Vambo AI Releases MORENA, a 1.5B Open-Weight Model Trained From Scratch for 12 African Languages

South African startup Vambo AI has released MORENA, an open-weight 1.5-billion-parameter language model trained from scratch for 12 African languages plus English and French. Languages covered: ChiShona, Kiswahili, Hausa, Yorùbá, Igbo, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Kinyarwanda, Setswana, Afrikaans, isiNdebele and Nigerian Pidgin. Co-founder Isheanesu Misi describes it as the largest open African AI model trained from scratch — a qualifier that distinguishes it from models fine-tuned on an existing base.