Zindi uses artificial intelligence to solve real world problems. Over the last three years, the South Africa-based crowd-solving startup has done that.
A group of data scientists under Zindi used machine learning to improve air quality monitoring in Uganda, and another group helped the insurance company predict customer behavior, especially on who was likely to leave and the possible interventions that would make them stay. The custom-made services offered by Zimnat were able to retain customers.
Some of the solutions that have been realized to counter the data-centered challenges that companies, NGOs and government institutions submit to Zindi.
Zindi invites its community of data scientists to take part in solution-finding contests. The winner of the cash prize is the data scientist who submitted their solution. The hosts of the competition get to use the best results to overcome the challenge they had, like in the air quality monitoring project by AirQo, which sought solutions for forecasting air pollution across Uganda, and in helping Zimnat cut its losses.
The public can now check air quality and air quality forecasts on AirQo's dashboard. The project is exciting because AirQo hired two of the winners from the challenge to help with the implementation. Megan Yates and Ekow Duker are from South Africa.
Lee said that AirQo raised funding from Google, based on the solution that they built, and they will be replicating it in other African countries.
Zindi is a database of data scientists. The startup secured $1 million in seed funding. The photo was taken by Zindi.
Microsoft, IBM, Liquid Telecom and the government of South Africa are some of the organizations that have used Zindi.
Lee is enthusiastic about the future of the community and excited about what Zindi has accomplished. Traditional consulting firms operating across Africa are often expensive and the platform is stepping up competition against them.
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College students will compete against one another for different solutions at the third Umoja Hack Africa challenge in March next year.
Zindi is using the inter-university competition to expose students to practical data science experiences and to solve real life challenges using artificial intelligence. The platform attracted about 2,000 students during the event that took place because of the Pandemic.
Lee, who is originally from San Francisco, said that students get to build their first machine learning models, and from there, it opens up all kinds of doors for their careers and education.
Zindi has a jobs portal that shortens the path from learning to earning. The talent placement portal allows organizations to find talent.
The crowd-solving platform realized a knowledge gap and needs to provide training to budding data scientists. Lee said that most of the users of Zindi are university students in need of learning experience, and who need enhanced skills to solve world problems.
A $1 million seed funding the platform recently secured will allow for the new plans.
Lee said, "For us, it's really about scaling the community and creating more value for all of our data scientists."
One of the things we understand is that data science is a new field in Africa, so we are going to use the funding to introduce more learning content. A lot of our data scientists are still in school. They are just looking for a chance to learn.
The seed round was led by San-Francisco based VC firm Shakti.
Lee said that they want to grow their users to one million in the near future, and that they are building a strong data science community in Africa. She said that this 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, "We want to make data science something that any young person who is interested in pursuing this career has access to the tools, the connections, and the experience that they need to make a successful career in data science."
Our goal is to make it accessible to everyone.
