Temi Babs, founder and CEO of Lagos AI startup Spitch, has set an ambitious goal: to capture 30% of Africa’s voice data market by 2031. This bold vision comes from a company that has raised limited funding yet is already serving major clients like Safaricom Ethiopia and Nigeria’s Leadership newspaper.
Spitch’s journey began in 2024 as a note-taking app for students, but quickly pivoted when the initial concept proved unworkable due to the complexities of African languages—lecturers often blended multiple languages mid-sentence, creating chaotic audio environments that standard AI models couldn’t handle.
Instead of abandoning the project, Babs and his team reframed their failure as a signal. If transcription was this challenging in controlled lecture settings, the underlying problem—getting machines to reliably understand spoken African languages—was far more fundamental: it was an infrastructure challenge.
Today, Spitch provides voice AI solutions for customer communications, content delivery, and other applications. Their platform now supports over 1,800 developers and processes hundreds of thousands of seconds of audio monthly, with a cumulative volume nearing three million seconds.
What sets Spitch apart isn’t just technical capability; it’s deep contextual understanding. Babs argues that capital alone won’t win this market—relationships, data insights, and cultural nuance matter more. “Any well-funded global giant trying to serve African markets would need the local knowledge we’ve built over two years,” he explains.
Spitch addresses data challenges through a three-stage approach: starting with internal recordings, then licensing datasets, and now partnering directly with clients to fine-tune models using their own voice data. They currently focus on actively training around 15-20 languages across West and East Africa while maintaining the technical capacity for over 400.
As concerns about AI-generated content grow—particularly with Nigeria’s upcoming elections—Spitch is emphasizing ethical practices like cryptographic signing to ensure voice data provenance. Babs advocates for public education around media literacy, urging people to verify information rather than accepting it at face value.