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This is a profound honor. My co-founder Bronson Bakunga and I are driven by a single belief: a person's access to opportunity should never be limited by their access to the internet. We are committed to working with the AI Hub to build the sovereign offline-first infrastructure that finally empowers a generation of African innovators to solve their own challenges. By CoFounder Kato Steven Mubiru
Crane AI Labs is advancing a sovereign offline-first AI stack designed to transform access to health education and agricultural services across Africa by bringing high-performance AI directly to low-connectivity environments. Founded by Ugandan engineers Kato Steven Mubiru and Bakunga Bronson with deep experience in digital public goods the company addresses a critical gap the absence of culturally aligned secure and on-device AI infrastructure capable of serving underserved and rural populations. Leveraging hyper-efficient foundation models (i.e Crane-Gemma) on-device inference offline AI agents and a unique AI governance benchmark (UCCB) recognized by the UK Government Crane AI Labs provides governments NGOs and enterprises with sovereign AI tools that run reliably without cloud dependence. Its platform integrates AI models mobile inference apps (TANO) and a Trust & Safety as a Service layer that ensures ethical culturally safe deployments. Through the Compute Accelerator our primary goal is to forge deep partnerships with governments and development banks to co-design and deploy national-scale Digital Public Infrastructure. We are specifically seeking to collaborate on policy frameworks for sovereign AI and to secure access to the strategic Africa-based compute necessary to train the next generation of multilingual models on the continent. The AI Hub's support is the critical catalyst to move our proven technology from successful pilots to population-scale impact. With partnerships and collaborations spanning Google DeepMind NVIDIA (Inception Program) Gates Foundation IBM and invitations from the World Bank Crane AI Labs exemplifies Africa's next generation of sovereign AI innovators
