Alliance4AI recently announced their list of 2019’s top AI adopters, naming InstaDeep as the leading African AI startup. The company, which stimulates Africa’s adoption of emerging technologies for development, highlighted InstaDeep’s strong partnerships with the Ministry of Industry and the launch of our DeepPBC product in late 2019 in their reasoning.
It is an honour to be placed on the map next to leading industry players such as Google, IBM, Data Science Nigeria, Zindi and Icog Labs.
Milestone year
2019 was indeed a big year for InstaDeep, both on the African continent and beyond. We made history by co-hosting the largest hackathon to date in the MENA region, AI Hack Tunisia, with more than 1000 ML developers present. We hosted several DevFests in partnership with Google Developer Group in Carthage, Manouba and Lagos, an initiative we are beyond proud to support seeing the raw enthusiasm and hunger for new machine learning knowledge on the continent with more than 2,500 young people attending the events. Furthermore, 2019 achievements in Africa included participated in Deep Learning Indaba with a record number of posters presented. On the research side two of our team members in Lagos, Orevaoghene Ahia and Kelechi Ogueji, built a world-first Pidgin-to-English translation model using Natural Language Processing (NLP), and we presented the joint Google DeepMind-InstaDeep research, AlphaNPI, on the main stage at NeurIPS.
Product launch
2019 was also a milestone year as we launched our first product, DeepPCB. Powered by reinforcement learning, the fully scalable Printed Circuit Board (PCB) router is entirely automated. With no-human-in-the-loop, the cloud-native product allows the user to upload their own board and get results in less than 24 hours, accelerating customer development cycles by weeks, if not months.
The recognition by Alliance 4 all is truly humbling and not one we take lightly. In 2020, we continue our work towards our goals of accelerating the transition to an AI-first world that benefits everyone. We will continue to work closely with our partners across the globe to be a source of inspiration for the AI community.
