My story begins and ends with capitalism. 我白手起家。
IRoots and Erasure
To understand my story you have to understand the trans-Atlantic slave trade and how the history of my family was erased and started again. We can only record back to freedom in the 1840s. My great-great-great grandfather John Renfro escaped slavery in Missouri to Canada. Our family ultimately settled in a town called Metropolis, IL and was there until we moved to Chicago in the early 21st century.
My family history is vague because the order of the day as a black person in the United States has historically been focused on survival. Only recently have we started to deeply record our history. This is because it was illegal for black people to read or write until the end of slavery, and Jim Crow up until the 1960s made education a great luxury for most black people in the United States. I called it Atobiography because I've dedicated my life to building the institutions that are necessary for African people to thrive. This story is an attestation to my dedication to the mission.
IIFoundation and Fire
Growing up, my father made it a priority to teach my siblings and myself all the context of what has happened leading up to this age of modernity. Some of my earliest memories are at the church where he was a pastor, showing us books of African and African American history. We'd spend hours in the church's offices reading. We were taught to never hold hatred and to treat people with kindness regardless. Having knowledge of the history enables you to understand why things are the way they are, and to use your human capability to help steer humanity in the right direction.
My mother is a doctor and a healer. Through her I learned patience, empathy, and excellence. When I ruptured my hamstring at a track meet in high school, my mother saw my devastation and in 2016 took me to my first yoga class. This evolved from physical therapy to a lifestyle; even my regular breathing has evolved from my practice. I attribute most of my success to my meditative practice and use of yoga.
IIIThe Quest for Power
I grew up with a deep sense of misplacement. I never felt like I belonged in the United States. Our family tree is full of question marks; it starts with slavery records in Kentucky, just with some names. We were moved from Virginia to Kentucky to Missouri, with members more than likely sold off across the United States. My existence is a miracle, and I don't take it for granted.
Before high school, I went through a Rite of Passage and became a man. The only thing on my mind was power. I read and wrote voraciously. The anger I grew up with was starting to be sublimated into ambition and productivity. I grew up in a country whose foundation was the forced labor of my ancestors. It just never sat right with me. No matter how hard I tried, I could not fit in. I could not reconcile my identity with the world around me. Though I appreciate the United States, I have known since I was a child that my humanity is that of the earth. Not bound to any country or entity. Sovereign. And I wish sovereignty for all people, as it is our right as creations of nature that share this planet.
IVTechnology and Transcendence
My father sparked my curiosity about technology and placed me in robotics club when I started high school. I love puzzles. Math and robotics were my favorite things to work on. I also loved sports. As I fed my curiosity, I realized that technology was the most impactful tool to shape the future. I first learned of artificial intelligence around 2014. The robots I worked on to compete with in FTC robotics competitions made me think of them coming to live with AI. I was inspired by games like Pokemon, where the game is played by a player and its 'agents'.
North Carolina A&T: The Foundation
At North Carolina A&T, I studied computer engineering and threw myself into research with relentless focus. In 2018, I began undergraduate research in natural language processing, working with LSTM networks (this was before GPT models existed), when the field was still exploring the depths of what neural networks could achieve. The reality of bringing machines to live was exhilarating. I wanted to be the best engineer I could possibly be, spending countless hours studying everything from circuits and silicon to algorithms and applications. I just wanted to continuously push the boundaries of what I and technology could accomplish.
My curiosity led me deeper into the mathematical foundations of computing. I built projects using BLAS and LAPACK, learning to optimize matrix operations and understand the low-level computational primitives that power machine learning. I was building intuition for how computation really works, from silicon to algorithms. This was also when I was first exposed to deep research papers and mathematical notation. It was under this undergraduate research program at A&T (Dr. Daniel Limbrick) that I learned to read and understand research papers, and to experiment with Latex on my own.
The turning point came in 2020 during my co-op at Apple as a software engineer. It was my first time working remotely. I had just evacuated Seoul, South Korea due to closed borders with the USA thanks to COVID. I was bored. While working on production iOS systems, I spent my evenings reading things. Some of these things included the Bitcoin whitepaper and Ethereum yellow paper. The elegance of cryptographic consensus, the mathematical beauty of proof-of-work, the vision of programmable money. THIS was the technology I needed to find. I realized that blockchain wasn't just another database; it was a new foundation for organizing human coordination and value exchange. The concept of AI agents using blockchain to autonomously coordinate and exchange value was obvious to me from the very beginning. I did my best to start aligning my career to work at this intersection.
