InstaDeep was the largest acquisition of a startup on the African continent last year. It was sold for half a billion euro to the pharmaceutical company BioNTech.
This is a healthcare success story at a time when the vast majority of investments in Africa are in fintech. It's also a deeptech victory at a time when most of the world is skeptical about whether deeptech can even be built, let alone scaled, in Africa.
So how did a math geek from Tunisia bootstrap a company that captured the hearts and minds of a continent? Tune in to find out.
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In This Episode
(3m15s) Start with passion
(6m17s) Engineering exits
(7m18s) Balancing today vs tomorrow
(9m07s) Delivering 10X value
(10m46s) Is there a shortage of talent in Africa?
(15m03s) AI, biotech, and the future
(18m14s) Do not limit yourself
Show Notes
InstaDeep: The Early Days: this article from Rest of World covers some of the early ventures and misadventures of Karim Beguir
Born in Tatouine: from a remote city in Tunisia, how Karim rose to the global stage
Google’s 2014 acquisition of DeepMind was an early inspiration to Karim in founding InstaDeep
BioNTech announced its acquisition of InstaDeep in 2023
Nucleotide Transformer is InstaDeep’s industry-leading genomics Language Models. In 2023 they released these models open-source to HuggingFace
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