DaVinci is a deep-tech frontier AI lab and startup based in Ballito, South Africa. We started from a blank page in April 2026, entirely self-funded, and within six months had a working proof of concept and a patent application filed. Africa Tech Festival is where we come out of stealth. Who are we Our flagship solution, Synapse, lets businesses and individuals curate and keep their own intelligence, whatever AI model they use. Today, intelligence is rented. Every time a business asks an AI model (LLM) a question, it works the answer out from scratch, as if it had never seen a similar problem. Nothing it figures out stays with the business or person that paid for it. Synapse changes that. Think of a seasoned expert: they have solved problems like this before and apply that experience to the case in front of them. Synapse gives AI that experience. It keeps the reasoning behind every problem solved, never a ready-made answer, in what we call the Experiential Reasoning Substrate (ERS). When a new query arrives, Synapse reuses that reasoning, applies it to specifics and builds a fresh answer. The more you use Synapse, the smarter and faster it becomes. Every problem solved adds to the ERS, so fewer queries need an AI model. The direction of travel is tokenless: answers delivered from your own reasoning, without paying a model to think the same thought twice. In our cold-start proof of concept, two in three queries were answered with no model call by day 15, and token use fell 75%. Our vision and mission Our vision is AI that grows by learning, not by burning more power. Our mission is to drive AI towards a tokenless experience with an intelligence everyone can curate and own. Power is now the binding constraint on AI, and global data-centre electricity demand is forecast to more than double by 2030 (IEA). Every query Synapse answers from reasoning it already holds is compute that never has to run and capacity the grid never has to build. The founders • Nick Joughin, CEO and co-inventor: architect and technical lead of Synapse, with a decade in growth strategy, corporate development and innovation commercialisation across 20+ industries. • Oscar Downing, CTO and co-inventor: technical architect of the Synapse engine. Outside of work Oscar enjoys fishing and spending time in nature, where he finds himself inspired to think, invent and build new things. He is a keen and proud supporter of the Springboks. • Ingrid Thomas, COO: 30+ years in enterprise and complex B2B revenue, with deep SAP partner and alliance ecosystem reach. • Redford Muir, CFO: finance and commercial structuring, grounded in deal assurance to development-finance and institutional-investor standard. Where we are Proof of concept complete. Patent pending. Open to Letters of Interest.