About
Cirrus AI (Proprietary) Limited is a South African company, founded in 2019 and based in Johannesburg, registration number 2019/510124/07.
Cirrus AI is building an integrated women's health platform in South Africa. It is designed to bring women's health products, the manufacturing to make them and the computing to design them into one business.
Cirrus AI is accelerating Africa's adoption of Artificial Intelligence through computational infrastructure, data generation, and industrial deployment across strategic sectors. Since it was established in 2019, Cirrus has focused on enabling new industries that emerge from the convergence of advanced computation, data systems, and real-world industrial deployment.
Advances in AI have the potential to drive innovation across African industry and reshape the societal landscape of tomorrow. While the continent was largely absent from the Internet Revolution, there is now a clear realisation of the importance of technology in building shared prosperity.
With growing connectivity and several strong, internationally competitive universities, interest in AI is substantial. Yet the region has not expanded fast enough to fully realise these opportunities, and there is a rapidly growing need for talent, infrastructure, and funding to support innovation at scale.
Cirrus pursues a multifaceted approach spanning computational infrastructure, data systems, and industrial deployment. By building these axes in complement to one another—and in collaboration with academia, government, and industry—Cirrus aims to deliver a step change in how AI is researched, applied, and governed across the region.
Computation and data foundation
Building a high-performance computational and data infrastructure to support AI research, advanced analytics, and industrial deployment across Africa, in collaboration with technology companies.
AI Africa Consortium
A multi-industry and academic collaboration network widening access to data, AI technologies and their implementation, to improve access to essential services for vulnerable communities, especially women.
Kifaru: coffee manufacturing
Establishing an advanced AI-enabled coffee production platform designed to support industrialisation, export-led growth, and value creation across African supply chains.
Womanon: women’s health
A technology-enabled women’s health platform focused on diagnostics, treatments, and data-driven care.
Compute and Data
Verreaux is Cirrus AI's computing platform, based in Johannesburg, and one of the company's divisions. Its compute facility is in Braamfontein.
It provides the computing for Cirrus AI's data platform, its therapeutics and diagnostics programmes and the company's own work. Cirrus AI uses it for model training, simulation and optimisation in its own research and product design.
What Verreaux brings together
High-performance computing
The high-performance computing system, and the inference capacity that runs the trained models day to day.
Research platforms
Celeragen, Luminelle, Elara and Estria: the platforms Cirrus AI's research team works in, from first candidates to the records behind them.
Salem
A decision-support system that can calculate, reconcile, flag and propose, but takes no action on its own. Every decision it supports needs a person's approval.
The digital twin
A digital model of Cirrus AI's operations, being built so that plans and processes can be tested before they are carried out.
Designed for manufacture
Candidate products are designed to be chosen against Cirrus AI's own production routes, so that each one is shaped by what can actually be made.
From data to better products
With women's consent, de-identified data from Womany is designed to inform the next generation of Cirrus AI's products.
How the work is recorded
Every research campaign on Verreaux is designed to be recorded in a compute log: the platform used, the dates, the candidates screened, the screening steps and the results, each traceable to a system record rather than estimated.
At the desk as well as in the data centre
Cirrus AI's team also runs its own research workloads on Dell Pro Max workstations with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. AI agents orchestrate the work, calling scientific software that runs on the machine itself, so the GPUs can work on research tasks around the clock.
Womanon
Womanon™ is Cirrus AI's women's health division. Its work covers hygiene, diagnostics and therapeutics across the female life stages. Its aim is health care built around women's lives, in the languages they speak, at prices they can pay.
Closing the women's health gap “could potentially boost the global economy by at least $1 trillion annually by 2040.”
World Economic Forum white paper written with McKinsey, 17 January 2024. Read the paperWomany™, a companion for the whole of her life
The Womany app is built and run by Cirrus AI. It is designed as a health companion for every woman, from her first period to the years after menopause. It is designed to help her understand her body, find the right care, keep her own health record and, if she chooses, take part in research.
It is designed for every season of her life: the first period; the reproductive years, including conditions such as endometriosis and polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), formerly known as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS); fertility, pregnancy, loss and birth; perimenopause; and menopause and the years after.
It is being built to speak English first, then isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Xitsonga, Tshivenda and the other languages of the women it serves.
What Womany brings together
WomanyApp
Helps her put words to what is happening, then find the next step.
WomanyHealth
Her own health record, built on open standards so it can move with her between clinics.
WomanyStudies
Research studies she can choose to join, with consent in plain words.
WomanyGo
Dispensers in schools, workplaces and public places, for dignified access to pads, tampons and other essentials.
WomanySense and WomanyAir
Sensors in things she already uses, such as pads, menstrual cups, rings and wristbands.
Womany Secrets™
An underwear range, with everyday and lingerie lines.
Her data is hers
Identifiable personal health data is held in custody by a separate non-profit company, which runs the consent register. Consent is specific to its purpose and can be withdrawn, and data licensed for research and product development is de-identified and aggregated first.
Kifaru Coffee
Kifaru™ Coffee is Cirrus AI's coffee brand and one of the company's divisions.
Kifaru is being set up to process African green coffee in South Africa into finished products for export: whole bean, ground and filter coffee, capsules and pods, concentrates, instant coffee and ready-to-drink coffee. It is designed to cover the whole path from green bean to finished product, from receiving the green coffee to roasting, processing and packing, so that the value of each step is added in South Africa.
Kifaru's coffee is designed to be sold through the same retail channels as Cirrus AI's women's health products, so the two businesses share one route to market.
Womany™ Coffee
Womany Coffee is a cold-brew, ready-to-drink coffee range that Kifaru is developing under the Womany name. It is designed to keep without refrigeration, so it can be sold where everyday products are sold: pharmacies, grocery stores and online. Every batch is designed to go through Kifaru's Proof-of-Flavour checks. It is also designed to introduce women to the Womany app.
Where it started
In 2022, a South African retailer put out a tender for finished coffee products and received no responses, because those products weren't made at scale in South Africa. Kifaru was conceived to close that gap.
The product range
Whole bean, ground and filter coffee; capsules and pods; concentrates; instant coffee; and ready-to-drink coffee, including the Womany Coffee range.
Proof-of-Flavour
Kifaru's Proof-of-Flavour approach is designed to measure the aroma compounds in each batch and match them to the flavour descriptors coffee tasters use, so that quality is consistent and traceable.
AI Africa Consortium
The AI Africa Consortium is owned by Cirrus AI and convened by the University of the Witwatersrand. It connects African universities, research laboratories, government and industry.
Established in 2021, the AI Africa Consortium builds multi-industry and academic collaborations across the globe to widen access to data, AI technologies, and the implementation of solutions that expand access to essential services—particularly for vulnerable communities and women.
Focal areas
Collaborations across academia, government, and industry to coordinate the development and deployment of AI for women's health.
Provisioning diagnostic support and care dialogue in local African languages.
Continental impact
By aligning established research institutions, high-performance computing, and local health systems, the Consortium is building an African AI ecosystem that can generate globally relevant science while directly serving local needs. Its work feeds into Womanon, ensuring that advances in AI reach communities through practical, deployed solutions.
Akila
Cirrus AI represents Akila, a member of the NVIDIA Partner Network, in Southern Africa.