The first submission deadline has now passed. The numbers tell us the bet was right.

More than 1,800 participants registered from 42 African countries. Over 200 projects were submitted.

That is not a participation statistic. That is a signal — that across the continent, engineers, researchers, and builders are actively working on the problem of making AI run efficiently on the devices people actually have, in the environments they actually work in.

See the Work

The submission gallery is live. These are real projects, built under real constraints, by teams who took the challenge’s premise seriously: that the future of AI in Africa will not be won by whoever can access the most compute, but by whoever can build the most effectively within limits.

Browse the submission gallery →

Join the Conversation

Builders across the continent are sharing their work and their process. Follow the challenge hashtag to see what is being made and who is making it.

#africadeeptechchallenge2026 on LinkedIn →

More to come. The review process is underway, and we will be sharing updates on what stood out, what the judges are looking for, and what comes next.

In the meantime — go see what more than 200 African builders made.

For Founders: A Room Worth Being In

If you are building an AI startup in Africa, there is an event on 3 September in Lagos that is worth your attention.

Delta40 — the Lagos and Nairobi-based venture studio that raised $20 million to back African founders from idea to scale — is hosting an AI Founder Showcase: an intimate, capacity-limited event connecting Africa’s AI founders directly with investors.

Delta40’s model is not just capital. They embed product, commercial, legal, and growth expertise alongside their investment — a structure designed for founders operating in markets where that kind of hands-on support is rare. The showcase is the kind of room where the conversations that matter actually happen.

Date: Thursday, 3 September 2026 Time: 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM WAT Location: Victoria Island, Lagos (exact address shared with confirmed attendees) Capacity: Limited

Apply to attend →

Africa Deep Tech Community · @africandeeptech · Join the community: bit.ly/ADTC_Discord

Getting there is a technical problem. And it starts with the model.

The Compression Question

A neural network’s intelligence is encoded in its weights — the millions or billions of numerical values learned during training that determine how the model responds to inputs. Those weights are also the reason large models are large. They consume memory, demand processing power, and make deployment on constrained hardware difficult or impossible.

The question is whether you can reduce that footprint without meaningfully degrading what the model knows. Information Session 5 of the ADTC 2026 Challenge takes that question seriously, with a session focused on one of the most powerful mathematical tools available for answering it.

SVD and What It Makes Possible

Kelvin Makwe, VP of Engineering at Insomnia Labs, will walk through how Singular Value Decomposition — SVD — can be used to compress neural network weights for faster, more efficient deployment on low-compute devices.

SVD is a technique from linear algebra that breaks a matrix down into simpler components ranked by how much information they carry. Applied to neural network weights, it allows you to identify which parts of a model contribute most to its performance and which can be approximated or discarded — producing a smaller, faster model that retains the capability that matters.

For builders working on the Laptop LLM Challenge, this is directly applicable. If your model needs to run on an everyday laptop without internet access, compression is not an optional optimisation — it is the engineering problem you have to solve.

Session Details

This is a technical, practical session aimed at builders who want to go beyond high-level framing and into the methods.

Date: Tuesday, 11 August 2026 Time: 2:00 PM UTC Format: Online Information Session

Register here →

Questions about the challenge? Post in the ADTC Discord.

On Saturday, July 18th, the Africa Deep Tech Community held the Builder’s Series-episode 01, the first-ever physical edition- hosted at Antler, Federal Palace Hotel, Victoria Island, in collaboration with Antler Lagos. The room filled with engineers, founders, and operators who came for exactly what was promised: an engineering-first conversation about the trade-offs, the failures, and the decisions made without a playbook.

Omoju Miller, Founder and CEO of Fimio, moderated the conversations with our two featured builders, guiding the discussion between them and an audience that clearly came ready to dig in, not just listen.

Emmanuel Akingbade and the Data Hiding in Plain Sight

The first spotlight went to Emmanuel Akingbade, building Qorel, an industrial edge platform designed to pull reliable, continuous data out of the equipment that actually runs the physical world: PLCs, sensors, and SCADA systems built decades ago to talk to a control-room screen a few meters away, not to a cloud platform or an AI agent. The conversation went past the pitch and into the texture of the problem: African factory floors, oil rigs, and substations generate data every second, and most of it has historically disappeared into analog gauges and machines that were never designed to talk to each other.

What made the conversation land with this particular room was how concrete Emmanuel got about it. He walked through a deployment scenario Qorel is built for: an offshore oil platform fifty kilometres from shore where the only connectivity is a satellite link that goes down roughly a third of the time. In one documented outage, that link stayed dead for 41.5 hours, and the system kept reading, buffering, and validating the entire time, accumulating close to 150,000 messages locally without losing a single one. When the link came back, the whole backlog synced in about 75 seconds, no operator intervention required. For a room full of engineers who’ve all fought exactly this problem, that kind of specificity- real numbers, a real failure mode, a system that survives it by design rather than by luck was the moment the talk stopped being a pitch and became a genuine engineering conversation.

Emmanuel was equally direct about where Qorel stands against established players like Ignition and AVEVA, who’ve had 15–20 years and thousands of installed sites to refine their protocol breadth and field hardening. His honest framing: the opportunity isn’t a “better technology” claim in the abstract; it’s that Nigeria’s own infrastructure reality grid collapses, tens of thousands of fiber cuts a year, power failures behind most telecom downtime is the exact condition Qorel’s architecture was stress-tested against from day one, while most of the incumbents were built and tested against far more forgiving Western grids.

Wilson Osonoderin and the Hustle Behind Stride EV

Next up was Wilson Osonoderin, founder of Stride EV - IoT-enabled electric mobility built around swappable battery infrastructure for African cities. The model is simple on paper and hard in practice: a rider swaps a depleted battery for a fully charged one at a Stride Station and is back on the road in minutes, with live asset tracking and anti-theft technology built into the system. Wilson spoke candidly about solving for range, durability, and fleet management all at once, against the realities of Lagos logistics and standard playbooks that simply don’t apply here. Attendees who caught him afterwards described it as one of the clearest lessons of the day on why solving real problems for everyday people has to come before the technology itself.

Omoju Miller: The Realities Behind Fimio

Beyond moderating, Omoju also turned the mic on herself, sharing the realities, lessons, and hard-won experience behind building Fimio. It was a fitting close to the builder conversations: a reminder that the isolation this series exists to break isn’t unique to Deep Tech in Lagos; it’s a founder thing. Her openness about her own build gave the room permission to ask sharper, more honest questions of Emmanuel and Wilson too.

A Room Bigger Than the Stage

What stood out beyond the two featured conversations was how much building was happening in the audience itself; we had founders working in African tech talent and hardware innovation who used the mixer to talk shop on manufacturing, IoT, and what it takes to design technology for African realities rather than importing someone else’s playbook. One attendee summed up the day’s real takeaway: Africa’s future won’t be built with software alone - it’s deep tech, hardware, industrial manufacturing, AI, and electric mobility, together.

What This Was Really About

The goal was never just a good afternoon of conversation. It was to chip away at the emotional, knowledge, and depth isolation that African deep tech builders so often carry alone by creating a recurring, high-trust room where the real questions get asked out loud, and where builders leave knowing they aren’t building in isolation.

Judging by the energy through the Q&A, the sidebar conversations, and the networking that ran well past the closing remarks, Episode 01 did exactly that.

This is just the beginning. The Builder’s Series continues.

Thank you to Antler Lagos for hosting, to Emmanuel, Wilson, and Omoju for showing up with the honest version of the story, and to everyone who came ready to engage rather than just watch.

Coming Up: Silicon Exchange Build Hours

🚀 In San Francisco, devs get direct access to the world’s top AI labs through local accelerators and insider networks. We’re bringing that same SF access straight to builders across Africa so you can compete globally.

We’re kicking off a live 4-part virtual series featuring engineers directly from one of the leading frontier AI labs in San Francisco to master agentic workflows—the actual setups top Silicon Valley engineering teams use to plan, execute, and ship.

Come get hands-on with cutting-edge tooling and build alongside 500 active developers across the continent.

🗓 Session 1: Thursday, August 13

⏰ 2:00 PM Lagos | 3:00 PM Joburg | 4:00 PM Nairobi | 6:00 AM PT

https://luma.com/siliconxchange-buildhours

The Africa Deep Tech Community brings together engineers, founders, and researchers working across science and technology in Africa. Follow us @africandeeptech and join the community on Discord: bit.ly/ADTC_Discord

What is more exciting for a deep tech builder than finding people who truly understand the problems you are trying to solve?

Building breakthrough technology in Africa can feel like solving impossible problems in isolation. The best innovations rarely happen that way — they grow within communities that challenge ideas, share hard-won lessons, and open doors to collaboration that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

On Saturday 18 July, the Africa Deep Tech Community is bringing that kind of community together in Lagos for the first-ever physical edition of the ADTC Builders Series, in collaboration with Antler Lagos.

