State of AI in Africa

Introduction

The AI Media Group have been working on a comprehensive analysis of the AI / Deep Tech landscape in Africa - we have looked at some 1900+ companies and will be publishing the inaugural edition entitled “The State of AI In Africa”at the AI Expo Africa leadership event to be held at the CSIR, Pretoria, South Africa (May 2022).

Background

Hailed the "last growth frontier”, the African AI / Deep Tech landscape is still relatively “un-mapped” but is now seeing a growing level of VC investment in this category allied to increased attention from global cooperates & NGOs seeking to establish a wider / deeper presence in the region.

Content

This report will serve as a foundational benchmark and will contain various insights categorising the landscape by company, size, industry, HQ city, country, industry type, year founded and specialities. Commentary and conclusions on the trends will be included. This report will appeal to VCs, analysts, corporates, start-ups, local / regional / national Governments, Embassies, Trade Bodies and NGOs.

The trends are now emerging with some top level insights being…..

We have so far looked at 1500+ companies to establish a baseline data set

Of the 1389 companies we could find consistent data on, 826 (60%) are based in the Africa region

Of those 74% are based in South Africa, 6% Tunisia 6% Nigeria 3% Kenya 2% Egypt 2% Ghana (with 18 other countries make up the remaining 7%)

Of those in South Africa, 405 (67%) are based in the city regions of Johannesburg and Pretoria while Cape Town accounts for 174 (29%)

Distribution in Africa by country

The most common commercial categories these companies operate in include; Information Technology & Services, Computer Software / Hardware, Financial Services, Internet, Telecommunications, Management Consulting, Marketing & Advertising, Electrical & Electronic Manufacturing, Information Services and Industrial Automation.

62% of all African companies active in the region are privately held with the vast majority (50%) having less than 20 employees.

Based on year founded, the last 5 years have seen a significant rise in the number of companies active in this sector, most likely due to the combined effects of available funding, lower start-up costs for tooling, cloud, compute and open source resources allied to the growing demand in the B2B space.

Initial Conclusions

The top 5 most “active” countries are South Africa, Tunisia, Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt – this broadly maps to the top tech investment hubs in the region as indicated by the likes of Maxime Bayen & Max Cuvellier

It’s clear we have we have growing and dynamic AI / 4IR tech ecosystem in Africa with South Africa accounting for the most frequent country of origin for companies in this sector.

Johannesburg looks like the No.1 contender for the “AI Tech Capital of Africa” based on the organisations we have assessed so far.

Its not clear the exact reasons why South Africa is so dominant but a larger and more established education & skills base, coupled to higher economic demand and an active tech entrepreneur / supplier ecosystem may (in part) account for this.

A larger parter / vendor ecosystem built around the likes of Microsoft, Google, AWS, IBM, Oracle & SAP who have historically had their Africa HQ operations in South Africa may also account for the landscape we currently see.

This is by no means an exhaustive survey and the data is continually changing and evolving.