African startups pitch for funding at 500 Startups Demo Day

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Kenya’s CardPlanet and Egypt’s ElWafeyat were amongst the startups that pitched at the 500 Startups Demo Day in San Francisco, United States (US), yesterday, having completed the four-month programme.

Disrupt Africa reported in November the two startups are included in the 30 companies chosen for the 11th batch of the 500 Startups programme.

CardPlanet, which was incubated at Nailab in Nairobi, powers remittance and digital money services for Africa, and is focused on healthcare remittance, bill pay and other vouchers, while ElWafeyat is an online platform for obituaries and condolences for North Africa and the Middle East.

500 Startups said it had invested in around 150 companies in the past year and was optimistic those that pitched would see similar success in obtaining funding to previous cohorts.

“We hosted three Demo Days in 2014, hundreds of investors attended our event and many companies raised over US$1 million,” the company said in a blog post.

“We believe scale and frequency are critical to the success of our accelerator program, so we are very focused on scaling ourselves. We wanna give a big high five to all of our hardworking startups, you made us proud this year.”

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Passionate about the vibrant tech startups scene in Africa, Tom can usually be found sniffing out the continent's most exciting new companies and entrepreneurs, funding rounds and any other developments within the growing ecosystem.

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