#1 — July 2026
What We Are Actually Building
MAKO AI did not start with a pitch deck.
It started with a pen pal letter in 2006. A 16-year-old boy in Nairobi named Meo wrote to my daughter as part of a school assignment. Twenty years later, that letter became a partnership — and that partnership became a company.
Meo is now our Field Operations Director in Kenya. He teaches coding to students in Ruai, identifies the problems agents could actually solve there, and keeps a running list of ideas that only someone living locally would know to build. Dr. Walker Kirkpatrick handles the systems architecture and open-source code from Portland. I run strategy and partnerships from Oregon. None of us can do this alone. We need all three skill sets — business, code, and boots-on-the-ground know-how — to build something that actually works.
What we do is simple in concept and hard in execution: we build custom AI agents on open-weight models and open hardware, then hand them over completely. No subscriptions. No data held hostage. No features you didn’t ask for. The client owns the hardware, the model, and the data. It keeps working whether they pay us again or not.
What Is Happening Right Now
Equipment shipment. We are shipping more hardware to Kenya in July — Raspberry Pi kits, sensors, and components Meo needs for the next round of deployments and student projects.
August competition. Meo and his students are preparing for a robotics and AI competition in August. This is not theoretical work. The students are building real projects with real code, and the competition gives them a deadline and a stage.
CDC board meeting. Meo has a follow-up meeting with Christian Compassion Kenya in July, this time with the Board of Directors and actual decision-makers. The goal is to install an agent at a clinic or school and prove it in the field. This is the step from “interested” to “deployed.”
Chicken Guardian pilot. Meo is talking to his church about starting a small chicken coop. Why? So we can build out the Chicken Guardian agent and get real data from a real operation. We do not build in a vacuum. We build where the problem lives.
August bootcamp. We are planning a coding bootcamp for August through MAKO Coding Academy. The academy is the supply line: students learn on open-source stacks, graduate with a working agent they built themselves, and enter the pipeline as deployers and maintainers. Agent revenue funds the academy. The academy produces the engineers. The cycle feeds itself.
Why “Field Notes”
This is not a corporate blog. We will use this space for build logs, competition updates, Kenya partnership progress, and plain-language discussion.
We are building in public because the people we serve deserve to see how the tools are made — and because we believe transparency is not a marketing strategy, it is a design requirement.
Next update: Meo’s report from the CDC board meeting. Watch this space.
— Anna Meyrick Kirkpatrick Managing Director, MAKO AI
Mako AI Technology Solution 
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