The DEMO Africa second leg of the South Africa tour, Cape Town saw many promising start-ups attending the event to pitch. The event that was hosted by Legazy and DEMO Africa at the UCT Solutions Space saw team Reginize being selected as the Cape Town winners.
Reginize is a recycling collections company which rewards people for recycling and also educates them about the benefits of recycling. With RE in their name standing for reducing, reuse or recycle and GEN standing for a generation, the team showcased an application that allows them to collect recyclable material for transformation and also educate this generation about the benefits of recycling.
It was a tight competition in Cape Town seeing 9 highly potential start-ups vying for first place. The judges – Tshitso Tsotshi, co-founder of BeBold, Tsepo Ngwenyama manager at UCT Business School solution space and Zuko Tisani, founder of Legazy all astonished by the innovative products, had a challenging but exciting time selecting the winners. Reginizer were pronounced winners from the top three teams (Reginizer, Kazi and Akiba teams) that had been selected for the second round of the competition. The other start-ups that participated were Go, Explore, Siyatender, Spoon Money, Vibescout, Kuba and Prospa.
“With Cape Town having a far more active startup ecosystem than Johannesburg, it was not a challenge in having our developed, profitable and impactful startups pitch. Regenize, Kazi and Akiba all closely contested the number one spot by our judges. But it was Regenize with a great green and gamification element that won,” commented Zuko Tisani.
“It has been an astonishing experience to be able to host two innovation tours in one country. We are really grateful to our partners Legazy and UCT Solutions Space who helped make this event a possibility, promoting our cause of discovering capable start-up companies,” said Harry Hare of DEMO Africa.
The Southern African puzzle is coming together, Reginizer is joining Loyal1 and GetHosted South African representatives and their innovations will compete in the regional hotplate against SMART Connect of Zimbabwe and the winner of the Botswana tour. The regional winner will represent Southern Africa at the launch event to be held in Morocco on the 18th and 19th of October. The successful startups in each region will automatically qualify to be part of the pool of 30 where the successful Startups will be provided with resources worth over US$150,000 including US$120,000 software tools from Microsoft and USD$15 000 from AWS that to help them build and grow their businesses.
Applications for selection to the 2018 DEMO Africa cohort close on 15th July.
