Two Zimbabwean Founders Raise $2 Million In America To Teach AI How To Talk
Two young men who started out in Zimbabwe and Zambia have raised $2 million in America for their artificial intelligence company that is now selling technology to some of the biggest tech companies in the world.
Michael Moyo and Louis Murerwa are the founders of Ocular AI, a San Francisco-based company. The money was led by US investor Drive Capital, with Y Combinator and other big investors joining.
Their story started around 2017 when both got full scholarships to study at Dartmouth College in America.
Moyo studied Biomedical and Computer Engineering. He did internships at Novartis and Microsoft and later got a full-time job at Microsoft in Washington.
Murerwa is Zimbabwean. He did two internships at Google and then got a full-time software engineering job at Google in New York City. In January 2024 he moved to San Francisco.
The two reconnected in 2024 and applied to Y Combinator, the world’s most famous startup school in Silicon Valley. They were accepted into the Winter 2024 batch and launched Ocular AI. The company is now based in San Francisco and Atlanta.
While most African AI companies build apps for local users, Ocular AI does the opposite. It makes the food that American AI eats.
Companies like OpenAI, Google and Nvidia are now building AI that can talk and listen like a real human. It must understand pauses, interruptions, and when two people talk at the same time.
The problem is there is not enough good quality voice data to train it. Most data online is old telephone calls
Ocular AI fixes that. They record studio-quality conversations and use thousands of vetted human experts to test where AI fails. They then sell those high-quality datasets and tests to the frontier labs and Fortune 100 companies. The company says it is already making over $1 million in revenue.