Why we built Yene AI
The best AI models in the world are one credit card away. This gate is what stops most people in Ethiopia from using them. So we built Yene AI.
The world is rapidly changing. AI has taken over. From processing our inboxes to organising our daily lives, it has now become an integral part of our lives. We have sat on the sidelines during many of the past tectonic shifts in the world's economy. Industrialization, technology, digitization. It's important that we are not left behind and are active participants in this revolution. Being late is not an option. It's costly, and we may not recover.
Access to frontier models is gated for many Ethiopians. A phone number for account verification, a credit card for payment, and more are some of the challenges. These requirements also vary from vendor to vendor. OpenAI has a set of requirements different from Anthropic. Other open-weight models like DeepSeek have their own guidelines.
Yene AI solves this access problem.
Yene AI wants to make it as easy as possible for an Ethiopian developer, analyst, or anyone working in the professional arena to have access to the latest models. All paid in birr locally via Telebirr.
What we built
Yene AI is an access door. It's deliberately simple:
- Sign in with Google. No forms, no card.
- Get your own API key. It works with the tools you already use — Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, and more.
- Top it up in birr with telebirr. Pay a few birr, get real usage. Only pay for what you use.
Yene AI is built on top of openrouter.ai. This partnership has allowed us to bring more than 800 AI models with a single API key.
Experience
No credit card. No monthly subscription you have to justify. You load a small amount of birr, and it converts into real API credit. If you're a student poking at an idea, that means you can start for the price of a macchiato. If you're a developer shipping something real, it means your costs scale with your actual usage, not with a plan you picked in advance.
Who it's for
Yene AI is for Ethiopian developers, students, founders, and tinkerers and anyone who has the ideas and the skill, and just needed a way in. If you've ever hit "add payment method" and stopped there, this was built for you.
Where we're going
This is just the start. We have bigger goal: it's to make sure that being in Ethiopia is never the reason someone gets left behind on AI. We'll keep lowering the friction, adding models, and listening to what builders here actually need.