IRANKUNDA Elyssa is the Founder & CEO of ATAS — Alliance for Transformative AI Systems — a Rwandan artificial intelligence research and development company based in Kigali, founded in 2025.

Elyssa founded ATAS on a conviction that AI built for Rwanda has to understand Rwanda: its language, its geography, its culture, and the way Rwandans actually live, work, and communicate. Under his leadership, the company runs research and product as one pipeline. Its active product, AcademiaPlus, is national curriculum infrastructure for Rwandan secondary education — entering its first schools this academic term. Its long-term research program, IMIZI, aims to build Rwanda's first Contextual Intelligence Infrastructure, teaching AI to understand Rwandan places and context the way Rwandans do. Underneath both sits original language research: Kinyarwanda speech recognition and generation, and natural language understanding for how Rwandans actually mix Kinyarwanda, English, and French.

As sole full-time member of ATAS, Elyssa personally leads the company's research, product development, and engineering — from initial research through shipped product.