Aya Data, a Ghanaian AI startup, on Friday secured $900,000 in initial funding which comprises debt and equity capital will be used to scale AyaGrow and AyaSpeech and hire fresh talent.
With the new fund, the company has $1.15 million in funding. Microtraction, Savannah Fund, and Scott Bell gave Aya Data $255,000 in the past. Other seed investors joined the most recent round of funding, which was led by 54Collective.
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Meet the Founders of Aya Data
Aya Data, founded in 2021 by Freddie Monk and Ama Larbi-Siaw, hires people to collect and identify data; images, videos, and texts for Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Gemini. The startup claims to train data annotation workers for data engineering and data science jobs.
In addition to collecting and annotating data, Ayadata also makes AI solutions that are unique to each business. The startup has two AI products: AyaSpeech, an end-to-end speech-to-speech solution that lets businesses, consumers, and governments talk to each other in native African languages and AyaGrow, a crop and field monitoring solution that gives commercial and smallholder farmers more power through AI-driven precision agriculture.
Aya Data, Sharip, Sama, iMerit, Cloudfactory, and Dataloop contribute to global AI system development. Major language models require massive data collection and identification.
World-class IT companies like Meta and OpenAI recruit workers to categorise and annotate data in developing nations like India, the Philippines, Kenya’s Dadaab, and Lebanon’s Shatila.
“We are dedicated to building local expertise that can leverage AI to tackle the continent’s most pressing challenges,” said Ama Larbi-Siaw, Aya Data’s co-founder and COO.
They compete with Brainpool.ai, Deeper Insights, SandTech, Pro AI, and Faculty AI in consulting. Still, these corporations outsource much of their data collecting and annotation to underdeveloped nations.
“Because we control everything in Ghana, we can deliver faster and more efficiently without the risk of involving third parties,” said Gillian Hammah, Marketing and Strategy officer at Aya Data.
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The company charges for data annotation. It serves 20 clients, including MIT, Seedtag, Unilever, Labelbox, and Nvidia, and earned $ 500,000 in 2023.
“The majority of our work has been with global clients, but we are increasingly focused on helping African businesses leverage AI to increase their competitiveness.”
The company will teach 1000 data annotators, engineers, and scientists in the following months to develop its products.
“Ultimately we are working to enable as many businesses and people to benefit from AI as quickly as possible, and to ensure that the ability to build this technology to a world class standard exists in Ghana and other similar markets.”