This Is Not a Conference

There will be no polished pitches or rehearsed keynotes. This is an honest, engineering-first conversation where builders speak openly about the realities of developing frontier technology under African constraints — the trade-offs, the failures, the decisions that had to be made without a playbook.

Two founders will go deep on what they are building and how:

Emmanuel Akingbade is building Qorel — industrial edge infrastructure that powers analytics, AI, and automation across manufacturing, oil and gas, and utilities. The problems he is working on sit at the intersection of hardware, data, and some of the most demanding industrial environments on the continent.

Wilson Osonoderin built Stride EV — IoT-enabled electric mobility with swappable battery infrastructure designed for African cities. Stride EV’s model lets riders swap a depleted battery for a fully charged one at a Stride Station and get back on the road in minutes, with live asset tracking and anti-theft technology built into the system. Building this has meant solving for range, durability, fleet management, and the realities of Lagos logistics — all at once.

Expect practical insights on product engineering, navigating technical constraints, and building resilient companies in environments where the standard playbooks don’t apply.

Who Should Come

Whether you are already building or still refining your idea, this session is an opportunity to gain real-world perspective, connect with fellow builders, and strengthen your approach. The room will be small, and the conversation will be direct — bring your questions and your problems.

Event Details

Date: Saturday, 18 July 2026 Time: 1:00 PM GMT+1 Venue: Antler, Victoria Island, Lagos Format: Physical Meetup — spaces are limited

Register here →

GPU Access for African AI Builders — An Information Session with Alex Tsado

Africa Deep Tech Community | Information Session — 21 July 2026

One of the biggest constraints facing AI builders in Africa is not talent or ambition — it is compute. Training and scaling AI models requires access to high-performance GPUs, and for most teams on the continent, the cost and availability of that infrastructure has been a genuine blocker.

Alex Tsado has spent his career working on exactly that problem. As a former NVIDIA product manager, he helped launch the company’s global cloud AI business and worked with the world’s largest cloud providers on AI infrastructure at scale. He then came back to apply that knowledge where it is needed most — founding Udu Technologies in 2025 to provide affordable, right-sized GPU access across Africa at prices up to 40% lower than global providers.

In this information session, Alex will walk through how African builders can access cloud GPUs to build, train, and scale AI models more efficiently — the practical side of low-resource AI innovation, from someone who has built the infrastructure to support it.

Date: Tuesday, 21 July 2026 Time: 7:00 AM PST | 2:00 PM GMT Format: Online Information Session

Register here →

The Africa Deep Tech Community brings together engineers, founders, and researchers working across science and technology in Africa. Follow us @africandeeptech and join the community on Discord: bit.ly/ADTC_Discord

Four hundred million tons. That is how much plastic the world produces every year. Of that, only 9% is recycled — not because recycling is unimportant, but because the economics and technical challenges make it the exception rather than the rule. The rest accumulates: in landfills, in waterways, and increasingly, in the human body itself. Eleven million tons of plastic enter the oceans annually, and microplastics have now been found in food, water, and human tissue.

These numbers tend to generate calls for better waste management, stricter regulation, and consumer behaviour change. Frank Onyemuwa came to a recent Africa Deep Tech Community session with a different argument: the real intervention happens much earlier, at the point of design.

Redesigning Chemistry from the Start

Frank Onyemauwa is a chemist with 15 issued US patents and more than 45 international patents as co-inventor, with experience developing new polymers and materials across a range of industries. He now works with Verdant on plant-based coatings and containers, and the session he led was grounded in a discipline called green chemistry.

Green chemistry, as Frank explained it, is not an environmental add-on applied after the fact. It is a design framework that applies across the full life cycle of a chemical product — from initial design through manufacture, use, and disposal — with the goal of eliminating hazards to human health and the environment at the source rather than managing them downstream. The distinction matters: most existing approaches to plastic pollution are reactive. Green chemistry is proactive.

The field is not new. Frank noted that it traces its roots to the 1990s, and specifically to the U.S. Pollution Prevention Act of 1990, which shifted national policy in the United States from pollution control to pollution prevention. That conceptual shift — stop the hazard from being created rather than clean it up afterward — is the organising idea behind the discipline.

Four Principles Worth Understanding

Frank walked through four key principles from the green chemistry framework — specifically principles 1, 7, 10, and 12 — that he described as pillars for practical application.

The first is prevention: it is better to prevent waste than to treat or clean it up after it has been created. The seventh is the use of renewable feedstocks — raw materials derived from renewable sources, rather than petroleum. The tenth is designing for degradation: chemical products should break down into innocuous substances after use rather than persisting in the environment. The twelfth is inherent safety — designing chemistry to minimise the potential for accidents and harm.

Together, these principles describe a kind of discipline that asks hard questions at the beginning of a product’s development rather than at the end of its life.

What Verdant Is Building

The practical application Frank pointed to is Verdant’s work on plant-based alternatives to conventional petroleum-derived plastics. Conventional plastics — the material in everyday packaging, cups, and containers — are derived from fossil fuels and persist in the environment for centuries after use.

Bio-based alternatives can be produced from plant materials, and Frank addressed a concern that came up in the discussion: whether sourcing plant-based feedstocks competes with food supplies. His response was direct — bio-based materials can be sustainably sourced without impacting food systems, though consumer education about the environmental trade-offs remains important.

Abiola raised the question of price competitiveness and whether AI has a role to play in developing these materials faster. Chukwuemeka asked about deforestation risks and what incentives exist for manufacturers to adopt bio-based alternatives. Both questions point to the gap between a technically viable solution and one that actually displaces the status quo at scale — a gap that involves economics, policy, and behaviour as much as chemistry.

Africa’s Angle

Frank’s framing for the Africa Deep Tech Community specifically was around opportunity. He highlighted AI as a tool for accelerating the discovery of new sustainable materials — and argued that Africa has a meaningful role to play in that work, not simply as a market for solutions developed elsewhere, but as a site of innovation. The chemistry problems are real and global; the materials science opportunity is open.

That argument — that the continent can contribute to the solutions rather than just absorb them — runs through the broader conversation the ADTC community keeps having, session after session, across domains. Green chemistry is one more place where that question is alive.

The Africa Deep Tech Community holds regular sessions bringing together engineers, founders, researchers, and builders working across science and technology in Africa. Join the community on Discord: bit.ly/ADTC_Discord

The Africa Deep Tech Challenge 2026 Is Officially Live!

Applications are now open.

Visit: https://africadeeptech.org/challenge-2026 to learn more and register.

Why Participate?

• Compete for a $20,000 prize pool and gain recognition for building practical, high-impact solutions

• Showcase your engineering capabilities on a continental stage

• Access mentorship, technical reviews, and community support
  Position your prototype for pilot deployments, venture exposure, and commercialization opportunities
  Join a growing community of African builders shaping the future of Africa deep tech.

  If you are working on AI, language technology, product engineering, or frontier solutions for constrained environments, this is your opportunity to take part.

  
  Applications are now open. Visit: https://africadeeptech.org/challenge-2026 to learn more and register.

Attend Knowledge Session

As part of the Africa Deep Tech Challenge 2026, join us for another information session exploring one of the most important engineering questions facing today’s builders:

The Last Mile of AI: Designing for Real-World Constraints

Our guest speaker, Oji Udezue (General Partner, Phalanx Ventures; former Chief Product Officer at Calendly and Typeform), will share practical insights from building products used by millions.

Together, we’ll explore:

• Practical frameworks for identifying high-impact problems worth solving

• How to design products that move beyond demos into real-world adoption

• Emerging opportunities across the Challenge domains

• Lessons from global innovation ecosystems and the XPRIZE Award.

If you’re participating in the Africa Deep Tech Challenge or considering applying, this session will help you think more strategically about what to build and why it matters.

Date: 7th July, 2026.

Date: 2:00 PM UTC

Register now and secure your spot: https://bit.ly/4gpeGXx

Tunis, Tunisia – 29th June 2026 – Open Startup, the pan-African organization supporting entrepreneurs and innovation ecosystems across Africa, has unveiled The Science Road, a new strategic direction focused on strengthening African science, deep tech and research-led innovations as they move from research into globally competitive ventures and industries.

Marking the organisation’s 10-year anniversary since its founding in Tunisia in 2016, Open Startup is entering a new phase, focusing on ventures developing solutions in health, climate, artificial intelligence, and adjacent technologies. This move builds on a decade of work empowering more than 3,000 founders and over 1,000 startups across more than 20 African countries. The Science Road brings together Open Startup’s programs under a unified acceleration platform, strengthening its role as a bridge between African founders, scientists, markets, partners and capital. It also introduces Openers First, a new investment arm that will provide early-stage backing to selected ventures emerging from the platform.

The new direction builds on Open Startup’s evolution from a university entrepreneurship competition to a pan-African investment-readiness and ecosystem-building platform. Over the past decade, the organization has connected founders with investors, corporations, universities, policymakers and international partners across Africa and globally. Open Startup has also built a wider community of more than 500 mentors, advisors and experts, trained over 300 coaches, and supported ventures that have gone on to raise funding, create jobs and remain active beyond the program period.

