Don Durkheim

Experience

1. Co-founder & President, Entelon

   2024 – Present

   AI company in Kigali building AI products and custom AI systems for businesses and institutions across Africa.

   • Direct development of every Entelon product and own system design, backend and AI engineering with Entelon’s development team.
   • Lead research on speech and language models: trained a VITS text-to-speech model on roughly 500 hours of Kinyarwanda audio and am co-developing a Kinyarwanda LLM.
   • Lead backend engineer on Mamora AI, built for HDI Rwanda: an AI-powered community wellbeing platform that helps detect disease outbreaks early and surface community wellbeing challenges. 500+ users through 30+ community health workers and 1,200+ reports filed.
   • Product lead on Visko, which takes the paperwork out of field research: teams keep the questionnaires they already use and simply talk through them, so answers move from the field to analysis without manual data entry.
   • Built Klok AI, which makes grading lighter for teachers: it reads students’ handwritten exam answers and suggests marks step by step, while the teacher stays in charge of every grade.
   • Designed the architecture for HeyRwanda, a companion for experiencing Rwanda from choosing where to go to finding your way and paying along the trip, and Phibram, which turns the conversations in a call center or hotline into a clear, continuous picture of service quality and customer experience.

2. Co-founder & Software Lead, Ladybug FRC 9647

   2024 – Present

   Rwanda's first and only FIRST Robotics Competition team: 30 students from 11 schools, backed by MINICT, the Rwanda ICT Chamber and FabLab.

   • Co-organized the team with teammates from my FIRST LEGO League team.
   • Lead the software department: robot simulation and CAD in Fusion 360.
   • Heading to the team’s first international competition in 2027.

3. Founder, WeSperr

   2025

   Data privacy startup that gives people control of their data: collected with consent, anonymized, and turned into insights businesses need, with users sharing the value.

   • Selected from thousands of applicants into the Hanga Pitchfest top 25.

4. Software Department Lead, FLL & FTC robotics, Collège Saint André

   2022 – 2024

   Competitive robotics, always on the software side.

   • Led the software department.
   • FLL: national top 4 and Best Innovation Award at the 2024 nationals, awarded by Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame. FTC: reached regionals.

Education

1. Rwanda Coding Academy

   2024 – Present

   Software development

2. Collège Saint André

   2021 – 2024

   O-Level (Senior 1–3)

Honors

1. Top 25, Hanga Pitchfest

   2025

   Selected from thousands of applicants with WeSperr. Hanga profile

2. 1st Place, Kigali Hacks

   2024

   Built Aidly AI with my team: step-by-step first-aid guidance for anyone in an emergency. The New Times

3. 2nd Place, National Gender Equality Ideathon

   2024

   Organized by RISA and MIGEPROF. Won 1,500,000 RWF for Famiverse, a family app that balances chores, plans and tasks across the household. Judging scores

4. Top 4 & Best Innovation Award, FLL Rwanda

   2024

   National finals at Intare Arena, Kigali. President Paul Kagame stopped at our table to ask about our robot, then presented laptops to the finalist teams, including ours.

5. Top 80 nationally, O-Level national exams

   2024

   Rwanda national examinations.

Skills

AI & ML

PyTorch, LLM fine-tuning, speech models (ASR, TTS), machine translation, pandas, Jupyter

Languages

Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, C++, C, Rust, Java, Swift

Backend

FastAPI, Django, Flask, Node.js, Express, Spring, PostgreSQL

Frontend

React, Next.js, SwiftUI

Infrastructure

AWS, Linux, Git

Robotics

Fusion 360, robot simulation

Contact

For partnerships, research collaborations, press or speaking, email dondurkheim13@gmail.com.