Egyptian, Jordanian Startups Take the Day at MITEF Arab Business Plan Competition Awards
Last year, the MIT Enterprise
Forum Arab Business Plan Competition awarded first place to
Hind Hobeika of
Instabeat, a heart rate tracking technology for swimmers that
has now launched its first IndieGoGo
campaign to fund its first prototype.
This year, the Arab Startup Competition in Doha, Qatar, continued
the trend in catchy names by awarding the top prize to
Instabug, a bug-tracking software for app developers, this past
weekend. Instabug, a graduate of Cairo accelerator Flat6Labs, allows app developers to add
a single line of code to their prototypes, which adds several
features that allow users to submit feedback in intuitive ways. Led
by Moataz Soliman and Omar Gabr, the platform has now been adopted
by over 120 developers since its launch last September.
Second prize went to
Darebni TV, an online vocational training portal that delivers
technical training and soft skills, in Arabic. Led by Marwan
Ziadat, Omar al Azzeh, and Waleed al Baddad, the startup has made
over $900,000 in sales since its launch 8 months ago, by selling
its online videos, exercises, and projects, mostly to universities
in Jordan. They hope to reach 100 million of the region's youth by
2020 to combat some of the highest youth unemployment rates in the
world.
Two companies tied for third place: Gallery
AlSharq, a graduate of Amman-based accelerator Oasis500, provides Middle Eastern
stock photography and digital content, and The Home Page, an online
furniture fair from Egypt.
MITEF also awarded its Female Entrepreneur Award to Diana Dajani of
EduTechnoz, a
curriculum-based gaming platform that aims to entertain and engage
children while teaching them Arabic.
Other favorites noted by a few judges included Ubility Net, a
platform designed to help telecom operators classify mobile
application traffic and eTobb,
an online medical portal designed to connect users to doctors, both
based in Lebanon.
While Egypt and Jordan won the day, entrepreneurs attended the Doha
event from every corner of the Arab World, including Algeria, where
it's notoriously hard to launch a startup. "The ecosystem in
Algeria just doesn't exist," said Tahar Zanouda of
Dialife, a diabetes tracking system that won third place
internationally in Microsoft's Imagine Cup
competition.
The hope is that events like the MITEF Arab Business Plan
Competition, and Wamda's Mix n' Mentor
Doha, which gathered entrepreneurs and mentors together for
in-depth conversations, will continue to support the region's
leading startups to overcome local hurdles.
"I think we're going to come back in 10 years and see that many of
these 50 finalists have turned their ideas into successful
companies," said Ahmed Alfi, Founder and Chairman of Sawari Ventures.
The $50,000 prize is more than a drop in the bucket; it could help
Instabug achieve profitability, he pointed out. "The financial
prize will sustainably help them along their way. I'm hoping next
year we’’ll have more teams from Flat6Labs; now we'll have to work
hard to replicate it."
The event, in partnership with Abdul
Latif Jameel Community Initiatives and supported by Enterprise Qatar
and Silatech, was
co-organized at Katara alongside AlFikra, the Qatar National
Business Plan Competition.
The three teams winning AlFikra focused on building companies
within Qatar. First place winner QPay is creating a payment gateway
for Qatar, while EduTechnoz, launched in Qatar by Palestinian
entrepreneur Diana Dajani, took second place.
Third place was awarded to Rawe, a local animation
development studio that employs local Qataris and helps boost their
careers.
Overall, the event showcased the evolution of the ecosystem, says
Fadi Ghandour, Chairman of the Board at Wamda and Vice Chairman at
Aramex.
"I have done lots of business plan competition judging and this one
is by far the best. The entrepreneurial teams, their ideas and
businesses were very sophisticated, including clear ways of either
building the business or scaling it, and they understood their
markets and are ready to fly," he says.
"This says a lot about the Arab world today and how far it has come
in the past three or four years in terms of building the
entrepreneurial ecosystem," he added, "but it's only the tip of the
iceberg. Give it a few more years and we are going to see an
entrepreneurial revolution."