The Seedstars Africa Summit brought together the best tech startup talent from around the continent this month, providing these early-stage companies with invaluable global exposure.
The third annual Seedstars Africa Summit took place on Dec. 14 in Mozambique, with all of the winners of the various Seedstars World competitions throughout Africa attending the event, according to ITWebAfrica.
Seedstars World, which describes itself as the world’s biggest startup competition in emerging markets, holds these events in around 70 countries before winners are selected to take part in a grand final.
Claudia Makadristo, Seedstars World regional manager for Africa, explained the value that Seedstars brings to the startups involved in the competition.
“We are at the core an investment company, so we have three focuses, to promote, to connect and actually to invest. But the main objective of what Seedstars wants to be and is, it’s an actual investment company,” Makadristo told Ventureburn.
“The other day I was talking to Kasha founder Joanna Bischel, our winner from Rwanda last year who made it to the global stage, she said what you guys have done for us, forget even the investment, forget the corporates, it’s exposure,” she said.
“We cater to most stages of entrepreneurs, we have a variety of different programmes that are very selective, very high level. Our objective is look, we need to do what we need to do to make entrepreneurs successful, we need to benefit from it as well,” she added.
The winners of the competitions in each African nation were present in Mozambique, and will join other Seedstars country-winners at the final event in Switzerland during April next year, where they will deliver pitches that could potentially earn them up to $1 million in equity investments and prizes, according to Seedstars.
The Seedstars Africa Summit serves as a platform through which tech entrepreneurs in Africa and around the world are given the chance to network, with startups from the 20 African countries involved in the Seedstars competition benefiting from the initiative and exposure.
The Seedstars Africa Summit was hosted by local ambassador UX Information Technologies and supported by main sponsor, Standard Bank, along with other partners including the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, UNFPA, Merck, Enel, TRECC, Microsoft, Orange, GSMA and VC4A, to name a few.
