28 Entrepreneurs from 15 Countries Selected at 71st International Selection Panel in London
LONDON – May 19, 2017 – Endeavor selected 28 entrepreneurs leading 20 companies from 15 countries at the 71st International Selection Panel (ISP) held May 15-17, 2017, in Canary Wharf, London. The event drew entrepreneurs and panelists from the U.S., Latin America, MENA, Europe and Asia.
Endeavor now supports 1,461 entrepreneurs leading 915 companies in 30 growth markets around the world. Panelists at the event included top global business leaders and investors who were drawn from Endeavor’s extensive network of mentors and supporters.
The ISP is the culmination of a rigorous multi-step selection process to identify innovative and driven entrepreneurs who are committed to advancing an ecosystem of entrepreneurship.
“Convening entrepreneurs, panelists and staff from all corners of the globe, and welcoming entrepreneurs from 15 countries into the network, the London ISP was an amazing testament to how far Endeavor’s model has spread over the past 20 years,” said Endeavor Co-Founder and CEO Linda Rottenberg. “A huge congratulations to the high-impact Endeavor Entrepreneurs selected this week!”
In London, panelists from around the world interviewed entrepreneur candidates about their businesses, evaluating them on their potential for high-impact growth, and then deliberated on which candidates should be selected to become Endeavor Entrepreneurs. Once selected, Endeavor Entrepreneurs gain access to comprehensive customized services, including introductions to local and international business mentors and volunteers from Fortune 500 consulting firms who will help them address key needs.
Endeavor Entrepreneurs have had a significant track record of creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, generating billions of dollars in revenues, and building sustainable growth models in their home countries.
Endeavor would like to thank AXA for their generous sponsorship of the event, and Barclays for hosting Interview Day. Additional thanks to Mallow Tree for their generous donation.
Endeavor will host the year’s upcoming ISPs in Lima, Peru (June 28-30), Beirut, Lebanon (24-26), New York City (September 11-13), Sofia, Bulgaria (October 23-25), and Miami (December 11-13).
Learn more about the companies and entrepreneurs selected below.
BRAZIL
Entrepreneurs: Vinicius Roveda & João Zarantine
Company: ContaAzul
Industry: Enterprise Software
Description: ContaAzul is a cloud-based accounting solution where small business owners and accountants can work together on the same platform, helping to increase efficiency and organization. With ContaAzul, small business owners can easily manage their day-to-day operations, including e-invoicing, inventory, bank reconciliation and payments, saving up to 65% of time and allowing them to focus on the things that matter. ContaAzul also enables significant productivity gains for accountants by providing them access to organized financial data from their clients, which allows them to easily review and reconcile their clients’ financials in minutes as opposed to hours, freeing up their time to grow their practice and help small business owners succeed.
Entrepreneurs: Max Gaudereto Oliveira
Company: MaxMilhas
Industry: Travel & Tourism
Description: MaxMilhas is Brazil’s leading marketplace for buying airline tickets and selling frequent flier miles. Sellers choose the selling price for their miles, and buyers can use MaxMilhas’ flight search engine to see if the miles price beats the actual ticket price. Through MaxMilhas, customers often save over 50% on their flight purchase.
BULGARIA
Entrepreneurs: Viktor Viktorov, Vasil Georgiev
Company: MyMall
Industry: Ecommerce
Description: For shopaholics in Bulgaria, MyMall is a dream come true. Previously, finding brand name sportswear and accessories that fit into a shopper’s budget meant spending hours in shopping malls. MyMall offers a diverse array of brand name yet affordable clothing, footwear, and sports goods on an easily-searchable, user-friendly ecommerce platform. The company carries over 100,000 products from leading labels such as Nike, Adidas and Under Armour, making it one of the most trafficked ecommerce sites in Bulgaria.
Entrepreneurs: Pressian Karakostov
Company: PubGalaxy
Industry: Advertising Technology
Description: In recent years, the online advertising industry has been disrupted by technology. Instead of relying on ineffective and sluggish direct sales, publishers increasingly sell their ad space using online platforms for Real Time Bidding. Unfortunately, due to the complexity involved, most independent publishers lack the experience, know-how and time to reach their full revenue potential. PubGalaxy helps publishers by taking care of their monetization needs. It offers a unique combination of algorithms and human guidance through dedicated teams. Thus, PubGalaxy not only yields higher revenues for the publishers, but also allows them to completely focus on growing their business.
EGYPT
Entrepreneurs: Yasser Rasheed
Company: RPMinerals
Industry: Infrastructure & Utilities
Description: RPMinerals, mines, selects and processes minerals to serve various applications such as oil & gas drilling, water drilling, tunneling and horizontal directional drilling, foundry, paper production, ceramics and cat litter. The company’s local production facilities in Egypt meet the entire Egyptian market’s need and export to customers in Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, Australia, the Americas, and Middle East. Now RPMinerals is striving to build on its strong track record to become the leading minerals and chemical supplier in the Middle East.
