Womena Graduates Second Cycle of Its Womentum Accelerator

Womena graduated the second cycle of its Womentum Accelerator, empowering seven of the top female-led, tech-based startups from the Middle East and North Africa.  

“When womena preached diversity as a core value of innovation, we mean diversity in all aspects: gender, experience, faith, industry, age and socio-economic levels," says Elissa Freiha, founder of womena. “We are proud of the true diversity shown amongst this year’s Womentum cohort,” adds Freiha.

After four months of acceleration, the founders are now fully equipped with the tools to scale their businesses in the region. Winning $25,000 in first place, Egypt’s FreshSource is disrupting the agriculture value chain through innovative solutions that aims to connect smallholder farmers to the modern value chain. Egypt’s Pas-sport bagged the second-place prize of $15,000, setting out to transform athletes' lives by unlocking global opportunities and connecting them to sports scholarships around the world. The third-place prize of $10,000 went to Dimension 14, a UAE-based solution for advanced planning problems within a single artificial intelligence (AI) powered application.

Womentum 2019, a women-in-tech accelerator programme by womena® in partnership with Standard Chartered, took the startups to Berlin and Dubai for an immersive experience in the two stimulating hubs, with a remote mentorship session in between, before concluding in an exclusive Demo Day on October 10, which witnessed the graduation of 3 startups being awarded a total of $50,000. Through the programme, the top-performing startups will also receive up to $100,000 in direct investment from the founder of women.

“After four months of accelerating talent women-led startups, we are proud to see the cohort graduate and join the growing community of successful startups in the region,” says Rola Abu Manneh, CEO of Standard Chartered Bank UAE. This year’s Demo Day event was sponsored by Google for Startups, allowing showcased startups to exclusively connect with investors, mentors and media from the regional ecosystem.