first computer in 1989, an Amiga 500. I started in graphic design, with Photoshop and CorelDraw, and spent 2000 to 2002 producing music and running a studio before moving into interactive production and web development in 2002. The design habit never left: I still do the brand and the interface before I write the first line of a product.

My career was built in the foundational layers of digital infrastructure and telecommunications. I managed the value-added services platform at Sasanet, whose free-SMS service sent about a million messages a month, and worked on the Committee of Experts constitutional-education campaign that reached Kenyans nationwide during the Katiba referendum. In 2011 I co-founded Global Message Company, one of Kenya's longest-running communications infrastructure companies, delivering bulk SMS to enterprises, government agencies and NGOs across East Africa. It is now moving into AI-augmented messaging: LLM workflows, automation pipelines and an API-first architecture.

From there the work moved up the stack: portals, marketplaces and member platforms in the 2010s; cloud-native systems and mobile-first products in the late 2010s; and now AI-native products built on vector search, embeddings and agentic workflows. Since 1997 Knight Ventures has been the vehicle for the products I incubate myself.

Unlike specialists who focus on one discipline, I operate across three connected domains: infrastructure, product innovation and technology strategy. That lets me see technology from the technical, operational, commercial and regulatory viewpoints at once, and it is why clients who come to me for a website usually leave with a product.