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Tag: InstaDeep

  • Tunisian startup Dabchy secures funding to scale second-hand fashion marketplace across North Africa

    Tunisian startup Dabchy secures funding to scale second-hand fashion marketplace across North Africa

    On Tuesday, Dabchy, a Tunisian startup specialising in second-hand fashion, announced that it has successfully secured pre-Series A funding.

    This funding round, led by Janngo Capital, aims to enhance Dabchy’s marketplace and expand its reach across North Africa and the Middle East.

    Read also: Verto launches $15,000 Global Business Award to empower African startups

    Funding details and growth strategy

    The pre-Series A funding round raised a seven-figure amount and included participation from notable angel investors, such as Karim Beguir, the founder of InstaDeep. 

    This investment will fuel Dabchy’s growth as it diversifies its offerings and improves its platform capabilities. 

    “This funding will accelerate our growth, enhance our user experience, and enable us to expand our reach across North Africa and the Middle East,” said Ameni Mansouri, CEO and co-founder of Dabchy.

    Dabchy was founded in 2016 by Mansouri, Ghazi Ketata, and Oussama Mahjoub. The platform connects buyers and sellers of second-hand fashion through an integrated delivery and payment system. 

    With over 1.3 million users, Dabchy is pioneering sustainable regional shopping. The startup’s mission is to simplify the resale of pre-owned clothing while promoting circular fashion practices.

    Read also: Tunisian fintech startup EasyBank secures $370,000 in funding boost

    Impact on sustainable fashion and the circular economy

    Fatoumata Bâ, Founder and Executive Chair of Janngo Capital, emphasised the importance of this investment for both Dabchy and the broader Tunisian economy. 

    “Dabchy is a true pioneer in the sustainable transformation of the clothing sector,” she remarked. “We are proud to lead this round of funding to help Dabchy strengthen its position as a leader in Tunisia’s circular economy.”

    The apparel sector significantly contributes to Tunisia’s GDP, with about 80 per cent of jobs in this industry held by women. This funding supports economic growth and promotes gender equality within the workforce. 

    Dabchy plans to leverage this investment to enter new markets like Egypt while expanding its product categories to include items beyond clothing.

  • AI company, InstaDeep chooses Rwanda for African AI research

    AI company, InstaDeep chooses Rwanda for African AI research

    InstaDeep, an AI company with roots in Tunisia and a central office in London, wants to open an office in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city. 

    Karim Beguir, the CEO of InstaDeep, said recently at Deep Learning Indaba, the yearly meeting of the African machine learning and artificial intelligence community, whose goal is to improve African AI.

    The Kigali office will open with six people who will do the study on artificial intelligence on the continent. “It makes sense to send and grow our team in Kigali as Rwanda becomes a leader in building the economy of the future. “We’re excited to tell this group of African AI researchers and developers at the Deep Learning Indaba,” Beguir said.

    The AI startup employs approximately 240 people across Tunis, London, Lagos, Dubai, Berlin, Cape Town, Paris, Boston, and San Francisco.

    Kigali gives an excellent opportunity for InstaDeep to maintain growing AI in Africa and build sustainable solutions for the continent and beyond, says the head of AI research in Africa, Arnu Pretorius. Rwanda hosted the first AI worldwide conference, ICLR, in Africa, demonstrating its policy leadership. Having an office in Kigali allows us to give additional possibilities to African AI talent from around the continent.”

    According to Deep Learning Indaba, Pretorius will lead the Kigali office. He was recently awarded the Kambule Doctoral Award, which recognises and encourages doctoral candidates at African universities to excel in research and writing in computational and statistical sciences.

    Read also: BioNTech acquires Tunisian startup InstaDeep for £562 million

    Rwanda as Africa’s AI hub

    Rwanda ranks among the top ten African AI readiness index countries. Rwanda was among the few African countries to draft a national AI policy with six priority areas[pdf]: AI literacy, infrastructure, data strategy, public and private sector AI adoption, and ethical implementation in April 2023. East Africa needs $76.5 million to implement the policy in five years.

    The policy is a big step towards launching Rwanda’s AI ecosystem and achieving its goals for national growth. Paula Ingabire, Rwanda’s minister of ICT and innovation, says that we are setting ourselves up to be the best place in Africa for playing with and making trustworthy AI technology that works well in Africa.

