Egune AI has built Mongolia’s first national AI language model, helping Mongolian people use digital tools in their own language. The company gathered unique Mongolian texts from all over the country, making sure the AI understands the language well. Their model now powers things like fast government helplines and rural school AI teachers, even in places with slow internet. The Mongolian government sees Egune AI as a key part of the country’s future, investing money and training teachers to use AI. Egune AI’s work could help close the digital gap for millions, but true rural impact is still a big challenge.
Why is Egune AI’s Mongolian-language foundational model important?
Egune AI’s national language model is crucial for Mongolia as it enables digital services in Mongolian, bridges the digital divide for non-English speakers, supports linguistic preservation, and powers vital tools like automated call centers and rural AI teachers – advancing digital sovereignty for a small-language nation.
Mongolia’s startup Egune AI has quietly reached two milestones that rarely happen together: it is now the eighth country worldwide to field a national foundational language model, and it is doing so for a language spoken by fewer than six million people.
Why a Mongolian-only LLM matters
- Linguistic survival: Even though 95 million global users turn to ChatGPT each month, only about 5 % of AI tools support smaller languages such as Mongolian.
- Digital divide: In Mongolia itself, only 15 % of youth are fluent in English, so native-language AI is the difference between inclusive growth and a new kind of colonial lag in services.
From pasture data sets to petabytes
The team’s biggest bottleneck was not compute power but curated text.
Traditional approaches rely on Common Crawl and Wikipedia dumps, but those sources contain fewer than 130 000 Mongolian pages. Instead, Egune researchers drove 25 000 km across the steppe, scanning handwritten tribal genealogies, Buddhist manuscripts and even cattle-brand registers to reach the two-billion-token threshold that state-of-the-art transformers need. Geo-political export limits on server-grade GPUs were circumvented by pooling university clusters and negotiating a special Beijing–Ulaanbaatar data cable to keep latency under 50 ms for rural herders on 3G.
Real numbers from the field
| Metric | 2024 baseline | August 2025 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Government call-center automation rate | 0 % | 72 % | UNDP report |
| Rural schools with AI teacher platform | 0 | 1 200 | Pocy policy brief |
| Mongolian-language AI queries per month | – | 4.3 M | Egune telemetry |
What the model actually does today
- Virtual civil servant for the “1111” citizen helpline, cutting average wait time from 11 min to 90 sec.
- Automated tender evaluation for Erdenet Mining Corporation, screening 1 000 bids in minutes instead of weeks.
- Audio-first interface that works on 100 kbps connections; herders ask weather questions by voice and receive spoken replies plus SMS backup.
Policy tail-wind
The government’s National AI and Big Data Strategy, finalized in May 2025, lists Egune as a critical infrastructure asset alongside power grids and telecom networks. A new clause even earmarks 0.5 % of the national budget for ongoing model retraining to keep dialectal drift in check.
The talent equation
The same strategy pledges to train 25 % of all teachers in AI literacy by 2027. Boot-camps already run in Ulaanbaatar, Darkhan and Erdenet, with remote modules streamed over the model’s lightweight 1.3-billion-parameter variant.
Investment snapshot
In May 2025, Golomt Bank led a $3.5 million equity round that valued Egune at $38.5 million, making it the first Mongolian AI company to cross the $30 million mark.
Open question
While urban uptake races ahead, 30 % of the population still lives on less than $3.20 a day. Whether the model can leap from flagship demos to genuine rural impact will decide if Mongolia becomes a case study in AI sovereignty or another cautionary tale of the digital divide.
What is Egune AI’s mission in building Mongolian-language LLMs?
Egune AI is the first company to create a national foundational AI model designed specifically for the Mongolian language. Its core purpose is to preserve Mongolia’s linguistic heritage while ensuring digital sovereignty – preventing the country from becoming dependent on foreign AI systems that cannot fully grasp Mongolian culture and traditional knowledge. The team is building models that go beyond translation; they embed cultural context and tribal knowledge directly into the AI’s understanding.
How does Egune AI address resource scarcity for low-resource languages?
Developing AI for Mongolian faces a fundamental challenge: less than 5% of global AI tools support smaller languages like Mongolian, compared to 70% for English. To overcome this, Egune AI has pioneered lightweight models that work efficiently even in rural areas with limited connectivity. They’ve built expertise in curating local data sources and developed techniques to train robust models from smaller datasets – a breakthrough that could serve as a model for other under-resourced languages worldwide.
What role does Egune AI play in Mongolia’s Vision-2050 development plan?
Egune AI has become central to Mongolia’s digital transformation strategy. The company powers virtual assistants for key government services, including the “1111” citizen call center, and has created the country’s first AI-powered education platform. Their technology supports Vision-2050’s goals of technological independence and inclusive development, particularly in reaching nomadic communities and visually impaired citizens who can now access services online.
How significant is Egune AI’s market position in Mongolia?
While Egune AI claims a 70% share of Mongolia’s AI market, independent verification from industry analysts remains unavailable. The company has achieved notable milestones: reaching a $38.5 million valuation and securing $3.5 million in investment from Golomt Bank. Their AI teacher platform launched in 2025, indicating active deployment across Mongolia’s education system, though third-party market data on actual usage rates is still emerging.
What challenges does Mongolia face in implementing its National AI and Big Data Strategy?
Despite progress in developing the strategy, significant implementation challenges remain. Rural areas still struggle with internet affordability and infrastructure gaps. While Mongolia advanced 11 positions in the AI Preparedness Index, experts note that the current strategy is “still insufficient” for fully bridging the rural-urban digital divide. The government is working to train 25% of teachers in digital literacy and expand AI education, but persistent gaps in connectivity and human capital development continue to limit digital inclusivity in remote regions.
