Digital All Stars is a series of articles which aims
to celebrate the best of South African digital. The articles, which will appear
on Memeburn and
Ventureburn, recognise and celebrate South Africa’s best digital entrepreneurs,
business people, advertisers, and media professionals among others.
In this piece
we take a look at some interesting African startups involved in developing
artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.
Kudi.ai
Nigerian
startup Kudi.ai has developed a chatbot which allows users to make
payments and send money to friends and family in Nigeria via messaging. The
company is a graduate of the YCombinator Winter 2017 batch.
Pelumi
Aboluwarin (pictured above, left with co-founder Yinka Adewale) says the
founders began working on Kudi in
July last year. “We registered an entity two months after and ran a private
beta in December 2016. We launched publicly in January 2017,” says Aboluwarin.
The company has seven employees.
The company
uses AI to understand user requests, drive conversations, understand user
spending habits and prevent fraud. “We developed it in-house using a variety of
machine learning techniques,” says Aboluwarin.
The startup
has put together a business-to-business solution too, which it
is piloting with banks and telecommunication companies.
“After
YCombinator we’ve raised additional seed funding from a group of angel
investors in the valley and in Nigeria,” says Aboluwarin.
Aajoh
Nigerian
startup Aajoh uses
artificial intelligence to help individuals that send a list of their
symptoms via text, audio and photographs, to diagnose their medical condition.
The business
was started in February last year — by Simi Adejumo (who is the CEO), Zuby Onwuta, Vikas Ramachandra, Ike Ilochonwu and Charles
Ademola — with an angel investment of $10 000.
The company
has two companies and 35 users signed up for its pilot programme. “Our present
go-to-market strategy involves getting companies to sign up to the platform as
part of staff health benefits,” says Adejumo.
Adejumo said
the app won’t replace medical diagnoses but will allow doctors to make the best
use of their time by allowing them to focus on the patients that need physical
care.
“In frontier
markets, there’s a high patient to doctor ratio with Nigeria having a 4000
to one patient-to-doctor ratio, in proper context on the average an individual
spends about 20 minutes with a GP, so assuming the population fell ill (all) at
once, it would take over 55 days to get care,” he says.
The company’s
immediate plans are to grow its pilot programme and then expand to India.
“By August we aim to have implemented partnerships with key pharmacies across
Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria and increased our user base to 1000.”
DataProphet
South African
startup DataProphet last
year received a significant investment of an undisclosed amount from
Yellowwoods Capital Holdings to expand its international offering. As part of
the deal, DataProphet will act as the advanced analytics partner for the group.
The startup,
based in Cape Town, has developed various machine-learning interventions,
mainly for the finance and insurance sector. It has also added a number
of large industrial and fast-moving consumer goods clients, some of which
are international clients.
Among the
applications the startup has designed are a conversational agent for
inquiries and a solution to detect emotion via image which has been integrated
into a game for major Japanese publisher Bandai Namco.
Daniel
Schwartzkopff (pictured right, with co-founder Frans Cronje) says four years on
the company has seen it now turning a profit and no longer relying on “burning
VC funds”.
The company
has 18 employees and Schwartzkopff says their immediate plans include
fleshing out its product offering for the conversational agent and expanding
overseas sales, primarily in the US (the company already has a sales office in
San Francisco).
“It is very
cost effective for US businesses to utilise DataProphet as we have a major cost
advantage by operating out of SA,” he adds.
Clevva
Founded in
2011 by Dayne and Ryan Falkenberg and Mark Pederson, the
Stellenbosch-based company uses virtual advisors on artificial intelligence
platforms to advise sales and technical consultants.
The platform
has been adopted by a wide number of large organisations in the banking,
insurance, telecommunications, oil & gas, software and electronics sectors.
These clients typically have large numbers of staff dealing with sales, service
and operations.
Clevva has
since its inception been entirely self-funded by the company’s co-founders and
directors. At present the company has a team of seven.
The startup
has been recognised by a wide range of industry bodies, including being
showcased by Gartner in 2015 as one of six African Innovations and
selected by Microsoft to be part of its BizSpark programme.
Clevva is
looking to expand globally, starting with the UK and Australia and then heading
to the US in the next 12 to 18 months.
Aerobotics
Founded by
Benji Meltzer and James Paterson in 2014, Cape Town based Aerobotics develops AI systems for drones.
The
company uses AI to assist farming consultants in South Africa, Australia
and the UK to analyse processed maps and extract actionable information to
identify problem areas in crops such as wheat, macadamia nuts, citrus and sugar
cane. This enables the company to develop variable rate fertilisation application
maps and predict the yield of crops.
“We have
built technology that goes as far as identifying and classifying individual
trees (using computer vision and machine learning) and then additional
algorithms that track each of these trees, with a number of metrics per tree
(health, biomass, canopy area, etc) over time,” explains Meltzer.
So far, the
startup, which has 11 employees and has previously been selected for Startupbootcamp Insurtech accelerator
programme in London, has used its own funds to finance operations, but signed a
term sheet in March for its first round of funding.
“The tech is
at a point now where we’re ready to scale operations and we’re looking to build
partnerships with major players in industry. In the future we’d like to explore
additional industries that would be interested in this data,” says Meltzer.
Stockshop.co.za
Founded by
former equity-derivatives specialist Annabel Dallamore together
with Julian Dallamore and Mark Karimov in 2013, Johannesburg startup Stockshop.co.za offers a number of artificial
intelligence solutions to financial institutions such as banks and
insurance companies.
These include
a conversational user interface (a bot in its infancy) that match-makes
available financial consultants or brokers with client leads. The startup has
also developed a bot interface that completes real-time identity
verification checks on behalf of banks and financial institutions in line with
requirements under the Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA).
The startup
has also developed a solution that uses an algorithm that pairs financial
behaviour, spending and other data along with emotional cues and provides
clients with assistance around financial matters such as payments,
administration, rewards, education, analytics and tracking.
It’s also
launched a micro-insurance platform in April that is unique to the African
market.
In 2013
the company received support from the Seed Engine accelerator and
has raised funding from two angel investors and a venture capital fund,
for an undisclosed sum. It now has 11 employees.
Source: ventureburn.com
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