By Akanni Dorcas

Omolabake Adenle is a Nigerian-American engineer, entrepreneur, and financial strategist. She is the founder and CEO of AJA.LA Studios. Her company creates digital tools for African languages.

She developed the “SpeakYoruba App,” which won a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) award from Women in Voice (WiN) in 2021.

The app was also shortlisted for the African Innovation Foundation’s Innovation Prize for Africa (IPA) in 2017. Adenle has a Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Cambridge, UK.

Early Life and Education

Omolabake Adenle was born and raised in the United States. She earned a Ph.D. in Bayesian Signal Processing from Cambridge University. She was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a Tau Beta Pi Honours Fellow.

Career

After her studies, Adenle worked at Morgan Stanley as Vice President of Quantitative and Derivative Strategies. During this time, she became interested in natural language processing for African and low-resource languages. She later started AJA.LA Studios, which develops speech and language processing tools for under-resourced languages.

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