I dedicated myself completely to blockchain and cryptography. I wanted to master it first as a foundation. Institutions run on trust, and blockchain is a trust generating machine. I took graduate courses in cryptography, diving deep into elliptic curves, zero-knowledge proofs, and the mathematical structures that make secure computation possible. I took my knowledge of mathematics and wrapped my mind around the complexities of the discrete log problem, Reed Solomon codes, Fast Fourier Transforms, and other mathematical primitives critical to understanding programmable cryptography. I honed my Solidity, understanding not just how to write smart contracts but how the Ethereum Virtual Machine executes them. I learned Rust, appreciating its memory safety guarantees and performance characteristics that make it perfect for blockchain infrastructure. Graduation was on the horizon, and every day I felt the pull of web3. I interned at Apple and Microsoft and, though able to work at a giant tech company full time, I knew that my heart was in blockchain. I never doubt my intuition, and this time around the facts backed it up. Freelancing was possible with the skills I had.
DWeb3: Building in the Wild
After graduating in 2022, I started my freelancing LLC called DWeb3 (Davis Web3) and dove headfirst into the Web3 space. I wasn't content to just learn about blockchain. I needed to build on it, to understand its real-world constraints and possibilities. Through DWeb3, I worked on smart contract development, protocol design, and helped teams navigate the complex landscape of decentralized systems. The beginning of DWeb3 was possible in great part to Andreessen Horowitz, where I interned on the CLF and crypto teams for 6 months. I used my spare time to hone my skills and absorb industry knowledge from some of the best investors in the space. In November, I parted ways with a16z and started working with Metagov as a consulting smart contract engineer.
At Metagov, I built SAFE for DAOs: a Simple Agreement for Future Equity implemented in Solidity that enabled decentralized organizations to formalize investment structures on-chain. With EZKL, I worked on one of the first GPT-level zero-knowledge machine learning models and wrote the company's first form of comprehensive documentation. At Giza, I designed and implemented the Giza Agent: an AI agent equipped with an ERC4337 wallet that could autonomously interact with blockchain protocols.
Through all this work, I discovered something fundamental about myself: freelancing never fit me. I'm not a mercenary. I'm a missionary. While I could execute on other people's visions effectively, my heart yearned to build something that aligned with my deeper purpose of democratizing access to financial opportunity and building infrastructure for the next generation. I liked the work I did a lot. And I was proud of where I had come. I actually got into the industry I dreamed of at the intersection of blockchain and AI. But when I got there I didn't feel fulfilled. While working at Giza I started my nomad lifestyle. I was living in Spain. That same feeling came over me like when I was working at Apple and Microsoft. That feeling of being happy to have a job, but melancholy that I'm not doing something I feel is my true purpose. This melancholy manifested to contempt and by April 2024 I was on a plane to Nigeria to try my hand at starting something new.
Nigeria is magical. I had never been to a country with so much energy. My DNA traces there, and I felt more belonging there than I had felt in most Western countries. It was during my time in Nigeria that I first encountered the reality of how difficult international payment was. Watching talented developers struggle to receive payments for their work, seeing how traditional banking systems failed entire populations, I realized that the infrastructure we take for granted in the US simply doesn't exist for most of the world. This wasn't a technical problem, it was a systemic one. And the feeling of solving this problem gave me the feeling of real alignment. That feeling, since then, I have never lost.
Sereel: From Payments to Capital Markets
This realization led to the birth of Sereel (initially Sereé, inspired by the Adinkra symbol Nsere Wa: four cowry shells in a cross, symbolizing wealth and prosperity). I first was working with a Nigerian developer I had met while doing a workshop on zero knowledge proofs in Lagos. Later on in the year, I travelled to Ghana, then Kenya. In Kenya, I met the people who would help me learn more about the financial system in Africa. It then clicked, the problem is not payments, it is capital markets. One thing I did learn while growing up in Chicago was that the city's strong financial presence was a result of the city's strong capital markets infra in the CME, OCC, and others. The idea became: if we can build out this infrastructure using blockchains, you accomplish the same goal with much less overhead. I ended up parting ways with my Nigerian partner because he wanted to focus on payments. I was working a bit with AIBunny at that time, with little knowledge that over the next several months he'd end up being my co-founder.
Over late 2024 and early 2025, we evolved Sereel into what it is today: a platform for the creation and facilitation of tokenized products, democratized for the institutions that need it most. I officially became CEO co-founder of Sereel (not Sereé) in early 2025. AIBunny became CTO co-founder. Since then we've found product market fit and are prepared for a safe launch.
The journey from studying LSTMs in a university lab to building global financial infrastructure on blockchain represents more than just career progression. It's the synthesis of technical mastery with social purpose. Every algorithm I studied, every line of code I wrote, every mathematical concept I internalized was preparation for this moment: using technology to democratize access to financial opportunity. There was a book I had read in college called Ikigai, and it taught me what this looks and feels like. I am happy building Sereel, and I am happy to be building it with folks I consider family.