Botswana-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Seriti Insights, has launched seipone.ai, an online media intelligence and social listening tool that seeks to educate and inform its clients on the value of tracking, monitoring, and analysis of marketing data.
Speaking at the launch, co-founder and CEO of Seriti Insights, Nomsa Makgabenyana, stated that for the first time ever, a digital media listening tool is able to capture and understand the large volumes of consumer sentiments of Africans and sense the emotion behind social media posts about a particular product or service, delivering them to users of seipone.ai in a sleek and user-friendly dashboard.
Using the power of artificial intelligence and applied machine learning, seipone.ai carefully mines historical and real-time data to help brands and companies understand consumer sentiments for insightful decision-making, no matter their language and style in linguistics, which are always changing.
Makgabenyana commented on Seriti Insights' goal to break barriers and enter other African markers to give marketers, advertisers, and brand developers the benefit of seipone.ai.
The launch was attended by key industry players in the marketing, advertising, and PR space in Botswana including Mr. Modisa Maphanyane, Sales Director at JCDecaux Botswana, who for his part stated that " Botswana and Africa have data problems and...without fail.seipone.ai is the solution. Seipone.ai ... machine learning and Mar-tech solutions are a ‘Magic Bullet’, and a key tool in our strategic pivot towards data-driven, high-level execution of client media communications.”
Seipone.ai was initially conceived in the midst of the 2020 COVID lockdowns when Seriti Insights entered the Japan NINJA competition facilitated by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency and was 1 of 5 startups to win $ 30,000 to build a prototype of a media listening tool that could detect misinformation around COVID-19 shared by Batswana in their indigenous language as well as English across various social media platforms. Seriti Insights saw beyond the pandemic and further developed that prototype into a fully-fledged tool, which they launched to the market as seipone.ai.
It is designed to learn and understand natural language and is able to understand Setswana and social media lingo/slang. It also gives emotions behind opinions and gives insights into what the public perception is, of the user's topic of interest, rendering it a bot with artificial intelligence capabilities with a user target comprising of marketing agencies, advertising teams, brand builders, and managers by helping them to manage their brand reputation, identify online mentions, gain consumer intelligence, and more using a mix of algorithms that capture and comprehend 87% of data that is missed by traditional media tools that would otherwise be left out.
Seriti Insights has strategic interests in East Africa, particularly Kenya and Rwanda, as they set their sights on scaling both the business, Seriti Insights, and the tool, seipone.ai. Makgabenyana gave a glance at their need to close their $350 000 seed round to supercharge their ambitions to scale across the continent.