“For ten years, Open Startup has worked to help entrepreneurs build ventures and access opportunities,” said Houda Ghozzi, Founder and CEO of Open Startup. “As we enter our second decade, we do so with greater maturity, a broader continental footprint, and a renewed ambition. We believe the Science Road can become a runway connecting Africa’s innovators to the world—unlocking new opportunities for collaboration, investment, and scientific advancement, while helping build a new narrative between Africa and the world: one defined by contribution, innovation, and shared prosperity.”

The Science Road responds to a segment of Africa’s innovation economy that remains underserved. Science and deep tech ventures often require specialist support, stronger links with universities and industry, longer development timelines and early capital before they can reach commercial use.

Through the new platform, Open Startup will simplify its offering around two core pathways. The first will focus on pre-seed innovators translating research and breakthrough ideas into investable ventures, while the second will support seed-stage startups as they scale technologies with the potential to address major market and societal challenges.

Openers First will provide an early financing layer for selected ventures emerging from Open Startup’s platform. The investment arm is designed to complement the organization’s investment readiness work and help promising ventures bridge the gap between pre-seed and seed-stage growth, while contributing to Open Startup’s long-term sustainability.

As part of this next phase, The Science Road will also take shape through stronger bridges between ecosystems, spanning from Tunis to South Africa, with Open Startup deepening its collaboration with partners such as CERI, Stellenbosch University and LaunchLab to support research-led founders as they move science out of the lab and closer to markets, investment and real-world adoption.

Open Startup’s work over the past decade has been supported by a wide network of partners across Africa and globally. These include KfW AfricaGrow, which helped accelerate the organization’s continental expansion, as well as AfricInvest, the United States Department of State, the European Union, Digital Africa, Bpifrance, the Drosos Foundation, the Steve Madden Foundation, Sanofi Ventures and universities such as Columbia University, Columbia Business School, MIT Sloan and MIT Africa.

With African innovation ecosystems continuing to mature, research-led ventures will require more targeted support to become commercially viable and investment-ready. Through The Science Road, the organization aims to support more African ventures as they move from discovery to company-building, growth and long-term value creation.

Open Startup is currently looking for DeepTech ventures and tech-enabled startups building innovative, scalable solutions to address critical challenges in Africa across two dedicated tracks:

• Pre-Seed Track: A 6-month program designed for early-stage startups validating their solution and building the foundations for growth.

• Seed Track: A 1-year program designed for startups that have validated their solution and are preparing to scale and raise growth capital.

Focus areas include:
ClimateTech, AgriTech, CleanTech, Renewable Energy, WaterTech, Circular Economy, HealthTech, MedTech, BioTech, Diagnostics, Telemedicine, FinTech, EdTech, Logistics, Supply Chain…

They are looking for startups that:

• Are incorporated in an African country and operate primarily in Africa.

• Are building a DeepTech or tech-enabled solution with strong scalability potential.

• Can demonstrate proof of concept, an MVP, or early traction, depending on the track.

• Have a committed founding team with the technical capacity to build and scale.

• Are proficient in English and able to actively participate in program activities.

Selected startups will benefit from:

• A regional training bootcamp focused on growth and investment readiness.

• Tailored mentorship adapted to their stage and sector.

• International exposure across African and global ecosystems.

• Investor and corporate matchmaking.

• Access to fellowships, including talent and technical support.

• Access to a vibrant community of founders.

• Potential investment tickets ranging from USD 20,000 to USD 50,000.

🔗 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐥𝐞𝐭: https://lnkd.in/dsxp7-ak
🔗 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐉𝐮𝐥𝐲 𝟑𝟏𝐬𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 :

• Pre-seed: https://www.f6s.com/open-startup-pre-seed-track-program/apply

• Seed: https://www.f6s.com/open-startup-seed-track-program-2026/apply

🔗 𝐑𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐨 𝐒𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐧 𝐉𝐮𝐥𝐲 𝟕𝐭𝐡: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/0hOa_6LQTu2c4MwVe-UeNg#/registration
🔗 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞: https://open-startup.org/

This Year's Theme: The Laptop LLM

Across Africa, laptops are the most widely available computing platform in homes, schools, businesses, healthcare facilities, and communities. Yet most modern AI solutions are designed for infrastructure that remains inaccessible to many.

ADTC 2026 is designed to change that. This challenge asks a different question: what becomes possible when we design language models for African realities from the start?

Why Participate?
•Compete for a $20,000 prize pool and gain recognition for building practical, high-impact solutions
• Showcase your engineering capabilities on a continental stage
• Access mentorship, technical reviews, and community support
• Position your prototype for pilot deployments, venture exposure, and commercialization opportunities
•Join a growing community of African builders shaping the future of Africa deep tech.

If you are working on AI, language technology, product engineering, or frontier solutions for constrained environments, this is your opportunity to take part.

Applications are now open. Visit: https://africadeeptech.org/challenge-2026 to learn more and register.

Gate 1 Submission Deadline: July 24, 2026

Let's build infrastructure-grade intelligence for African realities.

The ecosystem behind the builders.

The Africa Deep Tech Challenge 2026 depends on infrastructure, community reach, technical support, and deployment pathways. These partners represent current and previous ADTF challenge and conference collaborators relevant to this work.

The Africa Deep Tech Challenge 2026 is built around a different question: what if you didn’t need any of that?

Building Intelligence on the Edge

This year’s challenge — the Laptop LLM Challenge — will focus on efficient architectures. Lean deployments. Models designed around the constraints of real environments, not ideal ones.

For Africa, that framing is not a technical curiosity — it is a practical necessity. Unreliable connectivity, power constraints, and the cost of cloud compute are not edge cases here; they are the baseline. The builders who figure out how to deliver real capability within those constraints are not just solving an interesting problem. They are building something the continent can actually use.

The four pillars of the 2026 challenge say it plainly: efficient architectures, edge deployment, resource-conscious innovation, and solutions designed for local realities.

Mark the Date

The challenge launches on 16 June 2026. Full details — including how to participate — will be shared on the challenge microsite.

See the teaser →

The distance between a spreadsheet full of numbers and a decision-ready dashboard is, for most people, a full job description. You need someone to connect the data, clean it, build the model, validate it, and translate the output into something actionable.

Doudou BA built OctOpus to collapse that entire workflow into a prompt.

The Idea Behind OctOpus

OctOpus is an autonomous AI data scientist. Drop in a dataset, describe your goal in plain language, and it runs the full pipeline — profiling the data, running machine learning experiments, deploying the best model, and generating a report ready for a decision. No code required.

The use cases are the ones that matter most in commercial contexts: revenue forecasting, customer churn prediction, lead scoring, fraud and anomaly detection. These are not academic exercises — they are the questions that determine whether a business retains its customers, allocates its budget correctly, and spots problems before they become crises.

Why This Matters in Africa

Access to data science expertise is a real constraint for most African organisations. The gap between those who can afford a data science team and those who cannot is not a gap in ambition or data — it is a gap in talent access.

A tool that puts the full data science pipeline behind a plain-language prompt changes who gets to ask rigorous questions of their data. OctOpus is backed by Station F, Nvidia Inception, Google Cloud, Microsoft, AWS for Startups, and the Dakar Angels Network — a set of credibility signals that Doudou has earned by building in public and putting the product through serious technical scrutiny.

Session Details

This is a Founder Deep-Dive — the ADTC format that goes beyond the pitch and into the product and engineering thinking behind what someone is building. Doudou will walk through how OctOpus turns data into dashboards, forecasts, and decisions, with the session open for questions throughout.

Date: Saturday, 13 June 2026 Time: 17:00 GMT+1 Where: Africa Deep Tech Community Discord — bit.ly/adtc_discord

The Africa Deep Tech Community holds regular sessions bringing together founders, engineers, researchers, and operators working across technology in Africa. Join on Discord: bit.ly/ADTC_Discord

Last Day to apply to MIT Kuo Sharper Deep Tech Program

Today is the last day to apply for the MIT Kuo Sharper Deep Tech program in Botswana

Applications close: June 7, 2026

Apply here: 2026 Deep Tech Application

The MIT Kuo Sharper Center’s 2026 Deep Tech Program, developed as part of the collaboration with the Government of Botswana and co-designed with Material Impact, is now accepting submissions and nominations. This program is built for African teams utilizing science, research, and engineering to move their breakthroughs from the lab into the market. It will bring together top scientific minds from across the African continent, transforming cutting-edge research into market-ready ventures that will power the continent’s next wave of innovation-led growth in health, renewable energy, mining and minerals, and agriculture.

Apply here: 2026 Deep Tech Application

This program combines virtual and in-person learning, with the opportunity for exposure to multiple innovation ecosystems across different countries. Participants gain direct access to MIT faculty, Material Impact’s deep-tech investment expertise, and a powerful continental network of peers, mentors, and stakeholders.

