ADG advises Ubeka AI founders as part of Hytel's Women in AI Initiative

ADG Advisory is mentoring the founding team of Ubeka AI, a Zambian AI-powered beauty-tech company, through the Hytel AI Innovators Program's Women in AI Initiative.

The engagement

Ubeka AI is building an AI-powered beauty-tech platform for melanin-rich skin, giving young people across Africa access to personalized skin analysis and guidance through a smartphone — without the cost or scarcity of a dermatologist visit. For a generation of young Africans who have grown up with limited access to dermatological care and no shortage of unreliable advice, that access carries a weight beyond the product itself: it's the difference between years of trial, error and self-doubt, and a clear, credible answer about their own skin. The founding team is led by Camilla Mukupo, alongside co-founders Lucky Mulundu, Justine Imasiku and Musonda Sylvester.

The idea did not begin in a lab or a strategy workshop. Each member of the founding team came to the problem through direct, personal experience with it — years of products that weren't made for their skin, and the toll that takes on confidence long before it shows up on a balance sheet. That origin is central to how ADG has approached the engagement: the conviction was never in question. What the team needed was structure.

In June 2026, ADG Advisory was engaged to mentor the Ubeka AI founding team for a two-and-a-half month period, under the Hytel AI Innovators Program's Women in AI Initiative. The assignment runs through mid-2026.

The role we play

ADG's role is advisory, not operational. Over the course of the engagement, we work alongside the founders to build the governance, metrics and narrative discipline required to take a pre-seed, pre-revenue company into serious conversations with accelerators in the US and Asia.

That work spans three areas: a consistency review across the company's pitch materials, financials and technical documentation, to ensure the story a startup tells matches what it can substantiate; a platform strategy that sequences the business's growth — from a working core product to a multi-sided model connecting customers, dermatologists and pharmacies — rather than building ahead of demonstrated demand; and the narrative discipline to communicate both clearly to investors evaluating the business in minutes, not hours.

Founders arrive at this stage with ambition. What determines whether that ambition survives contact with an accelerator's diligence process is usually structure, not conviction.

Why this matters

The engagement sits within ADG's broader commitment to social impact — using our advisory practice to strengthen the environment in which underrepresented founders build and grow, not only the businesses in isolation. Ubeka AI's founding team is majority women-led, and the assignment falls directly within Hytel's mandate to expand what is possible for women building in AI across Africa.

Beyond the business case, the potential impact sits with the millions of young people the product is built for. Skin conditions like acne and hyperpigmentation are rarely just physical — across the communities Ubeka AI serves, they carry a real cost in confidence, self-esteem and social wellbeing, particularly among teenagers and young adults. A platform that gives that generation a credible, affordable answer — rather than guesswork or unsafe products — has a role to play well beyond skincare.

"Growth begins long before the first customer, the first investor, or the first line of code. It begins the moment someone believes a bold idea deserves a chance. Our job isn't to hand this team ambition — they arrived with plenty of it. It's to help them build the foundations that let an accelerator on the other side of the world recognize what we already see."

— Csaba Csényi, ADG Advisory

What's next

The mentorship runs through the end of the assignment period, after which the Ubeka AI team will be positioned to apply to accelerator programs in the US and Asia. ADG will continue to share the progress of the engagement as it develops.

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