YiRi

YIRI, by FuturAfric Intelligence Artificielle, is tackling the most consequential blind spot in global AI: Africa's 2,000+ languages are invisible to every major model — GPT, Gemini, Llama — leaving 1.4 billion people cut off from AI in their mother tongue. YIRI's answer is Africa's first collaborative language data platform, where native speakers across the continent annotate, transcribe, and validate linguistic data that directly feeds the training pipelines of homegrown African LLMs — a full-stack approach no competitor can replicate, combining proprietary datasets, sovereign cloud infrastructure hosted on African soil, culturally adapted models, and on-ground deployment. The platform is already live with annotation workflows in Dioula, Baoulé, Bété, and Sénoufo, a national AI strategy has been delivered for Côte d'Ivoire, and the team has documented 45% efficiency gains in the finance sector. The business model compounds across four streams — dataset licensing to global AI labs, SaaS API access, government contracts for sovereign language models, and enterprise solutions for banks and telecoms — in a market projected to reach $8.9B in African AI by 2030 at 30%+ CAGR, within a $328B global NLP opportunity. FuturAfric is raising Seed and Series A funding to scale YIRI to 20+ languages and 100,000+ annotators, with a single animating vision: an Africa that doesn't just use AI — but leads it.