AfricArena Summit 2020 Winners Announced

AfricArena, the African dealflow platform for tech startups, investors and corporates, hosted its fourth annual Summit as a hybrid event in South Africa, Cape Town – preceded by its Founders’ Bootcamp and VC Unconference Weekends – and virtually with AfricArena Air.

A platform made by, and for, investors and entrepreneurs in high growth market Africa, home to disruptive innovations such as mobile payment, is continuing to see, even through Covid-19, an acceleration in numbers of investment deals in its tech startups, primarily focused on inclusive fintech, social innovation and clean-tech/off-grid (those sectors representing over 53% of $2 billion in investment in 2019), and represent the next major growth market of investment in tech.

This year’s event was held virtually due to the global pandemic, this year’s winners of the hybrid 2020 AfricArean Summit have been announced, recognising 20 cutting-edge startups from 18 countries. The selected winners were awarded $350 000 in combined prize money in the form of cash and AWS credit cards. A few notable winners also received tickets to Viva Technology, which will take place in Paris in 2021. And South African tech startup, Kudoti won acclaim and was awarded in the Future of Africa category. 

In an official press release, Christophe Viarnaud, Founder and CEO of AfricArena, comments on the high-quality startups that were selected for the 2020 Summit.

“Braving strong economic headwinds and an adverse environment, we are very fortunate to have been able to put together such a high-quality hybrid AfricArena Summit, with possibly our strongest headline of speakers ever, and an incredibly rich selection of startups. We are very grateful to our anchor partners for this. 2020 is the year of accelerated digitalization and we, therefore, could not be more excited about our new contribution to the African ecosystems with AfricArena Wired. The platform is in effect a powerful technology addition to the AfricArena DNA around Founders and Investors content, knowledge repository, impact events and deal flow platform, now all available from your mobile phone. The response since launch was incredible and we hope this will unlock further value to the ecosystem at large.”

AfricArena Summit

Since its inception in 2017, AfricArena has been a platform dedicated to supporting the creation of market access and investment opportunities for its ever-increasing community of founders, angels, corporates and VC investors.

Designed with a digital approach in mind, AfricArena consists of a series of investment deal flow events and interventions and an open-source platform for all stakeholders, all based on principles of open innovation and entrepreneurship. Since inception, the AfricArena brand has rapidly gained enormous credibility in the tech startup ecosystem with alumni startups having raised over $160million in the past four years.

Thirty-four African startups presented their innovative solutions to a judging panel that included experts in tech, business, and investment. 

The Founders Boost Camp, in partnership with FSAT Labs and a VC Conference, was held by AfricArena two weeks before the Summit. 

The aim of the Founders Boost Camp was to support and train over 50 African tech startups who were preparing to pitch at the Summit. Clive Butkow of Kalon Venture Partners as well as Glenn Gillis, and Sheraan Amod, who are entrepreneurs, shared their expertise in building strong businesses. 

The winning startups

• Casky from Morocco won the “Scale from Africa to Europe Challenge” by Bpifrance.
• Kusini Water from South Africa was announced as the winner of the AirFrance/KLM Challenge. awarded for tech innovations in water analysis and purification
• SmartWage also from SA won first prize for the “Future of work challenge” by Viva Technology.

The Challenge of 1 000 (sponsored by the French Embassy) 

• Mellowvan/Mellowcabs won the Smart Cities category.
• My Pregnancy Journey won the Impact category.
• Kudoti won the Future of Africa category.

The AfricArena Tour “Best of Ecosystem winners” 

• CloudFret (Morocco)
• TaskMoby (Ethiopia)
• Oze (Nigeria)
• Circle (Egypt)
• Enova Robotics (Tunisia)
• Yego (Rwanda)
• BezoMoney (Ghana)
• Seekewa (Ivory Coast)
• FoodSasa (Tanzania)
• Yusudi (Kenya)
• Maad (Senegal)
• Tripplo (SA, Johannesburg)
• 3DIMO (SA, Cape Town)

The three finalists pitched their innovative solutions to Mitchan Adams, Co-founder, and Head of R&D. The two runner-ups were each awarded R25 000, and the winner, Lebogang Nkosi received R100 000 in cash.

Zimkhita Buwa – Board Member at Silicon Cape and Head of Intelligent Business Applications Core Practice at Dimensions Data (Middle East and Africa) congratulated the winners of the 2020 AfricArena Summit.

“Well done to the AfricArena team on yet another successful event, especially with all you had to contend with this year. AfricArena 2020 was a remarkable experience both in-person and over the virtual platforms – it was no small feat making this experience accessible to more people. Congratulations too to the winning startups! As an ecosystem, your success is our success, so may you soar to greater heights!”