This program targets early-stage teams from across Africa who are:

• Ambitious about transforming industries and regions through the commercialization of deep tech innovations

• Focused on key sectors including mining and minerals, healthcare, agriculture, and renewable energy

• Building scientifically grounded ventures backed by strong intellectual property or advanced research

• Exploring commercialization pathways or in the early stages of bringing their innovations to market

If you know a scientist, researcher, or founder who fits this description or someone whose work deserves to reach the market, we encourage you to nominate them.

Applications close: June 7, 2026

Apply here: 2026 Deep Tech Application

Laolu is the founder and managing director of Leke Services, and he has been doing on-the-ground work in Nigeria’s emerging EV sector. The number is not a forecast pulled from a global consultancy report — it reflects a set of local conditions that, when taken together, are more favourable than most people in the room expected.

Why Nigeria. Why Now.

Three converging factors make the timing significant.

Battery costs have been falling steadily, which directly affects the price parity calculation between EVs and internal combustion vehicles. Fuel costs in Nigeria, by contrast, remain high — and with no subsidy cushion to soften the impact for fleet operators and commercial drivers, the economics of switching are increasingly compelling.

The third factor is one most people miss entirely: Nigeria currently imposes zero import tariffs on electric vehicles. That is an unusual policy opening, and it lowers the entry cost for importation at a moment when Chinese manufacturers — the dominant source of EVs currently entering the Nigerian market — are producing at scale and looking for export markets to absorb their capacity.

The combination of falling hardware costs, high fuel prices, and tariff-free importation creates a window. The question Laolu was asking — and that the session explored — is whether Nigeria can use that window to build something durable, or whether it will remain a market for other people’s products.

The Numbers on the Road

Laolu presented adoption projections that gave the conversation a concrete shape. Nigeria currently has approximately 20,000 electric vehicles on its roads. By 2030, that number is projected to exceed 630,000 — representing around 15% of total vehicles nationwide. The implied annual growth rate is roughly 94%.

Those numbers come with important context. The current base is small enough that design adaptations and local customisation remain difficult to negotiate with manufacturers — changes require volume commitments that don’t yet exist. But as demand scales, the calculus shifts. Chinese manufacturers with excess production capacity, Laolu noted, have real incentive to adapt their products for markets that are growing at this rate.

Commercial Vehicles Come First

One of the session’s most clarifying insights was about where EV adoption in Nigeria will actually start.

Sixty percent of vehicles on Nigerian roads serve commercial purposes. Motorcycles, tricycles, buses, and logistics vehicles make up the dominant use case — not personal passenger cars. That ratio has a direct implication for infrastructure and investment: the charging ecosystem that matters most in Nigeria is not the home charger or the highway fast-charger, but commercial charging infrastructure designed around fleet operations and high-utilisation vehicles.

Fleet operators are already the primary demand driver. The economics are more straightforward for commercial operators — they can model mileage, fuel savings, and total cost of ownership in ways that individual consumers typically don’t. Mobile battery services were also raised in the discussion as a potential solution to the range anxiety problem in contexts where fixed charging infrastructure is sparse.

Building for Nigerian Conditions

The session did not shy away from the real challenges. Flooding was raised early — Samuel asked directly about EVs navigating Nigeria’s flooded roads. Laolu’s response was clear: well-built EVs are sealed and capable of handling water immersion. The risk is not with properly engineered vehicles; it is with manufacturers that cut corners. The lesson is not to avoid EVs in wet environments, but to be rigorous about sourcing from reliable manufacturers.

Humidity is a related but distinct problem. Dapo — a familiar voice from previous ADTC sessions on control systems — raised the use of desiccants as a potential mitigation strategy, drawing on their use in UAVs and underwater vehicles. Laolu agreed the approach could be promising as market demand grows and creates the conditions for local adaptation.

Philips pushed the conversation further upstream. The deeper argument, he suggested, is not about adapting imported vehicles to African conditions — it is about designing vehicles specifically for African needs from the outset. That requires a different kind of ambition and a different kind of investment, but it is the direction the session kept returning to.

The Manufacturing Question

Current local manufacturing happens primarily through knockdown kits — semi-knocked-down (SKD) and completely-knocked-down (CKD) assembly, where components are imported and assembled in-country. It is a common starting point for automotive industries in emerging markets, and it generates local employment and some degree of technical capability transfer.

But Laolu was direct about where the real leverage lies. Moving beyond assembly to genuine local manufacturing requires getting specific about supply chains: plastics, injection moulding, battery systems. These are not high-level conversations about industrial policy — they are detailed technical questions about what can be made locally, at what cost, and with what level of quality control. Getting the answers right is what separates a local automotive industry from a local assembly operation.

Government policy was discussed as a meaningful enabler. Lower interest rates for transportation projects, continued tariff support, and procurement policy that favours locally produced vehicles could collectively shift the investment calculus for manufacturers considering Nigeria as a production base.

The Ecosystem Challenge

Victor raised a question that cuts across all of these considerations: what happens when manufacturers lock users into proprietary charging ecosystems? The comparison to Apple’s approach to its own product ecosystem was explicit. Laolu’s view was clear — that kind of lock-in is counterproductive if the goal is widespread EV adoption. Flexibility in charging options, rather than captive ecosystems, is what serves the market.

Eugene, who has experience driving a BZ4X, shared an honest account of the challenges — range anxiety, limited charging infrastructure, the particular difficulty of winter driving on a reduced charge. His closing thought was that EVs could be as transformative for Nigeria’s transportation as solar power has been for its electricity: not a replacement for everything, but a fundamentally different way of solving a problem that existing infrastructure has failed to solve.

What Comes Next

Viktor closed the session by signalling where the community wants to take the conversation. Future sessions are expected to go deeper into the technical specifics of assembly processes and local manufacturing competencies. And an idea surfaced that the community has already begun discussing: an EV hackathon, drawing inspiration from the Shell Eco Marathon model.

The session made clear that Nigeria’s EV opportunity is real — the numbers, the policy environment, and the commercial use case all point in the same direction. What it requires now is the same shift the ADTC community keeps calling for across every technical domain: a move from high-level awareness to specific, deployable knowledge.

The Africa Deep Tech Community holds regular public sessions bringing together founders, engineers, policymakers, and researchers working on technology in Africa. Join the community on Discord: bit.ly/ADTC_Discord

There is an algorithm quietly running inside nearly every industrial process on the planet — regulating temperature in a Coca-Cola bottling plant, maintaining pressure in an oil refinery, stabilising a drone mid-flight, and in more advanced applications, guiding missile defence systems. It is called the PID controller, and most African engineers never go deep enough on it to be able to design, tune, or improve one from scratch.

That gap is exactly what Dapo set out to address in a recent Africa Deep Tech Community session. A certified automation professional and control systems engineer, Dapo has spent years working to bridge the distance between how control systems are taught in African universities and how they actually function in industry. The session drew on that experience to make a technical subject accessible — and to make a broader argument about what African engineers stand to gain by taking it seriously.

What PID Actually Means

PID stands for Proportional, Integral, Derivative — the three mathematical components that make up the control algorithm. In practical terms, a PID controller watches a process (say, the temperature inside a tank), compares it to a target value, and continuously calculates corrections to minimise the gap between the two.

Dapo used the analogy of cooking plantains to illustrate the concept: the cook observes how the plantain is browning, adjusts the heat, and responds to how quickly things are changing. As many Africans know, a few seconds at the wrong temperature could make the difference between an amazing meal of delicious golden brown fried plantains and ruined dreams. Dapo let us know that it is indeed possible to leverage PID in regulating the oil temperature to ensure that you get the best fried plantain on time every time. A PID controller does the job with a level of precision a human hand cannot match.

The three components each handle a different dimension of that correction. The proportional term responds to the current error — how far off the process is right now. The integral term accounts for accumulated error over time, catching persistent drift that the proportional alone would miss. The derivative term responds to the rate of change — anticipating where the process is heading before it gets there.

The Stakes Are Higher Than They Look

The Coca-Cola bottling example Dapo used was well chosen. In a high-speed production environment, PID loops maintain the consistency that keeps every bottle within specification. Get it wrong — overfill, underfill, incorrect temperature, wrong pressure — and the consequences range from product waste to safety failures to legal liability. The algorithm is not an abstraction; it is directly connected to the quality of what comes off the production line.

The energy dimension is equally significant. Dapo cited research indicating that properly tuned PID algorithms can deliver energy savings of between 5 and 15 percent. He referenced IHS data showing energy at 39.2 percent of cost of sale in 2024 — which means that for energy-intensive industries, better control engineering is not just a technical improvement, it is a financial one.

Africa’s Dependency Problem

The harder point Dapo made was about where African industry currently stands. Many companies across the continent, he explained, are running processes on pre-programmed controllers supplied by foreign manufacturers — systems that come configured, sealed, and essentially opaque to the engineers who operate them. When something goes wrong or needs to be optimised, the expertise has to be imported along with the fix.

