An open letter from Oyinbrakemi Praise Oyimi Omare

I want to tell you what I'm building next, and why I think it's worth backing.

First, what's already built. With my cofounders at Twine Campus, I've shipped a student social app that's live on the App Store and Remi, a study companion that reads a student's syllabus and builds their plan, live since March and winner of the New Venture Challenge audience choice two years running. On my own: Yfraud, a Chrome extension that catches scams before money moves, built and measured on 235,795 web addresses and 6,984 phishing emails. Mama Budget, which holds you to your weekly budget at checkout; the first version was built in 24 hours at MHacks. FlickChoice, one pick when you can't decide, with the site up and the app to follow. Twine stays. This is what sits next to it.

I grew up in Warri, Delta State. Nigeria has good technology now. It just speaks English and was built for Lagos. The South South, six states and around 30 million people, the one region where Pidgin is a first language, still fits itself into tools made for how someone else talks, pays and decides. Most people here simply don't. That's not sentiment. That's a market with no provision.

Twokriks exists to build the provision. Two creeks, the way we say it in Warri. It's the technology arm of Oyins Oil and Gas, my family's company, which has worked the region since 2006.

It starts with language, because everything else sits on it.

Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo are finally getting real data. NaijaVoices alone collected 1,800 hours last year. The South South got none of it. Ijaw, Urhobo, Itsekiri, Efik, Ibibio and the Pidgin we actually speak are absent from every model that matters, and the labs building toward superintelligence have no reason to fix that. In Warri, Lagos and Houston, mine is the first generation that only half speaks its mother tongue. The next one won't speak it at all unless the technology does.

Creeks is the first product: hear a real voice from the delta and say it back. Underneath it is Y, the brain: open models we own, trained on how people here actually talk, pay and decide, licensed to banks and builders rather than downloaded.

Then it goes where the language goes.

How a trader takes an order by voice note. How a grandmother sends money. How a tailor turns a design into a garment. The daily, transactional things that don't exist yet for us. Every product teaches Y, and Y makes the next product possible.

How it makes money.

The apps run free in Nigeria and build the corpus. Y is licensed to banks and fintechs. The US versions of Yfraud and Mama Budget are paid. Research is how we get there, not what we sell.

My next few years are that research: how our languages and habits, starting with the South South, get into these systems properly, and how what's built on them stays affordable for the people it's for. We prove things instead of claiming them.

What I'm asking.

If you speak a South South language, your voice. If you build, your hands. If you run a bank or a fintech, ten minutes. If you back early companies, twenty. [email protected].