BIH Supported Start-Ups Win The Seedstars Gaborone Competition
- November 25, 2019
- Posted by: jxtve
- Category: Press Release
Seedstars World, the largest seed-stage startup competition for emerging markets and fast-growing startups, hosted the Gaborone leg pitch session for the selected 10 startups on the 8 November 2019 at Botswana Innovation Hub (BIH).
BIH’s supported start-ups; Mohiri & Classmate Online dominated the pitch competition with the most inspiring and promising solutions for Botswana and Africa. Mohiri scooped first prize and received an all-expenses paid trip to the Seedstars Regional Summit in Johannesburg on the 03 December 2019, free access to a 3 months investment readiness program in 2020 and also received access to technology tools from a network of partners valued at $70,000.00.
Mohiri is a personalized job alerts service that connect low-medium skilled workers to opportunities for work by sending them alerts on their phones whenever there is a vacancy that matches their profile. With the support and interventions of the BIH Acceleration Programme, Mohiri has grown from a reach of 0 to more than 230,000 online people every week, in just 10 months. Today, Mohiri sends out job alerts to a pool of 16,000 registered members who depend on the application as a source of vacancy announcements and other career-related opportunities and content.
The second prize went to Classmate Online and they received access to technology tools from a network of partners valued at $10,000.00. Classmate Online, also in the BIH acceleration programme, is an inclusive, Social E-Learning platform for students and educators to access educational content and promote collaborative learning. Classmate offers a single collaborative and all-inclusive digital virtual classroom which eliminates boundaries between students who school in rural and urban areas, public and private schools, marginalized and non-marginalized etc. e.g the text – audio feature.
BIH supports innovation & technology startups through a number of interventions including; innovation capacity building, incubation programme, acceleration programme targeted innovation-oriented training, Seed funding (e.g. BIF), access to infrastructure in in the Science & Technology Park, shared working spaces, co-creation spaces (labs) and Fit-for-purpose ICT services. The Seedstars Gaborone pitch competition followed a bootcamp that was held for the 10 finalists at the BIH. The startups went through training to help them prepare for the final pitch.