The founder behind Africa’s first $680M+ AI Startup

From the edges of the desert in Tunisia, Karim Beguir built Africa’s largest AI company and its most lucrative exit. Though he could have stayed in the comfort of his traditional job in Europe, he was inspired by his father to return to the African continent to build — and has encouraged others to do the same.

When COVID crashed onto the world stage in 2020, one of the saviors turned out to be a small German pharma company founded by Turkish immigrants with no products and no revenue.

BioNTech’s mRNA technology ended up powering the first approved vaccine for COVID from Pfizer that helped bring the world out of the pandemic and made the husband-and-wife team behind it billionaires. But as the virus mutated, many new variants started to appear that the initial vaccines were less effective in dealing with. 

Karim Beguir’s company, InstaDeep, was working on potential cancer cures with BioNTech at the time and quickly pivoted to helping them sort through the genetic data on the thousands upon thousands of COVID variants popping up around the world. “Can we teach an AI system to learn COVID and tell us ahead of time what’s going to be dangerous?” Karim asked at the time. In 2022, InstaDeep developed a sophisticated early-warning system that was able to identify the 0.3% of variants that might prove problematic. “We caught all the key variants, which was, I think, one of the untold successes of AI during the pandemic,” Karim said.

Three years later, BioNTech acquired InstaDeep for nearly $700M, the largest-ever acquisition for an African deep-tech company, proving that AI was not just the domain of Silicon Valley. Overnight, InstaDeep’s success put the continent on the map as a locus of AI innovation for talent and investors. And it was a milestone for Karim, who went from a young boy in Tunisia living near the edge of the desert to the summit of the industry riding a wave of technological innovation. He was even rewarded with a TIME100 Impact Award from Time magazine for his efforts.

A Long, Long Time Ago…

Karim was raised in Tataouine. “Even in Tunisia, it’s the last city before the desert,” Karim recently told Endeavor co-founder and CEO Linda Rottenberg at the Endeavor Catalyst Investor Meeting, our annual invite-only event of LPs and entrepreneurs who are part of our co-investment fund. Later, when Karim was studying applied mathematics at universities in France and New York, he used to tell classmates that he came from Tatooine, the home planet of Luke Skywalker. He was only partially joking. Several of the movies were filmed in the city and the sets from the first 1977 movie are still there.

The family lived in this remote place because of Karim’s father. “My dad was a doctor, and after his diploma in France, he decided to come back to Tataouine, out of all places, because he wanted to really deploy his skills where they were most in need,” Karim explained. It was a decision that would guide Karim’s own career. Karim worked in investment banking and while the work was interesting and lucrative, Karim longed to follow in his father’s footsteps and make a bigger impact. When he won his TIME100 award, he dedicated it to his parents.

Karim knew exactly what he wanted to do — work with AI — and, most importantly, where he wanted to do it. Everyone told him that deep-tech innovation came from Silicon Valley or China. Maybe London or Paris. But Karim understood the array of talent inside the vast continent of Africa. “If anybody understands that talent in Africa is under-appreciated, it’s somebody like me,” he said. Faced with all that skepticism, Karim said to himself, “You know what? Nobody believes, so I’m gonna build it myself.” Karim started InstaDeep, based in Tunisia and the UK, in 2014 with, as he told TechCrunch, “two laptops, $2,000, and a lot of enthusiasm.”

“AI was not even a possibility then, and few of us were thinking of building an AI startup, let alone in Africa,” said Emmanuel Naim, an old friend of Karim’s and an early investor on behalf of Laurion Capital Management. “His commitment to look at the big picture, above the obvious resource, talent, and technological constraints has been remarkable. A decade ago, he once told me that no expert of any field had more than an advance of 6-12 months knowledge on any committed talented outsider. This prediction rings truer every day.”

Karim had turned down several acquisition offers before BioNTech approached them. But for InstaDeep, this deal just made sense. Not only was the acquisition the largest ever for an African deep-tech company, putting the continent on the map as a locus of AI innovation for talent and investors, there were operational benefits, too.

“It was a situation where we were already working hand-in-hand for five years,” Karim said. “We knew each other quite well operationally and we’re passionate about deep tech innovation. I really felt we needed to have everything under the same roof” for data sharing and other practical reasons.

‘Culture of Abundance’

Combining forces with BioNTech hasn’t slowed innovation at InstaDeep. Future projects with massive human impact range from using AI for personalized cancer vaccines to “moonshot” to automate railway scheduling with Deutsche Bahn, the largest rail operator in Europe.

Another unusual use case is one that most AI companies in the West would probably not even consider or concern themselves with — predicting locust breeding grounds using satellite data. It’s a uniquely African challenge, and one that’s being addressed because of African talent working on African soil. InstaDeep is building a new office in Kigali, Rwanda to tackle the project and has worked tirelessly to get the work of African AI researchers, especially women, accepted at elite AI conferences, an effort featured in the award-winning documentary below.

Check out Project Tatooine, which aims to provide AI training to 10,000 young talents in Tunisia over the next three years.

“When [locusts] arrive in an area, they devour the whole harvest of literally millions of people in sometimes a few hours. So it’s a huge issue,” Karim noted. “And it’s growing with global warming and climate change.”

Endeavor Tunisia was, of course, an early supporter. “What was impressive about Karim since the first time we met him was his passion and drive to build the best AI solutions globally by having the best possible deep-tech companies as benchmarks,” said Walid Bellagha, Managing Director of Endeavor Tunisia. “He had the big ambition to tackle tough global challenges with the confidence that African talent can play a critical role in that.” 

Karim has now joined the Endeavor Tunisia board in order to help nurture African entrepreneurs and is a limited partner in Endeavor Catalyst, Endeavor’s rules-based, co-investment fund. This is another example of the Multiplier Effect that Endeavor so often talks about — the idea of founders building up their ecosystems by developing future generations of entrepreneurs.

“I’m really trying to be helpful to many founders in Africa and beyond in AI generally,” Karim explained. “My goal is to create a culture of abundance. You can have exponential success. We proved it.”