LONDON, ENGLAND / PORT LOUIS, MAURITIUS, 9 June 2026 — Photon AI Ltd ("PhotonAI"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Boom Technologies Ltd, today announced the commencement of a $124 million Series A financing round, and the simultaneous issuance of RFP‑2026‑001, a global request for proposals covering data centre construction, graphics processing unit supply, satellite bus and payload integration, and equatorial launch services in support of PhotonAI's continental infrastructure programme.
PhotonAI is building what it describes as Africa's sovereign AI and orbital infrastructure: a programme comprising Angel-1, Africa's first foundation language model trained from scratch across the continent's languages; a network of sovereign data centres across Africa; and NiO Spaceport, Africa's first equatorial commercial launch facility. The company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Boom Technologies Ltd, a blockchain-based commerce, payment and settlement system that enables everyone, everywhere to transact online without banking intermediaries and settle all cross-border trades instantly in local currencies. Boom is operational in 60 countries on all continents.
The Series A financing is open to institutional investors, family offices, and sovereign wealth funds. The round targets a first close of no less than $62 million in the third quarter of 2026, with a full close at $124 million anticipated by the fourth quarter. Proceeds will fund the Phase 1 GPU cluster at the Mauritius data centre, the commencement of Angel-1 pre-training, the NiO Spaceport site selection and permitting programme, and the engineering, legal, and business development teams required to execute the full programme.
"Every AI model inherits the mindset of the society that built it. The nuances, the assumptions, and the prejudices travel with the weights. Angel-1 will be the first foundation model built from scratch for a continent of 1.5 billion people, in its own languages, on its own terms, with its own data remaining within its own borders."Peter Alfred-Adekeye — Founder & Chief Executive, Photon AI Ltd
Angel-1, the company's foundation language model, is designed from the architecture level for African languages rather than fine-tuned from an English-language base. The distinction matters structurally. Every existing large language model uses a tokeniser trained predominantly on English text. A tokeniser is the component that converts language into numerical tokens the model can process. Because African language morphemes are absent or fragmented in English-first tokenisers, a single Swahili or Hausa word that carries the semantic content of an entire English phrase is broken into eight to eleven tokens rather than one. This means African-language inference on incumbent models costs three to four times more per sentence than English — not by design, but by omission.
Photon AI's proprietary tokeniser will be trained on 180 gigabytes of African language text spanning 847 languages — effectively the full documented linguistic range of the continent — before Angel-1 model training begins. At that corpus volume, the tokeniser achieves native morphological coverage: an entire conjugated Swahili verb, a Yoruba tonal phrase, a Hausa compound noun, each resolves to one or two tokens rather than eight or eleven. The practical result is an inference cost advantage of approximately 3.4 times on African-language tasks compared to models such as GPT-4, meaning governments and enterprises pay a fraction of the cost to run the same query in their own language. At continental scale — across 54 governments, 800 million mobile money users, and millions of daily queries — that efficiency advantage is not marginal. It is the economic foundation of the business.
The first generally available release, Angel-1 v1.0 at 70 billion parameters, is targeted for the fourth quarter of 2027. Photon AI will access this compute through a combination of its own Mauritius data centre (Phase 1 operational Q4 2026) and contracted cloud burst capacity with major hyperscale providers, ensuring training is not gated solely on owned hardware. A developer preview, Angel-1 v0.5 at seven billion parameters, is targeted for Q2 2027, providing early API access and the sovereign evaluation programme with partial capability ahead of the full release.
The company's sovereign compute programme targets all 54 African Union member states with in-country AI infrastructure — data centres, inference capacity, and a government dashboard — under long-term sovereign contracts. Data residency is architecturally enforced: no government data processed under a PhotonAI sovereign contract is transferred outside the host nation's jurisdiction.
The NiO Spaceport programme establishes Africa's first equatorial commercial launch facility. The equatorial location provides a launch velocity advantage of 463 metres per second compared to sites at higher latitudes, reducing launch mass requirements and cost for low-earth orbit missions. Three candidate sites — in São Tomé and Príncipe, Equatorial Guinea, and Kenya — are under evaluation, with the host government to be selected through a competitive process. NiO satellites will carry Boomchain orbital nodes, propagating the Boom Technologies decentralised settlement layer through inter-satellite laser links.
"Unlike the United States, China or Russia — each with one head of state — Africa has 54. To build technology infrastructure that serves this continent, you cannot think like a company. You must think like a government, and execute like a business. That is precisely what our teams at Photon AI and Boom Technologies are doing. We are treating Africa as one cohesive sovereign — building unified payments, settlement, AI, and space infrastructure that serves all 54 nations as a single, coordinated programme. No one has done this before. We believe it is the most important infrastructure project of our generation."Peter Alfred-Adekeye — Founder, Photon AI Ltd & Boom Technologies Ltd
Simultaneous with this announcement, Photon AI issues RFP‑2026‑001, a global request for proposals open to suppliers, original equipment manufacturers, and construction and engineering firms worldwide. Photon AI operates on the principle that excellence does not observe borders: selection will be made solely on the basis of technical capability, delivery certainty, and financing creativity.
PhotonAI invites proposals across the following categories:
Full RFP documentation, technical specifications, and submission requirements are available at photonai.ai/rfp.html or by contacting rfp@photonai.ai. Submission deadline: 31 August 2026. PhotonAI reserves the right to conduct parallel negotiations and to select multiple suppliers per category.
Photon AI Ltd (Company No. 16441638, England and Wales) is building Africa's sovereign AI and orbital infrastructure. Its three programmes — the Angel-1 foundation language model, a network of data centres across Africa starting with four, and the NiO equatorial launch facility — together constitute what the company describes as the cognitive and orbital layer for a continent of 1.5 billion people. Photon AI Ltd is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Boom Technologies Ltd. photonai.ai
Boom Technologies Ltd is a blockchain-based commerce, payment and settlement system that enables the 2 billion adults in cash-based economies — predominantly in Africa — to transact online without banking intermediaries and settle all cross-border trades instantly in local currencies. Boom is operational in 60 countries on all continents. Boom Technologies Ltd owns 100% of Photon AI Ltd.