Innovative Young Ghanaian Entrepreneur making strides with his AI Beauty platform: Emmanuel Acheampong

Emmanuel Acheampong is a young innovative Ghanaian entrepreneur, a machine learning engineer, and the co-founder of roboMUA, an Artificial Intelligence(AI) beauty platform.

Emmanuel as an Artificial Intelligence engineer who is solution oriented noticed the challenges women face in finding the right makeup shade for their skin tone and decided to help solve the problem.

Speaking with Limitless Motivation Emmanuel stated that the idea for roboMUA was born after he and some friends discovered that a lot of women who utilize makeup foundations especially black women had a really tough time finding the right shade to match them. And realizing that artificial intelligence can help they decided to build roboMUA to help solve that problem.

roboMUA is an AI startup that is leveraging on multiple machine learning models to make the beauty industry innovative and inclusive. How the platform works is that you upload an image (picture/selfie) and you get recommendations of makeup shades. As of today, the platform has crossed over 13,000 users, receives over 1000 weekly users and more than 100,000 images have been uploaded. Also, about 20 renowned beauty brands like Gucci, L’oreal, Fenty Beauty, and Dior among others have now been onboarded to the platform with their foundations.

Like many new tech start-up entrepreneurs, Emmanuel encountered some challenges in building the AI platform and also convincing others to believe in his idea.

However, he had some break with the idea after he got the opportunity to pitch it at the 2019 Facebook NY Hackathon. According to Emmanuel, he was nervous when pitching the idea since it was the first time he had ever pitched in a Hackathon, and secondly for the fact that he thought no one in the place would care about makeup, but he was lucky enough to have Wesnie, Sparky and Mayank join the team to make it a reality.

Emmanuel continued to say that it was the hardest technical challenge he had done up until that point. Since there was no centralized place for skin tone images, he had to create his own dataset. Again there was no Pytorch SME and so there was a lot of trial and error, for example, he had no idea that if you train a Pytorch model with a GPU and save it when loading it in a CPU, you had to set map_location to CPU.

And although his idea was nowhere near close to winning, at the end of the Hackathon, he sat down for a few hours after everyone had left and was so proud of what he and his team had created. This event changed the way Emmanuel saw himself as an engineer. He became more confident in his skills and started building more technically challenging projects. And that was how the idea eventually transitioned into roboMUA.

Apart from roboMUA the AI beauty platform for which Emmanuel is majorly known for, the innovative young Ghanaian has also undertaken many technical projects one of which is an action on google home (Google Assistant Action) which tells both Akan and Caribbean Anansi stories. If you have Google Home, home mini, or Google Assistant on your phone you can invoke “OK, Google talk to Anansi stories” to listen to some of these stories.

Brief Biography about Emmanuel Acheampong

Emmanuel had his primary and junior high education at Crown Prince School. And later continued with his secondary school education at Legon Presec where he studied General Science. Emmanuel obtained a Bachelor of Arts (BA), Double Major, in Computer science and mathematics (Cum Laude) and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Engineering, Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Excellence at the University of Notre Dame.

Final Words: I don’t have a lot of advice but my mantra is always be learning and always be building. When you’re always learning you make yourself relevant and when you’re always building you make yourself valuable.

You can get in touch with Emmanuel on LinkedIn at Emmanuel Acheampong