🇿🇦South Africa

Cassava Technologies AI Factory

AI

Pan-African NVIDIA Cloud Partner deploying GPU-as-a-service and AI-as-a-service from data centers across South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and Morocco, having procured 12,000 NVIDIA GPUs with the first cluster operational in Cape Town. It offers localized model support via its CAIMEx multi-model exchange.

InkubaLM

AI

InkubaLM-0.4B is a 400M-parameter open-weights small language model built from scratch by Lelapa AI for five low-resource African languages (isiZulu, Yoruba, Swahili, isiXhosa, Hausa, plus English/French), using a LLaMA-style architecture trained on 2.4B tokens.

Vulavula

AI

Vulavula is Lelapa AI's API platform for speech-to-text transcription and machine translation across South African and African languages (isiZulu, Sesotho, Sepedi, Setswana, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English, Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, French), purpose-built for telco and financial-services contact centres.

Zabantu-XLM-Roberta

AI

Zabantu is a family of XLM-RoBERTa masked language models (roughly 80M to 250M params) trained from scratch on South African Bantu languages including Tshivenda, Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Northern and Southern Sotho, Setswana and Xitsonga. It serves as a benchmark for low-resource Bantu language NLP. It was built by the Data Science for Social Impact group at the University of Pretoria.