KrosAI, a Nigerian-founded telecoms infrastructure startup, is opening a route to artificial intelligence that runs through one of the world's most widely available technologies: the voice call. By allowing AI agents to answer incoming calls over traditional mobile networks, the company makes advanced conversational AI accessible to anyone with a basic feature phone — no smartphone, data plan, or internet connection required. (KrosAI)

Since launching in 2026, KrosAI has scaled to more than 70 paying enterprise clients, processing hundreds of thousands of call minutes across markets including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, the UK, and the US, with upcoming footprints planned in Rwanda, Malawi, and the UAE. In early November 2026, the startup raised $135,000 to expand its telecoms infrastructure for AI voice agents across emerging markets. The funding includes $60,000 from the AI Venture Lab of INSEAD, the international business school, alongside backing from other undisclosed partners.

An affordability wall around AI access

The company's approach targets a structural problem in global connectivity. Data from GSMA, the global mobile industry association, shows that 140 million Nigerians remain offline — not because they live outside internet coverage, but because smartphones are unaffordable. Entry-level, internet-enabled devices now cost 44% of the average monthly income, a figure that climbs to 76% for the poorest 20% in Sub-Saharan Africa. With entry-level smartphones rising from a former $100 price cap to $150 and $200, affordability faces an increasingly serious threat.

The usage gap extends well beyond Nigeria. The top 20 countries account for 68% of the global usage gap, led by India with 710 million people, followed by China (200 million), Ethiopia (100 million), the Democratic Republic of Congo (60 million), Egypt (60 million), and Tanzania (50 million).

Mobile data costs compound the problem. Under the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) affordability threshold, 1 GB of mobile data should cost no more than 2% of an average monthly income, yet Sub-Saharan Africa still far exceeds that baseline overall. For the bottom 40% of income earners in the region, 1 GB of data surges to 5% of monthly income, while 4 GB consumes a significant portion of earnings.

Poor network quality adds yet another barrier to reaching AI tools and platforms. Even users who can afford mobile data can lose access the moment they run out of it and lack the money to buy more. Amid these everyday constraints, emerging technologies such as AI are gaining penetration, while many people remain left behind.

From algorithms to phone lines

Speaking with Technext, KrosAI founder Joshua Firma framed the voice-call route as a distribution play modeled on mobile finance. “The same way financial technology products reach billions of people through mobile phones; it's the same way, I believe, AI and voice AI will reach lots of people,” he said.

While building custom AI voice agents has grown faster and more common, putting those agents into the hands of users remains a challenge. Beyond KrosAI's voice AI algorithms lies a demanding layer of telecom integration, identity verification (KYC), carrier negotiations, and local regulatory compliance.

After building a functional voice agent, the startup ran into unexpected paralysis in the telecom pipelines. “What we were not prepared for was the gruelling work that follows… It took us roughly four months to get a local telco partner to give us a number after going through KYC, and then another month to duct tape the phone numbers to the AI agent platform,” Firma recalled.

The friction stems from the strictly regulated nature of the telecoms industry and the fact that supplying voice agents with phone numbers is still an emerging phenomenon. Network providers operate under regulations set by national communications authorities such as Nigeria's Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and South Africa's Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA).

The infrastructure layer

To dissolve this distribution bottleneck, KrosAI serves as the infrastructure layer between AI developers and telecom operators. Instead of requiring every startup to spend half a year negotiating carrier agreements, the company compresses the entire timeline from months to under 30 minutes. “We are more like the domain name service for voice AI agents… or the Stripe for voice AI deployment, because we have done all the regulatory work behind the scenes,” Firma noted.

Navigating telecom rules across borders also requires deep local engineering. When expanding to Rwanda, Firma said, regulatory mandates stipulated that call traffic could not simply terminate on international cloud servers, which required physical telephony switches to be installed inside national borders before production lines could open.

Emergency hotlines and everyday inquiries

Attaching voice AI to a standard phone number makes the technology accessible well beyond smartphone costs, data affordability, and internet-speed barriers. For users in remote or underserved communities, voice agents provide a direct 24/7 hotline for reporting local emergencies such as flooding, fire outbreaks, or civil disturbances — no internet access required.

Firma noted that several startups, cybersecurity companies, NGOs, and organizations are already onboarded on the platform to serve their users and communities, including AethexAI, ScamAI, BimpeAI, Ushahidi, and the Clean Cooking Alliance. “Working with international NGOs like the Clean Cooking Alliance, automated voice agents run phone-based community surveys and collect vital feedback from households in regions off the digital grid,” he said.

Ushahidi, a Kenyan social enterprise, deploys agents to help people in indigent communities report emergencies such as fraud, floods, and fires — disasters that do not wait until morning to strike. In the same vein, universities and financial institutions are deploying phone numbers that allow prospective students or bank customers to dial in at any time to verify information, protect against scams, or resolve inquiries.

“We think the average person should be able to access AI technology via the same channel that they currently use to perform basic phone calls,” Firma said, predicting a rapid evolution of phone-based AI agent startups. The planned footprints in Rwanda, Malawi, and the UAE are the next checkpoint — each new market means revisiting the carrier negotiations, KYC clearance, and country-specific call-termination rules that, in Nigeria, once made a single phone number a months-long project.