Gaming The Narrative: Rise Of Fearless' Kanessa Muluneh

34-year-old Ethiopian-Dutch serial entrepreneur and investor Kanessa Muluneh grew up in what she calls a “typical immigrant household” in the Netherlands after her parents fled from the civil war in Ethiopia when she was just three years old. She went to medical school largely because that was the only one of the three options that her parents gave her that she found interesting—the other options, she tells Inc. Arabia, were lawyer or engineer.

“I had no idea what an engineer was, I didn’t care enough to read a law book, and so, I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go to medical school because they told me so,’” she recalls. And it was while Muluneh was finishing medical school that she set up her first startup as part of an internship at her university. At the age of 22, she sold her company, a telehealth solution that allowed female hospital employees to take calls from home, allowing them to work remotely.

Today, Muluneh has five exits under her belt, and she currently manages a family investment office together with her husband, an accountant, out of Dubai. Up until recently, she had invested primarily in tech solutions, with a focus on non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as well as blockchain and crypto, but it was only after she visited her homeland for the first time three years ago and reconnected with her heritage that she began to shift her investment focus from industries to locations, i.e. from Europe to Africa. “One of the reasons I did that is because I want to invest back in where I come from, because I feel like the diaspora should be highly aware of the fact that where they come from now is not the same place that our parents used to tell us about,” she says.

Having thus renewed her ties to her roots, Muluneh began to create videos in her mother tongue and share them on the social media platform TikTok, which led her to unexpectedly connect with communities in Ethiopia where she found herself being able to add value. So, what began with Muluneh educating other users about NFTs and blockchain ended with her taking her followers up on the idea to create a video game set in Africa. This is how she created Rise of Fearless, which she launched in May this year as a play-to-earn battle royale game based on the 1896 Battle of Adwa—a historic battle that saw Ethiopia defeat Italy’s attempts to colonize the country.

Looking back on the process of building the game, Muluneh shares that she was particularly keen on ensuring that the characters in Rise of Fearless had a distinctively African look, covering everything from skin tone to hairstyles, setting themselves apart from the stereotypical blond, blue-eyed heroes typical of most other video games. The team also crafted landscapes that were distinctly African, with clay houses typical of Sudan before the war, architecture inspired by Nubia in North Africa, and trees unique to Kenya. “I cannot take full credit for it,” Muluneh says. “Because [the community] helped me come up with the idea; I only executed it.”

Kanessa Muluneh at the launch of Rise of Fearless. Image courtesy Kanessa Muluneh.

At the core of Rise of Fearless, Muluneh adds, is a new way of storytelling about Africa. A marketer at heart, Muluneh believes that the game can help create a better image for the continent abroad. “I think the marketing of Africa or Asia or the Middle East is always poor, and it always [shows] crime or poverty,” she says. As such, by basing her game around the Battle of Adwa, Muluneh is attempting to spin a different tale about her homeland. “I thought, this is a nice story,” she says. “Why? Because the marketing of Africa is horrible… So, I said, why not a victory story for once? It’s an ode to the fight that they fought, and it means so much to Africa, and nobody knows about it.”

In April 2025, Muluneh launched a US$700,000 funding round to advance Web3 gaming in Africa, just ahead of her official launch at the Museum of Adwa in Addis Ababa. She tells us that the game, which launched in May, already has 3,000 users, and she has plans to launch the in-game shop over the summer and integrate Web3 functionality by the end of the year. The aim: to onboard 100,000 players and achieve revenues of $20 million by the end of the year. Other projects in the pipeline include rolling out the game for PCs and integrating artificial intelligence (AI) gameplay.

One of the key lessons that Muluneh has learned through building Rise of Fearless, she tells us, is the importance of having more than just business in mind when operating in Africa. “When you enter the African market, you really have to consider the social aspect, it cannot be just for you,” she says. “And that’s what a lot of people fail to realize when they enter that market. There should always be an aspect of what is in it for the community… Which is why I said, if we do this, what is the reason besides entertainment? What can we offer? Okay, it can be a way to make money, it can be a way to create a community.”

Indeed, Muluneh’s focus on community is perhaps best exemplified by her declaration to invest at least 15 percent of the company’s earnings back to support the building of gaming hubs and companies in Africa. “My eventual goal will be to have hubs throughout the continent where people can come and play together as a community, but there will also be the support of other developers,” she adds.

Muluneh now asserts that Rise of Fearless has potential to be developed into a movie, and, in the process, contribute to her larger goals for the African continent. “We’re also trying to give a little bit of a history class in the process,” she adds. “We’re talking about launching a movie like Black Panther, for example, because you have to create a hero scenario that presents Africa as a cool place. So, I want to create that narrative for the rest of Africa. Things that will connect people, especially the diaspora, back to the culture.”

Pictured in the lead image is Kanessa Muluneh, creator of Rise Of Fearless. Image courtesy Kanessa Muluneh.