UK-Based AethexAI Raises $3M Pre-seed To Build Voice AI Infrastructure For Emerging Markets

The company is building a voice AI platform designed specifically for regions where existing solutions often fail due to poor connectivity, high costs and difficulty handling local languages and accents.

AethexAI’s platform provides a self-hosted, fully managed voice infrastructure that includes telephony, orchestration and workflow integration, accessible through no-code tools and APIs. It aims to enable enterprises to deploy scalable cost-efficient voice agents across customer service and operations.

Founded by Mariama Diallo and Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa, the company targets emerging markets across Africa and the Middle East, where it sees significant unmet demand for reliable voice automation.

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Its proprietary system, Kora 1, is trained on diverse real-world datasets and optimised for noisy environments and multilingual communication. AethexAI also plans to launch a developer platform to expand voice application development across the region.

The new funding will support enterprise scaling, product development, and team expansion.

According to Mariama Diallo, co-founder of AethexA, voice is already how businesses operate across emerging markets, but the technology behind it hasn’t kept up: “We kept hearing the same thing from customers: that existing tools simply didn’t work in their environments. That’s why we built our own model stack and infrastructure from the ground up, designed for how these markets actually operate.”

According to Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa, co-founder of AethexAI, said: “Voice AI failed in these markets at every layer of the stack. Latency, cost, poor handling of code-switching, and weak performance under packet loss, jitter, and low-bitrate audio in real telecom networks led these systems to break in production."