He pointed to the oil and gas sector as a concrete example. Importing control engineering expertise for major projects has resulted in substantial additional costs and delays. The Dangote refinery was cited as a case where Nigerian engineers, given the right capability, could contribute meaningfully — and where the absence of that local capability has a direct and measurable cost.

The argument is not that African engineers are unqualified. It is that the training pipeline, from university to industry, is not equipping them to design and tune control systems from first principles rather than simply operating what someone else has already built.

Tuning Is Where the Real Knowledge Lives

One of the session’s most useful sections was the demonstration of what tuning actually involves and why it matters.

Dapo walked through how different tuning strategies affect the behaviour of a control system, using a simulated temperature controller. Aggressive tuning — setting the parameters to respond quickly and forcefully to error — reduces the gap between actual and target values faster, but causes oscillation: the system overshoots, corrects, overshoots again. In a food production environment, that kind of oscillation can mean product loss. In a more hazardous process, the consequences are more serious.

Conservative tuning produces a slower, more stable response — less overshoot, but a longer recovery time after a disturbance. Neither approach is universally correct. The point is that understanding what each parameter does, and why, is what allows an engineer to make the right call for a specific application. That judgment is what cannot be pre-programmed into an imported controller.

Dapo also introduced a separator tank simulator he is currently developing, which demonstrates oil production processes and the various control loops that govern them — a practical tool for training engineers on industrial applications without needing access to real plant equipment.

Where AI Fits — and Where It Doesn’t

The session’s closing discussion addressed a question that has become unavoidable across engineering fields: what does AI mean for control systems?

Dapo’s position was measured. Generative AI tools can assist engineers by breaking down complex processes, parsing large volumes of sensor data, and helping to model system behaviour — he mentioned Claude as an example of how AI can serve as a support layer for experts. In applications like drone control and home automation, AI is already enhancing how decisions are made in real time, drawing on historical records and live sensor inputs to improve outcomes.

But he was clear about the limits, particularly in safety-critical environments. Oil and gas, high-temperature industrial processes, and other hazardous applications are not domains where AI replaces the engineer’s judgment. The stakes of a bad decision are too high, and the variability of real-world conditions too complex, for automated systems to operate without trained human oversight.

Mogaji raised an idea that generated real discussion: training specialised language models in 3D simulated environments to develop an understanding of real-world physics and industrial processes. The concept — which Chukwuemeka summarised as building a process-specific “brain” that could serve as a digital twin for a particular industrial setup — points toward where the field may be heading, particularly for lower-stakes applications where the cost of error is manageable.

Making the Knowledge Accessible

Dapo’s training platform, SkillKatalyst, is his practical response to the gap he identified. With a community of nearly 700 professionals and a university-level course on servo mechanisms, the platform combines visual simulations, mathematical models, and project-based learning to teach control systems concepts in a way that connects theory to application.

The platform allows users to simulate different tuning scenarios and observe how a process responds to disturbances — giving engineers the ability to develop intuition for system behaviour without the risk of getting it wrong on live equipment.

Beyond training, Dapo made the case for affordable automation solutions tailored to the African market. Many small and medium enterprises on the continent cannot access or afford the kind of industrial controllers used in large-scale plants. Custom controller boards built on existing architectures — ARM processors and common microcontrollers — offer a viable path to bringing control engineering capability to a much wider range of operators. Combined with low-cost simulators and accessible learning tools, the building blocks for scaling this knowledge exist. What is needed is the commitment to develop them locally.

The Broader Point

The argument running through the entire session was consistent: deep technical knowledge — the kind that allows an engineer to design, tune, and improve a system rather than simply operate it — is not a luxury. It is the foundation on which industrial capability is built.

PID controllers are one layer of that foundation. They are not exotic or cutting-edge; they are standard. And that is precisely the point. The gap between knowing that PID controllers exist and being able to work with them fluently is where a great deal of African engineering capability is currently stuck. Closing that gap, sector by sector, is part of what the Africa Deep Tech community is working toward.

Join us this Saturday for a Founder Deep Dive Session

Want to be part of these conversations? Join the Africa Deep Tech Community on Discord: bit.ly/ADTC_Discord

Join us for unfiltered insights from Laolu Adeola, Founder & Managing Director at Leke Services, a boutique consultancy guiding leaders through mobility energy transitions. Ex-McKinsey Center for Future Mobility scholar, he's electrified strategies for batteries, EVs, and emissions reduction.

Date: May 9, 2026
Time: 17:00 GMT+1

Session highlights:
- Nigeria's EV edge: Transport boom, power hurdles, fuel spikes
- 4-layer ecosystem: Vehicles, charging, fleets, enablers
- Deep tech's local scale role (beyond imports)
- Specialized, scalable models over full verticals

Elevate your deep tech game in Africa's mobility revolution.

Want to be part of these conversations? Join the Africa Deep Tech Community on Discord: bit.ly/ADTC_Discord

The Africa Deep Tech Community holds monthly Frontier Sessions bringing together engineers, builders, and researchers working across science and technology domains in Africa. Join the community on Discord: bit.ly/ADTC_Discord

What a Flight Controller Actually Does

Before diving into components, Jesutofunmi framed the problem around three core questions that every flight controller must answer in real time: Where is the drone? What is changing? And what should it do next?

These questions sit at the heart of everything. The flight controller’s job is to process a continuous stream of sensor data and translate it into precise motor commands — reliably, and fast enough to keep the drone stable in the air.

The Sensors That Make It Work

The primary sensing component in most flight controllers is a 6-axis IMU — an Inertial Measurement Unit — which combines a 3-axis gyroscope and a 3-axis accelerometer. Together, they measure both rotation and linear movement.

Each sensor has its limitations. Gyroscopes, Jesutofunmi explained, can drift over time — small errors that accumulate the longer the drone is in flight. Accelerometers, on the other hand, are noisy: they pick up vibrations and rapid movements that make their readings unreliable during aggressive flight.

The solution is sensor fusion. Jesutofunmi described using a complementary filter, which combines readings from both sensors using an alpha coefficient — a value that determines how much weight to give to each sensor at any given moment. The result is more stable and accurate than either sensor could deliver on its own.

Proper tuning of the control system is equally critical. Jesutofunmi shared from personal experience: incorrectly tuning PID parameters during a test led to a drone accident that injured his forearm. It was a pointed reminder that real-time control systems in robotics are unforgiving when parameters are set wrong.

The Three Layers of Building from Scratch

Jesutofunmi described the full flight controller system as having three distinct layers: hardware, firmware, and middleware.

Building from scratch means owning all three. His own project — a 5-axis flight controller developed over several years for precision agriculture applications — includes redundant sensors and a fully custom flight stack. The hardware, the firmware, and the software layer above it were all built by his team.

He outlined the core considerations at each stage: system design driven by application requirements, component selection, layout, and power management at the hardware level; and at the firmware and middleware levels, the logic that processes sensor data, runs the control algorithms, and executes flight decisions.

Why Build Your Own Instead of Using an Off-the-Shelf Solution?

Jesutofunmi’s experience repairing a DJI Phantom 4 gave him a direct view into how tightly integrated commercial flight controllers are. That integration is precisely what makes DJI’s products work as well as they do — and precisely what limits what you can do with them.

When an application has unique requirements — a non-standard payload, a specific flight profile, or an environment where GPS is unavailable — off-the-shelf systems hit their limits quickly. Building your own means full control, full flexibility, and no dependency on a third party’s design decisions.

He was clear that building from scratch is not always necessary. For many use cases, existing solutions are the right choice. But for applications that demand performance optimization or full technical ownership, there is no substitute for building the stack yourself.

He also worked through custom ROV and drone builds involving Blue OS integration and custom actuator mappings — applications where the specific requirements made commercial solutions unsuitable.

Defense, Agriculture, and 3D Mapping: Africa’s Drone Opportunity

The session highlighted three sectors where African drone technology has clear and significant potential.

In agriculture, precision applications — the kind that Jesutofunmi’s own 5-axis controller is designed for — require drones tuned to specific tasks that general-purpose commercial hardware often cannot handle well.

In defense, the requirements are more demanding still. Reliability is non-negotiable, which means redundant systems throughout. Crucially, GPS cannot be assumed: in adversarial environments, jamming is a real threat, and defense-grade drones must be able to navigate without it. The approach being developed is visual odometry — using cameras and computer vision to determine position and movement independently of any external signal. Fiber optics is another alternative being explored for drone communication in these contexts.

3D mapping is a third area of significant opportunity, where locally built drone systems can generate spatial data for infrastructure, land use, and resource management — the kind of locally generated data that, as the session noted, is often unavailable from global platforms.

The Bigger Argument: Own the Technology

Jesutofunmi closed with a call that echoed the broader conversation happening across the Africa Deep Tech community. Africa’s dependence on foreign drone manufacturers creates a structural vulnerability — in supply chains, in capability, and in the ability to innovate.

