Thursday, November 29- Beirut, Lebanon. Seedstars ends its regional tour with a final regional summit that took place at the Hilton Beirut Metropolitan Palace Hotel with a crowd of entrepreneurs, venture capital firms and investors, and partners from the MENA region including Turkey. The regional summit was under the patronage of the office of the Prime Minister and gathered a crowd of key ecosystem players including Emre Gurkan, CEO of touch Telco managed by Zain, New York-based Ayah Bdeir CEO and founder of littleBits, Christopher Schroeder, investor and author of Startups Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East, and many more.
The regional summit was the last spot wrapping a full tour that included: a Seedstars Beirut local competition, a Growth Bootcamp for the Seedstars MENA regional winners, and the Beyond Banking Hackathon by Bank Audi. The local competition and fintech hackathon took place at antwork’s community square on 15 November and 27-29 November 2018 respectively. Bank Audi, a leader in banking in the region, made available and for the first time in Lebanon, over 6 APIs of their various services accessible to the 6 teams that spent 48 hours designing solutions in fintech to impress the Bank Audi team and hackathon jury.
The Seedstars Beirut local competition gathered eight Lebanon-based tech startups that arrived to pitch their businesses to compete for a spot at Seedstars World summit in Lausanne, Switzerland in March 2019. During which the winner team will be mentored by international experts on growth, market, finance, and investment as well as compete for up to $1M USD in equity investment. The jury consisted of Lara Ammar, Digital & Innovation Specialist at Touch; Sami Abou Saab, CEO of Speed BDD; Bijan Azad, Associate Professor at AUB; Amira Mourad; Head of Business Support Unit for Startups at IDAL; and Corine Kiame, Investment Manager at IM Capital. The first prize winners were Spike Diabetes Assistant App, an innovative healthtech app that manages diabetes using AI and recommends food suggestions relevant to your dietary requirements. Ziad Alameh, Spike’s CEO and founder did not hesitate to present the app’s various unique features from Insulin injection reminders, geolocation food recommendations based on dietary requirements, and sugar intake calculators, to in-app glucose monitors and shared user profiles.
The Seedstars MENA Regional Summit kicked off with an opening keynote by Seedstars event manager Laure de La Rocca in which she welcomed the crowd and introduced the network, including Lebanon’s ambassadors, Antwork and Speed@BDD. La Rocca continued to share impressive statistics of the impact of the Seedstars network and startups, and gave even more impressive projections for 2020. The summit then continued with a series of panel discussions and debates on the future of healthtech, entrepreneurship, the emergence of the 4thindustrial generation, and the challenges/opportunities of startup investments in the MENA region. The summit also witnessed a startup showcase by more than 20 startups from Turkey and the Levant, North Africa and the Gulf countries.
Looking over the Seedstars Regional tour was Zina Dajani, antwork Founder and CEO. As Seedstars local ambassadors, antwork supported in organizing several Seedstars stops and brought the regional summit to Beirut with the help of community partners like Touch, Bank Audi, and IDAL. “It was great to be part of this journey that proved to have local, regional and global impact. Being able to empower our rising tech startups through our various partnerships and outreach efforts on one hand, and our on-demand collaborative spaces and services on the other, is the most rewarding part of what we do. We aim to enable and empower a community of innovative startups and entrepreneurs and bridge our ecosystems together. It comes with no hesitance and with great enthusiasm to support and promote such global scale initiatives.”, Zina Dajani, founder and CEO of Antwork noted.About antwork:
antwork grows beyond just providing on-demand work spaces, and into facilitating work experiences, nurturing engaged communities, and empowering individuals in seeking their next big break. Through meticulously designing flexible spaces that cater to a diverse workforce with various needs, antwork has been enabling engaged communities nation-wide. antwork aims on connecting coworkers either through their events & programs that act as a platform for knowledge exchange and network building, the antwork app, or simply through creating smart collaborative spaces that are accessible to the entire ecosystem. “Antwork is an enabler, a platform connecting spaces, connecting people, and making things happen.”
About Seedstars
“They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.” – Mexican proverb
Seedstars is a Swiss-based group with the mission to impact people’s lives in emerging markets through technology and entrepreneurship, with a particular focus on the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN. Seedstars connects stakeholders, builds companies from scratch with public and private partners and invests in high-growth startups within these ecosystems. Seedstars aims at fostering impact investing and impact entrepreneurship over the world. Through different activities, that range from startup scouting, events organization to company building and acceleration programs, Seedstars has built the world’s biggest community of changemakers in emerging markets. Seedstars group includes the largest startup competition in emerging markets (Seedstars World Competition), the Entrepreneurship Forum for Emerging Markets (Seedstars Summit), physical entrepreneurs hubs (Seedspace), acceleration programs (Seedstars Growth), teaching & training programs (Seedstars Academy) and an investment entity with a startup lab and a fund (Seedstars Investments). Some of Seedstars main partners are Enel (Energy), School of Management Fribourg (HEG Fribourg) & TRECC – Transforming Education in Cocoa Communities (Education), BBVA (Finance), Tag Heuer (Fempreneurship, Time Saving and Innovation), Merck (Health) and Continental (Mobility).
About Seedstars World Competition
Seedstars World is the world’s largest startup competition in emerging markets. It has been five years now that Seedstars Team takes off every year for a 9-month world tour and scouts for the best early-stage startups in 65+ countries, organizing 100+ events. One winner is selected to represent each country visited, and is invited to attend one of the 5 Regional Summits, reuniting all local winners of each region to network with regional investors, mentors and corporates. Local winners are also awarded the chance to represent their countries at the Seedstars Summit, the competition final happening in Switzerland, where startups compete for up to $1M in investment. The Seedstars Summit is the flagship event of Seedstars, filled with breakout sessions, panel discussions, specialized workshops and the best minds from emerging markets.