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Founder Highlights

Member Profile

Asme Teka

Co-founder & CTO of Lesan AI democratizing access to the Web for millions of people all over Africa by making content available in their languages.

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Lesan AI illustrates the multi-faceted challenge of solving complex problems at the intersection of machine learning and languages as a Black Founder. As an early stage startup working on low-resources language, its founders have to overcome significant hurdles in the form of technical risk and fundraising challenges particularly prevalent in regions where the company operates.

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Challenges to overcome

• Large datasets required to train machine translation models are scarce for Ethiopian languages
• Being based in Europe, the value proposition of working on NLP for African Languages may not be understood by local investors

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Accomplishments

• Translations are already available for low resources languages in Africa such as Tingray and Amharic
• Lesan AI had to curate and collect their own dataset
• Translation accuracy is significantly higher than Google Translate