Get Hosted and Loyal1 have been named the winners of the South African leg of the DEMO Africa tour held at the Office Hub, Parkhurst Johannesburg.
GetHosted is a startup that provides access to spaces for all types of events ranging from work desks, themed parties and formal functions. It adopted an Airbnb model for space rentals.
Loyal1 is an end to end rewards application that has 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 Demo Africa tour saw five innovative start-ups going head to head in an effort to secure first place. Get Hosted and Loyal1 were selected as winners on the second round from the top three shortlisted teams. The other teams that participated were CommuScore, Afripav and You, Baby and I.
Get Hosted, Loyal1 and the winners of the Capetown leg will join the Zimbabwean national winner SMART Connect where 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 startups that 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.
