Founder
Keshav Mohabir
Co-Founder — Technical · Leads AIdesign
- UCT
- BCG
- Bain
- Stanford ML
- Cape Town
Mechatronics engineer (UCT, Honours Distinction) turned strategy consultant turned AI engineer. Keshav co-founded CATdesign in 2020 and leads its flagship practice, AIdesign: production agentic systems, data platforms and capability programs for enterprise, industry and government across South Africa and the United States.
He architects and builds the systems himself. Every AIdesign engagement is scoped, priced and delivered by him and co-founder Shulka Mohabir — no junior pyramid.
Background
- Engineering. BSc Mechatronics, University of Cape Town, Honours with Distinction. Stanford Online Machine Learning under Andrew Ng (98%).
- Strategy. Complex problems at Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Company — data-heavy strategy for enterprise clients.
- Operating. Co-founded an on-demand grocery startup; steered Bolt Food Cape Town through its COVID-era pivot to grocery delivery.
- AI engineering. Ships production systems: a retrieval-augmented community assistant with a member health-scoring engine for a leading SA founder community; a national SME data platform; 25+ open builds on GitHub including SmokeSignal (satellite wildfire alerts), Flowga (local-first vision AI) and EntangleRL (RL for quantum circuits).
Talks & Writing
Founders at Work Summit 2025
Main stage, Johannesburg — 250+ scale-up founders on automation, agents and where to start.
TALK · SEP 2025Agency in the Age of AI
Edge Growth Investee Day — AI agents as junior teammates for African SMEs. Recording and notes.
ARTICLEStop Using AI as a Search Engine
Four strategies for real returns from AI: brief it like a junior teammate, hand it your operations.
LIVE BUILDSVibe Coding Sessions
Agentic systems built live on stream — bugs, fixes and all.
Work With Keshav
Fixed-price AI systems reviews and production builds — see AIdesign for scope, pricing and the questions we get asked.
Initiate Consult