Kenya’s Fikra API has launched an AI inference API built specifically for African developers, startups and businesses.
Founded by James Miano earlier this year, Fikra API is an OpenAI-compatible inference API targeting African developers, with M-Pesa payments built in and pricing set in local terms rather than U.S. dollars.
Developers can send requests to Fikra’s endpoint and get responses from large language models, the same way they would with OpenAI or Anthropic, but with pricing, payment methods and token economics designed for African markets.
“If you are a developer or startup founder in Nairobi, Lagos or Cape Town and you want to build an AI-powered product, the standard path is OpenAI or Anthropic. Both require a minimum spend of around $20 before you can access the API,” Miano told Disrupt Africa.
“That figure sounds small, but in Nairobi $20 is close to a week’s salary for many people. For those who can afford it, the problem does not stop there. Frontier model output pricing is expensive and burns through tokens quickly, forcing constant top-ups that compound the cost.”
The second barrier is payment.
“Most people in Africa are not cardholders. OpenAI and Anthropic require a credit or debit card. Mobile money is how the majority of people here actually transact, and none of the major AI API providers support it,” Miano said.
Fikra API exists to solve both. Fully bootstrapped, the startup onboarded its first 10 users within days of launch.
“We have also shipped two proprietary models — a custom embeddings model ready for inference, and Fikra Nano 1B, which is a ternary weight fine-tuned model we built in-house. The ternary weight pipeline is a genuinely uncommon capability and gives us a technical foundation most API providers at this stage do not have,” Miano said.
Currently active only in Kenya, with payment infrastructure live via Paystack, which covers much of sub-Saharan Africa, Fikra’s model is built to scale continent-wide.
“Any African developer with a smartphone and mobile money access is the target user,” Miano said.
The startup charges $1 per 2 million tokens.
“We do not split input and output pricing the way most providers do. It is one flat rate. Payment is via Paystack, which supports M-Pesa and mobile money across multiple African markets. We are pre-revenue at this stage, with the commercial push beginning at launch,” Miano said.
“The main challenge is onboarding friction, getting a developer from signup to their first successful API call as fast as possible, because if that moment takes too long you lose them. We identified this early and have been iterating on it. The broader difficulty is distribution. The developers we are building for are not always in the same communities where tech press reaches, so finding and activating them requires ground-level work.”
