Egyptian Bot-Building Platform Widebot Wins the Seedstars Competition at Techne Summit

Seedstars World, the global seed-stage startup competition for emerging markets and fast-growing startup scenes brought its Egyptian round to a successful close during the Techne Summit which took place last Saturday and Sunday at the renowned Bibliotheca Alexandrina, as 9 startups took to the stage to pitch their ideas in front of the local jury panel composed of Fadi Antaki, from A15; Ahmed Said Hegazy, from Orange; Wessam El Beih, from Drosos Foundation; Willie Elamien, from Flat6Labs Cairo); Ashraf Abdel Wahab, from Microsoft 4Afrika; and Seedstars' Kamran Samadli.

WideBot, a startup allowing anyone to build his own intelligent chatbot without coding or technical experience in 10 minutes, was crowned as the winner and will be participating at the Seedstars Summit taking place in Switzerland in April 2018. The winner - which claims to be the MENA's first bot builder platform - will also get a week-long training programme, with the opportunity to meet the other 80 winners, as well as investors and mentors from around the world. The entrepreneurial champions will thus get the chance to pitch in front of an audience of 1,000 attendees, with the possibility of winning up to $1 million in equity investment and prizes.

Mermaid Egypt, a platform connecting professional cleaners to homeowners, came second and InterAct, with its product Touchizer, a device that converts any ordinary surface to be interactive, grabbed the last spot in the top 3.Continuing on its world tour of startup scenes in emerging markets and fast-growing startup scenes, Seedstars World just concluded their Beirut competition in September and is now heading off to Casablanca, where they seek Morocco's top startup.

Photo by @MONetwork.

Photographer: Seif Mansour.