InstaDeep: The African Exit

The Africa Health Ventures Podcast

InstaDeep was the largest acquisition of a startup on the African continent last year. It was sold for half a billion euro to the pharmaceutical company BioNTech.

This is a healthcare success story at a time when the vast majority of investments in Africa are in fintech. It's also a deeptech victory at a time when most of the world is skeptical about whether deeptech can even be built, let alone scaled, in Africa.

So how did a math geek from Tunisia bootstrap a company that captured the hearts and minds of a continent? Tune in to find out.

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In This Episode

* (3m16s) Start with passion. Passion will carry you through the years when you don’t know whether it’s going to work out or not. Passion will draw others to back you and keep on backing you, even when times are tough.

* (6m18s) Engineering exits is a delicate balancing act between short and long-term goals.

* (7m19s) How to navigate the hard balance between short-term profitability and long-term ambition? It took InstaDeep 5 years to build DeepPCB, which is now the best in the world in its product class.

* (9m08s) Deliver 10X value in your partnerships. This will harden the relationships that lead to clients, to investors, and to exits.

* (10m47s) How do we build investable talent in Africa? The journey to unlock African talent begins with the founder. Make yourself a world-class expert; pursue your vision with passion; and create the environment to grow and attract industry-leading talent.

* (15m04s) AI, biotech, and the future: we are today with Biology AI where LLMs were in 2020. The golden age of biology AI and biotech is just beginning. African founders have an unparalleled opportunity to build the data assets of the future.

* (18m15s) Do not limit yourself. Many African founders suffer from a failure of ambition. Think global from day one.

Show Notes

* InstaDeep: The Early Days: this article from Rest of World covers some of the early ventures and misadventures of Karim Beguir

* Born in Tatouine: from a remote city in Tunisia, how Karim rose to the global stage

* Google’s 2014 acquisition of DeepMind was an early inspiration to Karim in founding InstaDeep

* BioNTech announced its acquisition of InstaDeep in 2023

* Nucleotide Transformer is InstaDeep’s industry-leading genomics Language Models. In 2023 they released these models open-source to HuggingFace

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