Seedstars World, the global seed-stage startup competition for emerging markets and fast-growing startup scenes brought its Jordan round to a successful close during Seedstars Amman. The event took place Sunday August 7 at Orange’s Business Innovation Growth (BIG) Accelerator where 11 selected startups were invited to present their ideas in front of an international jury panel.
The event attracted interest from 80 attendees, and brought together entrepreneurs from Jordan and beyond. The local winner, Mind Rockets Inc., develops assistive technologies for the deaf community, using avatars to translate speech and text to sign language interpretation.
Mind Rockets was selected as the best startup in Jordan for its unique approach to translation, technology, and social impact. Mind Rockets will be participating at Seedstars Summit, taking place in Switzerland in April 2017, a weeklong training program with the opportunity to meet the other 60 winners, as well as investors and mentors from around the world.
Traditionally, the final day of the Summit will be dedicated to pitching in front of an audience of 1000 attendees, with the possibility of winning over 500K USD in prizes and equity investment. Mind Rockets will also have the opportunity to participate in the Seedstars MENA Regional Summit in December 2016.
The Audiogram, an app thatenables mobile phone users to listen to audio content related to their interests instead of listening to the phone ringing, came in second place. The app allows users to specify their interests, follow their favorite publishers, and receive audio content every time they make a call.
The 3rd place runner-up, Arabot, is a conversational Artificial Intelligence platform for Arabic language, delivering the first smart arabic chatbot for businesses.
The other pitching startups included: Friendture, an application to create, invite, and manage group activities based on interests and location, FindInterview.com,a platform that humanizes the recruitment experience, GreenWallet, a fully-automated micro-finance lending platform for short-term loans, Repzo, a mobile app that turns smartphones into a standalone field management tool to geo-tag and monitor activity, Moda Gate, an e-commerce platform that runs on the minimum required staff and easily scalable, Find Early Adopters, a service that helps startups validate their products, Swipt, a mobile application that focuses on customer engagement and promotional campaigns, and Trevx, a search engine for audio files.
The 11 startups pitched in front of a prestigious jury, Majd Afaghani, Seedstars Ambassador to Jordan, Orayb Akeel, CSR & CER Manager of Orange Jordan, Mohamed Malik of DASH Ventures, Emile Cubeisy, Managing Partner of Silicon Badia, and Tiffany Obser of Seedstars World.
The event was made possible by the generous sponsorship of Orange Jordan. A bootcamp pitch training session took place at Oasis500 for the startups selected to pitch in the Seedstars Amman competition; Josiane Smith, Enpact’s Country Coordinator, and Ziad Barouni, CEO & Founder at SnackableNews, were mentors for the session.
A keynote speech was presented by Orange’s Omar Arabat, Regional Product Manager. The event culminated with refreshments and networking.
Continuing on its world tour of startup scenes in emerging markets and fast-growing startup scenes, Seedstars World’s next stop is Prague, to select the best startup in the Czech Republic. Seedstars World is looking for smart startups that solve regional issues and/or develop profitable products for the global market.
