The winner of this year’s edition of the Seedstars World Competition is South Africa’s Giraffe, a recruitment app aiming to solve unemployment in South Africa. The startup won $500,000 to fuel its growth. Giraffe was crowned the best startup in the world at the Seedstars World Summit in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The low-cost mobile recruitment startup beat 53 other tech startups from across the world to win the first prize of up to USD 500k in equity investment.
Giraffe’s automated mobile recruitment app enables businesses to recruit staff faster and cheaper than any other way, and connects medium-skilled jobseekers with opportunities for free. By doing so, Giraffe aims to help reduce unemployment in South Africa and emerging markets in general. Since launching in Feb 2015, Giraffe has attracted over 75 thousand jobseekers and invited thousands of candidates for interview.
Seedstars launched its third edition of the Seedstars World competition in April 2015. The international team covered 54 countries, scouting for the best startup in each country. Giraffe was selected to represent South Africa, and went on to beat the other 53 countries to emerge as the winner at the competition on 3rd March.
Shafin Anwarsha, Giraffe co-founder and Head of Product- who pitched at the event- said, “We’re really grateful for this award. But we still have a long way to go and a lot of hard work to do before we achieve our mission of helping reducing unemployment in the emerging world and lifting people out of poverty”
Anwarsha went on to add, “We’d like to dedicate this award to South Africa. South Africa has so much talent, resources and the resolve to succeed. Despite the current issues at home, investors should take heed of this and take a long view that South Africa will once again emerge victorious.”
