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The founders of the Tunisian start-up InstaDeep did not wait for the health crisis to discover BioNTech. Specializing in artificial intelligence, the company was already working on cancer research with this German laboratory which has become world famous for having developed, in partnership with the Pfizer group, one of the main vaccines against Covid-19. Since then, the links between the two companies have continued to grow.
In mid-January, InstaDeep announced that it had developed and tested an early variant detection system with BioNTech. The calculator makes it possible to anticipate the infectious potential. “It was about creating a system that could cope with the exponential increase in variant sequences. We went from 300 per week to 10,000 in a year and a half. It is on this data that artificial intelligence intervenes”, explains Franco-Tunisian Karim Beguir, one of the co-founders of InstaDeep.
His system thus has “detected Omicron as a high-risk variant the same day its genetic sequence was released”reported the company in a press release at the end of January, even ensuring that it had identified 90% of the variants placed under surveillance by the World Health Organization (WHO) on average two months before their report.
The start-up, which today has offices in Paris, London, Lagos, Cape Town and Dubai, announced on January 25 that it had raised 88 million euros in funding from leading investors. plan, including BioNTech but also Google and the German railway group Deutsche Bahn. With this capital injection, the firm intends to accelerate the development of solutions in the field of artificial intelligence, strengthen its team of 45 researchers based in France and deploy in the United States.
Logistics, electronic design, biology…
A great achievement for polytechnic engineer Karim Beguir, 45, and his partner Zohra Slim, 38, self-taught in computer science and design. When they joined forces in 2014 to create a software solutions company in Tunis, the start-up counted only three employees, 1,226 euros in capital and a few computers. At the time, artificial intelligence imposed itself on them “out of passion and because we were experimenting at a time when this new deal in computing was arousing a lot of enthusiasm”explains Zohra Slim.
One of the first innovations, presented at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2017, has nothing to do with medicine or biology: it is an application that quickly compiles and processes web data on luxury products and lets you tell each visitor to the stand where their watch comes from and its price. Even if the concept could not compete today with Google Lens, the image recognition program developed by the web giant, InstaDeep was then at the forefront of this generation of entrepreneurs exploring the resources of artificial intelligence.
Over the years, the start-up has specialized in business intelligence, a discipline that helps companies optimize their decisions based in particular on intelligent calculation processes. To succeed in developing increasingly efficient systems, InstaDeep relies on a team comprising software engineers and experts in applied mathematics, as well as numerous researchers.
From a platform to help monetize space down to the millimeter in a sea freight container, to a calculator that can optimize complex circuit board layouts, to the development of a system for predicting locust invasions in Africa , the team touches on multiple sectors: logistics, electronic design, biology, etc. Among its current projects, a project to fully automate rail routing for Deutsche Bahn.
A growing entrepreneurial ecosystem
According to Khaled Ben Jilani, member of the AfricInvest fund, one of its main investors since 2018, the strength of the company is to have been able to diversify its fields of intervention, but also to have developed an ever-evolving system. “InstaDeep has bet a lot on research and innovation to create a hard core of artificial intelligence that can adapt and solve specific and complex problems in very different fields”he explains.
Today, the success of InstaDeep, whose fundraising is one of the largest ever on the African continent, also has symbolic value for the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Tunisia, which has been booming for five years. The number of start-ups is constantly increasing in the country, as are incubators and accelerators. According to one of the start-up’s Tunisian investors, Malek Meslemani, the success of InstaDeep “can encourage Tunisian entrepreneurs not just to target the local market, but to think big by betting on new technologies”.