Pelonomi Moiloa has taken an unconventional path to becoming one of Africa’s most recognized figures in artificial intelligence — from biomedical engineering in Johannesburg to a master’s degree in Japan, through data science at one of South Africa’s largest banks, to co-founding a startup that is building multilingual AI systems for African languages.
Moiloa co-founded Lelapa AI in December 2022 alongside Jade Abbott. The Johannesburg-based research and product lab has since launched InkubaLM, described as Africa’s first multilingual large language model, and Vulavula — meaning “speak” or “speak up” — a natural language processing service capable of transcribing, translating and analyzing text in local languages including isiZulu and Sesotho.
The company has attracted attention from global technology players. In March 2025, Microsoft President Brad Smith publicly cited Lelapa AI as one of the startups Microsoft had partnered with. Moiloa has also been recognized as one of Time magazine’s Most Influential People in AI, a Bloomberg Catalyst and a Mozilla Rise 25 Award recipient.
Moiloa grew up in South Africa and enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2011, completing a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering with a focus on human anatomy, biomedical transport phenomena and biomedical signals. She subsequently studied electrical engineering at the same institution, concentrating on networking systems, software development and systems management, before completing data science internships with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research between 2014 and 2016.
In 2016, she enrolled at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, where she completed a master’s degree in biomedical engineering in 2019. Her research focused on automated segmentation of neural calcium fluorescence images using recurrent convolutional neural networks.
After returning to South Africa, Moiloa served as a data science team lead at Nedbank from April 2019 to December 2022, leading projects across risk, human resources and marketing, including work on online and credit card fraud detection, adverse media monitoring and social media analysis.
During that period she also founded The Ungovernable NPC, an experimental community space whose initiatives include the Code Kamoso coding academy for teenage girls and a community vegetable and medicine garden.
At Lelapa AI, Moiloa describes the company’s mission as building the world’s most efficient language infrastructure to expand digital inclusion, ensuring African languages are not left behind in the age of AI.
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