companies

Lelapa AI

Johannesburg AI lab building speech and language models for African languages — isiZulu, Sesotho, Yoruba, Hausa — via its Vulavula API and InkubaLM.

Lelapa AI was founded in Johannesburg in December 2022 by machine learning engineer Pelonomi Moiloa and NLP researcher Jade Abbott, alongside academic co-founders Vukosi Marivate, Benjamin Rosman and Pravesh Ranchod from the University of the Witwatersrand's AI research group. The founding argument is that African languages have been chronically under-served by language AI built primarily on English and a handful of major world languages, and that closing the gap requires African researchers building African-language models rather than importing translated versions of Western tools. The company raised a $2.5 million seed round in February 2023 from Mozilla Ventures and Atlantica Ventures, with additional backing from individual investors including Google AI chief scientist Jeff Dean. Lelapa's two public products reflect that mission directly. Vulavula is a multilingual API offering speech-to-text, sentiment analysis and named-entity recognition for South African languages including isiZulu, Sesotho and Afrikaans alongside English, with support for code-switching between them. InkubaLM is a compact, openly released language model trained on five African languages — Swahili, Yoruba, isiXhosa, Hausa and isiZulu — plus English and French, pitched as one of the first openly available small LLMs built specifically for the continent's languages rather than adapted after the fact.

Founded

2022

Headquarters

Johannesburg, South Africa

Sector

lab