South African startup Cape AI has been acquired by AI solutions provider in order to scale its offering that makes such solutions available to large enterprises across Africa.
Founded in 2019 by Pieter Boon and Adit Mehta, Cape AI helps businesses grow by enabling them to make smart decisions through the use of AI technology. Cape AI has founded, incubated and spun-out multiple AI ventures, and has grown to be a prominent player in the AI solutions space.
Spatialedge, an AI solutions provider headquartered in Stellenbosch, is a big data and applied machine learning solutions company, with a focus on enabling companies to rapidly build and operationalise robust machine learning solutions. The acquisition was a great deal for both parties, said Retief Gerber, co-founder and CEO of Spatialedge.
“Spatialedge has grown from five engineers to over seventy in just four years, while market demand for working AI solutions continues to grow. It has been our objective to find ways to scale faster so that we can meet the growing demand. As part of our future growth strategy, we intend to engage in a number of mergers and acquisitions, and we already have a few more deals in the pipeline. The acquisition of Cape AI has allowed us to scale and acquiring them is just the beginning,” he said.
“We are on a mission to build the best specialised data and AI business in Africa, Europe and beyond. Whenever a company wants to invest in AI, their options are to either go for the non-specialised offerings or one of the many small players. In the end, this often results in non-performant and lacklustre solutions.Only by putting together a high performing organisation specialised in the artificial intelligence lifecycle, from implementing solid data pipelines to rapidly rolling out new use cases, can we transform organisations and bring them into the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
As part of the acquisition, Cape AI will be consolidated into the Spatialedge business.
