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EqualyzAI Launches Groundbreaking Technology to Bridge Global AI Divide

LAGOS, Nigeria – April 8, 2025 – EqualyzAI, a pioneering African-centric AI startup, today unveiled its suite of revolutionary AI solutions designed to democratize AI innovations for Africa, ensuring AI can think and make decisions in African languages. The company’s mission tackles one of technology’s most significant equity gaps: ensuring AI can understand, process, and make decisions in African languages and contexts. EqualyzAI’s breakthrough technology addresses the critical exclusion of over 1.5 billion people from meaningful AI engagement.

While major AI platforms struggle with non-Western languages and cultural contexts, equalyzAI has developed the world’s first AI models built from the ground up with African linguistic patterns and cultural nuances at their core. One of its pioneering products, uLearn, an agentic AI product for education, was recently showcased as a great example of the use of Meta’s large language model (Llama2) to build high-impact solutions as endorsed here.

Founded by awardwinning experts, Dr. Olubayo Adekanmbi and Dr. Ife Adebara, EqualyzAI is committed to ensuring African languages, cultures, and contexts are central to the global AI evolution.

“Our mission goes beyond technology—it’s about fundamental digital inclusion,” said Dr. Olubayo Adekanmbi, EqualyzAI co-founder and a Gates Foundation Global Grand Challenge winner. “When today’s AI systems can’t understand your language or context, you’re essentially locked out of the AI revolution. EqualyzAI ensures African languages, cultures, and contexts are central to global AI evolution.”

At the heart of EqualyzAI’s hyperlocal Agentic AI possibilities approach is how it builds foundational datasets that its localized AI learns from. It has mastered a people-first, linguistics-guided, and data-owner-informed practice through its Pan-African data collection network. The startup has realized that many African-centric AI models today rely on scraped online data, religious texts, radio broadcasts, and generic datasets, which fail to capture undocumented conversational styles, dialectal variations, and accent patterns. 

EqualyzAI has developed an inclusive data collection, validation, and enrichment ecosystem for a sustainable data pipeline through a crowd-validated approach, where it engages and incentivizes native speakers across communities to generate and validate audio by dialect; read and record words in local dialects; review and improve translation accuracy; translate complex code-mixed sentences; label images to enhance multimodal AI capabilities; and others. 

The company’s innovations come at a pivotal moment when AI accessibility directly impacts economic opportunity, educational advancement, and healthcare outcomes. EqualyzAI’s solutions enable:

• Businesses to engage with African consumers in their native languages
• Educational institutions to create AI-powered learning materials in local dialects
• Healthcare providers to improve medical communication across language barriers
• Government agencies to analyze citizen feedback in multiple languages
• Financial services to deliver inclusive banking solutions to underserved populations

“What sets our technology apart is that our Small Language Models consistently outperform much larger global models when it comes to African languages,” explained Dr. Adebara, EqualyzAI co-founder and a UNESCO award recipient for her pioneering work in computational linguistics. “For example, our AfroSLM 1.0 beats Google Translate and other popular LLMs in contextual translation of finance-related conversations in Nigerian languages.”

At the event, EqualyzAI demonstrated its cutting-edge AI solutions designed to address critical challenges in Africa while promoting linguistic diversity. Key innovations include:

Equalyz Crowd: A platform designed to collect hyperlocal datasets needed to build AI solutions that can be trained to understand and speak many African languages, ensuring inclusivity and representation.

AfroSLM 1.0: A Small Language Model (SLM) optimized to improve financial literacy in Yoruba and Hausa, empowering users with accessible financial education in their native languages.

uLearn: an interactive learning tool helping teachers generate lesson plans, notes, and quizzes in both English and local languages, transforming education across Africa.

AgentZero: our street-smart customer service chatbot understands emerging slang and informal expressions in delivering relevant and practical customer service.

LLMiner, a tool that helps organizations and governments extract actionable insights from years of archived audio, video, or scanned documents. By structuring these datasets into “query-able” tabular data, LLMiner enables seamless, conversational-styled data interaction—just like chatting with a friend on WhatsApp!

EqualyzAI’s approach represents a significant shift from current AI development methodologies, which have largely overlooked the linguistic diversity of Africa’s 2,000+ languages. By building models from the ground up with African languages in mind, equalyzAI is creating a more inclusive and equitable AI landscape.

Additionally, EqualyzAI shared its recent white paper, titled “How Small Language Models (SLMs) Are Revolutionizing Localized AI Innovations for Social Good in Africa.” The paper explores the transformative potential of SLMs in addressing Africa’s unique challenges and advancing AI accessibility.

About EqualyzAI

EqualyzAI is an African-centric AI startup dedicated to building AI solutions that solve real-world problems in emerging markets. Founded by Dr. Olubayo Adekanmbi and Dr. Ife Adebara, EqualyzAI is committed to ensuring African languages, cultures, and contexts are central to the global AI evolution. The company specializes in developing hyperlocal multimodal datasets in collaboration with native language speakers to create truly inclusive agentic AI innovations. For more information, visit equalyz.ai.

Media Contact:

Stacia Kirby, U.S.-1- 206-478-5841

stacia@kirbycomm.com