Yamify raised new pre-seed funding from Launch Africa Ventures to expand GPU access and AI infrastructure using African data centres and local payments.
Yamify has raised new pre-seed funding from Launch Africa Ventures to keep building its AI infrastructure platform for Africa. Yamify positions itself as a developer-first tool that helps teams deploy AI services quickly, using African data centres.
The company is often described as a “Heroku for AI tools,” meaning it aims to make deployment simple and fast for developers, similar to how Heroku simplified web app hosting. In practice, Yamify lets users spin up GPU-powered environments in under a minute.
GPUs are specialized chips used to run and train AI models, and they are often expensive and hard to access from many African markets. Yamify says it reduces common problems like high cloud bills, slow performance from overseas servers, and the need for in-house cloud engineers.
The startup was founded by Congolese entrepreneur Luc Okalobé, a former cloud engineer at TikTok and Salesforce. It runs GPU clusters called “YAMs” in Nigeria, Congo, and South Africa, and it can fall back to global cloud providers when needed.
Yamify also plans pricing and payments around local realities. Instead of a fixed SaaS license, users can run open-source AI models and pay through local rails, including naira, M-PESA, and MTN MoMo.
As more African startups and agencies try to ship AI features, infrastructure is becoming a bottleneck. Latency, GPU shortages, and foreign currency cloud costs can turn AI experimentation into a budgeting problem.
If Yamify can reliably offer regional GPU hosting and simpler deployment, it could help smaller teams ship AI products faster, without building complex cloud setups. The company says the new funding will support early distribution through partnerships with OADC and Cassava AI, while it continues raising the rest of its pre-seed round.
Primary Source: Techinafrica
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