On July 15th, we told you about Get in the Ring Cape Town where 8 entrepreneur’s faced-off in the ring with a hope of heading to the finals to raise R15 000 000 OR € 1 000 000 globally in investments.
Now, we are proud to tell you that Go Metro has emerged the best at the 2014 “Get In the Ring” Cape Town competition and Justin Coetzee will be going to Rwanda in September 2014 to represent Cape Town in the Regional Finals.
Go Metro is a data-driven transit app for City Transport that contextualizes schedules and real-time data with crowd sourced updates from users in the system. GoMetro is a social network for transit users – improving the customer experience of moving around in a city through a mobile-centred, location-aware service – for trains, buses and and BRT. The app connects users to transport operators for effective pinpoint communication of developments during operations. The app is free to users, with transport modes paying a license for advanced features.
Dubbed the ‘Olympics’ for start-ups, the inaguaral Get in the Ring: The Investment Battle saw 100’s of budding South African entrepreneurs enter and compete for an amount of up to R15 000 000 globally. The challenge was aimed at helping them to raise investment capital for their startups or SME’s.
The competition saw the 8 paired into two and then faceing-off through 5 rounds with different pitching topics: starting with who is part of their “Team”, secondly the company “Achievements” come into play, thirdly the “Business Model & Market” giving investors a look into the companies dynamics, fourthly the focus shifted to “Financials & Investment Proposition” and lastly they had to wow the judges in a “Freestyle pitch” where the contestants had their last few words to impress and validate why they should be the winners.
Apart from GoMetro, Wumdrop.com, an On Demand Courier app came in the second place while NerveData, a startup that installs smart devices into company operations to collect and provide clean operational data came third. Daptio, a mobile first Adaptive learning assessment platform emerged fourth in the competition.
“There is a trend towards pitching competitions at the moment and the uniqueness about “Get in The Ring” is the competitiveness and freestyle nature that allows startups the opportunity to showcase their startup, nationally, regionally and globally. With an amount of R15 000 000 in possible investment is a large pricetag that is attractive to any startup that wants to scale” quote Nicholas Haralambous founder of NicSocks.com.
The judges included Rob Stokes from Quirk Agency, Pieter de Villiers from Clickatell, Fredell Jacobs from Innovation Hub, Aparajuta Agrawal from SankalpForum and Ian Anderson from Blue Pencil.
“Last night’s event had great quality startups with excellent presenters, and had a rapid punchy format which got the audience into their headspace fast and held my attenion through out,” concluded Justin Stanford from 4Di Capital and founder of Silicon Cape.
Go Metro from Cape Town will be joined by Epochip who was the winner from Johannesburg’s Get in the Ring event held on the 16th July. Epochip would like to develop a long range wireless charging for mobile devices. The harness radio waves and convert them into electrical energy to charge cellphones and tablets.