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Accenture on the hunt for Africa’s top 30 tech startups

Accenture has a new initiative in the works that will prove quite interesting for any budding tech startups in the African continent.

In particular the company is trying to identify Africa’s Top 30 Tech Startups, having opened up the application process earlier this month on 7th September. Applications close next month on 7th October, with the initiative run by Accenture Africa and publishing partner Forbes.

“Open innovation allows a path for collaboration between established businesses and innovative start-ups with great products, but no direct route to market,” says Sandiso Sibisi, Open Innovation Africa lead at Accenture South Africa.

“African start-ups often struggle to find an opportunity to plug their great technologies into established client value chains. Yet, with the right support, this all becomes possible, opening the doors to amazing opportunities for value creation, benefiting Africa and its people,” she adds.

While Accenture says that all entrants are welcome provided their startup aims to address challenges on the continent such as business, governance and civil society, there are particular kinds of solutions the company is interested in seeing.

More specifically, “entrants working in the spheres of artificial intelligence, Blockchain and security, big data and analytics capabilities, Industry X.0, DevTech and Automation as well as extended reality,” Accenture explained in a press release about the initiative.

The rest of the application criteria are as follows:

  • Be an African start-up, founded by an African
  • Be a registered business
  • Have been in operation for less than nine years
  • Demonstrate innovation
  • Target and fill a significant market gap
  • Demonstrate exponential growth
  • Provide a product or service unconstrained by geography.

As for the judging process, once the application period ends on 7th October, there will be two phases. The first will involve quantitative assessments, and the second will whittle down all the entrants into the Top 30.

The list of top startups will be finalised 30th November and announced alongside the survey results in the February/March 2019 edition of Forbes Magazine.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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