Last month I flew to India from Amman — first to meet with the Athena Infonomics team, then to attend the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. A packed few days, and worth every hour of the flight.

It’s been a few months since Athena acquired TolaData — bringing together Athena’s advisory expertise and TolaData’s Berlin-built impact monitoring platform — and we’ve been moving fast. But there’s no substitute for actually being in the same room. We sat down together, got into it, and left feeling like we’d skipped about six months of getting-to-know-you. The depth of knowledge on their side, particularly around data-driven programme design and evidence-based decision-making, is exactly what TolaData’s platform is built to support. There’s a real alignment in how both teams think about turning raw data into meaningful action for development organisations.

The Summit was its own kind of energy. AI is moving at a pace that’s hard to fully appreciate until you’re in a room full of people trying to keep up with it — or get ahead of it. A lot of what I heard maps directly onto where TolaData is heading: making impact monitoring smarter, faster, and more useful for the organisations we serve. The conversations around responsible AI, localised data ownership, and practical implementation in the development sector were particularly relevant to what we’re building.

I came back to Amman with more ideas than I know what to do with. The intersection of what Athena brings and TolaData’s platform — end-to-end impact data management, indicator tracking, visualisation — there’s a lot there. For organisations working in international development and humanitarian response, the potential to move from data collection to genuine insight is closer than ever. We’re just getting started.

Looking forward to the next visit.

— Yazeed Sheqem, Chief Growth Officer, TolaData