#37 Scaling an African tech startup with Benji Meltzer.

Welcome to the ‘How to be Moderately Successful’ podcast. I’m your host Mike Scott, co-founder & CEO of Nona Digital.Today I’m talking to Benji Meltzer from Aerobotics who is not a typical guest in that he is not in FinTech, but I still believe that we will get value from today's discussion.Benji studied a business science degree with first-class honours in Mechatronics engineering before attending The Imperial College of London where he studied an MSc in Biomedical Engineering with a specialization in neurotechnology and graduated with distinction.Benji then went on to work as a business analyst building software models to evaluate strategic decisions, mainly in the mining industry before moving on to become the operations and logistics manager for Uber South Africa. Benji is now solely focused on Aerobotics where he is the co-founder and CTO. Aerobotics is focused on developing Artificial intelligence systems for unmanned aerial vehicles specifically focussing on the agriculture industry. It has raised around $27m to date, has customers in 20 countries, and is sitting on around 120m trees analyzed. They are a rapidly growing African scale up playing on a global stage and a really impressive business.At only 31 years old, Benji is a super impressive guy. Welcome Benji. It's great to have to you on the show.***Thanks for listening to the ‘How to be Moderately Successful’ podcast. This podcast is all about helping you to build better businesses, better FinTech products, and a better version of yourself.Today’s episode is sponsored by ourselves, Nona Digital. Building a FinTech business is difficult and building the software that enables that business, that scales and that your users love is very difficult.In today's hyper-competitive environment, getting your software built right really matters, but you also need to focus on building your business, your team, closing your next deal, and making the impact that you need to make. This is where Nona can help.With an excellent track record of delivering scalable intuitive software for FinTech companies around the world, we’ll take away some of your stress by making sure that your product is designed and built at the highest standards and by people that really care.We’re small enough so that you are always close to the principals but big enough to be able to deliver at the highest standards consistently without KPD’s. We have deep expertise in FinTech, and particularly in Blockchain application development.So, if you would like to accelerate your FinTech project with a team of experts, we’d love to hear from you. Head over to www.nona.digital to book a call directly with one of the principals.We are actively hiring senior developers and technical leads, and are offering a very decent reward for any referrals. If you know any senior developers that might be a good fit for Nona, please get in touch and there might be a meaningful reward in it for you. We get a lot of messages to thank us and our guests for the content that we put out which I can only assume means that you are getting value from the podcast.  If you’d like to support us then please do give us a rating and review.I’ll be back next week with another episode to help you build better businesses, better fintech products, and a better you.