DRC-born startup Yamify raises pre-seed funding to build 'Heroku for AI Tools' on African data centers.

Africa's AI boom faces a critical supply-chain bottleneck. Developers and small agencies across the continent want to build and deploy AI tools but routinely encounter the same barriers: high cloud costs, unreliable GPU access, latency from overseas servers, and infrastructure complexity that requires in-house cloud engineering expertise most startups lack. Yamify, a startup founded in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is building directly into that gap—and has just secured fresh funding to scale.

Yamify is a developer-first AI infrastructure platform operating as an on-continent alternative to cloud giants, enabling freelancers and web agencies to deploy GPU-powered AI tools in under a minute using African data centres. Founded by Congolese entrepreneur Luc Okalobé, a former cloud engineer at TikTok and Salesforce, the company had already gained early traction with fintechs and agencies across Lagos, Kinshasa, Brazzaville, Johannesburg, and San Francisco before this announcement. It initially launched with a $100,000 investment from Felix Anane, an early backer of Paystack.

The platform operates GPU-powered clusters known as "YAMs" hosted in Nigeria, Congo, and South Africa, with global cloud providers available as backup infrastructure. Rather than charge typical $20-per-month SaaS licensing fees, Yamify lets users run unrestricted open-source AI models and pay via local payment systems—naira, M-Pesa, or MTN MoMo—directly. The service targets freelancers, small agencies, and early-stage startups, not enterprise clients.

The pre-seed funding from Launch Africa Ventures, part of an ongoing round, will support early-stage distribution through partnerships with OADC and Cassava AI. The investment signals growing confidence among African venture investors in startups building the critical AI and infrastructure layer that will underpin the continent's digital economy. "Africa should not wait to be included in the AI wave—we should build it," Okalobé said.