InstaDeep, a creator of AI decision-making systems for solving real-world problems, has raised £74 million.
InstaDeep, now based in London, began in 2014 in Tunis in North Africa, with two laptops, $2,000 and, according to CEO Karim Beguir, “a lot of enthusiasm”.
From the start, he and co-founder Zohra Slim have made boosting local AI communities central to InstaDeep’s mission, through events, training and open-sourcing software.
InstaDeep is proud to have engineers and researchers in South Africa, Nigeria, Tunisia and the UAE alongside its teams in France and the UK.
The Series B round was led by Alpha Intelligence Capital together with CDIB, while BioNTech, Chimera Abu Dhabi, Deutsche Bahn’s DB Digital Ventures, Google, G42 and Synergie also participated.
InstaDeep will use the funding to advance its computing infrastructure and accelerate the launch of disruptive AI products across multiple industries including MedTech, logistics, transportation and electronics manufacturing.
The firm will also expand its global presence into the United States.
“This funding round is a tremendous vote of confidence from our partners BioNTech, Google and Deutsche Bahn after working closely with us on innovative, high-impact AI initiatives,” said Beguir.
“And we are very excited to get the support of Alpha Intelligence Capital, Chimera, Synergie and G42 as we see wide-ranging opportunities to deploy our AI products to tackle complex real-world problems.”
COVID vaccines and Omicron
InstaDeep and BioNTech formed a multi-year strategic collaboration in 2020 to launch a joint AI innovation lab to deploy the latest advances in AI and machine learning to develop novel immunotherapies.
As part of this collaboration, the two companies created an AI-powered Early Warning System (EWS) for detecting high-risk SARS-CoV-2 variants. The EWS identified more than 90% of World Health Organisation-designated variants on average two months ahead of time.
It detected Omicron on the day its sequence became available among more than 70,000 novel variants discovered in October and November 2021.
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Google and Deutsche Bahn collaborations
InstaDeep collaborates with Google on AI initiatives and has published joint research with DeepMind and Google Research. InstaDeep is also working on a moonshot product to automate railway scheduling with Deutsche Bahn, the largest rail operator and infrastructure owner in Europe.
Boris Kuehn, MD at DB Digital Ventures, commented: “InstaDeep has demonstrated unique capabilities in solving very complex railway problems using groundbreaking AI-first technologies. The team’s skills and thought leadership in this space have paved the way for the adoption of cutting-edge AI technologies in the railway domain.
“We are happy to join the investment round and enable a stronger partnership with Deutsche Bahn to jointly harness the potential of applying AI.”