All roads lead to Jo’ Burg as DEMO Africa kicks off

DEMO Africa 2016 will host a series of events, which include an entrepreneur bootcamp and a series of master-classes will be hosted in collaboration with the City of Johannesburg, the South African Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the LIONS@FRICA partners.

The event, however, officially kicks off on Wednesday 24th with a bootcamp for the tech entrepreneurs as well as DEMO Rehearsals and an LIONS@frica Annual General Meeting. This will later be followed by a DEMO Investor meeting as well as an official opening reception in collaboration with LeaderEX at the Sandton Convention Centre.

Now in its fifth year, DEMO Africa is one of the flagship initiatives of LIONS@frica and aims to connect African startups to the global ecosystem. DEMO Africa is the place where the most innovative companies from African countries get a platform to launch their products and announce to Africa and the world what they have developed.

The initiative has hosted 150 startups in the past four years raising more than US$14million in both investment and business value. “We have seen series impact in the last 4 years, one of the startups launched in 2014 has since gone to raise more than US$2 million and employed more than 150 people,” said Harry Hare, Executive Director, DEMO Africa.

This year’s event will feature some of the most prominent investors and entrepreneurs from Africa and the organizer’s hope to see deals being signed at the event. DEMO Africa will also feature a special area known as the “DealZone” where investors and entrepreneurs can have investment discussions.

DEMO Africa 2016 saw over 700 technology startups from 27 African countries apply to launch at the event. They were then narrowed down to 30 start-ups with South Africa having the highest representation of up to 11 startups followed by Nigeria 6, Kenya 5 and Ghana 3. For the first time Morocco will have a representative in the continental faire. Other countries include Egypt, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda.

The 30 finalist startups have products in 11 verticals including logistics, retail, e-commerce, education, banking and finance, media, renewable energy, health, and agriculture. Banking and financial technologies had the highest number of entries followed by media, e-commerce and education.

The event is set to run from today to the 26th of August with an aim of connecting African startups to the global ecosystem.