How InstaDeep became Africa’s biggest AI startup success
Karim Beguir starts his interview with Rest of World by bringing up Star Wars. This is something he does often, since he’s from the remote Tunisian city of Tataouine, which lent its name and otherworldly desert landscapes to the movie franchise.
For Beguir, the trivia highlights how distant his hometown is from the global centers of tech. It also conjures the image of an exciting, still-unexploited frontier.
Beguir, a mathematician, first made his career in finance, working for banks in Europe and the U.S. But in 2014, he left a cushy job in London and moved back to Tataouine. He wanted to do something more meaningful.
Starting an artificial intelligence company at home, where there were few precedents for tech entrepreneurship, was the most ambitious thing he could think of. He founded InstaDeep along with Zohra Slim, a Tunisian software engineer. Ten years later, the company has grown to more than 400 employees, with offices in London, Paris, Berlin, Tunis, Lagos, Cape Town, Boston, and San Francisco. InstaDeep is one of the few major AI startups based in Africa.
When the Covid-19 pandemic ground the world to a halt, InstaDeep trained a large language model to accurately predict new, dangerous variants before they spread. In 2023, InstaDeep was acquired for $682 million by BioNTech, a German pharmaceutical company that created the first Covid-19 vaccine approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The deal was the biggest tech acquisition ever in Africa.