    BioNTech, a German biotech company, bought InstaDeep earlier this year for £362 million in cash and unnamed BioNTech shares. The remaining £200 million will be paid based on how well InstaDeep does in the future.

    Uur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of BioNTech, said at the purchase, “The acquisition of InstaDeep allows us to use the rapidly changing AI capabilities of the digital world in our technologies, research, drug discovery, manufacturing, and deployment processes.”

    Now that InstaDeep is a part of the company, it’s important to remember that this is not the first time BioNTech will start an important project in Rwanda. The German biotech business started building its first factory in Kigali, Rwanda, last year. This factory will help make mRNA vaccines in Africa.

    About BioNTech

    BioNTech, situated in Mainz, Germany, develops and manufactures active immunotherapies for patient-specific illness treatment. It develops mRNA-based pharmaceutical candidates for individualized cancer immunotherapies, infectious disease vaccines, protein replacement therapies for rare diseases, engineered cell therapy, novel antibodies, and small molecule immunomodulators.

    The company created an injectable mRNA-based human treatment to bring individualized cancer immunotherapy to clinical trials and construct its manufacturing process.

    BioNTech was started in 2008 based on the study done by Uur Ahin, Ozlem Türeci, and Christoph Huber. MIG Capital and AT Impf gave the company a start-up loan of €150 million. The company’s primary goals are to make tools and drugs for individualised cancer immunotherapy and to develop and test them.

    Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann, Michael Motschmann, and Helmut Jeggle started the company. In 2009, EUFETS and JPT Peptide Technologies were both bought out.

    Katalin Karikó’s work on mRNA at the University of Pennsylvania helped Pfizer and BioNTech make the COVID-19 vaccine. In 2013, she became a senior vice president at BioNTech.

  • BioNTech acquires Tunisian startup InstaDeep for £562 million

    BioNTech acquires Tunisian startup InstaDeep for £562 million

    BioNTech SE plans to acquire Tunisian-founded, United Kingdom-based InstaDeep for up to £562 million (about $680 million). This will be BioNTech SE’s largest deal to date.

    According to the Financial Times, the German vaccine manufacturer plans to employ the machine learning capabilities of InstaDeep to better its drug discovery process. This will include the development of personalised medicines that are targeted to a patient’s cancer.

    According to the CEO of BioNTech, Uur Ahin, “The acquisition of InstaDeep allows us to incorporate the rapidly evolving AI capabilities of the digital world into our technologies, research, drug discovery, manufacturing and deployment processes. Our aim is to make BioNTech a technology company where AI is seamlessly integrated into all aspects of our work.”

    BioNTech intends to apply computational techniques to generate tailored medications for people with cancer.

    InstaDeep’s CEO, Beguir, said, “AI is progressing exponentially and our mission at InstaDeep has always been to make sure it benefits everyone. We are very excited to join forces and become one team with BioNTech, with whom we share the same culture of deep tech innovation and focus on positive human impact.”  

    “Together, we envision building a world leader that combines biopharmaceutical research and AI with the aim to design next-generation immunotherapies that enhance medical care — thus, helping fight cancer and other diseases,” he added.

    Read also: Chipper Cash to acquire Zambian Zoona

    Background on the BioNTech-InstaDeep transaction

    It is believed that BioNTech will pay an upfront sum of £362 million, which will be a combination of cash and an undisclosed amount of BioNTech shares. 

    InstaDeep’s future success will determine whether or not the company receives the remaining £200 million, according to a statement released by the company.

    InstaDeep’s CEO, Beguir, discussed the company’s usage of reinforcement learning in an interview the previous year. 

    Reinforcement learning is a type of machine learning that assists in the formulation of optimization strategies and handles them simultaneously. 

    InstaDeep’s artificial intelligence technology has been put to use in a variety of contexts, including assisting a huge shipping corporation in effectively transporting thousands of containers to a railway station and automating the scheduling of 10,000 trains. 

    Other examples include the routing of components on a printed circuit board and the construction of sophisticated treatments using silicon.

    A moonshot solution to automate railway scheduling is now being developed by the company in collaboration with Deutsche Bahn, which is the most important train operator in Europe.

    In 2019, InstaDeep and BioNTech entered into a multi-year strategic relationship to construct a combined artificial intelligence innovation centre. Within this lab, the companies planned to use the most recent developments in AI and ML to create breakthrough immunotherapies. 

