Company

The intelligent
connection point.

Making every African business reachable — in Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, and English.

"Ori" is Yoruba for intelligence, wisdom, and divine consciousness. "Node" is a network connection point. Together: the intelligent connection point for African business.

Mission

"To make every African business reachable, responsive, and intelligent — regardless of size, location, or the language their customers speak."

Maraba was founded on a simple observation: Nigerian businesses lose hundreds of thousands of naira every week to missed calls. A restaurant misses a Friday reservation. A clinic misses an appointment request. A logistics company misses a pickup call. Not because they don't care — but because they're busy running their business. We built the infrastructure to fix this.

Vision

"To become the default voice infrastructure for African commerce — the layer that makes every business, from market stalls to multinationals, always available."

Founding

Maraba is built by Orinode, founded in 2026 in Lagos by Usman Abubakar Aliyu, with Mustapha Umar Muhammad, Esq. as Head of Research. Maraba is currently in private beta. Every design decision is made with Nigerian callers in mind — Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba are first-class, not afterthoughts.

Contact the founder directly: usmanaliyu@orinode.ai

Team

The people building Maraba.

A small, focused team in Nigeria.

UA
Usman Abubakar Aliyu
Founder

Building Maraba's voice infrastructure end-to-end — STT, TTS, language detection, and the dashboard. Based in Lagos. Reach him directly: usmanaliyu@orinode.ai

MM
Mustapha Umar Muhammad, Esq.
Head of Research

Leads research on Nigerian language coverage, dataset quality, and ethical-use policy. Lawyer + researcher background.

More team announcements as the beta cohort grows. Hiring engineers? Send your CV to hello@orinode.ai.

Values

What we stand for.

record_voice_over
Linguistic Respect
Language is identity. We don't treat Hausa, Igbo, or Yoruba as secondary options. Every language the platform supports is built with the same depth and care as English.
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Reliability First
A call centre that goes down costs businesses real money. We engineer for uptime, publish honest incident reports, and own failures when they happen. A formal SLA will be published with the public launch.
language
African-Built, African-Priced
Our infrastructure, team, and pricing are designed for African businesses — not imported from Silicon Valley and localised as an afterthought. Naira pricing, African servers, African support hours.
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Transparency
Honest pricing. No hidden fees. No dark patterns. If something breaks, you hear from us first — not after you notice. Audit logs, webhook events, and usage data are all yours to see.
security
Privacy by Design
Caller data belongs to the business that collected it — not to us. Built for NDPR (Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023) compliance; DPO appointment + NITDA filing planned before public launch. Caller number masking is built in. We never use customer call data to train shared models.
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Speed as Respect
A caller waiting 5 seconds for an AI to respond is a caller who hangs up. Sub-second response time is not a feature — it is the minimum viable experience. We optimise relentlessly.
Timeline

Building the future
one call at a time.

Jan 2026
Orinode launches Maraba project
Usman Abubakar Aliyu starts Maraba under the Orinode banner; Mustapha Umar Muhammad, Esq. joins as Head of Research. The team begins building the multilingual speech pipeline on open-source Whisper. The goal: an AI receptionist that handles Nigerian languages properly.
Q1 2026
Code-switching prototype
Internal prototype handles mid-sentence Yoruba↔English switching in test recordings. Hausa diacritics (ƙ, ɗ, ɓ) round-trip through the tokenizer without loss. Still pre-production.
May 2026
Private beta opens (invite-only)
Currently here. Maraba is invite-only — we're onboarding the first cohort of Nigerian businesses (restaurants, clinics, logistics teams). Request beta access via the contact form.
Later 2026 (planned)
Public launch & developer API
Open signup, four subscription tiers, PAYG billing. Python and TypeScript SDKs. Pricing and infrastructure on this site reflect the planned launch state — not the beta state.
2027 onward (aspiration)
Pan-African expansion.
If the Nigerian beta validates the model, we want to extend to other African markets — Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania — and add Swahili and Twi support. Pace depends on demand and capital. Nothing committed yet.

Built in Lagos, Nigeria.

We write code on Lagos time. We understand the power cut mid-call. We build for the realities of African business because we live them.

location_on Lagos, Nigeria groups African-founded team dns African servers
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