African startup Amini AI says its mission is to ensure African nations aren’t left behind in the race for AI domination.
Amini AI, a Nairobi-based startup, is working to build essential data infrastructure for emerging economies, aiming to position itself as the “operating system for the Global South.” The company’s technology supports artificial intelligence (AI) adoption and broader digital transformation across regions struggling with significant data scarcity and limited processing capabilities.
One of the company’s primary areas of focus is Africa’s agriculture sector, where smallholder farmers produce 70% of the continent’s food supply. These farmers face major challenges adapting to climate change, largely due to limited access to reliable data and persistent digital divides.
Women, who account for 80% of Africa’s smallholder farmers, are particularly affected, with many lacking accesse to information critical for building resilience against climate risks.
Amini’s AI-powered platform delivers hyper-local, highly accurate data tailored to smallholder farms. The system uses a combination of satellite imagery, ground sensors, and machine learning to process complex raw data into actionable insights.
Data is provided through APIs or accessible channels like USSD and SMS for users without smartphones.
Through partnerships with local cooperatives, agtech firms, and global stakeholders such as consumer goods companies and insurers, Amini improves access to environmental data, enhances production efficiency, and supports regulatory compliance, including with evolving rules like the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR).
The platform also plays a role in improving access to financial tools such as agricultural insurance.
To date, Amini has reached 1.2 million customers through direct users and last-mile delivery partners.
Despite these efforts, significant data infrastructure gaps remain. According to a 2024 report by Xalam Analytics, Africa accounts for nearly 19% of the global population but holds just 1% of the world’s data centre capacity.
Only 2% of the continent’s data is processed locally. Founder and CEO Kate Kallot stresses that data in regions like Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia remains largely analogue, scattered, and unstructured, limiting these regions’ ability to fully adopt advanced AI technologies.
Amini AI is collaborating with governments and partners in Ivory Coast, Barbados, India, Nepal, and Cambodia to help build data infrastructure for these regions.
The company, which has raised $6 million in funding and employs 25 people, is working to aggregate, clean, and structure diverse datasets to create an “AI-ready” infrastructure.
This system is designed to manage large volumes of environmental and agricultural data, enabling improved decision-making for both the public and private sectors.
One example is Amini’s collaboration with global insurance broker Aon and the African Development Bank. The company’s satellite-based analytics have reportedly reduced crop insurance management costs by up to 30%, helping expand insurance coverage to vulnerable farmers and improving payment processes and supply chain stability.
In Morocco, Amini’s data is being used to provide early warnings about water scarcity risks, enabling businesses to make faster, data-driven decisions on resource management.
Kenya has emerged as a strategic base for Amini due to its favourable conditions for tech development. The country has over 90% mobile penetration, a digitally literate, youthful population, and a supportive government policy environment.
Initiatives such as the Konza Technology City project and the broader Digital Kenya 2030 vision offer startups access to tax breaks, funding opportunities, and infrastructure support. Nairobi’s established tech ecosystem, including innovation hubs like iHub and Nailab, further contributes to Amini’s operational foundation.
Amini AI’s model emphasizes data democratization, aiming to make high-quality environmental and agricultural data accessible to organizations of all sizes, from governments to local businesses.
The company also advocates for local data processing to preserve knowledge systems and cultural context within AI development, addressing concerns about data from the Global South being processed abroad.
Kallot has highlighted the risk that, without local infrastructure, emerging markets could lose control of their data and be excluded from shaping AI models that impact them. She argues that building data infrastructure is as essential for modern development as constructing roads or hospitals.
In addition, Amini’s platform addresses the limited opportunities for young, digitally native workforces in emerging regions. While many possess technical skills, the lack of local infrastructure often confines them to low-value tasks, such as data labelling for foreign technology companies.
Competitive Landscape
Amini AI operates in a competitive and evolving market. In the environmental and sustainability data sector, it competes with firms such as BeCause (Denmark), which offers sustainability data management; Ubuntoo (United States), an AI-powered sustainability solutions platform; and GHGSat (Canada), which specializes in satellite-based greenhouse gas monitoring.
Amini T faces significant indirect competition from cloud giants like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) because these hyperscalers offer comprehensive IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services that natively encompass functionalities Amini T provides, such as cloud application and API integration, and cloud-native development.
While a business can opt to leverage the vast ecosystems and economies of scale of these large platforms directly with their own in-house talent, Amini T carves out its niche by offering highly specialized expertise, customized solutions for complex multi-cloud or niche integration challenges, and value-added consulting and management services.
Amini claims that it sets itself apart by building localized data infrastructure tailored to the unique challenges of the Global South — from data scarcity to limited digital infrastructure — while offering deep, customized solutions that go beyond standard cloud services.
