In its summer 2023 issue 12, the magazine ActuIA featured an interview with Karim Beguir, co-founder and CEO of InstaDeep, discussing multi-agent artificial intelligence. A few weeks after the publication, on July 31, 2023, BioNTech completed the acquisition of InstaDeep. Despite the acquisition, InstaDeep retained its brand, leadership, and industrial clients. By the end of 2024, the company had grown to more than 400 employees, up from about 240 at the time of the acquisition. The collaboration between InstaDeep and BioNTech began in 2019. In November 2020, as BioNTech was developing its vaccine with Pfizer, the two companies established a joint AI innovation laboratory in London and Mayence. Their teams worked on selecting neoantigens for cancer vaccines and optimizing RNA sequences for BioNTech's RiboMab and RiboCytokine platforms. One of their most notable projects was an early warning system for SARS-CoV-2 variants. This system, introduced in January 2022, used protein Spike modeling and a language model to analyze virus sequences. Tested from September 2020 to November 2021, it detected 12 of the 13 WHO-designated variants on average 58 days before they were officially recognized. It identified the Omicron variant as high risk on the same day its sequence was uploaded, among over 70,000 variants discovered in late 2021. According to Karim Beguir, only an AI system could handle the volume of data generated at that time. Founded in Tunis in 2014 by Karim Beguir and Zohra Slim, InstaDeep moved its base to London in 2015. It raised $7 million in 2019 from AfricInvest and $100 million in 2022, with BioNTech and Google among its investors. In January 2023, BioNTech announced the acquisition of 94.7% of InstaDeep's shares for about £500 million, including conditional payments. This was BioNTech's largest acquisition and, according to TechCrunch, the largest acquisition of an African startup. InstaDeep now operates as a British subsidiary of BioNTech, with Karim Beguir continuing to lead it. He was awarded the TIME100 Impact Award in February 2024. In October 2024, BioNTech hosted its first AI Day, where it unveiled Kyber, a powerful computing cluster with 224 Nvidia H100 GPUs and 86,000 CPU cores. By 2025, the Paris office had over 130 engineers and researchers. InstaDeep's AI tools have made significant advancements in biology, including models that analyze DNA sequences and design antibodies more efficiently. The company also expanded its reach into sectors beyond healthcare, such as agriculture and engineering, with new collaborations and applications. As of 2026, InstaDeep had offices in Tunis, Kigali, and Cape Town, with a growing focus on geospatial intelligence and AI infrastructure in Tunisia. Karim Beguir, who grew up in southern Tunisia, has become a prominent voice in the global AI community, advocating for Tunisia's role in the future of artificial intelligence.