South African crowed-solving startup Zindi building a community of data scientists and using AI solve real-world problems
Zindi is all about using AI to solve real-world problems for companies and indvidusls. And the South Africa -based startup has done that over the last three years they have been in existence.
Just last year a team of data scientists under Zindi used machine learning to improve air quality monitoring in Kamplal as another group Zimnet, an insurance company in Zimbabwe, predict customers behavior - especially on who was likely to leave and the possible interventions that would make them stay Zimnat was able to retain its customers by offering customer -made services to those who would have otherwise discontinued.
These are some of the solutions that have been realized to counter the data-centered challenges that companies, NGOs, and government institutions submit to Zindi.
Zindi announces these challenges and invites its community of data scientists to take part in solution-finding competitions. Participating data scientists submit their solutions and the winner gets a cash prize. The hosts of the competition get to use the best results to overcome the challenge they had- like in an air quality monitoring project by AirQ0. Which sought solutions for forecasting air pollution across Uganda and in helping Zimnat cut its losses.
"So AirQo now has a dashboard that allows the public to check air quality and air quality forecasts. One of the exciting things about this project is that AirQo hired two of the winners from the challenge to help with the implementation of the project," said Zindi co-founder and CEO, Celina Lee. South African Megan Yates and Ghanaian Ekow Duker are the platform's other co-founders.
"AirQo also raised funding from Google, based on the solution that they built, and they will now be replicating it in other African countries," said Lee about the competition that was organized in partnership with the Digital Air Quality East Africa(DAQEA) project of the University of Birmingham and the AirQo project from Makerere University,Kampala
Among other notable private and public organizations that have tapped Zindi include Microsoft,IBM, Liquid Telecom and UNICEF, and the government of South Africa.
So far, Lee is excited about what Zindi has achieved and is enthusiastic about the community's future, given how the crowd-solving startup has grown since its launch. The platform is now providing alternatives and stepping up competition against traditional consulting firms operating across Africa, which are often expensive.
Zindi;s users have grown three-fold from the start of last year to 33000 data scientists from 45 countries across the continent. It has also paid data scientists 300000 USD in prize money.
This number is set to grow as it hosts the third inter-university UmojaHack Africa challenge in March next year, where college students will compete against one another for different solutions.
Zindi is using the inter-university competition to expose students to practical data science experiences and to solve real-life challenges using AI. During last year's event, the platform attracted about 2000 students during the event which took place virtually because of the pandemic.
"Students get to build their first machine learning models, and from there,it opens us all kinds of doors for their careers and education,: said Lee, who is originally from San Francisco's.
Zindi currently has a jobs portal to "shorten the path from learning to earning"The talent placement portal allows organizations to tap from its pool of talent by posting openings.
The crow-solving platform is also planning to introduce a learning component that provides training material to budding data scientists; this is after it realized a knowledge gap and need for training. Besides, Lee said that most of Zindi's users are university students in need of learning experience, and who require enhanced skills to solve world problems.
The new plans will be made possible by a 1 million dollar seed funding the platform recently secured.
Lee said, "For us, it is really about scaling the community and creating more value for all of our data scientists".
"So we are going to bu using the funding to introduce much more learning content, because one of the things we understand is that, especially in Africa, data science is such as a new filed, And a lot ofo ur data scientists are still university students or very early in their careers. They are just looking for a chance to learn and build their skills."
The seed round was led by San-Francisco-based VC firm Shakti, with participation from Launch Africa, Founders Africa, and FIVE35.
All their plans are toward building a strong data science community in Africa and for the continent, according to Lee, who said that they want to grow their users to reach one million in the near future. This, she said, will be achieved by opening up training opportunities to early-career data scientists and by forming a strong community that encourages collaboration and mentorship.
Lee said,"And so where we want to eventually reach a million data scientists in Africa- we want to make data science something that any young person who's interested in pursuing this career has access to the tools, the connections, and the experience that they need to make a successful career in this filed.
Our vison is to make AI accessible to everyone
