The man who built Africa's largest AI firm
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2026
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From the deserts of Tunisia to the boardrooms of global tech giants, we meet Karim Beguir, the mathematician who turned two laptops and 2000 dollars into Africa’s biggest AI firm.
We hear how his company, Instadeep, caught the attention of Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and how it helped to track dangerous new variants in the Covid pandemic using large language models.
If you'd like to get in touch with the team, our email address is businessdaily@bbc.co.uk
Presenter: Ed Butler Producers: Niamh McDermott and Hannah Mullane
Business Daily is the home of in-depth audio journalism devoted to the world of money and work. From small startup stories to big corporate takeovers, global economic shifts to trends in technology, we look at the key figures, ideas and events shaping business.
Each episode is a 17-minute deep dive into a single topic, featuring expert analysis and the people at the heart of the story.
Recent episodes explore the weight-loss drug revolution, the growth in AI, the cost of living, why bond markets are so powerful, China's property bubble, and Gen Z's experience of the current job market.
We also feature in-depth interviews with company founders and some of the world's most prominent CEOs. These include the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and the billionaire founder of Epic Systems, one of the world's largest medical record software providers, Judy Faulkner.
(Picture: CEO of Instadeep, Karim Beguir, at a photoshoot in Paris in 2024. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.5 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. |
| 0:09.2 | Welcome to Business Daily Meets on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:12.6 | This is where we bring you in-depth interviews with people in business from across the globe. |
| 0:17.0 | And today, we have an entrepreneur who grew up in the Tunisian desert and went on to |
| 0:23.2 | found Africa's largest AI firm. If you had told me what would happen with in Sadi, starting |
| 0:29.6 | with a bootstrap, two laptops, $2,000 to creating the largest exit in African tech history |
| 0:36.2 | and the largest in AI outside the US to this day, |
| 0:39.0 | I'd have said, you must be dreaming. |
| 0:40.7 | It was a startup that would impress Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. |
| 0:44.9 | I was like, this must be a fake. |
| 0:46.9 | I called Zora. |
| 0:47.8 | I said, can you check this? |
| 0:49.0 | And she was like, no, no, the email is indeed from Facebook, so meta, and you should go. |
| 0:54.8 | And helped in the end with the fight against COVID-19. |
| 0:59.1 | You had this explosion of variants, but no human can process that amount of data. |
| 1:05.9 | That's Karin Begir, founder of Instadie in today's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:14.8 | Karin Begir was born in France, but he moved to southern Tunisia at an early age |
| 1:20.6 | to the very landscape that inspired Hollywood's Star Wars movies. |
| 1:25.4 | Today, it's not a story of science fiction, but one where real innovation begins. |
| 1:31.8 | The whole family moved when I was one year old to the Tunisian desert, literally Tatarin, |
| 1:37.7 | which is famous for Planet Tatwin of George Lucas and Star Wars. |
... |
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