    Because of this long-term cooperation, InstaDeep has become the focal point of a growing portfolio of activities centred on artificial intelligence and machine learning at BioNTech. This acquisition is the consequence of that partnership.

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    Some Info on InstaDeep

    InstaDeep was established in 2014 by Karim Beguir and Zohra Slim. In January of last year, the company successfully raised $100 million as part of its Series B investment, which Alpha Intelligence Capital and CDIB sponsored. BioNTech was one of the participating investors, together with Chimera Abu Dhabi, DB Digital Ventures of Deutsche Bahn, and Google, among others.

    Offices have been set up in Paris, Tunis, Lagos, Dubai, and Cape Town by an enterprise AI firm with headquarters in Tunis and London. The company uses advanced machine learning techniques to bring AI to apps that are used inside a business setting.

    According to a statement released by the company, InstaDeep’s 240-person team will continue to offer its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning services to other businesses, including Google and Nvidia. 

    It is anticipated that the deal between BioNTech and InstaDeep will be finalised within the first half of 2023, provided that the standard closing conditions are met and that regulatory approvals are obtained.

  • African-founded AI startup, InstaDeep Closes $100M Series B funding to accelerate Disruptive AI Across Industries and US

    African-founded AI startup, InstaDeep Closes $100M Series B funding to accelerate Disruptive AI Across Industries and US

    African-founded artificial intelligence (AI) startup – InstaDeep has closed a $100 million Series B funding round to advance its high-performance AI tech, hire more elite talent and accelerate the launch of disruptive AI products across multiple industries – including biotech, logistics, transportation and electronics manufacturing while also expanding its global presence into the United States.

    About InstaDeep

    InstaDeep was founded in 2014 by Karim Beguir and Zohra Slim and is today an EMEA leader in decision-making AI products for the Enterprise. With expertise in both machine intelligence research and concrete business deployments, the company provide a competitive advantage to its customers, including helping companies to improve the crucial parts of their operations by harnessing AI technologies such as Reinforcement Learning, a type of machine learning that helps design effective optimization strategies for an array of challenges, from therapeutics development to railway operations and more. InstaDeep is on a mission to accelerate the transition to an AI-first world that benefits everyone.

    The company headquarter was moved from Tunis in North Africa to London and had offices in Paris, Tunis, Lagos, Dubai and Cape Town to aid its global expansion. CB Insights recently selected the company as one of the 100 most promising AI startups globally for the second year running.

    100 AI companies 2021

    History and Impacts of AI

    As you may care to know, artificial intelligence (AI) is a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. The fundamental goal of AI is to get machines to simulate human intelligence.

    The phrase artificial intelligence (AI) was first coined at the “Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence” by John McCarthy in 1956 and is widely considered to be the birth of artificial intelligence as we know it today. But the journey to understand if machines can truly think began much before that. In the 1940s, in the book “The Organization of Behavior”, – Donald Hebb proposes the theory that neural pathways are created from experiences and that connections between neurons become stronger the more frequently they’re used. Hebbian learning continues to be an important model in AI today.

    There’s no denying that artificial intelligence has dominated the technological landscape. The science fiction of yesterday quickly becomes a reality. AI has already altered the way we think and interact with each other every day that we almost do not realize it. From the invention of voice search, chatbots, gaming and digital assistants to robots, automated homes, self-driving cars, virtual assistance etc., AI is making life and work easier for humanity and helping businesses serve their customers better.

    Accenture researched the impact of AI in 12 developed countries. The study revealed that it could double economic growth rates by 2035. AI will enable people to use their time efficiently, which will increase their productivity by 40%. This is especially true for global IT economics.

    Statista study on artificial intelligence in 2017 shows that – 84% of business organizations will adopt AI because it gives them a competitive advantage over their rivals.

    A recent survey carried out by CNBC also reported that 81% of executives worldwide say AI will play a prominent and critical role in how their businesses operate this year.

    Companies are phasing from the first generation of AI, which deals with pattern, text and image recognition, to decision-making AI, which helps them make timely decisions in complex spaces.

    Apparently, we are shifting towards an AI-powered world, if not already.

