Drawing on support from Felix Anane—one of the early investors behind Paystack—the company has raised US$100,000 in pre-seed funding, with aspirations to close the round at around US$200,000.

Founded by Luc Okalobé, a former cloud engineer with tenure at firms such as TikTok and Salesforce, Yamify bills itself as the “Heroku for AI” in Africa.

Its platform allows users—particularly freelancers, startups, and digital agencies—to deploy GPU-powered AI tools in less than a minute, hosted in data centers within African countries.

These local GPU clusters (dubbed “YAMs”) are complemented by backup infrastructure from global cloud providers.

Yamify’s strategy emphasizes affordability, locality, and ease of use. Rather than requiring enterprises with cloud engineering teams, its platform supports open-source AI tools, billing in local currencies (such as naira, MTN MoMo, M-Pesa) and lower overhead through optimizations like shutting down idle compute resources.

Since entering private beta in July 2025, the startup has attracted early interest from fintechs and web agencies in African tech hubs, including Lagos, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, and Brazzaville.

Over 1,500 developers and startups are on its waitlist, and the company is positioning to expand further.

The newly secured funds will be channelled toward the release of Yamify’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), a feature designed to let users describe in natural language the kind of AI tool they want and have it provisioned automatically—speeding up what usually takes days into minutes.

The startup also plans to embed “forward engineers” into client organizations to help accelerate the adoption of AI.

Luc Okalobé emphasized the urgency and importance of building AI infrastructure in Africa, rather than waiting for inclusion from outside.

“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.”