Midweek Check-In: Move Over For The Hardware-AI 🤖 Supremacy Era!

Machines 🤝 with a body and mind are IN!

What’s good, Dear Innovator 😎

There’ll be no hand-holding while we say this…

Today makes it EXACTLY halfway into 2025. What have you achieved in the last 6 months???🧐

(yes, the multiple question marks are very necessary)

‘Cos with the way your mates are moving, that solution that you’ve been perfecting for 5,000 years 👀 might become obsolete before it even sees the light of day o

… sorry for the laugh…

💰 Follow the Money—And You’ll See It Too!

Dear Innovator, we’ve entered a new era.

This one is not just AI or just hardware. It’s a fusion of both and if you’ve been watching investor movements, the signal is loud and clear:

• d-Matrix raised $110M to build AI chiplets (tiny, powerful processors made for gadgets like smart glasses, wearables, and robotics).

• Humane raised $230M to ship their AI pins in 2024. Even though it flopped, HP bought the company for its talent and patents 👀

• Did we forget to mention Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer, which is built to train the AI models behind their driverless cars. They have Optimus too, the humanoid that’s learning to walk, sort and lift things.

• Techno also has a German Shepherd–inspired robo‑dog that climbs stairs, responds to voice, bows, and even shakes hands😍All powered by onboard AI and sensors.

And these are just a few (we’ve mentioned others in past newsletters)!

In Africa🌍 we have a couple of ‘em:

• A solution built by Ubenwa Health (Nigeria). The app uses AI to detect birth asphyxia from the cry of a baby.

• Then there’s the RxScanner. It is a handheld spectrometer built by RxAll to combat counterfeit drugs, with an AI-powered analysis of the drug’s chemical composition in seconds.

What’s to be gleaned from these and other AI-powered/AI-Hardware solutions by African Innovators is that there’s a gap for consumer-facing AI-Hardware solutions (smart gadgets for regular people). The ones we have rn are more industry/purpose-specific.

If you’re thinking of what to build next, start here, and be a leading voice in this AI-Hardware era!

---

ICYMI…

You don’t have users (yet) ‘cos they don’t trust you! 💔😔

Click here to read the full newsletter, get into the reason behind this and how to fix it.

---

Tech News Just For You:

1. Nigeria’s CAC has been bitten by the AI love bug

2. Johannesburg’ Metrobus is switching to contactless card payments

3. Case Radar is building ChatGPT for lawyers with court documents that have never been online

4. X is piloting a program that lets AI chatbots generate Community Notes

5. Ghanaian company, Liquify, has raised an oversubscribed $1.5 million seed round of funding to close the $120bn African trade finance gap.

*
*

Do you follow our socials? You should o! 😮

Follow us on X and IG for more deets on African Innovation

*
*

P.S: This will get to you an hour later than usual. The clocks run slower over here. Sorry 🙏