Renée Okafor founded Yoke Systems in Lagos in 2023, after the better part of a decade running infrastructure inside a series of West African scale-ups. Yoke is a Lagos-headquartered AI infrastructure company that sells the operating layer underneath agentic workloads — model routing, observability, cost controls, and a thin orchestration surface — primarily to operators in West and East Africa who would otherwise be re-implementing the same plumbing in-house.
Yoke is unusual in its category in that it is profitable, not vc-backed, and led by a founder who refuses to talk about geography as a constraint. Okafor's public position, repeated in our April Chiang Mai cluster piece by way of comparison, is that the cluster effect operators talk about in Toronto, Lisbon, and Chiang Mai is at least as visible in Lagos.
Okafor sits on the editorial advisory wall (uncompensated) for two of our beat surveys.