Editor’s note: African-Startups is a sister publication of EU-Startups, bringing trusted coverage of startups, venture capital, and innovation across Africa.
After backing 10 African gaming studios through its $1 million Google Play Indie Games Fund, Google is now turning its attention to Africa’s growing AI startup ecosystem. Global AI companies have been scrambling to establish a foothold in Africa. Earlier this year, we saw Nairobi-based WildMango secure one of OpenAI’s first small and medium business partnerships on the continent, while a month later, France’s Mistral AI partnered with Nairobi’s Qhala to launch an AI Accelerator Bootcamp for African founders.
Unlike in other countries, Africa’s AI ecosystem is being built around practical applications, and Google is taking note. The search giant has announced the inaugural cohort of the Google Africa Applied AI Lab, a programme managed by the Google AI Futures Fund in partnership with Google Research, designed to close the gap between African-led AI innovation and the frontier resources needed to take it to market.
For its first cohort, Google has selected 10 African AI startups from a pool of thousands of applications submitted by startups across more than 45 African countries. The selected startups get early access to Google’s frontier AI models, including Gemini and Gemma, hands-on technical mentorship from Google engineers, research scientists, and product leaders, and venture capital guidance from the Lab’s four VC partners (4DX Ventures, Norrsken22, Novastar Ventures, and Ventures Platform). In December, the cohort will meet in Accra for a demo day at the Accra AI Community Centre, where the founders will show investors, industry leaders, and the wider community what they have built.
Here are the 10 startups selected by Google for the inaugural cohort of Google Africa Applied AI Lab:
AethexAI
Founded: 2025
HQ: London
AethexAI, which emerged from stealth with a $3 million pre-Seed round in June 2026, is building the voice AI stack for emerging markets, covering everything from speech models to enterprise deployment. Its platform is driven by Kora 2, a proprietary model stack trained on real conversational speech across emerging markets, built for callers who frequently switch between languages mid-sentence. AethexAI says its platform supports over 100 voices across markets and powers AI voice agents with under 500ms streaming latency. The company serves banks, telecom providers, and customer support centres with an end-to-end agent studio, workflow automation, and real-time call analytics.
Agrails
Founded: 2023
HQ: San Francisco
Agrails is building an AI-powered investigative and risk intelligence platform for industries shaped by climate, particularly agriculture, insurance, and lending. The company says its platform is 70% more cost-effective than traditional solutions, and its use cases include climate insurance, sustainability compliance, lending decisions for climate finance, and nature credit verification. According to Agrails, 62% of Africa’s economy is influenced by climate, and it argues that its technology is essential infrastructure for businesses that need to act decisively on environmental risk. The company is backed by investors including TLcom Capital, Future Africa, Mercy Corps Ventures, and Persistent Energy.
Crane AI Labs
Founded: 2025
HQ: Abu Dhabi
Founded by Ugandan engineers, Crane AI Labs is an AI infrastructure and deployment company focused on making frontier AI locally usable and institutionally deployable across Africa and the Global South. Its work spans healthcare, education, agriculture, financial services, and public services, with a focus on offline, on-device deployment for settings with limited or no internet connectivity. In healthcare, Crane’s EaseHealth tool has been deployed across 15+ public health facilities in Luweero District, Uganda, with 268+ consented frontline health workers. In education, its Ganda-Gemma models bring foundational literacy and numeracy support to children in Luganda, on affordable phones. The company’s work is funded in part by Google.org.
Intron
Founded: 2020
HQ: Lagos
Founded by Tobi Olatunji, Intron describes itself as the infrastructure layer for voice interactions across Africa. Its speech-to-text and text-to-speech APIs are purpose-built to handle African accents, code-switched speech, where speakers blend multiple languages in the same sentence, and local language nuances. The company cites use cases including clinical ambient listening, medical dictation, judicial and legislative transcription, call centre automation, reproductive health voice bots, and voice authentication.
Satlyt
Founded: 2024
HQ: San Francisco
Satlyt is a space software company enabling satellites to run AI and data-processing applications onboard, in orbit, rather than transmitting raw data back to Earth for processing. Through the Satlyt Network, satellites can work together as a distributed computing infrastructure, with edge computing capabilities that reduce latency and enable real-time insights. Satellite operators use Satlyt to unlock the compute already installed on their spacecraft; software companies use it to deploy applications in orbit without building or launching their own satellite. The Nairobi- and Sunnyvale-based startup is led by CEO Rama Afullo and raised $8 million this month to build the intelligence layer for satellites.
Smile ID
Founded: 2017
HQ: Portola Valley
Smile ID was founded in 2017 after its founder was blocked from accessing his bank account because of the IP address associated with his location. The company uses computer vision to verify identity and power secure customer onboarding for financial institutions across Africa. Its product suite includes biometric authentication, onboarding workflows, and anti-money laundering screening, with country coverage spanning the continent. It is backed by Costanoa Ventures, Norrsken22, and CRE, and is led by CEO Mark Straub.
Termii
Founded: 2017
HQ: San Jose
Founded in Lagos in 2017 by Gbolade Emmanuel, Awe Ayomide, and Idowu Atinuke, Termii positions itself as the transaction reliability and intelligence layer for financial systems across emerging markets. Its platform powers OTP delivery, fraud checks, transaction alerts, and customer communications for banks, fintechs, payment processors, telecoms, and e-commerce businesses. At the heart of its current product is Ayla, an AI model trained on billions of transaction signals that scores every OTP and alerts for delivery probability before it fires. The company is a Y Combinator alumnus and has processed over 1 billion transactions. It was also selected for the Google for Startups Accelerator Africa programme, Class 10, in April 2026.
Tolbi
Founded: 2020
HQ: Dakar
Tolbi is a pan-African climate-agtech company using satellite imagery and AI to improve agricultural outcomes for smallholder farmers. Its platform combines remote sensing data with on-the-ground advisory, delivered via voice guidance, to help farmers make better decisions on planting, irrigation, and harvesting. The company is led by CEO Mohamadou Lamine Kebe and is headquartered in Dakar, with operations in Côte d’Ivoire and San Francisco. Tolbi’s stated mission is to contribute to food security in Africa through sustainable agriculture, while also accelerating climate action through carbon financing.
Vendy
Founded: 2022
HQ: Lagos
Vendy is a Nigerian startup enabling businesses to run storefronts and take payments inside WhatsApp and other familiar platforms, removing the need for a standalone e-commerce website. Now operating as Kleevar, the escrow-protected marketplace model allows buyers to pay into a held account, with funds only released to the seller once the buyer confirms the order has been received as described. The platform also includes flexible delivery options, dispute resolution, and a loyalty programme, all accessible from a single account that lets users buy, sell, or deliver.
Viamo
Founded: 2012
HQ: Saskatoon
Viamo was built on a conviction that nearly three billion people remain hard to reach by traditional media or the internet, yet deserve access to the information that shapes their health, livelihoods, and decisions. The company connects people without smartphones to digital services through basic phone calls, using voice and local languages. In 2023, it combined its voice infrastructure and multilingual expertise with AI to launch its Voice AI Solution, which has since evolved into Ask Viamo Anything (AVA), a conversational AI tool accessible via a standard phone call. Viamo’s global network spans 15+ countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and its work covers health, agriculture, governance, and education.
