Grace Ashiru
Voice AI startup AethexAI has raised $3 million in pre-seed funding to develop localised customer support automation for Africa and the Middle East. The round was led by 4DX Ventures, with participation from Enza Capital, Dorm Room Fund, Mojo Ventures, and the Stanford GSB ’26 Fund, alongside angel investors including Stanford faculty, telecom executives, and AI researchers from Anthropic.
Founded in 2025 by Mariama Diallo and Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa, AethexAI is building its own small-model architecture, the Kora series, ranging from 300 million to 1.7 billion parameters, to reduce latency and better handle regional dialects of English, French, and Arabic. The company focuses on high-volume enterprise use cases including KYC verification, debt collection, and customer activation, and currently processes more than 17,000 calls daily. The new capital will support enterprise rollout, APIs, SDKs, and regional expansion.
