Early life as a refugee inspires alumnus to use big data to foster economic empowerment
One morning in February, 1994, Timothy Kotin’s mother walked into his elementary school classroom in the city of Tamale, Ghana and quietly ushered him and his siblings out of the building. They drove to the family’s home, where they hurriedly squeezed some items of clothing into a few suitcases before speeding away in search of a safe haven.
Ethnic conflict in the West African country forced the family to flee their home, and Kotin, his parents, and siblings lived on a military barracks for several weeks before they eventually secured safe passage to Accra and started life anew in the nation’s capital, 400 miles from their hometown.
As Kotin overcame the fear of life as a refugee and settled into a new school in a new city, he drew motivation from the selfless work of his parents—his mother served as a dedicated schoolteacher and his father worked for an international humanitarian organization.
“Those experiences inspired me to think beyond my own interests to what contributions I could make toward social and community development, by way of giving back and helping to prevent conflicts like the one that displaced my family,” he said.
After living as refugees, Kotin's family settled in Accra, a city of more than 2 million people that is the capital of Ghana.
More than two decades later, Kotin, S.B. ’11, who earned a degree in electrical engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is doing just that. He has returned to Africa at the helm of SuperFluid Labs. He co-founded the startup to empower businesses and individuals, especially in the developing world, with modern data science and machine learning techniques to help them solve critical business challenges. The company currently has offices in Nairobi, Kenya, and Accra, Ghana.
“Everyone talks about how data is the new oil, the new natural resource, and like any natural resource, the greatest value really comes from refining it,” he said. “The challenge in Africa and other developing markets is the lack of expertise around gathering the right data sources and using the latest data science methodologies to mine and process these resources to deliver value and critical insights.”
The concept for SuperFluid Labs grew out of Kotin’s work at an IBM Research office in Nairobi. He and his IBM colleagues focused on improving access to digital financial services for the 2.5 billion people living in the developing world. Working closely with micro-lending firms in Africa opened Kotin’s eyes to the global disparities inherent in financial and data systems.
“There is a strong correlation between access to financial services for low-income communities and their economic empowerment,” he said. “Improving access for these communities can also have a dramatic, positive impact on a developing nation’s GDP growth.”
Kotin makes a presentation about SuperFluid Labs at the Hong Kong-based DBS Accelerator's Demo Day in 2015. (Photo provided by Timothy Kotin.)
At SuperFluid Labs, Kotin and his team collaborate with firms to apply data-driven solutions to important economic and social problems. For instance, they are working with a company that sells solar panels to low-income communities throughout Africa to develop predictive models to easily identify and target suitable customers. This enables the firm to expand its business and provide low-cost electricity to more individuals in remote regions.
In another recent project, SuperFluid Labs partnered with a social enterprise in Ghana to develop analytical tools that gather and organize critical agricultural information, such as weather forecasts and commodity prices. The social enterprise seeks to seamlessly provide this information to rural farmers, in the hopes of enabling agrarian families to achieve increased revenues.
Leading the tech-focused startup is the perfect marriage of Kotin’s interests and background. As a child he often found himself tinkering with anything he could get his hands on and saved his school lunch money to buy electrical models and LEDs. That curiosity and passion carried over into his electrical engineering studies at SEAS.
Harvard enabled him to whet his appetite for social entrepreneurship. During his sophomore year, he co-founded a non-governmental organization aimed at fighting the spread of malaria in Ghana’s slums by providing resources, such as insecticide-treated mosquito nets, and organizing education campaigns.
Those experiences gave Kotin the skills he needed to launch a socially focused data science business.
This screenshot shows an example of a business intelligence dashboard created for a SuperFluid Labs customer. (Image provided by Timothy Kotin.)
Despite the challenges of growing the small company, such as guiding customers to see the potential of data-driven decision making and recruiting world-class engineering talent, Kotin remains focused on the global future of his firm. The company plans to open an office in Germany this year and recently began working with a U.K.-based client that has operations in Africa, in addition to its existing clients in both East and West Africa. His goals for the not-too-distant-future include expanding operations to Southeast Asia and eventually opening an office in the U.S.
“For me, the best part of leading SuperFluid Labs is the opportunity to make an impact,” he said. “Early in life, I realized I could use science and technology to contribute to this world. Using my creativity to solve big problems, and the ability to make a difference for businesses and in the lives of individuals, is unbelievably rewarding.”
