Artificial intelligence (AI) firm AethexAI has raised a $3 million pre-seed round led by 4DX Ventures.
Other investors in the round include Enza Capital, Dorm Room Fund, Mojo Ventures, 26 Fund, and individual investors from Stanford faculty, telecoms executives, and AI researchers from Anthropic.
AethexAI is a voice AI infrastructure company supporting enterprises across Africa and the Middle East. The company plans to rebuild the voice stack to address an existing shortcoming in Voice AI, which is said to struggle with telephone calls, cost, and subpar speech handling. As anyone who has encountered an AI customer service system knows, they are awful today.
AethexAI was co-founded by Mariama Diallo and Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa.
Diallo previously worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs before joining Model ML. Odemuyiwa trained as a computer scientist at Caltech and worked with companies like Meta.
AethexAI’s proprietary voice tech stack, called Kora 1, is said to have been trained on licensed datasets from call centers and content platforms working to master diverse speech.
The company adds that it is also launching a developer platform that enables third parties to build.
“Voice is already how businesses operate across emerging markets, but the technology behind it hasn’t kept up. We kept hearing the same thing from customers: that existing tools simply didn’t work in their environments,” says Diallo.
Odemuyiwa says voice AI has failed in markets at every level, including cost. The service is already available in production with enterprise customers.