From Tunis in the North to Cape Town in the South, InstaDeep branches out to cover the whole African continent.
February officially marked the month that InstaDeep opened the doors to its sixth office in Cape Town, South Africa. The decision is part of a long-term strategy to build out our AI operations on the African continent and strengthen the company’s position as Africa’s leading AI company*.
Showcase African talent
The first two employees joining the InstaDeep dream team in SA are Dr Arnu Pretorius and Elan van Biljon who will be working with our AI Research team. With substantial experience in Research, the pair has a number of awards and recognitions to show for, and notably authored the first-ever African research paper to be accepted at NeurIPS (in 2018). Arnu and Elan have both also been ranked in the top 5% of reviewers for ICML and NeurIPS, while Arnu has also published research at ICML and co-authored a NeurIPS paper accepted at the Bayesian Deep Learning workshop 2019. At InstaDeep, the two will work on various research and applied projects across the globe, whilst also supporting business development opportunities in the region.
“The Cape Town office provides great opportunities, not only on a personal level but more importantly, for the entire South African Machine Learning community. There aren’t many places where you can do top AI research as well as work on cutting-edge Deep Reinforcement Learning applications at scale. To pursue these types of opportunities, top SA talent have often had to leave the country and we hope that this no longer will be the case. Elan and I are proud and humbled to start the company’s SA journey. We are inspired by the long term vision that InstaDeep has to help showcase top talent from Africa working together with amazing people from abroad”, says Arnu.
Although a duo today, the Cape Town team is anticipated to grow rapidly creating further exciting job opportunities for talented engineers in Africa down the line.
Arnu Pretorius (left) and Elan Van Biljon (right) at InstaDeep’s new offices in South Africa.
Unlimited opportunities
As an African founded AI start-up we are incredibly proud to be where we are today. Since our humble beginning with only two laptops in 2014, some highlights include our partnership with Google DeepMind on research, becoming a preferred Service Delivery Partner for NVIDIA and presenting our AI results on the main stage at NeurIPS 2019. Today, we also work with global blue chip clients and have five employees certified as Google Developer Experts in Machine Learning out of about only 130 people globally.
Africa holds unlimited AI opportunities and at InstaDeep we have made it our mission to build an AI-first world that benefits everyone. Whilst until recently there was relatively little AI development on the continent, traction is now building quickly, thanks to the quality work of many organisations, including Deep Learning Indaba, Data Science Nigeria (DSN), Alliance 4 AI and others, and also Google AI has opened a research centre in Ghana. At InstaDeep we already work closely with these organisations through co-hosting various high impact events and hackathons. We look forward to continuing our work and are thrilled to hit the ground running in Cape Town and beautiful South Africa!
Interested in joining our team? Please apply via hello@instadeep.com!
*Alliance 4 AI named InstaDeep the “Number One AI start-up in Africa” in their 2019 overview
https://www.alliance4ai.org/the-surprise-adopters-of-ai-in-2019/
