My name is Jade.

I’m Co-founder & CTO of Lelapa AI, where we build resource-efficient language AI for the real world — bringing language AI from Africa to the world under the constraints that actually matter: limited compute, fragmented data, and diverse linguistic contexts.

I co-founded Masakhane, the award-winning grassroots open research movement for NLP for African languages.

I am passionate about creating an ubuntu-punk future, as opposed to the cyberpunk one.

I have over a decade of experience in technology — once dubbed “Full-stack ML” because I’ve worked at every end of putting an ML model into production, across banking, NGOs and startups.

In 2024 I was named one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35, and a recipient of the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans Award.

In-between, I tweet extensively and angrily.

And sometimes, I take that anger out musically — bassist of Pussy Heaven and Follow Me Follow You.