The South African innovation tour held by DEMO Africa in partnership with Legazy saw a surprising turn of events having two teams qualify for the second round to compete for South Africa’s national spot. The amicably start-ups Get Hosted and Loyall came first in an event that took place at the Office Hub, Parkhurst Johannesburg.
GetHosted has built an application that provides access to spaces for all types of events ranging from work desks, themed parties and formal functions. GetHosted has adopted an AirBnB model for space rentals. Loyal1 is an end to end rewards application and have partnered with retailers in using Bluetooth beacons to send push notifications for consumers to use reward points. Additionally, Loyal1 is creating algorithms to analyse and understand the user buying behaviours of consumers and make recommendations to them and also to sell data to the retailers.
The innovation tour saw five innovative start-ups going head to head all in effort to secure first place. The panel of three judges—Lebo Gunguluza of Azzure Bank and South Africa’s Dragon Den investor, Kenneth Kayser Co-founder of the Barclays Rise Incubator and Zuko Tisani founder of Legazy, were all highly impressed by the competitiveness of present start-ups.
“Legazy is an agency that promotes African start-ups across the world, through sponsoring opportunities for them to compete, exhibit and overall tell the African innovation story. All start-ups that presented have proved that in Africa Innovation is the next big thing. It is, however, notable that most of these start-ups have flaws in presenting a sound revenue model and that is something they need to greatly work on,” commented Zuko Tisani as he gave advice to the teams that participated.
Get Hosted and Loyal1 were selected as winners on the second round from the top three shortlisted teams. “Having two teams tie after the second round is a clear indication that innovation in Africa is stepping up and we at DEMO Africa are more than pleased at the progress Africa is marking,” remarked Harry Hare of DEMO Africa. The other teams that participated were CommuScore, Afripav and You, Baby and I.
Get Hosted, Loyal1 and the winners of the Capetown leg are joining the Zimbabwean national winner SMART Connect were the best start-up will be selected to represent the Southern African region. The successful startups in each region will automatically qualify to be part of the pool of 30 where the successful Startups will be provided with resources worth over US$150,000 including US$120,000 software tools from Microsoft and USD$15 000 from AWS that to help them build and grow their businesses.
The South Africa tour moves to Cape Town on Thursday 5th at the Rise Accelarator. Application for selection to the 2018 DEMO Africa cohort close on 15th July. Application is done online on the DEMOAfrica site at www.demo-africa.com