    InstaDeep Funding

    In May 2019, InstaDeep had raised US$7 million in Series A funding to power the development of its scalable product platform aimed at empowering enterprises with decision-making using AI and now closing a $100 million in Series B financing led by Alpha Intelligence Capital and CDIB. Other investors in the round include BioNTech, Chimera Abu Dhabi, Deutsche Bahn’s DB Digital Ventures, Google, G42 and Synergie.

    There seems to be no limitation to the real-world problems InstaDeep is looking to further solve for enterprises with its decision-making AI systems having closed this Series B funding.

    “This funding round is a tremendous vote of confidence from our partners BioNTech, Google and Deutsche Bahn after working closely with us on innovative, high-impact AI initiatives,” said Karim Beguir, co-founder and CEO of InstaDeep. “And we are very excited to get the support of Alpha Intelligence Capital, Chimera, Synergie and G42 as we see wide-ranging opportunities to deploy our AI products to tackle complex real-world problems.”

    With the new funding, the African-founded AI company plans to accelerate the launch of disruptive AI products across biotech, logistics, transportation and electronics manufacturing. Advancing its computing infrastructure, expanding into the U.S. and hiring more talent is also in its use of funds strategy.

    InstaDeep Collaborations in Accelerating Disruptive AI

    InstaDeep formed a multi-year strategic collaboration with BioNTech to launch two years ago. The mandate was to deploy the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in developing novel immunotherapies.

    One of its notable global achievements came in late November 2021 when it created an early warning system (EWS) for detecting high-risk SARS-CoV-2 variants. Per a report by FT, this EWS identified more than 90% of World Health Organization (WHO) designated variants on average two months ahead of time and detected Omicron three days before it was classified as a variant of concern by the WHO.

    InstaDeep also collaborates with Google’s AI research divisions to create an early detection system for desert locust outbreaks in Africa; it has worked on AI initiatives and has published joint research with DeepMind and Google Research.

    One common theme with these collaborations is that all three organizations are investors in InstaDeep’s new financing round.

    “With them being our partners and customers, they’ve been able to see firsthand what InstaDeep platform and the team can achieve,” said Karim Beguir, CEO InstaDeep. “So we see it as a significant milestone and also sort of a vote of confidence in our capabilities and products that they are investing having worked very closely with us on difficult problems for years.”

    The company is also working on a moonshot product to automate railway scheduling with Deutsche Bahn, the largest rail operator and infrastructure owner in Europe.

    “InstaDeep has demonstrated unique capabilities in solving very complex railway problems using groundbreaking AI-first technologies. The team’s skills and thought leadership in this space have paved the way for the adoption of cutting-edge AI technologies in the railway domain. We are happy to join the investment round and enable a stronger partnership with Deutsche Bahn to jointly harness the potential of applying AI,” said Boris Kuehn, managing director, DB Digital Ventures.

    InstaDeep – Changing the Status Quo in Africa

    It is mind-blowing to see how InstaDeep has established itself as a global company using AI to solve complex problems and collaborating with DeepMind and Google in its eight years journey. What is more surprising is Beguir mentioning that they started the company with just two laptops, $2,000 and a lot of enthusiasm, and today, InstaDeep currently has over 170 employees. More than 130 are in AI research, engineering, ML and DevOps departments. At the same time, half of the team is based in its African offices: South Africa, Nigeria and Tunisia, with headquarters in London.

    When InstaDeep launched, Africa wasn’t in the picture detailing AI’s contribution to global economic growth. And while that picture hasn’t changed so much, InstaDeep is one of the few African companies, including South Africa’s Aerobotics and hearX Group, trying to change that status quo and give Africa a say in shaping the future of AI.

    “We’ve managed to build a culture of high standards and prove that the talents in Africa are capable of being competitive, working and collaborating with the very best,” said Beguir. “That’s the story we’ve been able to nurture. And today, we’re proud to have a team which is now over multiple countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa, but has some very passionate African AI researchers, engineers making a tangible contribution.”

    If Beguir and the InstaDeep team has taught us anything, location doesn’t pose a barrier in making a global impact, and no resources may be too little to start with. This is even more true for African founders operating in the tech ecosystem.

    “It is possible to create a globally competitive company with strong African roots, but also well integrated into the world working on genuine deep-tech innovation, and doing things that haven’t been done before,” says Karim Beguir, InstaDeep CEO.