Afrigather Aya Knowledge, a Ghana-based AI consultancy startup, has raised $900,000 seed spherical. The funding is a mixture of debt and fairness and might be used to scale two of its merchandise, AyaGrow and AyaSpeech, and make use of new abilities.
The brand new fund brings the startup’s complete funding to $1.15 million. Aya Knowledge beforehand raised $300,000 from Microtraction, Savannah Fund, and UK Buyers. The most recent funding spherical was led by 54Collective, with participation from different angel traders.
Launched in 2021 by Freddie Monk and Ama Larbi-Siaw, Aya Knowledge employs people to gather and label knowledge—photographs, movies, and texts—wanted for the event of Giant Language Fashions like ChatGPT and Gemini. The startup additionally claims it trains staff employed for knowledge annotation duties for highly-skilled technical roles like knowledge engineering and knowledge science. It at the moment employs 11 folks throughout such roles.
Past knowledge annotation and assortment, Ayadata builds customized AI options for companies. The startup has two AI merchandise: AyaGrow, a crop and discipline monitoring answer that empowers industrial and smallholder farmers by AI-driven precision agriculture; and AyaSpeech, an end-to-end speech-to-speech answer that enables companies, shoppers, and governments to work together in spoken, native African languages.
Aya Knowledge is a part of a rising checklist of startups—Shaip, Sama, iMerit, Cloudfactory, Dataloop—which are enabling the event of AI programs globally. Giant language fashions are skilled on giant swaths of knowledge that have to be collected and labelled accurately by people. International tech firms like Meta and OpenAI usually outsource the information labelling and annotation duties to firms like Aya Knowledge in growing economies—India, the Philippines, Kenya’s Dadaab and Lebanon’s Shatila—who then rent people to precisely label and annotate these knowledge.
“We’re devoted to constructing native experience that may leverage AI to sort out the continent’s most urgent challenges,” mentioned Ama Larbi-Siaw, Aya Knowledge co-founder and COO.
In its consultancy enterprise, the agency competes Brainpool.ai, Deeper Insights, SandTech, Professional AI, College AI. Nonetheless, these firms nonetheless outsource a variety of their knowledge assortment and knowledge annotation duties to enterprise course of outsourcing in growing economies.
“As a result of we management the whole lot in Ghana we are able to ship sooner and extra effectively with out the chance of involving third events,” notes Gillian Hammah, Advertising and Technique officer at Aya Knowledge.
The enterprise expenses a price for knowledge annotation providers. It made $500,000 in income in 2023 and at the moment serves about 20 energetic purchasers together with MIT, Seedtag, Unilever, and Labelbox amongst others.
“The vast majority of our work has been with international purchasers, however we’re more and more targeted on serving to African companies leverage AI to extend their competitiveness.”
The enterprise goals to to coach 1000 knowledge annotators, engineers, and scientists within the coming months and enhance its inhouse merchandise.
“Finally we’re working to allow as many companies and other people to learn from AI as rapidly as potential, and to make sure that the flexibility to construct this know-how to a world class commonplace exists in Ghana and different related markets.”
