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- FLOEWS (Nigeria), Melanin Kapital (Kenya) and ShapShap (Nigeria) make Africa shine in Dubai
Three African startups have made it to finals in the Supernova Challenge Pitch Competition organised by North Star Dubai at the 42nd GITEX GLOBAL holding in United Arab Emirates (UAE). In the finals are FLOEWS (Nigeria), Melanin Kapital (Kenya) in the Africa fast category; and ShapShap (Nigeria) in the Mobility & Smart Cities Innovator category.
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They emerged finalists out of the more than 800 startups from all over the world that pitched for the $200, 000 grand prizes among other support lines including mentorship.
Gearing up for the final pitch. Bashir Abubakar of FLOEWS celebrate his entry as a finalist
The Supernova Challenge is the biggest pitch competition in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, where Startups have opportunity to become the next unicorn.
Nine Nigerian startups had earlier emerged as semi-finalists including Identity Pass, 9JaCodeKids Academy, Floews, MedTech, Paddycover, Pricepally, LiveBic, Technyon Technologies, and Wellness Health Technologies.
Nigeria Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami, lauded the startups as African representatives with a strong chance to cart away the winning prize.
Meet the finalist
FLOEWS is a multi-award winning startup that are seeking to help solve the problem of ever persisting adversity of climate change, extreme weather & natural disaster such as flooding, by providing an equitable access to a democratized, socially inclusive and gender responsive self-manageable disaster risk management and early warning intelligence to the disaster vulnerable individuals, business communities & economies, towards reducing & mitigating disaster risk on lives, infrastructure, bio-diversity, food/water supply & overall economic losses estimated in $trillion USD Globally.
Melanin Kapital is a fintech that developed a sustainable finance platform helping banks and institutional investors to disburse sustainability-linked financing to SMEs in Africa. Through ‘Smart ESG Scoring System’ we aim at driving $1bn of sustainability-linked financing into African SMEs by adapting the eligibility/risk scoring systems to SMEs, digitizing the investment and management processes, and allowing real-time tracking of financial and ESG performance.
ShapShap provides white label APPs to SMEs for aggregating, optimizing, and allocating last-mile jobs to gig workers ensuring their sustainability and scalability.
Every startup is a winner
North Star offers all startups whether they win the competition or not, many opportunities to engage with investors and the wider North Star audience.
According to the organisers, the judges are looking for how innovative is the idea, the market opportunity derivable from the idea including possible market size, competition, and scalability. Other criteria include business model, revenue model, pricing, and target customers. Also considered is traction; whether the idea already attracted any revenue, customers, and investors. Team is equally important. The drivers of the idea must have the prerequisite skill to take the startup to success.
