ArabNet Digital Summit, one of the largest startup events of the region concluded in Dubai last week. Startup Championship, a pitching competition that brought in 18 startups from all across the region to compete against each other was one of the main highlights of the event.
All the 18 startups were selected in ArabNet events in Kuwait, Riyadh, Beirut, Muscat, Dubai & Casablanca.
Each one of them was given five minutes to pitch in front of regional judges who selected five finalists to pitch again in the second round in front of international judges.
Winner – Sadeed from Jordan
The competition was won by Sadeed, a Jordanian startup that allows companies and agencies to automate their social media customer care.
Sadeed uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the performance over time and understand what’s being said by the user (follower). The platform currently supports three languages, English, Arabic (different dialects) and German.
The startup was founded by a team of engineers who have previously worked for Souq, OpenSooq and some other leading startups last year.
Sadeed’s platform also offers a dashboard with different insights including the number of comments processed, replied to, ignored, or removed for abuse.
The startup received $20,000 as the winning prize.
Second Place – Nabta Health from Kuwait
The Kuwait-based Nabta Health was the first runner-up. Co-founded by Sophie Smith & Dr. Mussaad Al-Razouki, Nabta is a dedicated platform for women’s health in the Middle East & North Africa. Nabta had also won the Step’s Pitch Competition little over a month ago. The startup aims to provide a set of different healthcare services to accompany women in important events of their lives, including marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth.
Nabta will provide these digital healthcare services in form of clinical advice, AI-driven health recommendations, fertility assistance, and both prenatal and postnatal care through different bilingual (English & Arabic) web and mobile apps.
Third Place – Sadeem from Saudi Arabia
Saudi flood sensing startup Sadeem was the second runner-up. Co-founded by Mustafa Moussa, Ahmad Delwah & Edward Canepatwo, Sadeem had started as a research project at King Abdullah University of Science & Technology. The startup has developed multi-patented monitoring system which displays physical phenomena occurring in the city including flash flood maps, traffic maps and pollution maps in real time.
The monitoring can help city planners and other decision-makers take better decisions in city planning, development, and operations. But more than anything else, Sadeem’s system could help save lives during a flood incident and reduce economic losses by up to 30%.
The startup was also the winner of GITEX Future Stars competition last year in Dubai.
Last year’s ArabNet Startup Championship was won by Saudi healthtech startup Sihatech.
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