Ultrasound Startup, M-Scan Wins $25,000 at Techcrunch Battlefield Africa
A startup from Uganda, M-SCAN has won the 2018 Techcrunch Battlefield Africa in Lagos, going home with the $25,000 equity-free grand prize and a trip to TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019.
M-SCAN which develops portable mobile ultrasound devices (Ultrasonic probes) that are laptop, tablet and mobile phones compatible emerged winners from 15 startups who took the stage.
A virtual banking experience powered by smartphone and data, Betr emerged as runners up. The company wants to scale the potential of making banking way more accessible for millions of people currently unbanked across Southern Africa.
Some of the other startups that pitched included, Apollo Agriculture—the company leverages advances in machine learning, remote imaging via satellite and mobile money to deliver input finance and agronomic advice to small holder farmers, SudPay developed an integrated, multi-support, multi-service and multi-operator digital tax collection platform that connects merchants to financial institutions while LabTech designed a urine testing hardware and software solution to speed up the diagnosis of Uterine Tract Infections (UTIs).
In the same vein, MAX, operational in Lagos,Nigeria showcased its readiness to influence moto-taxi mobility on the continent using mobile apps, inclusive data-driven asset-financing and psychometric tests to profile drivers, a crowdfarming platform, Complete Farmer enables users to invest in sustainable farms and monitor farming activities through data driven cultivation protocols and IoT-enabled precision farming, FoodHubs help small holder farmers to avoid post-harvest losses by storing their produce using mobile solar-powered cold carts and coldrooms and Honey Flow Africa that optimizes book keeping operations by digitizing and bringing the power of IoT to the process to improve honey production, processing and predictability.
Others include Agripredict, a startup that provides farmers with tools to improve predicting disease, pest infestation and extreme weather condition; an end to end technical recruitment platform that eases the process of hiring software developers called CodeLn, the world’s first clean cookstove (100% smokeless, biomass cookstoves that cook food faster and burns 70 times less using processed proprietary water resistant Goodlife Biomass pellets produced from forest and agricultural waste) with built in self-powered IoT system for real time monitoring developed by Powerstove Energy and Trend Solar, an assimilated 4G Android smartphone and Solar Home System integrated to provide affordable access to energy, internet and mobile in an all in one solution.
This would be the second Startup Battlefield in Africa, following the first ever that happened in Nairobi Kenya where Lori Systems emerged as winners. The startup scene on the continent is unarguably gearing up, which was your favourite solution?
