I could train a 1B-A200m model on an iPhone 17 Pro at ~650 tokens/sec. It will take 360 days on 20B tokens of training data and use 156KW of electricity which cost $51. The phone will fry of course, so I wrote algorithms to run inference on your phone rather. We named it after a plant that survives in resource-constrained environments, the Cactus.
can run similar model on your Grandma’s Pixel 6a at 80 tokens/second
while only draining 10% battery per hour of continuous inference and using 250MB RAM only.
Cactus runs Nvidia Parakeet 1B models on Raspberry Pi at over 17000 tokens/seconds with only 4% word-error-rate.
End-to-end function calling for Gemma, Qwen & LFM models take sub 1sec on mobile devices.
We raised some money from YCombinator, Oxford's Seed Fund, FCVC (portfolio include Slack, Coinbase, GitLab, Instacart etc.), and 6 smaller funds like Transpose (run by Garry Tan's brother), fellow YC founders, as well as 62 tech CTOs/VP/Directors both via syndicate and directly at Google DeepMind etc.
Cactus now powers cool products you've probably heard of...I think. 6 exceptionally gifted "Cactus Jacks" from UCLA, Nokia, Google, Stanford, Oxford have joined us! The project is also co-maintained by groups at UCLA, Yale, Upenn, Imperial, Georgia, NUS, UCI, CU Boulder and UCI.
Same destination, just a different route!
| Core Expertise |
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| Main Tools |
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| 2025-XX | Cactus (YC S25) | Founder & CTO | Low-latency AI for phones and wearables |
| 2024-25 | Deep Render | AI Research Engineer | Realtime video models that run on phones |
| 2021-24 | Wisdm | ML Software Engineer | Perception AI for Maxar Defence satellite views |
| 2019-21 | MSc + Open Source | JAX/NanoDl, Torch/SuperLazyAutograd, CUDARepo, etc. | |
| 2018-19 | Google GADS + Andela | Scholar | Systems design (pre-MSc) |
| 2017-18 | National Youth Service | Software Engineer | Posted after bootcamp, mostly ARM |
| 2012-16 | University (from 15y) | EECS, data structures, algorithms, maths, physics |
- After CUDARepo, Nvidia reached out, I did 7 technical rounds, got a verbal offer, back-and-forth over YOE/pay, then I got YC.
- Did MSc at QMUL, just to work with Prof Matt Purver (Ex-Stanford Researcher on CALO), did my project/thesis with his team.
- Did BEng under Prof Onyema Uzoamaka (Rumoured first Nigerian CS grad from MIT), he taught computing archs off-head!
- Biggest career miss was a PhD Studentship at Meta FAIR, recruiter went to vacation after onsite for weeks.
| Profile | Nigerian-British, born Jan 1996, 185cm, 83kg |
| Language | English, Igbo, German (barely), French (yikes) |
| Hobbies | Calisthenics, UFC, chess, music, dance |
| Philosophy | Humanist Christian, unpolitical (your peace over my opinions) |
 Speaking at UCLA |
 The Cactus Jacks |
 Team dinner |
 Calisthenics 6/7 days |
 Cactus Jacks at YC |
 Cactus Pod at YC HQ |
| Expressive Rap |
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| Alternative/Folk |
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| Oldies |
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| Genre-Blending Urban |
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| Dark Pop |
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| Animation |
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