Tech
These two founders left Goldman and Meta to build voice AI for markets everyone else overlooked
Customer support and service are among the hottest sectors in voice AI right now. But building a product that sounds human and responds without noticeable delay turns out to be much harder in some markets than others — and most of the major players weren’t built with Africa and the Middle East in mind.
AethexAI, a startup founded last year to close that gap, has raised $3 million in pre-seed funding led by 4DX Ventures, with participation from Enza Capital, Dorm Room Fund, Mojo Ventures, and Stanford GSB 26 Fund. Individual investors include Stanford faculty, telecom executives, and AI researchers from Anthropic.
Rather than using existing orchestration tools like Vapi and LiveKit, the company built its own small model and orchestration layer from scratch to handle the localized dialects of English, French, and Arabic spoken across its target markets — a decision driven, as we’ll get to, by the particular demands of operating in the region.
The company is also launching its platform for enterprises to try out its tech and sign up for its services, along with APIs and SDKs for developers to experiment with its models.
The startup was founded by Mariama Diallo and Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa. CEO Diallo worked at Goldman Sachs and later joined YC-backed ModelML as a product and growth hire. CTO Odemuyiwa graduated from Caltech, worked at Meta, and enrolled at Stanford Business School before co-founding the company. The pair wanted to build something for emerging markets and started looking for opportunities.
Businesses around the world are racing to adopt AI tools to automate parts of their operations. But that doesn’t always work out. In Egypt, a call center automated a significant share of its calls, but rolled the system back because of poor results, the founders found. Several support centers in Africa told them that finding and hiring engineers to automate calls at the right cost was a persistent headache.
“The latency and jitter that we saw on automated calls in this region were outrageous. If we had become orchestrators, we might have had to use large models that were hosted outside the region, resulting in higher latency. We realized that in order for this to work, we have to use very small models and cut latency at every step,” Odemuyiwa told TechCrunch about the decision to build the company’s own models and orchestration layer.
AI labs that deploy their latest models usually spend millions training them and acquiring data. AethexAI found a solution for both. Rather than chasing the largest possible models, it decided that small models are enough to tackle the latency problem while maintaining accuracy and developed its own Kora series, with parameters ranging from 300 million to 1.7 billion. That’s a fraction of the size of the LLMs, which is precisely the point.
To train these models, the startup used anonymized recordings from a call center partner. It also shipped hard drives to radio stations across Africa to collect more audio data. To keep costs down, it built a contributor network of university students to annotate data and pronounce local names. As a result, the startup says, it’s now handling more than 17,000 calls per day.
On the business side, the company is taking care to walk clients who are new to voice AI through the process, offering onsite demos and workshops to help them identify the best use cases for automation.
“We always tell customers that we cannot be everything for everybody right now. We’re small. 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],” Diallo said.
The startup is open to working across all industries, but at the moment, a big part of its use cases involves calls for debt collection, customer activation, or KYC — Know Your Customer verification, the standard identity-checking process used by banks and telecoms. The company is hiring forward-deployed engineers on a contract basis to serve local markets and building channel partnerships with telecoms providers to handle telephony for voice AI calls. Plug-and-play solutions, it says, simply won’t work here.
Walter Badoo, co-founder and managing partner of 4DX Ventures, argues that the Africa and Middle East market is fundamentally different from the markets most voice AI companies were built to serve.
“Enterprises in Africa and the Middle East process roughly three times the call volume of their Western counterparts, as voice is still the dominant channel for customer interaction,” he said. “Incumbent systems were built for Western markets characterized by high-end GPU infrastructure, standard English and European speech environments, and enterprise workflows common in the US and Europe. That creates real gaps when enterprises need systems that handle dialects, code-switching, and informal speech patterns, and that work within their existing telephony infrastructure and their actual price points.”
Put another way, while companies like ElevenLabs, Deepgram, Sierra, and Cognigy are expanding globally at a fast pace, the markets they were built for and the markets they are entering aren’t always the same thing. Startups like AethexAI are betting that the gaps — models specialized in local dialects, on-the-ground partnerships, infrastructure built for the region — represent a market opening that the giants have neither the incentive nor the architecture to close.
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Tech
Google’s Gemini nears billion-user milestone
Google is about to add another name to its long list of products with more than a billion users, a list that already includes Search, Gmail, Drive, Android, YouTube, and Chrome. The company said during its Q2 2026 call that the AI assistant Gemini now has over 950 million monthly users.
The company noted that Gemini users have tripled from last year. Earlier, in February, it said that the Gemini app crossed 750 million monthly active users. With this growth, Google’s assistant is in line to compete more closely with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which hit 1 billion monthly active users in June.
“Users love new agentic features like Daily Brief and our personalized agent, Gemini Spark, which is now available in the U.S. and internationally. We’ve been shipping helpful new features like this at an incredible pace,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said during the call.
Apart from users on Android, the Gemini app has found a strong user base on iOS with launches like the Nano Banana image generation model. According to Appfigures, the app has been downloaded over 137 million times on iOS in the last 12 months.
In its latest “State of AI” report, the analytics firm Sensor Tower noted that ChatGPT’s market share among AI assistants fell below 50% for the first time. The report, which looked at H1 2026, also noted that Gemini’s share rose to 27.7%.
Many people already use AI assistant apps as a substitute for search. However, Google reported that its search vertical is going strong, partially thanks to the AI-centric overhaul. During this quarter, its Q&A-style AI mode crossed 1 billion users. The company said that it is driving “an incremental increase” in search queries. Google also noted that through hardware engineering, it has reduced the cost of AI mode for the company, despite introducing new models and features.
