How These AI Founders Are Pulling South Africa’s Elders Into the Digital Era

Botlhale AI co-founders from left to right: Sange Maxaku, Xolisani Nkwentsha, and Thapelo Nthite

In a world where English still dominates the digital landscape, three South African engineers decided it was time to change the narrative. For Botlhale AI co-founders Sange Maxaku, Thapelo Nthite, and Xolisani Nkwentsha, the spark wasn’t born in a boardroom or lab — it began with a simple moment at home.

During a semester break, Nthite’s grandmother asked him to help load prepaid airtime on her phone. She knew what she wanted to do, but couldn’t read the English instructions on the voucher or navigate her phone’s settings. “That’s when it hit me,” Nthite recalled. “The only barrier was language.”

What started as a personal frustration grew into a realisation shared by his friends at the University of Cape Town’s Electrical Engineering department. South Africans were being left out of the digital world not because of a lack of access, but due to language barriers. From that insight, Botlhale AI was founded: a company built to make technology speak to people in their languages.

The Founders Behind the Code

While Botlhale AI’s mission is technological, the people driving it are deeply human. Each founder brings a distinctive personality that complements the others, a balance that has shaped the company’s identity as much as its innovation.

Sange Maxaku, thoughtful and measured, is the group's reflective strategist. He speaks with quiet conviction, often pausing before responding as though mentally testing the weight of each word. His grounded nature keeps the company’s ambitions realistic, and its mission focused on people first.

Thapelo Nthite carries the spark of the storyteller — expressive, intuitive, and deeply empathetic. He’s the kind of founder who sees solutions through lived experience, often reminding the team why language inclusion matters beyond profit margins. His grandmother’s story remains the moral compass of their work.

Xolisani Nkwentsha, meanwhile, is the analytical driver — sharp, detail-oriented, and calm under pressure. Known for his dry humour and discipline, he’s the one who quietly turns ideas into tangible systems. Together, their contrasting strengths create harmony: Maxaku’s structure, Nthite’s empathy, and Nkwentsha’s precision.

Beyond their differences, what binds them is humility and heart. They often describe Botlhale not as a business, but as an ecosystem, a way to translate their shared experiences growing up in townships and rural communities into tangible social impact. That sense of grounded purpose keeps them authentic in an industry often obsessed with hype.

Bothlale AI Co-Founder: Sange Maxaku

The trio met while studying mechatronics and electrical engineering, fields often associated with robotics and power systems rather than communication. Yet they saw how their technical expertise could directly address an everyday problem. “We thought, let’s become the ‘they’ that we speak of,” Maxaku said, referencing the common phrase — ‘they should build this’.

At its core, Botlhale AI develops speech recognition and natural language processing tools that allow enterprises to engage customers in multiple South African languages. Their software can interpret and respond to spoken language, making it possible for banks, call centres, and service providers to interact with clients in isiZulu, Sesotho, or Xhosa and not just in English.

This isn’t simply about convenience; it’s about access. Only about 30% of South Africans are fully comfortable expressing themselves in English, which means millions are effectively excluded from digital services. “We wanted to build solutions that real people could use, not just those fluent in English or living in cities,” said Nkwentsha.

Bothlale AI Co-Founder: Thapelo Nthite

From the start, Botlhale AI’s mission wasn’t to create flashy technology but to build relevant technology. The founders saw a gap in how financial institutions and service providers engaged mass-market consumers. “In urban areas, ATMs have no queues,” Nthite explained. “But back home in the village, people line up for hours even though they have smartphones. That’s because they can’t self-service in their own languages.”

Their early bet, that companies would eventually use WhatsApp as a primary customer service platform, proved right. Today, Botlhale AI enables these enterprises to offer multilingual self-service channels and automated call-centre analytics. Their technology even helps quality-assurance teams by transcribing and evaluating calls in multiple languages to ensure agents remain compliant and customers aren’t exploited.

This dual emphasis on access and accountability distinguishes them in South Africa's rapidly growing AI sector. The company has expanded its reach by developing APIs that enable developers and creators to integrate African-language speech models into their own applications, ranging from transcription services to educational tools.

The Cost of Building in Africa

Despite its success, Botlhale AI faces familiar challenges. Developing local AI models is expensive and data-intensive. “The hardest part is the cost of infrastructure and the availability of data in our local languages,” said Maxaku. “Most of what exists online is formal or dictionary-based. We’re trying to capture how people actually speak.”

The other challenge is talent. While South Africa has world-class engineers, few have experience building large-scale AI systems. Recruiting or retaining those with specialised skills can be prohibitively costly for startups.

Then there’s the issue of capital. AI companies require patient investment because research and development come before revenue. “You can’t start today and deliver tomorrow,” Nthite explained. “It takes time before you can put a working product in front of customers.”

Still, the founders remain optimistic. They view these obstacles not as deterrents, but as part of the long road toward establishing a sustainable AI ecosystem on the continent.

Bothlale AI Co-Founder: Xolisani Nkwentsha

While the company is rooted in technology, its heart lies in community. All three founders come from humble backgrounds, where access to information and digital services was limited. That shared experience fuels their commitment to inclusive innovation.

“It’s our way of ensuring that people go through life with access to opportunities and information, in languages they prefer,” said Maxaku. For the founders, the mission goes beyond profit: it’s about empowerment, education, and digital dignity.

They also believe young South Africans shouldn’t shy away from the AI field, even if it seems intimidating. “Just start,” advised Nthite. “You’ll learn as you do. The best way to teach yourself is by trying.”

Their emphasis on practical learning and multidisciplinarity, combining technical skills with business, law, or social sciences, reflects a broader understanding of innovation: that it thrives when diverse skill sets meet.

Over the next five years, Botlhale AI plans to expand its reach across Sub-Saharan Africa while deepening automation capabilities for customer experience platforms. The company is also building a self-service API suite that will allow other developers to access its language models without intermediaries.

While they automate more business processes, they remain mindful of the human impact. “Any automation in Africa has social implications,” Nthite said. “We come from the same communities that benefit from those jobs, so we have to build responsibly.”

The team also notes that new investments from tech giants like Microsoft allow startups to host data locally and meet regulatory standards. For them, this isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about sovereignty.

Becoming the ‘They’

What makes Botlhale AI remarkable isn’t just what it builds, but why it builds. In an era when AI is often framed as an abstract, global race, their story reminds us that technology is only meaningful when it serves people.

From helping a grandmother read her phone to enabling banks to speak isiZulu, Botlhale AI is proving that innovation doesn’t have to come from Silicon Valley; it can start with a conversation in your own language. As South Africa steps into its AI era, companies like Botlhale are showing that the next big disruption might not be about speed or scale, but about understanding.

After all, in their own words: “We thought, let’s become the ‘they’ that we speak of.”