The AI That Speaks Your Language Is Being Built in Port Harcourt
A man played with an aerosol can near fire and it exploded. The caution label was in English but he could not read it. That is why Leangoogs exists.
A man in a village picked up an aerosol can and played with it near an open fire. The can exploded and people were burned. One lost their sight permanently.
There was a caution label on the bottle but it was in English. He could not read it.
Prince Onyeji, founder and CEO of Leangoogs AI Technologies Limited, tells that story every time someone asks why his company exists.
He said;
“People in the village learn majorly by experience and lesser by reading. If the person playing with the aerosol could read, he would have read the caution on the label.”
That story is the entire mission of Leangoogs.
What Leangoogs Is
Founded in 2024 and incorporated in 2026, Leangoogs is headquartered in Port Harcourt. It builds speech-to-speech AI for African languages covering automatic speech recognition, machine translation and text-to-speech. Five languages are supported: Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Nigerian Pidgin and Swahili, with ten more planned.
Speech-to-speech means you speak and the AI speaks back in your language. What separates Leangoogs is how it handles code-switching, the natural Nigerian way of mixing Igbo, English and Pidgin in one sentence. Every major AI model falls apart at that point. Leangoogs treats it as the default.
The Part That Sets It Apart
Most startups in this space fine-tune foreign base models from companies in California or Beijing. Onyeji took the harder road. Every Leangoogs model is trained from scratch on the company's own GPU infrastructure. Nothing in the stack can be revoked by a foreign company. Nothing depends on anyone else's permission.
Training from scratch required data that did not exist at the quality needed. So Leangoogs built its own African language data labelling and annotation pipeline with field audio sourcers, annotators and language leads. That pipeline is now a product line serving organisations that need African language data and have nowhere else to get it.
Where the Technology Is Going
In healthcare, models scan drug labels and render them in indigenous languages so rural patients understand what they are taking. In education, students learn in their mother tongue. In financial services, the CBN's anti-money laundering mandate is driving demand from banks that must monitor customer communications in local languages.
Onyeji spent eight years as a process engineer at Shell and Pan Ocean Nigeria and five years teaching Python and data science. He leads the Language Models pillar at the AI Sovereignty Network. Leangoogs is currently raising Series A and building toward a Nigerian data centre before expanding across Africa.
