Karim Beguir
The story
Karim Beguir is a graduate of École Polytechnique and a former Program Fellow at NYU's Courant Institute. He worked in financial engineering at JPMorgan and Bank of America before deciding to work on something with more impact, inspired by his father, a doctor. He ran a youth association in Tataouine combining sport and coding, and through it met Zohra Slim. In 2014 the two founded InstaDeep with 'two laptops, $2,000, and a lot of enthusiasm', bootstrapping until 2018 while Beguir's published AI research attracted clients and later investors such as Google and BioNTech. The short says a 2019 contract to schedule trains for Germany's rail network proved the model. InstaDeep began working with BioNTech in 2019 and built an early warning system to flag high-risk COVID-19 variants. After raising $100 million in 2022, it agreed in January 2023 to be acquired by BioNTech for up to £562 million, about $682 million.
By the numbers
Their company
TunisiaAIInstaDeep
AI company building decision-making systems for biology, logistics and industry
