Jozi Angels and 22onSloan fund and mentor innovative AI business ideas aimed to solve African problems, founders warned on how not to fumble the bag.
- Start-up founders need to be financially literate.
- Scaling soon is bad for businesses.
- Mentorship and funding available for entrepreneurs with lucrative solutions to African problems.
Wits University is hosting the fourth edition of the Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD) conference from January 26 to 29 at the Wits Science Stadium and investors are present to advice Artificial Intelligent (AI) powered business founders.
Bernadette Bule, Wits alumni, and Business and Partnerships Manager at 22onSloane, the largest startup campus in Africa, based in Johannesburg, said there is a fundamental skill every founder must have.
“I’ve seen that a lot of founders lack financial literacy, which leads them to desire to scale their businesses way too early. Our programme looks at the stages of our BRL (Business Readiness Level), which is from zero to ten, and determine your business needs as per your BRL level,” she said.
Keshni Morar, Angel Investor at Jozi Angels, agreed. She said a lot of businesses scale prematurely, leading to their downfall. Morar’s core work includes funding and mentoring early-stage South African start-up’s.
“Sometimes they [founders] may not be the right person to scale the business. Understanding fundamentals of business and self-awareness really helps with transferring the power to someone who is more capable of getting the business where it needs to be,” she said.
There were many AI-powered startups at AMLD, from AI models designed to assist doctors with follow-ups, scheduling patients and sending appointment reminders to efforts to end the use of English as a lingua franca through AI-mediated one-on-one conversations amongst African descendants of different languages.
One of the co-founders of Masakhana, a company research and funding company aimed at democratising AI in South Sudan, Lydia Kila Taban said: “We have more than 2,000 spoken languages in Africa, but the technology we use does not understand most of our languages. This results in a lot of people being unable to understand technology as it is not in a language they speak and think in.”
Masakhana is working to solve this problem with the help of researchers, engineers, computer scientists and others passionate about preserving African languages and heritage. This is a perfect example of the type of solutions Jozi Angels is willing to take risk funding.
Bule said with great ideas and the right funding, young people could help put a dent in South Africa’s unemployment problem.
FATUTRED IMAGE: AMLD conference gathering at Wits University. Photo: Lulah Mapiye
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