A Nigerian startup, Reedapt, is positioning itself to transform the dubbing and multilingual streaming landscape for African content creators, driven by the vision of its co founder, Apotierioluwa Owoade, who identified deep structural gaps in the industry during his stint at Lagos based firm Aforevo. Owoade’s experience between 2022 and 2023 exposed the high cost of dubbing, estimated at over five hundred thousand dollars per full production, as well as persistent quality challenges, including poor cultural nuance and weak emotional delivery in translated content.
Motivated to address these limitations, Owoade teamed up with software developer David Mac Asore and later brought in machine learning specialist Maryann Nnaji and product engineer Emmanuel Ibiang, forming a four member team that evolved from an experimental “Hagen Project” into Reedapt in 2025. The platform has since shifted from a basic translation concept to a full scale dubbing and real time multilingual streaming solution tailored to Nollywood producers, churches, and African storytellers seeking to reach wider audiences beyond English language barriers.
The startup has begun gaining market traction, securing enterprise dubbing contracts with a Nollywood gospel producer and building a user base of over two hundred active customers, dominated by individual creators, while a smaller segment of enterprise clients drives most of its revenue. Operating a subscription model priced in dollars, the company says the decision reflects its cost structure and global ambition, with plans to scale to fifty thousand users before the end of 2026 and raise five hundred thousand dollars to accelerate development.
Despite early progress, the founders acknowledge significant technical and financial hurdles, particularly the scarcity of high quality African language data needed to train accurate speech models. Reedapt is developing in house systems designed to handle complex linguistic realities such as code switching and cultural expressions, while maintaining independence from foreign AI providers. Backed by over fifty thousand dollars in personal and cloud based funding, the team says its long term goal is to build Africa’s leading dubbing infrastructure, expand into emerging content markets such as India and the Philippines, and support up to five hundred languages by 2030.