With China and the United States slugging it out for top spot in the AI supremacy race, one wonders what role, if any, the African continent has to play. But in the sweltering heat of Morocco, ToumAI is quietly staking a claim for relevance in AI innovation.
While global AI advancements have largely been driven by Western and Asian tech giants, an emerging crop of African startups is proving that the continent has more to offer than just a growing consumer base.
"In a world where AI advancement has been dominated by the US, China, and to a lesser extent Europe, we are proud to be building an important AI application layer from Africa for global markets," Youcef Rahmani, Chief Operating Officer of ToumAI said.
Rahmani, an Algerian with a project finance and law background, was working in Morocco when he met co-founders Odin Demassieux and Imade Benelallam at a tech event in Casablanca. Benelallam, a professor of Computer Science, was conducting research on under-resourced languages at the time and frequently shared his discoveries with both men.
Those conversations around Benelallam's work soon revealed a problem: AI systems had no provisions for African languages, making it difficult for businesses to leverage insights from artificial intelligence to serve customers better. Thus, a solution was born. Today, the startup is building AI-driven customer experience (CX) solutions tailored for emerging markets.
Capitalising on AI's blind spots
AI models are largely trained with data that can be found online, which heavily favours widely spoken languages such as English. Consequently, African languages — spoken by over a billion people — are exempt from AI-driven solutions.
ToumAI works directly with businesses, including telecom providers, banks, and call centres, to gather and analyse voice data. This data is then used for business decisions such as resolving customer complaints. This approach enables the AI to understand local dialects, accents, and speech patterns more effectively than generic language models.
"Let's just focus on Africa for now, but this is also the case in a lot of other emerging markets. You have most of your customer base that might be illiterate. We know, for example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, this can be the case for up to 40% of the adult population, depending on where you are. So enabling voice orders and voice commands in local languages unlocks apps for them," Rahmani told Techpoint Africa.
Initially, ToumAI, which derives its name from Toumaï, a fossil skull discovered in Chad and thought to be the oldest member of the human race, focused on analysing text for its solution.
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However, it soon shifted its focus to voice. While it continues to work with text, the pivot to voice was influenced by the literacy challenges in the markets it wishes to serve, ensuring that it bridges the barrier created by text-based solutions.
For its first proof of concept, the startup worked with Moroccan financial institution Attijariwafa Bank in 2022 to analyse customer feedback collected via text before expanding its scope to cover voice interactions. It has also partnered with telecommunications provider, Orange.
The startup, which is currently working on proof of concepts for businesses in North and West Africa, says it is seeing early progress. According to Rahmani, a telecom provider in Tunisia saw its conversion rate for a subscription product jump from 3% to 30% after integrating ToumAI’s AI-powered voice solutions.
Similarly, a Moroccan telco significantly reduced its average customer service wait time from four minutes to just one minute and thirty seconds, improving both efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Business model and competition
Rahmani recognises that ToumAI plays in a highly competitive space but argues that the startup possesses distinct advantages.
The first is its focus on emerging markets. While ToumAI currently focuses on African languages, the startup ultimately intends to build a solution that serves emerging markets, and Rahmani believes its first-mover advantage is crucial. Its existing partnerships with telcos in Africa already provide it with large datasets that will help it improve its model.
In addition to its market focus, Rahmani points to its team as another competitive advantage.
All members of its team are African and work from Morocco, allowing it to access highly skilled talent while keeping costs lower than its European or American counterparts. The company is also keen to provide its team with international exposure by encouraging them to publish academic papers.
"Our team’s strong research background, with multiple published papers on AI and CX, underpins our ability to innovate and solve real-world challenges. This dedication to research and development is a cornerstone of our success,” Benelallam noted.
Rahmani highlights data privacy as another key advantage. Since Africa has limited data centres and cloud infrastructure, customer data is often processed in overseas data centres, a practice that many regulators on the continent find unacceptable.
ToumAI’s solution is an on-premise privacy vault that anonymizes voice data before sending it to the cloud for processing. Once processed, the data is sent back to the privacy vault, where it is decrypted locally, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations while maintaining efficiency.
Unlike competitors that charge per minute, ToumAI offers a yearly maintenance fee with tiered pricing based on customer interactions. The maintenance fee varies from one customer to another and depends on factors such as the number of languages supported and the type of interaction.
Looking ahead
ToumAI began fundraising roadshows in late 2023 but started getting investor commitments in 2024. Much of the pre-seed funding commitments were secured before the summer of 2024, culminating in Launch Africa Ventures leading a €1 million pre-seed round.
Other investors include Madica Ventures, Orange Ventures, Digital Africa, GO Ventures, BPI France, and business angel Bruno Akpaka.
Speaking about his firm's investment in the startup, Uwem Uwemakpan, Head of Investments at Launch Africa Ventures, said, “Emerging markets and diverse societies demand CX solutions that can adapt to their unique complexities. ToumAI’s innovative approach to Holistic CX is setting a new standard for how businesses can engage meaningfully with their customers. We’re proud to support their journey.”
With funding secured, Rahmani shared that the startup will now focus on converting its existing POCs into permanent contracts while expanding its team, particularly in data analytics, to support further growth. A larger team will also aid its goal of supporting more African languages, beginning with those spoken in West Africa.
Beyond hiring, ToumAI is actively pursuing strategic partnerships with call centre software providers and big tech companies like NVIDIA and Intel, both of whom it is already affiliated with through hackathons.
Having spent nearly a year fundraising and even experiencing an investor withdrawal, Rahmani says the team has learned an important lesson: never put all your eggs in one basket.
"As long as you haven't signed anything and cash isn't in the bank, you just need to still be in the fundraising mode," he notes.
Quizzed on what success looks like for ToumAI, he said, " We really hope to prove [that] we can build highly technical solutions in Africa. That for me would be the greatest success."
