Few people outside the developer community know that MTN Group – Africa’s largest telecommunications company by subscribers – operates a software marketplace aimed at making life easier for programmers.
MTN in 2020 began contemplating the idea of launching an application programming interface (API) marketplace to help local developers access software tools and data more easily. Three years later, Chenosis began operating under the leadership of CEO Saad Syed as a start-up housed within MTN.
TechCentral caught up with Syed after one of the companies using Chenosis – a Cape Town-based start-up called Botlhale AI – recently won the technology category of the “Youth-owned Brand Awards” for its large language model (LLM) API for African languages.
MultiChoice Group-owned DStv uses Botlhale’s African language capabilities to offer customer services in multiple languages via the broadcaster’s WhatsApp chatbot. By tapping into Bothlale’s capabilities via an API on the Chenosis platform, DStv was able to use the LLM without having to invest in building its own from scratch.
Languages supported by Botlhale’s LLM include Afrikaans, isiZulu and Sesotho. According to Maggie Matsie, executive head of group digital enablement at MultiChoice, the addition of African language capabilities has improved customer engagement via DStv’s WhatsApp chatbot by 55%.
According to Syed, this is an example of the challenges Chenosis is helping solve through its API platform. There are dozens of other vendors like Botlhale using the platform to offer services ranging from KYC (“know your customer”) verification tools to fraud detection, payments processing and access control. Developers can ingest these APIs to add complex services to their applications securely while speeding up their development cycles, he said.
“Pricing varies based on the utility. You can pay per consumption, where you are charged per transaction each time a call to the API is made, or you may pay a flat fee that gives you unlimited usage over a period of time,” said Syed.
Enterprise customers tend to take the post-paid approach to API consumption. But one of Chenosis’s goals is to help “long-tail” developers with “great ideas” who might not have the same kind of access to resources as large enterprise users. “This could literally be a student building something in their bedroom who wants access.”
Syed said Chenosis plans next to move a level up from democratising data through APIs to democratising development by offering low- and no-code tools to help people with ideas who might not be skilled in programming. Chenosis will soon add an LLM that has the ability to ingest natural language descriptions of app functionality and translate these into working applications through code in the API marketplace. A first iteration of this tool is expected by year-end.
One of the challenges in the relationship between developers and low-code platforms is the question of who owns the intellectual property. No-code tools are great for rapid development and they give creators the ability to test whether ideas work for specific markets quickly. But as these applications scale to cater to growing customer needs, they often need to be rebuilt to improve their efficiency. In certain cases, intellectual property ownership can become a thorny issue when creators want to extract the code from the low-code platform they used to build their app.
Chenosis CEO Saad Syed
“Our aspiration is that there is an opportunity for the person who comes up with the idea and builds that outcome to have the ability to have mobility with the code but we still need to test for that. When people are building AI models on publicly available LLMs, then the same issue arises – who owns the outcome? – because the code is sitting in the LLM,” said Syed.
The Chenosis team is multi-disciplinary, with more than half the staff comprised of people in the early stages of their career, said Syed. Rather than having fixed, well-defined roles, employees are expected to function with the fluidity of a start-up and focus on problem solving in a general sense.
Although this allows the team to be nimble and iterate quickly, the overarching corporate governance procedures of parent MTN – which owns 100% of Chenosis – help the start-up remain compliant with legal and regulatory requirements. Syed said one of the major limitations of Chenosis’s journey towards profitability is not necessarily a lack of customer appetite for its products, but the overhead of operating in a new domain from a regulatory perspective.
The relationship with MTN also helps Chenosis by expanding its footprint to all 18 markets in which the telecommunications giant operates across Africa. Syed said although Chenosis is not necessarily limited to only those countries, it does most of its trials and development in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and Zambia. Syed believes some standardisation of regulation across markets on the continent would help the company scale faster.
“What would be an interesting journey is how regulators in the different countries view the different outcomes that we are building and how they apply their different oversight to that. A pan-African view of what that looks like – on data privacy regulations for example – would help us solve a problem once and have it solved for the whole of Africa,” said Syed.
