Jul 1, 2026 · Launch

Why we built Yene AI

The best AI models in the world are one credit card away. This gate is what stops most people in Ethiopia from using them. So we built Yene AI.

The world is rapidly changing. AI has taken over. From processing our inboxes to organising our daily lives, it has now become an integral part of our lives. We have sat on the sidelines during many of the past tectonic shifts in the world's economy. Industrialization, technology, digitization. It's important that we are not left behind and are active participants in this revolution. Being late is not an option. It's costly, and we may not recover.

Access to frontier models is gated for many Ethiopians. A phone number for account verification, a credit card for payment, and more are some of the challenges. These requirements also vary from vendor to vendor. OpenAI has a set of requirements different from Anthropic. Other open-weight models like DeepSeek have their own guidelines.

We asked builders here what they're dealing with

Before building, we ran a short survey of Ethiopian developers and the pattern was hard to miss. Almost everyone is already using AI. Most of them can't pay for it the normal way.

Quick survey of Ethiopian developers · June 2026

94%

already use AI regularly or when they can

76%

have hit the payment wall in some form

57%

say it's slowing their work down

“Have you ever tried to pay for an AI tool and couldn't?”

Only 1 in 4 can pay the normal way. Everyone else works around it or gives up before trying.

Didn't even try — “I know it won't work”41%

Found a workaround24%

Tried and it failed12%

No issue, I can pay fine24%

How they're using AI

This isn't curiosity. It's already in their daily tools and their code.

Chat apps (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini)86%

AI coding editors (Cursor, Copilot…)65%

Desktop apps (Claude desktop…)33%

API keys in their own apps & scripts27%

“How much is not having access slowing you down?”

More than half say access is actively costing them work.

A lot — blocking real work · 24%

Somewhat — frustrating · 33%

Free tiers cover me · 25%

Not relevant · 18%

The workarounds people described say it best:

“borrowed a friend's card” “virtual credit cards” “bought dollars P2P” “through sketchy sites” “coworker tops up my card” “the organization buys it for us” “foreign connections”

None of this should be the price of using AI. That's the gap Yene AI closes.

Yene AI solves this access problem.

Yene AI wants to make it as easy as possible for an Ethiopian developer, analyst, or anyone working in the professional arena to have access to the latest models. All paid in birr locally via Telebirr.

What we built

Yene AI is an access door. It's deliberately simple:

Sign in with Google. No forms, no card.
Get your own API key. It works with the tools you already use — Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, and more.
Top it up in birr with telebirr. Pay a few birr, get real usage. Only pay for what you use.

Yene AI is built on top of openrouter.ai. This partnership has allowed us to bring more than 800 AI models with a single API key.

Experience

No credit card. No monthly subscription you have to justify. You load a small amount of birr, and it converts into real API credit. If you're a student poking at an idea, that means you can start for the price of a macchiato. If you're a developer shipping something real, it means your costs scale with your actual usage, not with a plan you picked in advance.

Who it's for

Yene AI is for Ethiopian developers, students, founders, and tinkerers and anyone who has the ideas and the skill, and just needed a way in. If you've ever hit "add payment method" and stopped there, this was built for you.

Where we're going