Sartify (Swahili LLM)

Sartify is a Tanzania-based deep-tech AI company building Swahili-language models and tooling. The company was cofounded by Dr. Michael S. Mollel (CEO), a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow with degrees in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Dar es Salaam and Information Communication Science and Engineering from NM-AIST Arusha, and Innocent Charles (Chief AI Officer), formerly an engineer at iPF Softwares and Neurotech Africa.

The company's main product is Pawa, a Swahili-English generative AI assistant. Pawa is backed by Sartify's in-house model family released on Hugging Face under the sartifyllc organization, including Pawa-Gemma-Swahili-2B, a Swahili fine-tune of Google's Gemma 2B base model. Sartify reports training Pawa on over 50 billion Swahili-language tokens. The company also operates the Swahili LLM Leaderboard on Hugging Face Spaces to track open-model performance on Swahili evaluations, which gives the work a benchmarking artifact other groups can use.

Swahili is the official language of Tanzania and is spoken by an estimated 100 million people across East Africa, but it is severely under-represented in the pretraining corpora of frontier commercial models. The category Sartify sits in includes Jacaranda Health's UlizaLlama and Lelapa AI's InkubaLM, all targeting African low-resource languages. Sartify's choice to release weights and benchmarks openly on Hugging Face places its work on the open side of that category.

Mozilla selected Sartify for the first Mozilla Builders Accelerator cohort, announced September 23, 2024, with awards of up to $100K plus mentorship under the local-AI theme. Mozilla Builders rules require participating projects to release their work under open-source licenses. The grant sits at the training, weights, and data layers of the open stack: Sartify is producing model artifacts, training pipelines, and Swahili-language data that other African-language efforts can build on rather than a single closed product.