Yamify, a Democratic Republic of Congo–based AI infrastructure startup, has raised $100,000 in pre-seed funding from Felix Anane, an early backer of Paystack. The company is also seeking an additional $100,000 to close the round. The capital will be used to launch its flagship Managed Cloud Prototypes (MCP) feature, which enables users to describe the AI tool they need in a simple chat interface and have it deployed instantly on local or global cloud servers.
Most cloud-based AI infrastructure is built with large enterprise teams in the U.S. or Europe in mind. These services are typically billed in U.S. dollars, assume the presence of in-house cloud engineers, and operate at a cost structure that is often impractical for Africa’s fast-growing but budget-conscious developer ecosystem.
Yamify’s approach is different: it provides one-click access to open-source AI tools hosted on GPU clusters in African data centres, billed in local currencies such as naira, M-Pesa, or MTN MoMo. This means freelancers, startups, and creative agencies can go from idea to live AI product in minutes without enterprise-level budgets or infrastructure expertise.
Founded in 2024 by Luc Okalobé, a former cloud engineer at TikTok and Salesforce with over 15 years’ experience, Yamify is designed to function like an “AI app store” offering chatbots, automation agents, video generators, and large language models with the underlying server infrastructure already in place.
The company’s GPU-powered clusters, nicknamed “YAMs”, are currently hosted in Nigeria, Congo, and South Africa, with backup capacity from global cloud providers. Unlike traditional $20-a-month SaaS licences that restrict usage, Yamify offers unrestricted open-source editions at lower costs, payable in local currencies.
Africa should not wait to be included in the AI wave we should build it. At Yamify, we believe in community-led AI infrastructure made for Africa and the world.
Luc Okalobé
Yamify joins a growing cohort of African AI infrastructure providers, including Y Combinator–backed Cerebrium, which has raised $8.5 million for enterprise-scale AI model training. While Cerebrium targets large-scale training platforms, Yamify is taking a developer-first, community-led route focusing on local GPU-powered AI deployments, open-source tools, Kubernetes-based orchestration, and region-specific billing.
Globally, Yamify competes with specialised AI cloud providers like Lambda and CoreWeave, as well as hyperscalers AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. But Okalobé’s go-to-market strategy bypasses enterprise sales in favour of grassroots adoption embedding Yamify in hackathons, developer meetups, and universities. “We go after people who don’t know AWS exists,” Okalobé said. “We help them launch their first chatbot or automation and grow with them.”
Since entering private beta in July 2025, Yamify has attracted interest from developers, fintech startups, and creative agencies in Lagos, Kinshasa, Brazzaville, and Johannesburg. The waitlist now includes over 1,500 developers and companies, among them Y Combinator 2023 startup Vaultpay.io.
Yamify’s pricing starts at $15 a month for individuals and $500 a year for agencies, with free tiers for experimentation. The company’s cost advantage comes from its team’s expertise in cloud cost optimization, including detecting idle workloads and shutting them down automatically. “Hyperscalers don’t turn things off for you. We do,” Okalobé noted.
In the next six months, Yamify aims to onboard 100,000 users, with a longer-term goal of generating $1 million in annual revenue and becoming the go-to AI infrastructure layer for Africa’s next generation of startups. For Okalobé, however, success is measured by impact rather than just revenue: “If developers are telling others, ‘Yamify helped me launch this,’ then we’ve already won.”
