Four African tech startups have been named winners of a mining challenge run by Moroccan state-owned firm OCP Group, earning the chance to trial their solutions at one of the company’s mines.
The OCP Challenge was designed to find solutions faced by OCP Group, which sits on 70 per cent of the world’s phosphate reserves, including boosting maintenance capabilities, improving mined ore quality, managing mining equipment better, and improving safety during periods of low visibility.
More than 200 startups applied for the challenge, with 12 selected to go to Morocco and participate in a bootcamp, working with OCP experts to build a pitch. The bootcamp concluded with a demo day, where startups presented their solutions to the mine, and ultimately four winners were selected.
They included two from Morocco, project management platform PilliotY and GSTS, as well as South African AI platform for asset health and performance management Kriterion and Tunisian robotics firm Enova Robotics. These four winners will now implement their solutions at the OCP Benguerir mine during a three-month experiment phase.
The other eight startups that took part included four from Morocco, namely Peacock, Smart On, 100AI and Farasha, as well as Ashanti AI (South Africa), SolutionIQ (Senegal), InstaDeep (Tunisia) and Astral Aerial (Kenya).