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Tech
Google will now let you sign in to your account with a selfie video
Google is adding a selfie video option as a new way for users to log in to their accounts, the company announced on Thursday, joining a growing wave of tech companies betting that biometrics and not passwords are the future of identity verification online. The tech giant says selfie videos give users more options to sign in if they’re ever locked out or don’t have access to their usual phone or computer.
Users set up a selfie video by looking at their device’s camera and completing a few guided head movements — think turning right or left or nodding — to capture multiple angles of their face. If a user is having trouble signing in later, they can take another selfie video to get back into their account, and Google will then compare the new video to the one used at setup to confirm it’s the correct person.
The bigger challenge Google is trying to solve is proving a real human, not a bot or a doctored video, is on the other side of the camera. “When you use a selfie to sign in, we use multiple layers of security to help prevent impersonation attempts like fake photos and videos (i.e., deep fakes),” Google wrote in the blog post. “For example, we match your video against your saved selfie and require you to perform simple movements to prove it’s a live video. We also use our standard security practices to detect and help prevent suspicious sign-in attempts.”
This isn’t just about individual accounts, though. As AI-generated video gets more convincing, “liveness” checks are becoming a baseline requirement for any company handling logins, payments, or sensitive data.
Although the new option could help protect accounts against fraud and help users recover locked accounts, it also raises concerns around user privacy and biometric data collection, an area regulators have increasingly scrutinized as more companies build products around facial and voice data.
Google says selfie videos are stored securely using encryption and remain protected even when they’re not being used, and that users can choose to delete the videos from their Google account at any time.
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Tech
Meta launched a new AI optimism ad set to a song about human extinction
Meta’s newest advertisement begins with a black-and-white shot of an eye, showing us what someone sees as they read countless panicked headlines about how AI is going to take our jobs, isolate us, and spark a global crisis.
“Some people will have you believe AI is going to make us feel less connected. That it’s going to leave us behind,” a voiceover says. “We couldn’t disagree more.”
Suddenly, the video shifts to color, and shows a cycle of different people opening their eyes and smiling. Then, we see a couple dancing on a rooftop, pointing at a rainbow; a group of teens swimming in a lake; a child frolicking in a field; friends embracing after time apart.
“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want. But we’re betting on people, and we like those odds,” the voiceover says. “The future is for everyone.”
That’s a nice sentiment — pretty convenient for a company betting hundreds of billions of dollars that AI will revolutionize humanity. But the strangest part of the advertisement is not that we’re watching these happy moments play out via Instagram posts. It’s that the soundtrack to the ad is the David Bowie song “Five Years.”
If you are not familiar with this song, I urge you to give it a listen, read the lyrics, and think about what it is trying to say. It seems clear to me, but I studied poetry in college, so as a control for this experiment, I asked my brother — a blockchain analyst who loves Claude Code and does not read for fun — if he could tell me what the song is about.
“I thought climate change at first, then zombie apocalypse, then an asteroid hitting the earth,” he told me. He is correct. It is a song about the human race panicking after learning they will die in a mass-extinction event in five years.
If you’re not familiar with Bowie’s music, this track might sound happy and inspiring, matching the ad’s upbeat tone. The part of the song that is used for the advertisement was probably chosen because it uses the word “people” over and over again, and without the context of the song, it’s not clear what it’s about.
But if we look at the lines directly preceding this section:
News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying
We “had five years left to cry in” and the “earth was really dying.” It’s pretty bleak.
It is not reassuring to convince people that AI is going to make the world better while playing a song about the end of the world, and yet, this contradictory musical choice seems to have sailed right past everyone at Meta, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“Meta has always believed in giving people the power to share, connect, and shape your world in the ways you want,” he wrote alongside the video. “As we enter this next wave with AI, we continue to believe the future is for everyone. We’re focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to everyone.”
Then again, tech leaders are not known for their literary analysis skills. Meta’s Oculus used to give new hires copies of the science fiction novel “Ready Player One,” which is set in a dystopia in which a tech company making virtual reality products becomes overly powerful and evil. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has directly cited inspiration from the movie “Her,” which warns us about what can go wrong when we use AI for emotional support. Palantir, a company that builds AI surveillance systems for the government, is named after Palantir, a seeing stone from the “Lord of the Rings” franchise that the Dark Lord uses to spy on his enemies. Elon Musk is currently throwing a fit about the “accuracy” of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey,” a story with such realistic elements as sea monsters, magic, and divine intervention. These guys make a great argument for the value of studying the humanities.
Meta isn’t alone in its recent promotional foibles. Instead of racing to build AGI, the top AI companies seem to be fighting over who can make the creepiest advertisement. A few weeks ago, Anthropic released an eerie video of its own. As my colleague Lucas Ropek described it:
The ad begins with a video of a burning house (not exactly a heartwarming start) before pivoting to a series of still images. These images include a crowd of people being surveilled by facial recognition, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows upon rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and what appears to be a group of laborers toiling in a mine where (presumably) raw materials for smartphones are being dug up.
Meanwhile, a voice-over track features different people asking questions like “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?”
Anthropic is trying to convince us that it understands the risks AI poses to society, and therefore, this is the company that people can trust to develop AI responsibly. The message it actually conveys feels closer to the mood of Bowie’s “Five Years.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to the Anthropic ad, “I thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something.”
As these companies spar to control the public perception of AI, their efforts don’t seem to be making much progress. A recent Pew survey found that only 16% of Americans think that AI’s impact on society over the next 20 years will be positive, and 40% believe it will have a negative impact. Better luck next time, Meta.
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