Local health tech startup goes to the global round of Seedstars World this year
Seedstars World, the global seed-stage startup competition for emerging markets and fast-growing startup scenes brought its Bangladesh round to a successful close last week for the third year in a row on October 23. Just like last time, this event took place at GP House where eight startups pitched to a local jury panel.
Present at the event as the chief guest was Professor Mohammad Kaykobad. Eight startups, out of 170 applications, were invited to pitch in front of a prestigious jury consisting of Tina Jabeen of Startup Bangladesh – IDEA; Kazi Hassan from Grameenphone; Khurshed Alam from LankaBangla Finance; Prince Mojumder from Genex Infosys Limited; Mustafizur Rahman from CVCFL; Ahad Mohammad of Razor Capital; Samad Miraly from Startup Dhaka; Tareq Al Muntasir from Socian; and Adriana Collini from Seedstars.
After an hour and half of gruelling pitching, local health tech startup CMED Health emerged as the champion of the Bangladesh round. Interestingly, CMED was the first runners-up in last years' competition. They are currently working on an IoT-enabled cloud-based preventive healthcare platform that monitors health parameters, predicts health risks and reduces healthcare costs. CMED co-founders include Dr Khondaker Abdullah-Al-Mamun, a biomedical engineer with over 10 years of expertise in healthcare and R&D, and Dr Farhana Sarker, a data scientist. REPTO Education Centre and Cookup Technologies became first- and second-runners up respectively. Both the champion and the first runners-up were graduates of GP Accelerator.
CMED will be invited to the Seedstars Asia Regional Summit in Bangkok in November and will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to the Seedstars Global Summit, taking place in Switzerland in April 2018. The Global Summit is a week-long training programme with the opportunity to meet the 75 other local winners, as well as investors and mentors from around the world. Traditionally, the final day of the Summit will be dedicated to pitching in front of an audience of 1,000 attendees, with the possibility of winning up to the USD 1 million in equity investments.
The participating startups were mentored by seasoned industry leaders including: Asif Ahmed Tonmoy, Head of Marketing, Socian Ltd; Habibullah Bahar, Co-Founder, Field Buzz; Rosie Keller, Associate for Asia, Seedstars World; Gregory Omondi, Market Engagement Manager, GSMA; Shahriar Rahman, Country Manager, Kutumbita; Shawn S Novel, Head of the Firm, Shawn Novel & Associates; Muhaimin Khan, Chief Operating Officer, Better Stories; and Anup Dutta, Designer, Grameenphone Accelerator.