Last week we held our first out-of-Europe Seedcamp event in South Africa, and it was a full on success. We were already delighted by the high quality during the application process – the event itself turned out to be even more impressive.
After the usual short pitches by teams in the morning, the teams broke up into the mentoring sessions to take in all of the knowledge the mentors were ready to share. We shared some information on Seedcamp and our foray into new geographies after lunch, followed by another batch of mentoring sessions.
The overall energy and the startups’ thirst for knowledge was really inspiring – it was clear that the mentors’ input was highly valued by all the participants. All sessions needed to be almost violently broken up to keep up with the schedule, which is always the best indication for great discussions.
The popular vote showed Cognician and iSigned to be the darlings of the audience – two teams tackling complex problems with some elegant ideas and solutions.
We want to say a big thank you to all of the great mentors who took all of their day to help Seedcamp and the participating teams to grow and go forward. Gareth Knight, the organiser of the Tech4Africa conference helped us to find some really outstanding mentors from different backgrounds – we had visitors from all disciplines of venture capital, angel investors, successful founders and company builders, bloggers, advisors, and strong support from large local and international technology companies.
The day would not have been possible without the support of our sponsors: Google helped with the welcome drinks the night before, the Gordon Institute of Business Science was a brilliant venue with nice breakout spaces, Microsoft sponsored lunch, and Vunanitech pitched in as well.
If you have any plans of visiting South Africa soon – we can not recommend it more. The local entrepreneurship scene is growing, there is very strong mutual support, and South Africans are quite simply amazing hosts. Tech4africa, which was held on the day after Seedcamp, was a great testament to that.
Some of the teams also blogged about their experiences:
- Patrick from Cognician on how to get most out of the day
- Jason from 10layer wrote an open letter to say thanks (our pleasure!)
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