After co-founding Vambo AI and serving as CTO for nearly four years, I'm stepping away to begin a new chapter. Building Vambo taught me more than I could ever fit into a post. I'm deeply grateful to the team, and to everyone who believed in us and backed the journey along the way. I've now joined the ML engineering team at AethexAI (@aethexailabs). AethexAI is the next generation of conversational voice AI for emerging markets, already serving customers across Africa and the Middle East. What drew me in is the team's approach and execution: building voice AI from first principles for the languages people actually speak and the environments they live in, and making it work at scale. It's a natural continuation of the work I've dedicated the last few years to: 60+ African languages, building models where little or no data existed, leading large-scale data collection efforts, and most recently releasing MORENA, a 1.5B-parameter model trained from scratch for African languages. Getting voice right for these markets is work I care deeply about, and I'm excited to push the frontier further with this team.