About African Languages Lab
We don't wait for inclusion. We build it.
African Languages Lab is an AI research and deployment company for African languages. AI for Africans, by Africans.
Our story
We invested in the ecosystem
Language goes to the heart. Yet most of the world's AI speaks to Africans in someone else's language, reasoning in English and translating at the edges.
We couldn't outspend Silicon Valley, so we invested in the ecosystem instead. For over a decade, African Languages Lab has gathered high-quality, expert-validated data with native speakers and communities across the continent.
Today that work powers Mansa, All Voices and Swarm Intelligence Hub, supports 30+ African languages and earned the 2025 Innovator of the Year award at LocWorld54. We are still research-led, and we still build with the people whose languages we work in.
Our mission
How we work
Three principles behind everything we build
01
Data first
Every model starts with validated data from native-speaking experts.
02
Built with communities
Speakers help collect, check and shape the data through All Voices.
03
Research that ships
We publish, contribute 62 languages to Common Crawl and deploy products people use every day.
Milestones
Recognition along the way
01
2025: Innovator of the Year
Named Innovator of the Year at LocWorld54 for our work on African language AI.
02
2025: 62 languages to Common Crawl
We contributed 62 African languages to Common Crawl, as part of giving back to the wider AI community.
03
2026: Research at ACL
Our paper on low-resource African NLP, covering 40 languages, appears at ACL 2026 in San Diego.