INDONESIA
Entrepreneurs: Adrian Gunadi
Company: Investree
Industry: Financial Services
Description: Investree is a web-based marketplace that matches lenders and borrowers online through P2P lending. Its two main products are invoice financing and employee loans. The former is for SMEs, which supply listed companies, multinational firms, state-owned enterprises or government offices. This loan is given against these SMEs’ invoices to their clients, reducing risk revenue mismatch that could hamper the debt payment. The latter is a loan whose terms are custom fit for employees who pay it back through automatic salary deductions. Investree differentiates itself from traditional lenders with its speed and transparency.
ITALY
Entrepreneurs: Paolo Galvani, Giovanni Daprà
Company: Moneyfarm
Industry: Fintech
Description: Moneyfarm is planting the seeds for prosperity with a technology-first approach to wealth management. A retail asset management company, Moneyfarm’s robo-advisor technology helps customers manage investment in Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) portfolios. With its automated systems, Moneyfarm intelligently manages consumer portfolios at a lower cost than incumbent players. By focusing on developing customer trust, Moneyfarm has already attracted a wealth of users who trust Moneyfarm to manage their assets. Now the company is turning its attention from proving its solution to driving growth as it strives to become the top digital investment manager and financial advisor in Europe.
Entrepreneurs: Bruno Garavelli
Company: Xnext
Industry: Manufacturing – Equipment
Description: Xnext, with its patented XSpectra® technology, has developed the next generation of X-ray for non-destructive quality tests (NDT) on industrial production lines and security checks for baggage control. XSpectra is a new multi-energy scanning technology capable of precisely identifying the chemical-physical composition of materials in real-time. The XSpectra can be a unique point of control on a production line, eliminating the need for metal detectors and traditional X-rays.Through a joint venture with Raytec Vision, Xnext has built its RayNext X-ray, which it piloted with a leading European co-packer and successfully launched Interpack 2017 in Dusseldorf.
JAPAN
Entrepreneurs: Chika Terada & Kei Tomioka
Company: Sansan, Inc.
Industry: Social Media
Description: Remember the person you met at that conference who worked for a company that might have been interested in buying your product? Too often, that person goes forgotten, along with their business card which is typically misplaced or thrown out. Tokyo-based Sansan makes finding that right contact indescribably easy. Sansan is a cloud-based business card management service for companies looking to strengthen their networks by taking business cards from buried in desks and converting them into a resource for better sales activities. Since its founding in 2007, Sansan has set the standard for cloud-based contact management in Japan, where business cards feature prominently in the professional world.
JORDAN
Entrepreneurs: Hussam Hammo
Company: Tamatem
Industry: Gaming
Description: Arabic is the fourth most widely spoken language globally; however, less than 1% of all online content is available in the language. Tamatem fills that gap by working with international game developers to localize and publish popular games for the Arabic user. This enables developers to access the $680 million MENA gaming market where the average revenue per paying user is eight times that of Europe. By using its knowledge of local users’ preferences, the Tamatem team offers localization instructions, cost-effective marketing, monetization strategies, and several technologies that manage communication throughout the process. With many games having reached number one on the iOS and Android app stores, Tamatem boasts MENA’s most downloaded game portfolio
LEBANON
Entrepreneurs: Cyril Hadji-Thomas
Company: Bookwitty
Industry: Ecommerce/Media
Description: While the written word remains a powerful tool, the way it’s consumed in the digital age has significantly changed. Bibliophiles now have the convenience and variety afforded by ecommerce platforms, but trade off on the rich knowledge, expertise and discoverability unique to local bookstores. Keeping up with the times while maintaining the charm of bookstore browsing, Bookwitty is a global, multilingual book retail platform that offers a curated and personalized book buying experience for its consumers. The company offers a collection of 26 million books that ship worldwide for free, as well as high-quality content through its network of publishers, bookstores and writers, and personalized recommendations via its proprietary search engine. Operating in the $106 billion global publishing market with teams spread across Beirut, Paris, Brussels, Montreal and New York, the company’s growth to becoming a global player will be one for the books.
Entrepreneur: Michel Khoury
Company: Eastwood Schools
Industry: Education
Description: Eastwood Schools is a collection of K-12 private schools that utilizes tech-enabled learning methodologies to modernize education and improve engagement amongst students in GCC. All course content is accessed on iPads and delivered through the school’s dedicated Apple iTunes U page. With its flipped-classroom model, students learn the material at home and engage in personalized learning through collaborative projects and discussion-based classes. As the first school in Lebanon with a fully integrated Apple iPad Program, Eastwood Schools won the School of the Year award five years in a row from the American University of Beirut and Lebanese American University.
LOUISVILLE
Entrepreneurs: Kyle Green
Company: Healthcare Asset Network
Industry: Healthcare
Description: One of the most surprising reasons for America’s crippling healthcare costs is the $765 billion dollars’ worth of unused supplies or “medical surplus” that hospitals throw out every year (National Academy of Medicine). Kentucky-based Healthcare Asset Network (HAN) is an asset recovery and alternative sourcing platform that allows healthcare systems to buy and sell high-quality excess medical inventory, supplies, and equipment at competitive rates via its desktop and mobile applications. Independent studies have found that HAN’s platform shortens the selling time by 85%, and generates annual savings of $225,000 per hospital in asset recovery alone. Operating in the $15.6 billion U.S. medical surplus market, HAN hopes to become the platform for trading secondary healthcare assets in country, and aim for global expansion within the three years.
