THE FIRST PAN-AFRICAN DATA SCIENCE COMPETITION

Founded in 2018, Zindi is a Cape Town-based startup and the largest African data science competition platform. Zindi works with companies, non-profit organisations and government institutions to develop, curate, and prepare data-driven challenges, to ‘solve Africa’s toughest challenges’.

HOW ZINDI WAS STARTED?
Zindi was created as a subsidiary of Ixio Analytics, which is a data science consulting company also based in Cape Town. Ixio was founded by Megan Yates, a South African who has been working in data science since 2012.

Zindi came out of a realisation on Ixio’s part that there was a growing pool of data scientists – and potential data scientists – in Cape Town and across Africa, who were looking for opportunities to grow and apply their skills at the same time. Companies and other organisations in Africa were at this point, where they were creating massive amounts of data and being faced with this dilemma of how to take it forward and how to capitalise on the real value of the asset they are building, which is data.

From this realisation, the founders saw a huge opportunity, and Zindi was born.

HOW DOES IT WORK?
First, they identify and define a problem and then they help design a data set that would be needed to build an AI or machine learning solution. Then they post that on their platform and open it up to the community. Zindi has a community of over 8 000 data scientists registered on the platform and they are getting over 100 new registrations every week.

Data scientists would register on Zindi and then register for the competition, which means that they accept the terms and conditions and can then access the data and essentially build machine learning models on the data.

WHY IS CAPE TOWN THE BEST BASE FOR ZINDI?
Cape Town is a great place for a tech or AI startup to be; there’s a vibrant startup scene and the talent pool in Cape Town has been a definite benefit for Zindi. Being close to UCT and Stellenbosch University, there is a really good pipeline of talent in the city.

IS USING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING FOR THE BENEFIT OF SOCIETY IMPORTANT TO ZINDI?
The applications of AI has been driven by corporations that are looking to use AI to make profits but what Zindi is excited to figure out is how to translate those same technologies, those same approaches, for social impact.

While Zindi is a for-profit company, the company does have a social mission and are passionate about solving problems for companies and other organisations which will also have a positive impact on society.

WHAT ABOUT ZINDI’S PRESENCE IN THE REST OF AFRICA?
Zindi has a network of ambassadors in other countries, so while they don’t have offices, as such, in other countries, they do have a presence across the continent. South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya currently have the most users, but other countries such as Tanzania, Uganda, Tunisia and Senegal are coming up very strongly. But they have data scientists in their network from practically every country in Africa.