![[Startup Interview] Mutembei Kariuki, CEO, Fastagger, Kenya](Images/Key Persons/Mutembei Kariuki-Fastagger.jpg)
[Startup Interview] Mutembei Kariuki, CEO, Fastagger, Kenya
As more companies and institutions in Africa leverage onthe power of Artificial Intelligence to accelerate growth, Fastagger a Kenyan startup is accelerating AI applications by providing access to high quality data enhanced by human interaction.
The company’s CEO and co-founder Mutembei Kariuki explains.
Give us a brief introduction of your company?
Fastagger is an AI as a service platform that provides image annotation services to AI driven companies. Our goal is to accelerate AI applications by providing access to high quality data enhanced by human interaction. We seek to offer an end-to-end service, full-stack data management, model development and testing support, perfecting the model and giving the rights to use the full-fledged A.I. model.
Who are your clients?
Our clients include organisations implementing AI in their business. Currently, we have clients in conservation research, drone utility monitoring, insurance among others.
What do you consider your greatest selling points?
We support companies implementing AI throughout the whole development process. This is from brainstorming use cases, data management including labeling all the way to deploying the model and updating it.
What is the greatest threat to your business?
Policy makers and organisations have not yet understood the power that AI has to offer in delivering business outcomes. This lack of knowledge and understanding is a key threat as organisations expect magic to happen with AI. We find we need to support organisations in building the data pipelines to ensure they have good data.
How has the market responded to your services?
There is a demand for such services. However, businesses are always cautious about new technology and with AI there is a lot of experimentation before you find a good use case that can bring business value.
How have customers’ preferences and trends shaped your business?
Our entire business is built around the customer and what business value they want to get from AI. One key trend shaping the demand for AI is the increasing need to automate processes and get insights from all the data the companies are producing.
We have adapted our processes to focus on the end goal of the specific customers and this has enabled us to predict trends for products.
What are the ambitions of the company in 2020?
The focus of 2020 is expand into new regional markets and industries. We have received requests from East African countries as well as markets such as Japan. We intend to develop more products that can be marketed to a broad range of customers using AI.
Any new developments from your company?
We are building unique corpuses of data to solve challenges in the African context as we have seen that Africa has been largely ignored by AI companies developing AI agents. We are looking at the sectors of health, agriculture and retail primarily.
Who should contact you and why?
Companies that have an AI project that relies on image data and machine/computer vision should reach out as we have the capacity to deliver high quality training data and model creation support.
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Africa Business Communities is conducting a series of interviews with startup businesses in Africa.
Are you a startup in Africa and interested in an interview? Great! Send an e-mail to bas@africabusinesscommunities.com
