About us
About Sankofa Health
Sankofa curates African health data, builds AI models on it and creates AI-powered products and services for healthcare, precision medicine, pharmaceutical companies, researchers and AI companies worldwide. Sankofa Health (Pty) Ltd is based in Umhlanga, South Africa, and is a member of NVIDIA Inception.
What we do
From core AI to on‑premise AI to edge AI.
Sankofa curates health data, builds AI models on it and puts them to work at every level of computing, from large-scale training in the data centre to small devices beside the clinician and on the vaccine fridge. We provide our services directly and license them to partners with the reach to deploy them.
Large-scale training and hosting
Curated, de-identified health data mapped to FHIR R4 and OMOP, Sankofa’s own AI models served alongside the leading foundation models, and synthetic data for research.
Sankofa CoreAI where the data is held
Models that train on the systems of hospitals, universities and pharmaceutical partners, with federated learning combining the results.
Sankofa CohortAI at the point of care
Compact AI devices that run clinical guidelines and models offline beside the clinician, and predict vaccine-fridge failures from 27 parameters before they happen.
Sankofa Clinic · Sankofa ColdOur skills
- Health data engineering and curation
- Machine learning and model training
- Foundation and local models
- Model serving at scale
- Federated learning
- Edge AI and embedded systems
- IoT hardware and sensing
- Healthcare data science
Leadership
A team that has built at scale before.
Sankofa’s founders have built and operated technology businesses at scale since 2004, for global telecoms and fast-moving consumer-goods companies, taking their platforms from a single site to thousands.
Dr David Fraser
Building neural networks since his 1992 PhD; former Group CTO of Blue Label Telecoms; co-founded Touchsides, acquired by Heineken; Chartered Engineer.
LinkedIn ↗
Gary Kaplan
Former joint CEO of Blue Label Telecoms; co-founded Touchsides with David, acquired by Heineken; Chairman of Dis-Chem Life; Chartered Accountant.
LinkedIn ↗
Mike Mpanya
Head of Country Digitisation for Africa at Cisco, managing its digitisation fund; formerly with Discovery’s Vitality Health International across seven African markets.
Lawrence Joffe
Entrepreneur who leads Sankofa’s AI, platform build and data engineering end to end; formerly global data engineering lead at Heineken and Touchsides.
LinkedIn ↗
Dr Leigh-Anne Fraser
Leads Sankofa’s science; PhD chemist building neural networks since the 1990s; formerly Chief Scientific Officer of Skye Advanced Technologies; Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry; Chartered Scientist.
LinkedIn ↗The wider team brings AI and machine-learning engineering, healthcare data science, data engineering, and software and systems engineering, and Sankofa’s clinical services are developed with guidance from practising doctors and specialists.
Partners
Built with world-class partners.
NVIDIA Inception
Sankofa is a member of NVIDIA Inception, NVIDIA’s programme for companies building at the frontier of AI.
Cassava Technologies
Sankofa works with Cassava, which is building AI infrastructure across Africa.
Healthcare and research partners
Sankofa works with healthcare organisations, data networks and research institutions, and will name them as each partnership is announced.
Partner with us
We welcome new partners.
Sankofa grows with its partners. Whether you hold health records, run health services or build AI and new medicines, we would like to work with you.
Hospitals, laboratories, imaging groups and health networks
Add your records to Sankofa Core, retain ownership of them and share in the revenue they earn.
Become a data partner →Health networks, programmes and foundations
Take Sankofa Clinic and Sankofa Cold to clinics and vaccine programmes, with the reach you already have.
Talk to us →AI companies, researchers, pharmaceutical companies and contract research organisations
Build and test with African health data and Sankofa’s models through Sankofa Core and Sankofa Cohort.
Talk to us →
Sankofa is a word of the Akan people of Ghana. Its symbol is a bird carrying a golden egg, the knowledge earlier generations kept safe. In Sankofa’s mark the bird faces forward: decades of health records, protected and used to build the medicine of the future.
Sankofa is pronounced sahn-KOH-fah.
Work with us
Let’s talk.
Whether you build AI models, develop new medicines, run health services, fund health programmes or invest, we’d like to hear from you.
General enquiries: hello@sankofa.health
Media: press@sankofa.health
LinkedIn: Sankofa Health ↗
Sankofa Health (Pty) Ltd
Suite 102, 25 Richefond Circle
Ridgeside Office Estate, Umhlanga Rocks 4319
South Africa