Africa Online was started in 1994 by three Kenya students at MIT. It developed from an online community hosted at MIT called KenyaNet. KenyaNet was one of several Africa-focused online communities (the others were Okyeame (Ghana), Naijanet (Nigeria), and Salonet (Sierra Leone) formed and run by MIT students and hosted on MIT servers.
These online communities were probably among the most fervent virtual communities in in the early pre-web 1990s, unsurprising since Africa in the diaspora (and indeed Africans on the continent) had so few public spaces where ideas could be exchanged in real time. With the commercialization of the internet, Africa Online moved its focus to connecting Africans on the continent to the internet. The company has since grown to service a substantial number of countries all across Africa.