Community – Culture – Small Business
9/27/2024 – We are excited to announce that Ike Nwaneri has joined African Restaurant’s Week’s Advisory Board. As a dynamic leader with extensive experience across many fields including the hospitality industry, Ike brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise that will be invaluable as we continue to grow and strengthen our initiatives.
His passion for supporting cultural initiatives and empowering small businesses aligns perfectly with our mission and we are confident his insights will help guide us as we embark on new projects and expand our impact.
African Restaurant Week is honored to have Ike as part of our advisory team, and we look forward to collaborating with him to further our goals of boosting the local economy by supporting culture and small business, fighting hunger, fostering social good, building communal and cultural ties. Please join us in welcoming Ike Nwaneri to the African Restaurant Week family!
Ike Nwaneri was born in Nigeria in 1981. He is popularly known as a creative marketing engineer and 3-time award winning marketer in the United States of America. In the past 41 years, he has lived on two continents, operated on projects and clients in 7 countries, created startups that have developed positive business development impact for Fortune 100 companies like McDonald’s, BMW, MINI, Rolls Royce motor cars, Renaissance hotel, State Farm Insurance and over 350 brands in different industries of hospitality, technology, education, finance, beauty, and 100+ start up entrepreneurs pursuing their dreams.
He has developed marketing campaigns that have garnered billions of views in online traffic, over $450 million in revenue, and built three start up companies, of which he has made two successful exits.
With university degrees in Marketing, Systems and Computer Science, and Business Management from Howard university and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management, he is professionally trained to build, develop and grow companies from inception to scale. His company has offices and operations in the United States, Africa (Nigeria, Kenya) and Asia (Jaipur India, Guangzhou China).
His most notable startups include cofounding Kojami in 2007, a mobile and web events startup that instantly, in seconds, created event websites and promoted these events to mobile devices nearby or within social online networks, while using photos and video content within the platform to entertain other end users seeking events to attend closeby. This startup at its peak had 8 million active users absorbing content daily and 50,000 events created everyday in USA, United Kingdom, Africa and Mexico. This company was sold in 2011.
He is the designer, patent holder and inventor of the KRUZR1 and KRUZR2 life sized multi-purpose artificial intelligent robots, used for sterilizing and security services of high traffic areas throughout the United States in 2020 and 2021. He cofounded ZEND health, an online health supplies marketplace that traded millions of units of various medical supplies to small business owners, schools and government agencies during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. He is passionately active in innovating the restaurant and hospitality industry, as he works currently on different boards and constantly innovates the operations, marketing and business development for restaurants around the country. He has accomplished this with hundreds of restaurant locations throughout the East coast of the United States and most notably, the fastest growing African fine dining restaurant and hospitality brand on the East coast, Swahili Village. He plans to keep innovating this industry long term.
He has been involved in charity initiatives that provide opportunities, education, support and awareness to (1) Africans in Africa and in the diaspora, (2) for homeless men and women in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, (3) victims of domestic violence and (4) young black and African students of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). He is now adding a new mission of enhancing the modern marketing strategies and business development of minority owned businesses in the United States of America and Africa.
He mostly works in the Washington DC metropolitan area with his core team and lives in Maryland with his beautiful wife and 3 extremely active children, two sons and one daughter.