companies

Awarri

Lagos-based AI startup building Nigeria's first government-backed open-source LLM, training models and voice tools to understand Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Pidgin.

Awarri was founded in Lagos in 2019 by Silas Adekunle and Eniola Edun, two Nigerian entrepreneurs who had previously worked in robotics and gaming — Adekunle built the consumer gaming robot behind Reach Robotics, which had an Apple retail deal before the company wound down, and Edun co-founded a Lagos gaming platform. Awarri initially worked across frontier-technology consulting and robotics before narrowing its focus to language AI for African contexts. In 2024, Nigeria's Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy selected Awarri as the technical partner to build the country's first government-backed large language model, trained on Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin and accented English rather than starting from a Western-language base and translating outward. The resulting model, N-ATLAS, launched as an open-source release at the UN General Assembly in September 2025, alongside Langeasy, a crowdsourcing app Awarri built to collect voice and text data in Nigerian languages at a scale no existing dataset covered. The company has so far raised a pre-seed round from undisclosed investors, with the N-ATLAS project itself backed by a mix of government funding and support from partners including UNDP, UNESCO, Meta, Google and Microsoft. Awarri remains a small team relative to the scope of the project, drawing on a network of contributors through its Beta Tester Program and a fellowship of AI trainees to help label and validate data.

Founded

2019

Headquarters

Lagos, Nigeria

Sector

lab