I build companies at the point where those three meet. Satellites that see what nobody is measuring. Data centres that make rural hydro pay for itself. Farm intelligence for people the extension service never reaches. All of it in Zambia, all of it built to run without a donor.
Siddhartha Parmar (Sid) is a Zambian founder based in Lusaka. He builds companies across space technology, renewable computing, agricultural intelligence, mining and copper trading, and music. He is the founder of SpaceZ (formerly IgnitoSPACE), described as Zambia’s first space company, a co-founder of Quantum Hash Ventures, and the founder of Aurum Resources. He works with investors, operators and partners entering and building in Zambia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
It needs infrastructure designed for the conditions that actually exist here. Intermittent power. Missing maps. Thin capital. Long distances. Those are not excuses. They are the design brief.
Satellites where there are no maps.
Hydro that earns instead of waiting for customers.
Advisory that reaches a feature phone.
Rescue divers trained here, not flown in.
Artists paid in the country they record in.
Every venture has to survive without charity. If it cannot, it is a project, not a business.
Each one takes a resource Zambia already has and builds the missing layer on top of it. Coordinates are the primary site of operation.
Zambia's first space company. Satellite imagery and analysis turned into decisions about crops, water, land use and climate risk. Formerly IgnitoSPACE.
Modular data centres placed next to renewable generation. The compute buys the surplus power a rural mini-grid cannot otherwise sell, which is what makes the grid bankable.
Satellite data and AI turned into field-level advisory for smallholders. Yield estimation, crop stress, planting windows, delivered through channels farmers already use.
Commercial and rescue diving with Hennie Smit. Mine rescue dive training and equipment supply for the Copperbelt, with an expedition and conservation arm funded by the industrial side.
A Zambian music streaming platform built for local payment rails, local data costs and local rights. Artists get paid in the market they actually have listeners in.
Copper cathode and concentrate trading, mine sale and acquisition mandates, and procurement for outside investors who want exposure to Zambian copper without running a mine. See the Aurum desk →
Align, procurement intelligence for tender bidders. Zambian.info, a national business directory. AutoMatch, an AI car marketplace. Safari.today, travel content. Kept honest about which are active and which are archive.
This page carries a date because a page like this without one is a lie within a month.
Pre-seed. Shareholders agreement, rights structure, first office.
Working out which orbital services are worth a Zambian company owning rather than reselling.
Cathode and concentrate trading through Aurum Resources. Learning the desk from the inside.
Property development and sales. Properties for lease and sale, plus bespoke mandates to sell on behalf of clients. Building low-profile storage units on the Mukatasha property for CBD shop owners.
Fibre, communications and security scope for the Ikelenge hydro-solar mini-grid. Bidding the Anzana RFP.
Turning 30,000 farmer records into an advisory product a cooperative will pay for.
Converting the ZOAC rescue dive proposal into signed training contracts.
Started selling on the internet from Zambia before it was obvious that was possible from here.
Platforms, marketplaces and directories. Learning what actually gets used in a market with expensive data.
Represented Zambia in international telecommunications forums. Halcyon Fellow. Country Director of the Zambia Business Angels Network.
Founded what is described as Zambia's first space company. The company later split into two arms, one for software and insights and one for hardware. Awards at the SANSA Africa Earth Observation Challenge and the NewSpace Africa Pitch Competition followed.
The energy thesis. Compute as the anchor customer that makes rural generation bankable.
The orbital layer, the metals layer, the subsurface layer and the culture layer, plus property development and sales. All of it sitting on the same energy and data foundation.
Keynotes, panels and closed-door sessions. I speak from operating experience, not from a slide deck about the future.
Most AI talks in this region are delivered by people who have never shipped a system that had to survive a real user on a bad connection. Everything below is running, or has run, inside one of my companies.
Written, not summarised. Click any one to read it.
We keep sequencing development in the order it happened somewhere else. The binding constraint here is not movement. It is information and power at the edge.
Rural mini-grids fail for a boring reason. Nobody buys enough power. Compute is the anchor customer that fixes the balance sheet.
Fibre moves data somebody already has. Zambia's real deficit is observation. Nobody knows, week to week, what is actually happening on the ground.
Conservation funded by grants is fragile. Conservation funded by an operating company that needs the resource intact is durable.
Almost every product assumption imported from elsewhere breaks here for the same reason. It assumes continuity. Power, connectivity and cash are all intermittent.
Agentic AI demos beautifully and fails in specific, repeatable ways. After running them across five companies, here is the list nobody puts in the keynote.
Four kinds of people write to me and they all want different things. Pick the right one and you will get a faster answer.
Data room, thesis memo and current raises. Tell me the cheque size and stage you invest at.