Egyptian data science and artificial intelligence (AI) startup Synapse Analytics is developing two, more scalable products of its own after working with corporate customers on a host of successful projects.
Founded in 2018, Synapse Analytics helps businesses and organisations leverage their data to obtain descriptive, predictive and prescriptive insights, build data-driven products, and use machine learning and AI for optimisation and analytics.
It has four distinct teams – Data Science and Machine Learning; Deep Learning and AI; Big Data and AI; and Business Consulting – and has worked on projects for 10 corporate customers thus far, including helping a remittances company predict demand at their 40 branches across Egypt, and assisting a FMCG company in optimising its gas utilisation within its manufacturing process.
Before launching Synapse, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Ahmed Abaza worked on a host of digital transformation initiatives, during which he stumbled upon usage of data analytics services. The success of these services inspired him to build a “data science and AI as a service” business, as opposed to a traditional digital consultancy, which is what Synapse Analytics is. Abaza told Disrupt Africa the startup is filling a big gap.
“Most companies and enterprises have been accumulating data in their years of operations, but they still lack awareness of how monetise on their data beyond descriptive analysis or business intelligence, or very preliminary Excel reporting,” he said.
“Also, their data can power and create better innovations. Their data can fuel algorithms of many kinds, such as credit scoring algorithms, document authentication, or optimisation algorithms for operations such as supply chain and retail, by which they can save humongous amounts of costs, sell more, and give customers a superior experience.”
Synapse helps companies do this, and its offering has proven popular with customers. But Abaza said the growing number of data scientists across the world still lacked access to user-friendly tools that could help them complete projects and deploy their models. Synapse is therefore working on two products of its own to solve this problem.
The first, Azka Analytics, is an automation platform to help data scientists preprocess, model and deploy algorithms in a fraction of the time it usually takes, and the second, Azka Vision, is a Computer Vision Platform that helps different facilities use their security cameras, to detect faces and footfall, and get many other forms of analytics.
Both products are still in development, though Azka Vision is built and ready for deployment. Synapse, which has been self-funded thus far, is now looking for investment to accelerate the development and launch of its Azka products. The startup is also in the process of expanding into other Arab Gulf countries.
