Denis Opudo
Due to diversity in African cultures embraced by many families in Kenya and the rest of Africa, sex education is one of the toughest topics to discuss between parents and their children. This makes children more inferior when it comes to asking questions while growing up. CEO of Sophie bot, Irving Amukasa, and the team came up with the solutions to the problem in the form of an AI bot. Irving is taking us through his plans of achieving his future goals.
He says he is the team leader of Irving Amukasa, C.E.O and Co-founder who is working on vision and at the same time he is the lead on a new tech. He is an actuarial science drop out student who has been developing android apps since 2013 after clearing high school and working on bots since 2014.
Derick Mureithi who constitutes Irving’s team is the C.T.O, and Co-Founder. He maintains and updates tech stack run point on four-man tech team. He is an IT graduate from JKUAT. Core Python developer Beverly Mutindi C.F.O and Co-founder is also a team player. She is money man or lady, runs the company’s books and is a business developer. He is an undergraduate student taking Genomic Science at JKUAT.
The rest of the team are developers John Nzau also doubles up as social media lead, Rashid Beduni and Justice Muinde, a business developer.
Their company which is called Sophie Bot started in August 2016 with Irving re-branding an old bible chat robot that he had built in 2014 to now answer questions on sexual health. He had just been robbed, so all the initial code was written in a cold secluded corner at JKUAT with strong WIFI, on Derick’s Laptop. They deployed on the google play store with only answers to three questions, and within a fortnight, with 150 users they feature on an early morning TV show. They secured $10,000 plus three months incubation from UNFPA Kenya, that afternoon. They used three months gaining traction and impact figures trying to validate if sexual health is a problem worth solving and if Sophie Bot the right solution.
After doubling their user base from the press and showcase at the Nairobi innovation Week, it was clear they had grown past early adopters and the technology. The company is forced to invest in new technology that would let Sophie bot learn from conversations and subsequently their sustainable business model of using the same technology to automate customer support for businesses in sexual and reproductive health.
He further talked of why men rarely take part in sexual conversation topic and what led him to be different. He said that its the intersection between the problem, a society not willing to talk about sexual health, and the technology, chat robots automating conversations hence anonymity and zero judgment. He has learned the secret recipes for all lasting and meaningful innovation and he couldn’t help myself but dive in.
The organization spent time running on invested capital, but that was to provide insight on what monetary value they could create. They have learned the value of their tech is to automate customer support for businesses in their space, and they have set forth to execute on that. Sophie Bot as a resource for sexual health competition is random WebMD searches and wellness portals by porn sites, like the Pornhub sexual wellness center. Sophie Bot wins on quality credible answers platform independence and their conversational interface.
Sophie Bot for customer support competes against overwhelmed customer support agents. Sophie Bot wins on platform independence, scale and pricing. It is priced as the yearly wage for maintaining two customer support staff.