MEXICO
Entrepreneurs: Luis Enriquez, Jorge del Villar, & Adolfo Cano
Company: Cultura Colectiva
Industry: Digital Media
Description: Despite Mexico City’s thriving art, literary, music, and food scenes, traditional Mexican media outlets struggle to accurately portray the country’s vibrancy. Further, with nearly 300 million Spanish speakers plugged into the internet, 50% of which are millennials, media companies fail to keep up with fleeting trends and inefficiently cater to younger audiences. Cultura Colectiva is a digital media publisher that leverages proprietary data-driven algorithms to identify and create viral content geared towards Spanish-speaking millennials. The website currently receives 36.3 million unique visits per month and is on par with the New York Times and Guardian for video views (Top 25 worldwide) with 700 million video views per month.
MOROCCO
Entrepreneurs: Hammad Benjelloun
Company: Adlive
Industry: Advertising Technology
Description: For advertisers, media agencies, and digital publishers, managing multiple digital media campaigns is time intensive and laborious due to many stakeholders and various advertising platforms. Further, the data gathered from the target audiences does not flow in between existing platforms, which leads to inefficient campaign performance. Adlive is a digital media workplace that brings all media traders onto a single platform and offers an automated way to plan, execute, and optimize digital media campaign performance. In a global digital advertising market worth $194 billion, Adlive currently operates in the UAE, Spain, France, and Morocco. The Adlive platform offers digital media buyers one central location to launch campaigns 10x faster and boost campaign performance by 70%, compared to standard agency trading desks.
SAUDI ARABIA
Entrepreneurs: Abdulaziz AlJouf
Company: PayTabs
Industry: Financial Services
Description: PayTabs is a payment processing company aiming to disrupt the payments industry by providing simple and trusted processing for merchants and retailers. Operating in the MENA and Asia-Pacific regions, PayTabs processes payments in 20 countries and targets a $1.5B regional ecommerce market. PayTabs offers merchants an online invoicing system, PayPage, and an eCommerce API that easily integrates with any website. PayPage is designed to serve even those small entrepreneurs without websites who set up shop on their social media pages. Hailing from an ecosystem that is just beginning to recognize the value of financial technology, PayTabs is rapidly capitalizing on this untapped market.
SOUTH AFRICA
Entrepreneurs: Graham Rowe & Richard Johnson
Company: Sancreed
Industry: Healthcare
Description: Mass-scale chronic diseases like diabetes rely on face-to-face, generalist doctor care, with the average doctor consultation lasting seven minutes. Left to manage the disease on their own, only 6% of diabetes patients globally obtain the health outcomes possible with modern drugs and protocols, leading to unnecessary complications and 500% higher healthcare costs than healthy patients. Sancreed links people with chronic diseases (currently diabetes) to a dedicated, clinically-accredited expert coach, through its multi-sided, data-driven platform, ‘Guidepost’. On average, the company’s patients experience a 45% reduction in their frequency of hospitalization and a 2.5% drop in A1C (measure of diabetes control) within six months of using Guidepost.
SPAIN
Entrepreneurs: Carlos Ferrando & Nacho Vizoso
Company: Closca
Industry: Commerce/Retail
Description: Today, more than 200M people worldwide bike as their preferred mode of transportation in cities, yet only 24% of urban cyclists use a helmet (European Commission, Mobility & Transport). Aiming to change this, Closca has developed a one-of-a-kind foldable helmet that people want to wear and carry. Capable of shrinking by 52% in size, Closca’s 100% safety certified and patented “Fuga” helmet has gained brand recognition and worldwide adoption thanks to partnerships with high-end designers and boutiques like the MoMa Design Store, Adidas, Paul Smith, TED and more.
Entrepreneurs: David Troya
Company: Glamping Hub
Industry: Travel
Description: For some people, nothing beats getting dirty and exploring the “great outdoors”. Others prefer more glamorous accommodations: room service, hot showers, etc. Glamping Hub is a booking portal that combines the best of both worlds, where travelers can book over 14,000 unique outdoor accommodations from tree houses overlooking the Sacred Valley in Peru to luxurious campervans off the coast of Portugal. Glamping Hub has tapped into a $50Bn highly fragmented sector, hand-selecting an exclusive directory of luxurious outdoor accommodations in over 80 countries based on comfort, proximity to nature, and affordability.
UAE
Entrepreneurs: Lachlan Jackson
Company: Ecocoast
Industry: Infrastructure, Construction
Description: Ecocoast develops turnkey solutions to answer the marine industry’s most pressing coastal problems through its superior, more durable and sustainable products. Its primary clients are multinational contractors and developers who seek out Ecocoast for its innovative technical solutions. Its range of products cover marine protection, using high-strength, non-traditional materials that leave a smaller environmental footprint, and marine demarcation, designed to support and secure marine environments.