Startup Istanbul 2015 Challenge: Meet the Winners

Startup Istanbul 2015 Conference was an extraordinary event, effectively blending startups, entrepreneurs and investors from all over the world, world-known speakers, mentors, and people who were there only to network. The spirit of ambition, motivation and eagerness to connect was filling the beautiful halls of Istanbul Lutfi Kirdar Congress Center.

On the stage we saw many well-known in the entrepreneurial ecosystem around the world speakers and mentors. The attendees had the privilege to listen to Steve Blank, Dave McClure, Morten Lund, Steli Efti,Christopher Schroeder, Ross Kingsland and many other extraordinary people.

Of course, the most exciting part of the event was the Startup Istanbul Challenge Finale. We were happy to see the top 16 startups pitch in front of the jury Steve Blank, Andrea Barrica and Andy Tsao. The 16 chosen startups were:

iGrow from Indonesia, Mytoddlr from Nigeria, Nims from Kenya, WePress from Dubai, Security Wall from Pakistan, Expensya from Tunis, Taskulu from Iran, Waveit from Isreael, Pockee from Greece, Melissa Climate from Bulgaria, WebHR from Pakistan, Hajj Guider from Pakistan, Gaming Battle Ground, Welcome from Greece, Transterra Media, Picturesqe from Hungary.

The quality of pitches this year was in very high level and it was very tough choice when it came to naming the top 3 winners. After all, the jury made their decision and the winners were announced.

The first place went to Nims from Nairobi, Kenya.

Founders: Louis Wajeiya and Ian Karega

The founders of Nims believe in eliminating fraud. They also believe in transparency and efficiency. A 2014 AFCE report indicated the typical organization loses 5% of revenue from fraud estimated at $3.7 trillion globally. 85% of the occupational fraud cases reported were as a result of asset misappropriation, which included petty cash, disbursement and reimbursement of expenses. Nims helps reduce fraud while creating transparency and efficiency by harnessing both mobile and web technology to give businesses control measures in safeguarding their expenses. Nims is an expense management tool that simply helps businesses gets a hold of their expenses.

The second was iGrow from Depok, Indonesia.

Founders: Andreas Senjaya and Andika Amri

iGrow is a platform for helping people to do plantation with limitation of land, knowledge to plant, and skill to harvest by utilizing unused land. They connect urban people who want to do plantation to local farmer, land owner, and crops buyer.

And the third place was for Taskulu from Tehran, Iran.

Founders: Farhad Hedayatifard and Kazem Keshavarz

Taskulu is a deeply integrated and extensible platform for online collaboration. By default it provides users with Kansan-style task management and real-time chat, but it can be easily customized to include more features based on customer’s needs by enabling project-level extensions. It also gives you the opportunity to integrate applications you use on a daily basis with your Taskulu projects so that you can manage your team and projects from start to finish on Taskulu and get (or send) important information from (to) other tools you’re using along the way.