Cédric Manouan
CEO & Co-founder
AI engineer; incoming PhD student in AI Safety (INP-HB); former CMU-Africa research associate; lead writer of a $250k grant-winning proposal on African mother tongues; AI analyst at IFC.
Company
About DipR AI
Pioneering African sovereign intelligence layer through deep-tech applied research.
Our Mission
DipR AI exists to break the API consumption trap. African institutions and companies are currently forced to depend on closed-source, foreign-hosted black boxes. This presents massive data sovereignty issues and ties local development to fluctuating foreign exchange. By building custom models natively and collocating them in regional state-of-the-art datacenters, we ensure absolute long-term sovereign independence.
Applied Research Focus
We do not build API wrappers. Our lab publishes at tier-1 international venues (ACL, NeurIPS, ICLR) and is actively working on: Frugal language modeling (directly processing acoustic representations of local languages like Baoulé, Dyula, and Wolof), high-ratio quantization, hardware-aware neural architecture search, and local agentic safety sandboxes for regulated environments.
The Cofounders
DipR AI was founded by three native technologists committed to building high-density compute assets and frontier models directly on African soil, making Abidjan and Kigali global research hubs.
Gabrial Z. Ashungafac
Chief Scientist & Co-founder
Applied AI research leadership across global and African institutions.
Edy Koffi
CTO & Co-founder
Senior Software Eng, Cloud Solution Architect, specialized in the design and build of distributed systems; ESATIC alumnus.