He pointed to how DJI, Apple, and Tesla built their positions: by going deep on the fundamentals, understanding their technology from the ground up, and building systems that others could not simply replicate. The argument is not that African companies should avoid learning from global players, but that they should aspire to build with the same depth — developing home-grown drone technology rather than indefinitely depending on foreign vendors.

The talent and the problems are both here. What is needed is the commitment to build from first principles.

The Africa Deep Tech Community holds monthly Frontier Sessions bringing together engineers, builders, and researchers working across science and technology domains in Africa. Join the community on Discord: bit.ly/ADTC_Discord

Two brothers. One laptop with a broken screen. An offline AI inference server that went on to be downloaded over ten million times globally — recognised by the inventors of PyTorch before it found a home market.

That story was told in the room at the Africa Deep Tech Roundtable in Lagos this February. So was the story of a team that started with a bionic prosthetic arm in a Nigerian university and pivoted to building drones. And the story of a company that mapped the entire country’s energy infrastructure in nine months, producing geospatial data that didn’t exist on any global platform.

The talent is here. What is not here — yet — is the ecosystem it deserves.

The Africa Deep Tech Conference 2026 Roundtable brought together founders, corporates, investors, government, development partners, and academia for an honest conversation about what it will actually take to build deep technology in Africa — not as a concept, but as an industrial capability.

The conversation was direct. It named the bottlenecks clearly: under-equipped labs, a broken relay from research to product to market, procurement frameworks that routinely lock out local builders, and a capital environment structurally misaligned with the long cycles that deep tech requires. It also named what is working, and where to start.

Out of that discussion came a set of concrete commitments — on shared infrastructure, corporate pilots, talent pipelines, and policy accountability — anchored in a 12-month action horizon.

We have now published the synthesized reflections and next steps from that roundtable as a formal communiqué.

It covers:

• How the room defined Deep Tech in the African context — and why that definition matters

• The supply and demand gaps holding the ecosystem back

• The priority sectors where Africa can and should build meaningful capability

• The strategic shifts the group called for

• Specific, near-term actions across equipment access, corporate piloting, talent development, and policy

• A proposed coordination structure and how to plug in

The communiqué is being shared with relevant government ministries, development finance institutions, and ecosystem leaders. It is the first concrete deliverable from the roundtable — and the opening of a wider conversation.

Read the full communiqué →

The Africa Deep Tech Community recently gathered for a wide-ranging session that brought together technologists, entrepreneurs, educators, and investors to explore one central question: How should Africa — and Nigeria in particular — position itself in the global AI revolution? The session was anchored by a presentation from Omoju Miller, CEO of Fimio, who had just returned from a 5-day trip to Nigeria on behalf of the US State Department’s AI diplomacy program.

What followed was one of the more substantive conversations the community has had — touching on everything from edge computing and crypto payment rails, to manufacturing strategy, talent pipelines, and the challenges of AI education on the continent. This recap covers the key themes. Find her presentation slides here.

Nigeria’s Unique Position in the AI Era

Omoju opened with historical context, tracing the arc of industrial revolutions and arguing that Africa — particularly Nigeria — stands at a genuine inflection point. Unlike previous revolutions, where the continent was largely left behind, this one presents a different set of entry points.

Nigeria’s advantages are real and compounding: a large and growing developer community, a globally distributed talent pool, a battle-tested fintech ecosystem that already operates at scale, and a deeply entrepreneurial culture forged through navigating infrastructure and institutional gaps. These aren’t minor assets — they are the very qualities that the AI era rewards.

Omoju also framed this as a moment where the rules of participation are being written. The countries and communities that shape AI standards, tooling, and applications now will have outsized influence over how the technology develops — and who benefits from it.

The Case for On-Device AI

Central to Omoju’s argument was a sharp reframing of AI infrastructure. Conventional wisdom holds that AI requires massive data centers — cloud compute, high-bandwidth connectivity, and expensive hardware. For Africa, she argued, on-device AI (also called edge AI) is not a compromise or a workaround. It is the right strategy.

The reasoning is grounded in practical realities. Infrastructure limitations make large-scale data center deployment costly and operationally fragile. On-device solutions can work fully offline, dramatically reduce data costs for end users, and keep sensitive data local — preserving sovereignty over information that would otherwise flow to foreign servers.

Omoju went further, proposing that African AI solutions should be audio-first to lower literacy barriers, and permissionless by design — enabling broader participation without relying on gatekeepers. Inventing for local context, she stressed, rather than adapting solutions built elsewhere.

Some participants, including Jinmi and Raymond, pushed for a more balanced view, noting that a combination of edge computing and small-scale, regionally appropriate data centers might better serve Africa’s diverse infrastructure landscape. The debate was healthy and unresolved — which itself reflects the genuine complexity of the challenge.

Edge AI in Action: Real-World Applications

The theoretical case for edge AI gained texture as participants shared concrete examples from their own work and observations.

In education, the group discussed how AI on local devices could deliver personalized learning experiences in underserved communities where internet connectivity is intermittent or unaffordable.

Dapo introduced Transync, a protocol he built for data collection in demanding industrial environments — including deep-sea oil rigs. Transync uses edge intelligence and a principle he called “reporting by exception”: rather than transmitting continuous data streams, the system only sends information when a parameter moves outside its normal operating envelope. The result is efficient, resilient data collection even in bandwidth-constrained conditions. It’s a precise example of locally-invented technology solving a problem that imported tools weren’t designed for.

Other applications discussed included AI-assisted agricultural monitoring, manufacturing quality control, and field trip-based learning models — where conference attendees visit data centers and operational environments to bridge the gap between technical skills and industry-specific problem-solving.

Decentralized AI and Crypto Payment Rails

Julian, creator of the open source project Flow, introduced a complementary vision: building talent pipelines for decentralized AI. He described an “agentic economy” — where individuals can participate in permissionless networks that coordinate AI tasks and human-AI collaboration, without needing institutional access or approval.

When asked about analogues and foundations for this work, Julian pointed to Bittensor, a decentralized AI network whose subnet architecture could serve as a building block.

Omoju connected this to a broader trend: crypto infrastructure, once dismissed as speculative, has quietly become embedded in financial systems in ways that most users no longer notice — much like how few people think about which AWS region is serving their application. As AI agents increasingly need to transact autonomously, at machine speed and across borders, fast and programmable payment infrastructure becomes essential. AI, she suggested, will be one of the primary drivers of crypto adoption going forward.

Manufacturing vs. Software: A Productive Tension

One of the session’s most energetic exchanges centered on Africa’s economic development strategy. The question: should the continent prioritize traditional manufacturing — following the path of East Asia’s industrialization — or lean into software, data, and AI?

Omoju made the case for the latter. A revolution centered on intelligence and software can reach more people, more quickly, at lower capital cost than factory-floor manufacturing. The barriers to participation are lower, and the returns can scale rapidly without the same physical infrastructure requirements.

But the group resisted a binary framing. Several participants argued that manufacturing and software development are complements, not substitutes — that Africa needs both, and that the choice between them often reflects false constraints. Chukwuemeka announced plans for a formal panel debate on manufacturing versus software at the next Africa Deep Tech conference. The topic clearly warrants the full treatment.

Building a Moat: IP, Open Source, and Local Context

A recurring thread through the session was how African developers and companies can protect intellectual property while staying engaged with the global open-source ecosystem — and without getting drawn into an unwinnable arms race with well-resourced labs.

Omoju’s answer was direct: don’t compete at the model layer. The real durable advantage lies in the application layer — solutions so deeply tuned to local context that they are practically impossible to replicate from the outside. Deep familiarity with Nigerian market dynamics, local languages and dialects, specific industrial conditions, or the transaction patterns of a particular market are not things a foreign team can simply download and deploy.

Dapo’s work on industrial telemetry systems illustrated this point. These are solutions built from the inside out — grounded in problems that global players don’t fully see or understand, and offering value that is highly specific and therefore defensible.

The Education and Talent Challenge

Philips offered a frank assessment of AI education and implementation in Nigeria. Three structural challenges stood out: misaligned incentives (people lack a clear line of sight from learning to livelihood), a tendency to conflate technology with software development to the exclusion of hardware and systems engineering, and persistently low course completion rates even when learning is free and accessible.

Omoju built on this by arguing that technical education without entrepreneurship training is incomplete. Creating a working technology is only half the battle — if there’s no business model to capture value from it, the technology fails commercially regardless of its merits. She pointed to informal apprenticeship and mentorship as models that often work better in practice than formal, credential-focused programs.

Ike raised the matching problem: there is a growing pool of young technical talent, but they’re not always connected to the industries where their skills are most needed. Field trips and embedded experiences — getting engineers into manufacturing facilities, oil fields, and markets — were proposed as mechanisms for bridging that gap.

A Note on Investment and Metrics

Omoju closed with advice aimed at investors looking at African AI companies: resist the temptation to get drawn into debates about AI capabilities or infrastructure. These conversations, she noted, tend to become defensive and distract from what actually matters — unit economics, customer retention, revenue growth, and market fit. Evaluate African AI companies the same way you’d evaluate any strong business. The AI is a means, not the story.

