Specialised South African technology group Alphawave’s businesses Saigen and Callbi have merged into a single operating company trading as Saigen, with Sam Clarke as CEO.
The two businesses have operated as closely linked companies for years. Saigen builds AI-powered speech recognition for under-resourced languages and specialised domains, including code-switching within a single utterance across South African languages. Callbi, built on the Saigen engine, transcribes and analyses contact centre conversations for quality assurance, compliance and operational insight. The Callbi name will be retained for the contact centre business.
Clarke was appointed by the Alphawave board following global business management software provider Klipboard’s acquisition of Skynamo, where he served as CEO for 14 years.
“Saigen and Callbi have built genuinely competitive technology in a field dominated by much larger international companies,” said Frans Meyer, CEO of Alphawave. “Formalising them into one company removes duplication and puts a dedicated chief executive behind the opportunity. Sam has taken a product business through the shift from strong technology to strong commercial execution. That is the shift this move is designed to enable.”
Clarke comments: “Saigen’s speech recognition services continue without change. Customers and integration partners retain the same APIs, endpoints, commercial terms and support contacts. Callbi customers will keep the same account teams and commercial terms, and reseller partners continue under existing agreements.
“The teams, the technology and the support arrangements our customers know carry on as they are. What changes sits behind them,” he says.
The merger brings the research team that builds the speech models and the engineering team that builds the product into one organisation working to one set of priorities. For Callbi customers, the intended effect is faster deployment of new AI capabilities.
“Most of what our contact centre customers want next depends on how quickly we can turn research into product,” says Clarke. “Removing the boundary between the model team and the product team is the single biggest thing we can do to accelerate that roadmap.”
Gert Fourie continues to lead Callbi and joins the executive team of the combined company, while Charl van Heerden continues to lead research and AI.
“Callbi has grown into a substantial business that processes hundreds of thousands of calls every day,” says Fourie. “This merger gives us direct access to the research capability our product depends on. For our customers, that will show up in faster innovation.”
The combined company will also pursue opportunities beyond contact centre analytics, including making its speech technology available to integrators and partners in other domains.