Every year, seedstars visits the world looking for the best and scalable startups in the emerging markets. A total of 5000 startups applied to this year’s competition, to pitch at the sessions hosted in 75 cities in 65 countries.
Out of the 65 startups that attended the summit, 12 were shortlisted.
AgroCenta (Ghana) is an online sales platform that connects smallholder farmers directly to an online market which has wider geographic size, to sell their commodities.
Junkbot (United Arab Emirates) is a do-it-yourself robotic kit which helps children to make their own robots and gadgets by recycling things around them such as cardboard, old CDs, plastic water bottles, tea or coffee cups, etc.
SayurBox (Indonesia) is an online platform providing high-quality fresh products from local farms. In a year, the business grew more than 10 times in revenue size and partnered with more than 50 farmers, having now a strong network of farmer communities and local producers.
Kargo (Myanmar) is the first trucking marketplace to bridge the gap between thousands of truck owners and emerging businesses.
EVE.calls (Ukraine) is an online SaaS platform that helps companies to sell, notify and survey their customers with an intelligent robot.
Celcoin (Brazil) turns any smartphone into a Utility Payment Terminal for bill payments, recharges, and other services. With Celcoin, anyone with a smartphone can receive over 800 utility payments, recharges, games, digital content and transportation services for customers and contacts. Celcoin comes at no extra cost and can bring in new revenue for users.
Payit (Mexico) is a secure payments platform concentrated on making it easy for people in Mexico (and soon Latin America) to pay all of their day-to-day expenses.
RedCapital (Chile) is a crowdfunding p2p lending platform through which investors obtain attractive returns at low risk and SMEs get loans at a fair rate. RedCapital has a risk predictor which allowed their investors to have zero default until today.
Medsaf (Nigeria) uses technology to make the process of buying and selling medication easy and efficient for hospitals and pharmacies worldwide. Being the trusted medication platform for Africa, it connects pharmacies and hospitals with safe and cost-effective medications.
CMED (Bangladesh) is an IoT enabled cloud-based preventive healthcare platform that monitors health parameters, predicts health risks, and reduces health costs.
Gifted Mom (Cameroon) democratises health information access in emerging markets through an AI-based remote medical support platform.
EMGuidance (South Africa) solves a critical problem for medical professionals by aggregating medical content from regional experts in one app.
AgroCenta was founded by two ex-esoko employees, Francis Obirikorang and Michael K. Ocansey in 2015 to improve the agricultural value chain in Ghana. Two critical problems within the value chain, which are the lack of an access to market for smallholder farmers in the rural areas, which subjected them to activities of exploitative, buying from middlemen and the lack of a coordinated truck delivery system to cart their commodities from farms to markets to sell.
AgroCenta’s idea is to solve these age-old problems by introducing an online sales platform that connected smallholder farmers directly to an online market, which has wider geographic size, to sell their commodities. The end result? Exploitative buying was reduced to the barest minimum since farmers were in control of selling their commodities at prices that were favourable to them.
Once a farmer gets offers from interested buyers, the problem of logistics and transportation were sorted using AgroCenta’s patent TrucKR solution that allowed the smallholder farmer in any remote village in Ghana access trucks at the click of a button. You can call it the uber for trucks. AgroCenta is changing the very lives of smallholder farmers by using technology to solve problems they encounter in agriculture.
OTHER AFRICAN STARTUPS AWARDED
- Enel Africa Energy prize: SolarFreeze (Kenya) is pioneering mobile cold storage units powered by renewable energy for rural smallholder farmers, to help them reduce the huge challenge of post-harvest loss in much of the developing world
- Transforming education prize: Edves (Nigeria) is a portal for schools that encompasses all school management needs such as sharing education materials with learners and for parents to make payments to schools,
- Merck health tech prize: EMGuidance (South Africa) which aggregates medical content from regional experts for medical professionals in one app and platform.