She also suggested that investors and founders alike would benefit from spending time in local markets — not conference rooms — observing where transactions actually happen, where friction exists, and where small interventions could unlock significant value.

Looking Ahead

The Africa Deep Tech Community session painted a picture of a continent at a genuine moment of possibility — not by following paths laid down by Silicon Valley or Shenzhen, but by developing a distinctly African approach to the intelligence revolution.

On-device AI, permissionless participation, crypto-powered agent economies, and applications rooted in local context: these form the outline of a strategy that takes Africa’s constraints seriously while treating its advantages — its people, its problems, its entrepreneurial energy — as the core assets they are.

The conversation continues at the next Africa Deep Tech conference. Judging by the depth and energy of this session, it’s just getting started.

When we rely solely on black-box hardware, we face a ceiling we didn’t build:

• Less control over specific mission parameters.

• Lower margins due to licensing and import costs.

• Limited room for the kind of “deep tech” innovation that solves local problems.

Because if you don’t own your flight controller, you don’t truly own your product. You’re just a system integrator.

The Shift from Assembly to Architecture

At Africa Deep Tech Community, we’ve been tracking a shift. More engineers and founders across the continent are realizing that the real leverage isn’t in assembling parts—it’s in mastering the core technology that powers them.

To bridge this gap, our next Expert-Led Frontier Session dives into the very heart of the machine.

The Session: Building UAV Flight Controllers From Scratch The Expert: Jesutofunmi Kupoluyi, Embedded Systems Engineer (JIMS Innovations)

Why This Matters

This isn’t just a “how-to” for hobbyists. It is a strategic masterclass for engineers, operators, and founders who want to build sustainable, sovereign drone solutions.

Here is what we’ll be breaking down:

• The Ground Up: A clear architectural roadmap of what it takes to build a flight controller from scratch.

• Hardware vs. Firmware: Making better technical decisions to optimize performance and cost.

• Strategic Autonomy: Practical ways to reduce reliance on imported, proprietary systems.

• The African Reality: Designing UAV solutions specifically for the unique environmental and logistical challenges of the continent.

“Whether you’re building drones or building a drone business, ownership of the core tech is the ultimate leverage.”

Join the Session

Don’t miss this chance to learn from one of the brightest minds in African embedded systems. Let’s move beyond assembly and start building the future of African autonomy.

• 📅 Date: Saturday, April 11th

• 🕒 Time: 15:00 GMT +1

• 📍 Location: Africa Deep Tech Discord

Join the community to access the session 👉 bit.ly/adtc_discord

Update: Selecting the Engineers for the Address Index Project

Since our initial call for engineers, the selection process for the Address Index project has been rigorous, illuminating, and deeply inspiring. We are excited to announce that the selection committee has shortlisted and referred the engineers who will be leading this frontier work.

While the technical bar was high, we wanted to pull back the curtain on what differentiated the top talent during the matching phase. For those looking to land a deep tech opportunity in the future, these are the four pillars the selection committee prioritized:

1. Algorithmic Rigor: They looked for engineers who didn’t just “write code” but could explain the mathematical approach behind it—specifically regarding Algorithmic Normalization to prevent data outliers from skewing the index.

2. Resilient Architecture: Candidates stood out if they prioritized API Resilience and Scalability. This meant demonstrating an ability to implement asynchronous processing (AsyncIO), request throttling, and robust error-caching to manage high-cost API environments effectively.

3. Modern, Modular Design: They looked for comfort with Python 3.12+ and a commitment to modular design. The best candidates build systems where the “core logic” remains intact even when specific modules are swapped out.

4. Geospatial Logic: Precision is everything in this project. They selected those who could demonstrate Spatial Reasoning—the ability to handle large census data and complex geocoding without compromising data integrity.

What truly separated the “good” from the “great” wasn’t just the code in their GitHub repositories, but their ability to justify it. The successful candidates didn’t just show the committee what they used; they walked through the why. They could communicate the trade-offs made during the design phase and explain why a specific approach—even if theoretically sub-optimal—was the right choice for a real-world constraint.

To the talent in our community: Deep tech isn’t just about knowing a language; it’s about owning the logic. As you build your portfolios, focus on being able to articulate your design decisions. We look forward to seeing many of you apply for future frontier builds.

The Africa Deep Tech Community (ADTC) is more than a Discord server; it is a structured operating system for technical founders, researchers, and engineering leaders building real infrastructure across Africa. Every month, the community runs a set of high-signal programming designed to move members from inspiration to execution.

The Frontier Session

The flagship monthly event. A 60-minute live session on Discord Stage built around a cross-sector theme that deliberately bridges disciplines; connecting AI with hardware, blockchain with IoT, life sciences with machine learning, and beyond. Rather than staying siloed within a single vertical, the Frontier Session forces convergence: getting builders who wouldn’t ordinarily be in the same room to think together, challenge assumptions, and spot opportunities that only emerge at the intersection of fields. The first session, Edge Robotics in Deep Waters, led by Lemuel Ifuwe, an AI Researcher at Sheffield Hallam University, sets the tone for applied, frontier-level thinking about architecting real-world Autonomous Underwater Vehicles.

Teardown Night

Every few months, the community gets hands-on with real technology. A product, a medical diagnostic device, a smart energy meter, or a blockchain hardware wallet gets pulled apart technically and examined from every angle. The purpose is simple: build the kind of deep, applied insight that only comes from understanding how things actually work, not just how they’re marketed.

Research Review Club

Africa needs more builders who can read a research paper and ask, “How do we ship this?” The Research Review Club bridges that gap. A paper is shared a week in advance, a community volunteer presents a summary, and the group digs into the translational science. What does this mean for real-world products? Focus areas include TinyML, offline AI, bioinformatics, and battery optimisation. This is where lab meets market.

Founder Deep Dives

Once per quarter, the spotlight turns to the people actually building. An AI founder, a hardware founder, a Web3 builder, and a biotech founder each get to share the unfiltered story of the technical moat they’re constructing, the infrastructure constraint that nearly broke them, and the regulation that slowed everything down. No pitch decks, no polish. Just high-signal, applied learning from people in the trenches.

Africa DeepTech Intelligence Brief

Published every four months, this is ADTC’s curated signal filter for the continent’s deep tech landscape. Funding rounds, research breakthroughs, policy updates, startup teardowns, and infrastructure insights are all compiled into a digest shared on Discord, distributed as a PDF, and published as a LinkedIn carousel. The goal is to make ADTC the go-to knowledge hub for anyone serious about what’s being built across Africa.

Together, these programs are designed to produce outcomes: funded startups, cross-border collaborations, visible prototypes, and research turned into real companies.

Join us!

Other interesting updates

[Innovate Africa Fund] Call for Problem Owners | Wicked Innovation Labs Hackathon ($2000 in prizes)

The application form for the *Call for Teams is live here: https://bit.ly/WickedInnovationLabsHackathon2026

Calling on builders, thinkers, and makers to form teams and compete in the Wicked Innovation Labs Hackathon.

Select one of the shortlisted problem statements, build your team, and submit your approach. You’ll be selected based on how deeply you demonstrate understanding of the problem as well as how well you execute through two sprint cycles, all the way to a working prototype.

Calling teams who are ready to think hard, move fast, and make something real. Register your team via: bit.ly/WickedInnovationLabsHackathon2026

Deadline: March 26, 2026

The conference goal was simple: Elevate the conversation about deep tech in the region while building bridges between deeptech practitioners and enthusiasts from different disciplines.

Here are the key highlights from four days of intense innovation and deliberation.

See the full conference schedule here. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel to be notified when the full conference session videos are uploaded. Highlight reels are uploaded to our Instagram page.

Day 1: Grounding in the Ecosystem

The conference began with intimate off-site engagements designed to connect participants with the physical infrastructure and community in the Nigerian tech scene.

• Infrastructure Tour: A focused group visited the Kasi Cloud Data Centre in Lekki, offering a firsthand look at the future of data infrastructure supporting cloud services on the continent.

• Community Town Hall: The afternoon transitioned to the Semicolon campus in Yaba, a prominent hub for tech talent training, for an open exchange between conference delegates and the local resident ecosystem, where our keynote speakers inspired the audience of would-be builders to think beyond apps as a medium for tech innovation, letting them know that their crazy dreams are valid.

Day 2: Biotech and the “Smell Cyborg”

The main conference program kicked off at the Victoria Crown Plaza Hotel, opened by the Convener, Emeka Afigbo. The day was anchored by a keynote from Osh Agabi, CEO of Koniku Inc..

• Visionary Biotech: Agabi discussed his work in biotech, specifically “smell cyborgs” that analyze volatile organic compounds to diagnose diseases in real-time. His vision of turning bathrooms into healthcare data centers challenged attendees to rethink the future of personalized medicine. He also announced the launch of Koniku Nigeria.

• The Innovation Sandbox: Throughout the event, the Innovation Sandbox allowed attendees to engage with emerging tools and exhibitor displays in an interactive environment.

