Lelapa AI / InkubaLM
African-language transcription and translation, plus the small InkubaLM model
Overview
Lelapa AI is a Johannesburg company building resource-efficient language AI for African languages. It sells Vulavula, a transcription and translation API aimed at contact centres, from $9.99 a month, and publishes InkubaLM, a 0.4-billion-parameter model trained on five African languages plus English and French, under a non-commercial licence.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 14 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- 1,000 API calls a month
- Transcribe and Translate
- 10,000 API calls a month
- Transcribe and Translate
- 500,000+ API calls a month
- Transcribe and Translate
- Lower per-call cost
- No rate limits
Use cases
What you can produce with Lelapa AI / InkubaLM
- Speech-to-text for code-switched isiZulu and South African English, with Sesotho, Afrikaans and African French in beta
- Speaker diarisation and confidence scores on transcripts
- Text translation between English and African languages including isiZulu, Sesotho and Afrikaans
- Live transcription during calls, or Sync processing straight after they end
- InkubaLM-0.4B weights for non-commercial research and fine-tuning
- A REST API and Python SDK, with Zapier and Turn.io integrations
ASEAN Perspective
Lelapa AI / InkubaLM in Southeast Asia
InkubaLM is not directly applicable to ASEAN use cases — its five supported languages (isiZulu, Yoruba, Hausa, Swahili, isiXhosa) have no overlap with Southeast Asian languages. However, its core methodology — training from scratch with language-first tokenisation on low-resource data budgets, achieving parity with far larger models — is directly relevant to ongoing ASEAN efforts to build indigenous language models for Bahasa Indonesia, Filipino, Thai, and other regional languages. ASEAN AI researchers and policymakers building sovereign language infrastructure will find InkubaLM's efficiency results and open datasets (Inkuba-Mono, Inkuba-Instruct on HuggingFace) a useful technical reference. As a model to use today for ASEAN tasks, it offers nothing; as a research blueprint for what a well-resourced but compute-constrained regional AI lab can achieve, it is highly instructive.
Vulavula is a focused, cheap way to transcribe and translate South African languages, with code-switched isiZulu and South African English production-ready and a sensible pricing ladder from $9.99 a month. InkubaLM is a credible piece of efficiency research, but its weights are non-commercial and untouched since 2024.
Expect change: language codes have been removed without warning, and much of the language list is still in beta. With no ASEAN or APAC languages, it is a reference for low-resource methods here rather than a tool to deploy.
What we found
Lelapa AI is a Johannesburg language-AI company led by chief executive Pelonomi Moiloa and chief technology officer Jade Abbott, and it has two things worth knowing about. The one it sells is Vulavula, an API for transcription and translation in African languages, released in November 2023 and now aimed squarely at contact centres in telecoms and financial services. The one it is known for is InkubaLM, a 0.4-billion-parameter language model trained from scratch on 2.4 billion tokens of isiZulu, Yoruba, Hausa, Swahili and isiXhosa alongside English and French.
Lelapa calls InkubaLM Africa's first multilingual small language model; that is the company's description, not an independent ruling. Its August 2024 arXiv paper claims performance comparable to much larger models on translation, question answering, AfriMMLU and AfriXNLI, and a 2025 compression challenge run with Zindi produced versions Lelapa says are up to 75% smaller. The weights are on Hugging Face under CC BY-NC 4.0, behind an access form, and have not been updated since September 2024. Commercial use is not allowed.
Vulavula is the paid path, and it does speech-to-text and translation, not general text generation. Each API key comes with 100 free calls and expires after 90 days. Plans are $9.99 a month for 1,000 calls, $49.99 for 10,000 calls, and custom Enterprise pricing above 500,000 calls. Transcription is production-ready for code-switched isiZulu and South African English, with Sesotho, Afrikaans and African French in beta; translation covers more languages, several still in beta.
The service changes quickly and not always gracefully. Lelapa's own release notes admit that an August 2026 update removed an isiZulu language code without a deprecation window or notice, and Translate moved to an EU region in 2025. The pricing page offers annual billing, but annual prices were not shown in the version we read. Data aggregators record a seed round of about $2.5 million in 2023 from Mozilla Ventures and Atlantica Ventures. No ASEAN languages are supported.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
Notable facts
- InkubaLM was trained from scratch — not fine-tuned from an existing Western model — with a custom 61,788-token vocabulary built specifically for African language morphology.
- In the May 2025 Buzuzu-Mavi global challenge (490 participants from 61 countries), African developers took all three top spots and compressed InkubaLM by 75% without meaningful performance loss.
- CEO Pelonomi Moiloa holds a Master's in biomedical engineering from Tohoku University, Japan — her neural imaging research background directly informed Lelapa's approach to low-data, high-efficiency model design.
- Microsoft President Brad Smith specifically named Lelapa AI in a March 2025 speech on AI in South Africa, citing it as a model for African-led AI infrastructure development.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Lelapa AI / InkubaLM's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Lelapa AI / InkubaLM unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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