Customer support is getting a voice makeover, but not everywhere. AethexAI, founded by former Goldman Sachs and Meta employees Mariama Diallo and Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa, aims to bring human-like responses to voice AI in Africa and the Middle East.

Their $3 million pre-seed funding round from 4DX Ventures and other top investors backs their mission. Diallo and Odemuyiwa built AethexAI’s small models and orchestration layer from scratch, focusing on local dialects like English, French, and Arabic to cut latency.

Their approach is unique: rather than using large models that might introduce delays, they developed Kora series with parameters ranging from 300 million to 1.7 billion. This model size allows them to handle more than 17,000 calls per day efficiently while maintaining accuracy.

“We cannot be everything for everybody right now,” Diallo told TechCrunch. “When we start talking to a company, we ask them to pick one use case that is the most important to them to start with.”

With a focus on debt collection, customer activation, and KYC processes, AethexAI plans to work closely with local telecom providers and universities for data annotation. Their goal: plug-and-play solutions that work within existing telephony infrastructure.