African companies are deploying AI at speed. They deserve tools built for their context — their regulations, their data formats, their budgets. That is what we are building.
The tools that exist today were built for Silicon Valley enterprises with Silicon Valley budgets. Datadog charges $3,000/month and requires a dedicated DevOps team to operate. African startups are left unprotected or building janky in-house solutions that never quite work.
We started Lantern after watching a fintech in Nairobi get hit with a $4,000 surprise API bill from a prompt loop nobody noticed. Their LLM was also leaking customer M-Pesa codes into logs. Neither problem had an affordable solution.
So we built one. Two lines of code. Full visibility. Real security. Priced for the market we actually live in.
How we think about the product, the company, and the market we are building for.
We are not outsiders entering the African market. We are the market. Our PII detection handles Kenyan, Nigerian, and South African data formats because we know them firsthand — not from a Wikipedia article.
The best security tool is the one that actually gets installed. Two lines of code is a feature, not a compromise. Every decision we make asks: can a developer at a lean startup use this in an afternoon?
We do not oversell. Our v0.1 does monitoring, protection, and cost control. We say what is built, what is coming, and what is out of scope. Our customers deserve to know what they are buying.
A fintech in Lagos and a fintech in San Francisco face the same LLM risks. They should not face a 30x price difference in the tools to address them. $99/month is a deliberate choice, not a discount.
Our roadmap is public. Our pricing is public. When we make mistakes, we say so. The African tech community is small and trust compounds. We are in this for the long term.
Pre-seed companies win by moving faster than anyone expects. We ship working software every week, talk to customers every day, and iterate on what we learn. Perfect is the enemy of funded.
We are not outsiders entering the African AI market. We identified this gap firsthand while working with local startups deploying LLMs with no safety tooling.
18 months of runway to reach 25 paying customers, $10k MRR, and expand across Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. If you are an investor who believes in African AI infrastructure, we would love to talk.