5 Local Startups Will Be Going To The Seedstars Regional Summit

The Seedstars World Pitching Competition braced Harare shores on the 29^th of June and on the night, eight startups were competing for a place at Seedstars Global competition. The global competition will be hosted in Switzerland on the 5th of April next year.

How does Seedstars Pitching competition actually go?

Firstly, there are local competitions (like the one on the 29th) and the exceptional startups from this competition get a chance to go to the regional summits –there are 5 regional summits- and the best startup from each country also gets to attend the global summit to compete for the $500 000 grand prize.

From the Harare competition, five local startups will be going to the regional competition that will be hosted in whilst the number one startup will be going to both regional and then the final Seedstars summit later this year

Who will be going forward?

As mentioned before, there will be 5 local startups proceeding from Friday’s event. Here’s a list of the startups and what they do :

Civic tech

Vote Africa got the nod as the ‘best civic tech’ which is a huge focus in this year’s Seedstars competition. Civic tech is any use of technology to empower citizens or make government more accessible and effective and Vote Africa’s election focus fit in perfectly with this theme. Vote Africa looks to teach the electorate about relevant topics in elections and encourages the participation of the electorate in the electoral process. Vote Africa also allows the electorate to create dialogue with other similar minded people in their region.

Best learner

There was also a ‘best learner’ award up for grabs and this was meant to acknowledge the startup that had made the most strides since the start of the pitching sessions. So, before the event that was open for everyone on Friday, there were two days that saw the startups being taught to refine their pitches and the startup that made most strides during this process was Justice Today.

Justice Today is a mobile app that aims at protecting citizens from crime. The application also employs AI to educate citizens on steps to take when they have been victimised. The application also allows users to report crime in real time.

3^rd Place

Youfarm is a crowd-farming platform that provides alternative funding for both small scale farmers and commercial farmers in the country. On the platform, anyone can participate in the agricultural value chain by investing in crop or livestock and sharing the profits with the farmer when the produce goes to market.

2^nd place

Wellnescript is a wellness and digital health startup. In Africa, we are not generally concerned with our wellness and these guys are trying to change that. They provide services such as diabetes wellness checks, hypertension wellness checks and they also provide corporate wellness checks – where they go in companies and assess the staff’s wellbeing.

1^st place

Rera is quite an interesting platform. The platform allows interested parties to farm their own poultry produce online.  For those with extremely busy schedules, Rera promises to take care of the labour associated with poultry farming on your behalf. The platform is open to families, event planners and even food outlets and the promise that Rera is banking on is convenience above all else. Rera will be the startup representing Zim at the Seedstars next April

Where to?

From here the startups start preparing for the regionals next year. For Rera ,however, the focus will be on Seedstars Summit in April and it’s great that they have almost a year to prepare for that competition. All the best to them and all the other startups who we will be getting in touch with and reviewing their apps over the coming days.