An independent analytics consultancy.
Cipher Labs is an independent analytics and software practice working with companies across Southern Africa. We do not split the work into a strategy team and a delivery team: the same practice that does the analysis also builds the software, so a recommendation and the system that has to carry it out never get separated.
How we treat uncertainty and clients
How we treat uncertainty
We treat uncertainty as something to state, not hide. A projection comes with a range, not a single number dressed up as a fact, and the reasoning behind it stays open to questions.
How we work with a client
We work from the extracts and systems a company already has. Typical outputs are a decision-grade analysis, a working system, or both. You deal with the people doing the work directly, not through an account manager.
Conversations start at hello@cipherlabs.cc.
Claudius Mutevhe
Claudius holds a BSc Honours in Actuarial Science from the University of the Witwatersrand and has passed eleven professional actuarial exams. Before founding Cipher Labs, he worked at Quantium South Africa, progressing from Junior Analyst to Associate Consultant, across banking, retail, and healthcare analytics. He has five years of experience in data analytics and software development, and is currently completing a Master’s in Finance.
Cipher Labs was founded to bring the same analytical discipline to mid-market operators who need clear numbers, not a full data science team.
Credentials
- Experience
- Five years in data analytics and software development
- Studying
- Master’s in Finance, in progress
- Qualification
- BSc Honours, Actuarial Science, University of the Witwatersrand
- Professional exams
- Eleven actuarial exams passed
- Previously
- Quantium South Africa, Junior Analyst to Associate Consultant
- Sectors
- Banking, retail, and healthcare analytics
What we build
Analytics warehouses in dbt on PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Databricks, and Snowflake. Reporting layers a team keeps using after handover. Apache Superset dashboards that hold up in real use. SQL for operational reporting such as procurement, goods-received, shelf-life, inventory movement, and measures of data quality and reporting timeliness. Financial and leadership reporting in Power BI, pitched at the person who decides.
On the software side: custom internal tools, pipelines, automation, and reporting the company owns. Advice on choosing and shaping a fit-for-purpose system. Work through real deployment friction, including infrastructure and systems that were not built to talk to each other.
We also design and build websites, from the layout and typography to the code that ships.
We are not tied to one stack. Python, SQL and PostgreSQL, dbt, Apache Superset, BigQuery, Databricks, Snowflake, and Power BI are tools we know well, but we work in whatever a company already runs.
If this is the way you want a number treated, get in touch.
Johannesburg and Gaborone are the usual centres of gravity. We work with clients wherever they are.
Three kinds of build
Data
Warehouses, reporting layers, dashboards
dbt, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Snowflake, Superset, Power BI
Software
Internal tools, pipelines, automation, integrations
Python, SQL, whatever the company already runs
Web
Websites, designed and built
Next.js and React, or the platform you prefer
Any stack. We work in the systems a company already has rather than replacing them with ours.
If your numbers do not add up, a report is still built by hand, or your team has outgrown its tools, get in touch.
A few sentences on the situation are enough. We reply from the same address you see here.