• Builders Panel: A session specifically for practitioners provided practical insights into the complexities of building Deep Tech Ventures in Africa. The audience was reminded that great companies are built in times of adversity, and not to be shy to take audacious steps towards our dreams

Day 3: Product Leadership and Expert Surgeries

Day 3 focused on the mechanics of growth and technical mastery, featuring a keynote by Oji Udezue, Managing Partner at Kernel Fund.

• Building Rocketships: Udezue shared his “battle-tested wisdom” on product-led growth, drawing from his experience at companies like Calendly and Microsoft to help founders turn startups into market-dominating forces.

• Expert Surgeries: In one of the most appreciated sessions, Oji and Osh joined forces for structured dialogue and open consultation with attendees, providing direct access to world-class expertise.

• Investor Fireside chat: An engaging conversation between Adia Sowho and Iyin Aboyeji on “The Long Game: Financing the Science-Led Transformation of Africa,” reminded us that failure is the default mode for startups, especially in Deep Tech, and the ecosystem will only make progress when we find ways to derisk failure for our most motivated innovators

Day 4: Industrialization and the Pitch Stage

The final day shifted toward applied and future-facing programming.

• Africa Deep Tech Industrialisation Roundtable: High-level stakeholders from the tech ecosystem, corporate, government and academia discussed the role of deep tech in driving African industrialisation, producing dialogue with direct implications for policy and investment.

• AI Soverignity Discourse: The roundtable was followed by an intervention on AI Soverignity titled: “Whose AI is it?” This conversation introduced a framework for balancing the AI model innovator’s values against those of the region as well as the user.

• Startup Pitches: Early-stage deep tech ventures presented their solutions to a panel of investors, marking some of the most anticipated and high-energy moments of the week. Stride EV emerged as the winner of the best pitch award.

• Africa Deep Tech Pavilion and Poster Presentations: The event also featured a dedicated showcase space for research and projects, facilitating a rich exchange between academia and practitioners.

Thank You, Partners and Volunteers!

None of this would have been possible without the support of our forward-thinking partners.

Accelerate Africa, Future Africa, Ilorin Innovation Hub, Semicolon, Kasi Cloud, 3MTT Nigeria, Innovation Support Network (ISN) Hubs, AR/VR Africa, Imisi 3D, Vontech, Udu Technologies (UduTech), Askya Investment Partners, The Offshore Lab (TOL), Fountain Pictures, The Angel-A Collective

And the volunteer team

Gbolahan Alli, Oluwafunmilayo Olumoko, Judith Okonkwo, Jinmi Oluanuiga, Yemi Bamgbose, Victor Obaro, Julian Duru, Zak El Fassi, Helen Eboagwu, Cynthia Mamah, Temitope Dada, Yannick Djoumbou Feunang, Nkem Nweke, Oluwatoyin Aromokeye

By helping make this conference possible, you have cast a visible vote of confidence in the most innovative and motivated talent that our region has to offer.

Thank you!

The Path Forward

The Africa Deep Tech Foundation (ADTF) concluded the event with a renewed commitment to advancing the ecosystem by connecting innovators across the continent and the diaspora. By grounding high-level visionary sessions in the lived reality of African infrastructure, Africa Deep Tech Conference 2026 proved that the continent is not just observing the deep tech revolution—it is participating in it and may one day lead it.

In the meantime, conversations will continue across our channels.

This was just Day 0. The real build starts now.

Join us!

This isn’t a simple geocoding task. We need a modular, scalable system (10k+ addresses per day) that transforms a raw Italian address into a rich, machine-readable JSON profile.

🛠️ The Challenge

You will design a pipeline (Python 3.12+) that delivers:

• Geographic Reasoning: Precise geocoding and automated selection of the most granular ISTAT/census units.

• A Modular Wealth Index: A 0-1 normalized score derived from at least three independent indicators (e.g., property values, educational attainment, employment).

• Explainable AI: Every output must include a confidence score (0-1) based on data freshness and proxy strength.

• Resilient Engineering: Implementation of exponential backoff, request throttling, and caching to respect external data sources.

🎯 Who Should Apply?

We want engineers who treat “Clean Code” as a priority and understand the nuances of spatial data. You should be comfortable justifying your data provenance and handling the tradeoffs between granularity and representativeness.

Ready to build the future of contextual data?

Apply here: https://forms.gle/7gkbSnfrkjaye9Ek6

Unlock the power of African Diaspora Knowledge in 9 minutes.

Take the African Intellectual Capital Pulse Survey!

Are you part of the African diaspora with expertise or interest in Africa’s healthy and sustainable development? Then we invite you to complete this very short Diaspora Intellectual Capital Pulse Survey – by the UrbanBetter Academy, in collaboration with Research Alpha –the first initiative of the recently launched Diaspora Knowledge Hub for Healthy Hopeful Urban Futures at Cambridge University.

This survey centres the intellectual capital of the diaspora –your knowledge, skills, research and professional experience – to help shape solutions for healthier, climate-resilient African futures.

The survey explores who you are, how you have used, or would like to use, your intellectual capital to contribute to Africa’s healthy, sustainable development, the barriers and enablers you face, and your hopes for future collaboration. All responses are anonymised and will inform the co-development of the Hub’s focus and programmes.

Please take the survey here: https://web.miniextensions.com/YpTzV69uuCvmjqFMvU9r

Final Call: Africa Deep Tech Conference 2026

In just 4 days, Lagos becomes the global hub for frontier tech. Join us from February 24–27 to catalyze Africa’s deep tech ecosystem.

Learn from visionaries like Osh Agabi and Oji Udezue. Experience 4 days of innovation featuring technical deep dives, expert surgeries, and hands-on workshops on Chip Design, AI, and Robotics.

Tickets are nearly sold out! Secure your spot today.

Register now: africadeeptech.org/conference-2026

Luqman Lawal, Founder & CEO of a Stealth Startup, facilitated an insightful session on AI in Healthcare. This talk explored how artificial intelligence is transforming healthcare and why Africa, particularly Nigeria, holds one of the world’s most important, yet underutilized, health data assets. Drawing on his Oxford research in AI-powered ECG interpretation, he discussed how building fair, high-quality medical AI requires representative data, much of which resides in African populations. He showed that the opportunity before us is not only to find and refine this data responsibly, but to translate it into sustainable models that improve health outcomes locally while shaping the future of medicine globally. He maintained that African young people have a critical role to play in this next chapter of healthcare innovation, as clinicians, technologists, researchers, and builders of systems that serve the world.

AI Healthcare for African Populations

Luqman shared his journey from medicine to AI in healthcare, highlighting his work at Oxford and with Mayo Clinic’s platform. He discussed the need for AI in healthcare to be fair and representative, especially for African and other underrepresented populations. Luqman emphasized the importance of using African data to train AI models and suggested cardiology as an entry point for AI applications in healthcare. He called for young Africans to build solutions in AI healthcare and encouraged immediate action to address these issues.

AI Healthcare in the African Context

Luqman discussed the challenges and opportunities in using AI for healthcare, particularly in Africa. He highlighted the need for representative and fair AI models, emphasizing that Africa has a wealth of healthcare data that could be leveraged to improve AI accuracy for Black populations worldwide. Luqman’s research focuses on evaluating AI ECG interpretation in Africa through three lenses: diagnostic accuracy, workflow efficiency, and socio-technical determinants of adoption. He stressed the importance of starting small and building solutions that address both profit and purpose. Luqman’s work aims to bridge the gap between AI accuracy and its adoption in African healthcare settings, with potential policy and global impacts.

AI Healthcare Models for Africa

Luqman discussed his research on AI and healthcare, focusing on the generalizability of ECG models developed in the US for African populations. He explained the importance of proving that these models do not work well for Africans, which could lead to the development of more accurate models for the continent. Luqman also addressed questions about data sovereignty, explaining that the data used in his research belongs to the hospitals and institutions involved, with his team having temporary access for testing purposes. He emphasized the need for transparency and trust in collecting community-level health data, and mentioned a platform being developed to allow individuals to own and control their health data.

AI Healthcare Research Commercialization

The conversation focused on Luqman’s research and potential commercialization of AI models for healthcare, particularly for African and Caribbean populations. Philips raised questions about the intersection of activism and opportunity in healthcare research, while also inquiring about IP ownership, funding strategies, and scaling the project to a multi-billion dollar business. Luqman emphasized the potential market size and discussed strategies for ethically sourcing data and obtaining necessary approvals. The conversation ended with an announcement about the Africa Deep Tech Conference coming up in February, which will focus on AI, healthcare, and other tech topics.

The Africa Deep Tech Conference 2026 is a pan-African convening built for and around innovators. It connects builders, founders, funders, corporates, policymakers, and researchers to accelerate frontier technology innovation across the continent.

This multi-day convening showcases Africa’s deep tech talent and positions the continent as the next global frontier for AI, robotics, quantum computing, biotech, web3, and XR. Get your ticket now