From consumers to creators: Meet 10 Nigerian AI founders rewriting the tech narrative

For years, Nigeria and much of Africa have been seen primarily as consumers of artificial intelligence rather than builders. That is now changing. A new generation of founders is emerging, creating AI systems rooted in local realities but built with global relevance.

Nigerians are now building AI systems that are diagnosing babies' cries, and putting a large language model trained on Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo in front of developers at the United Nations General Assembly. In this article, Nairametrics spotlights 10 AI founders whose works are changing the narrative in the AI industry and positioning Nigeria as a force to reckon with in the global tech space.

Saheed Azeez – YarnGPT

Saheed Azeez is the creator of YarnGPT, a text-to-speech artificial intelligence model that is capable of translating English and other foreign languages into Nigerian accents and at least four indigenous languages, including Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba. Azeez first drew attention in 2023 as the first runner-up at the Bluechip Data and AI Hackathon. In 2025, he finished building a text-to-speech model trained on an instinct for local authenticity. That model became YarnGPT.

Instead of relying on the clipped, generic-sounding adapters most TTS systems use, YarnGPT used pure language modelling to generate speech in a set of distinctly Nigerian voices and could dub an English-language video into Yoruba, Igbo, or Hausa within minutes. It could also turn a written news article into something closer to a podcast.

In June 2026, at the third edition of its own Data and AI Summit at Eko Hotel & Suites in Lagos, Bluechip Technologies, the pan-African IT firm co-founded by Olumide Soyombo and Kazeem Tewogbade, announced on stage that it had acquired YarnGPT outright. Tewogbade later explained the logic plainly: Bluechip had been quietly trying to build its own internal tool for converting text into local dialects, and decided there was no point starting from zero when a working engine already existed. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but for an ecosystem more used to watching its brightest builders get scooped up by foreign accelerators, a homegrown hackathon project getting bought by a homegrown company was exactly the kind of proof of concept Nigeria's AI scene needed.

Tobi Olatunji and Olakunle Asekun – Intron Health

Tobi Olatunji and Olakunle Asekun are the founders of Intron Health, a healthcare AI system that converts doctors' speech into structured medical records, designed for clinical environments in African hospitals. Rather than adapt an existing speech-recognition tool built for American or British voices, the founders decided to train their own model on African accents from scratch.

What began with a handful of hospitals in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa has since become Sahara, a suite of proprietary voice AI products. The company raised $1.6 million in a pre-seed round in mid-2024, led by Microtraction, with participants including Octopus Ventures and Plug and Play Ventures. It joined NVIDIA's Inception programme and struck research partnerships with Google Research and the Gates Foundation. By early 2026, Intron revealed that Sahara had expanded to cover 57 languages, built from a proprietary dataset the company says exceeds 14 million audio clips gathered from over 40,000 speakers across 30 African countries. It also said it served more than 40 organisations in 8 countries.

Adebayo Alonge – RxAll

Adebayo Alonge, Amy Kao and Wei Liu, are the co-founders of RxAll. The three met at the Yale School of Management, and together, in 2016, they founded RxAll to solve the problem of counterfeit drugs. They created a handheld device called the RxScanner, a nano-spectrometer that reads a drug's molecular signature and runs it through a machine-learning model trained to compare that signature against known genuine samples. A pharmacist can scan a tablet and get a verdict on its authenticity in about twenty seconds, all through a connected mobile app, without needing laboratory equipment.

RxAll went on to raise $3.15 million in a seed round in 2021, led by SOSV's hardware accelerator HAX, and built out a wider ecosystem around the scanner, including a point-of-sale system for pharmacies, a delivery network, and partnerships with drug regulators including Nigeria's National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control. By 2025, RxAll revealed that its network had grown past 5,000 pharmacy locations across Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda, and that its scanner had helped pull more than 1.3 million counterfeit doses out of the supply chain since inception.

Obi Ebuka David – Autogon AI

Obi Ebuka David is the founder of Autogon AI, a no-code AI infrastructure platform that allows businesses to build, deploy, and manage machine learning models without needing deep technical expertise. David found that hiring skilled AI engineers was slow and expensive. So, in 2023, he set out to build something closer to a drag-and-drop AI factory: a platform where a business could upload its own data and come away with a working fraud-detection model, a customer-behaviour classifier, or a risk-scoring system, without hiring a research team to build one from scratch.

About 98 percent of Autogon's infrastructure, the algorithms, the training pipelines, the real-time APIs, was engineered in-house, built using techniques like Google's attention architecture and stitched together with AWS rather than leased wholesale from a foundation-model provider. The company picked up backing from Fast Forward Venture Studio in early 2024.

For Nigerian businesses and the broader tech ecosystem, these founders show that homegrown AI solutions can attract global investment and solve local problems. The shift from consumer to creator signals a maturing market that could strengthen the naira's digital economy and create new opportunities for Nigerian developers and entrepreneurs.