The afternoon session at Day Two of PIVOT East 2013 in Kampala has seen the competition move to the Mobile Finance category where startups from Uganda and Tanzania competed for the headlines.
The first to pitch was Inforex Africa, which enables communications and forex trading between bureaus and offers current forex information to the public.
Inforex said it is targeting more than 680 forex bureaus in East Africa and beginning by growing locally in Uganda.
The team already has more than 36 per cent of Ugandan forex bureaus as their clients and have had more than US$646,000 in inter-bureau trade.
Inforex told the judges and investors that it is looking for a total of US$38,000 in investment for local growth and expansion into East Africa.
Uganda’s M-Duka were next to present their startup. M-Duka is an innovative new way to pay for products and services using a mobile phone.
It is designed for anyone who is looking for a way to make an online purchases and sell virtual goods. The developers say they are targeting the vast majority of Ugandans who still purchase their products physically.
For example, the presenting team said: “US$450m of mobile airtime was sold in Uganda in 2011. Only 16 per cent was done electronically.”
The first startup to be pitched from Tanzania at PIVOT East was TiME, from DEPHICS.
The application is mainly for online ticketing and the company is hoping to make money through commissions and advertisements. TiME tickets targets 58,000 moviegoers in Tanzania, with the team believing 90 per cent of those have smartphones.
The TiME developers asked for US$85,000 for product and customer development.
However, one of the judges, Mbwana Alliy, managing partner of the Savannah Fund, told TiME that the biggest market is not always the best one to target. The best one is where traction is fastest.
intelworld, headquartered in Kampala, also pitched in the afternoon.
The startups aims to extend the applications of the mobile wallet to make mobile payments the heart of day to day business payment transactions including utility payments, integration with banks, bulk payments, mobile commerce, mobile money transfer and mobile gaming.
In the market today, intelworld has easypay, mbet and the Communicator.
The team behind intelworld said while they encourage the big communications companies to work with developers, Kenya’s Safaricom does not engage the developer ecosystem as well as rivals MTN and Airtel in Uganda.
GO Finance was the last startup from the finance category and the competition all together to pitch at the PIVOT East 2013.
GO Finance seeks to use financial records of companies to target small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) and is seeking US$1.5 million in investment.
They currently have US$80,000 in cash, which was granted by Airtel Tanzania for a platform to pilot their GoBi product.
GO Finance plan to make more money through the supply chain of fast moving consumer goods companies.
The Mobile Finance category was regarded as the most competitive with all startups being considered great innovations.
