Ugandan health startup M-Scan has won the 2018 TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa held on Tuesday in Lagos.
M-Scan beat fourteen (14) other tech startups to win the second edition of the tech challenge and $25,000 equity-free grand prize, a trip for two to TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019, and the coveted title of “Africa’s Favorite Startup.”
BettrFinance, a FinTech startup from South Africa emerged runner up.
Two Nigerian startups – MAX Okada (Nigeria’s first for commercial motocycles) and Powerstove (Nigeria’s first clean cookstove with self-powered cloud-based monitoring technology) emerged among the final five.
REACTIONS
Congrats to Uganda’s mScan for a richly deserved win at #TCBattlefield Africa. Their low-cost mobile ultrasound device for pregnant women in Africa is tech innovation at its best!,” tweeted Miishe Addy, a tech enthusiast from Ghana.
Sofia Zab, head of FinTech (Africa Under-30s) for Forbes, also expressed delight with the victory of the Ugandan startup.
“Entire audience erupts in standing ovation as m-Scan is announced as winner of #tcbattlefield. Most support I’ve ever seen at such an event. Congrats to the team!”
WHAT IS M-SCAN ALL ABOUT?
M-SCAN is a low cost energy efficient portable ultrasound device that connects to Mobile phones, tablets or laptops to achieve ultrasound especially in resource limited parts of Uganda and Africa at large.
Founded by Phyllis Kyomuhendo, M-Scan helps to address a mini challenge for Ugandan women – 830 women die everyday due to maternal difficulties.
M-SCAN devices have been piloted at two medical camps in Uganda, one at Bugembe HC IV and Kalangala HC IV.
The devices helped save 13 mothers who had complications; thanks to timely referral after detection of the complications.
OTHER TECH STATUPS
Apollo Agriculture: Leverages advances in machine learning, remote imaging via satellite, and mobile money to deliver input finance and agronomic advice to smallholder farmers with radical efficiency and scalability.
Sud-pay: Developed an integrated, multi-support, multi-service, and multi-operator digital tax collection platform that connects merchants to financial institutions.
LabTech,: UriSAF by LabTECH is a urine testing hardware and software solution designed to speed up the diagnosis of Uterine Tract Infections (UTIs).
Complete Farmer: A “crowdfarming” platform that enables users to invest in sustainable farms and monitor farming activities without discarding their daily routine using data driven cultivation protocols and IoT enabled precision farming.
FoodHubs: Uses mobile solar powered cold carts and cold rooms to help smallholders farmers store their produce, so as to avoid post harvest losses.
Honey Flow Africa: Optimizes beekeeping operations by digitizing and bringing the power of IoT to the bee keeping process to improve honey production, processing and predictability.
AgriPredict: Provide farmers with tools that equip them with information that will improve predicting disease, pest infestations, and extreme weather conditions
MAX: Transforms moto-taxi mobility in Africa using mobile apps, inclusive data-driven asset-finance, and a comprehensive driver on-boarding program that uses machine learning and psychometric tests to profile drivers and create credit scores for them. MAX enables financial inclusion for drivers, prioritizes safety, and uses IoT technology to track all drivers in real-time.
CodeLn: An end-to-end technical recruitment platform that automates the entire recruitment process, making it fast and easy for companies to find and test Software Developers and reduce the risk of bad hires.
Bankly: An innovative financial product focused on reaching the unbanked in Africa, in a “Recharge to Save” model. Bankly developed a cash-digitization payment and savings products, in which users pay using Bankly vouchers.
Powerstove Energy: The world’s first clean cookstove with built-in self-powered IoT System for real time monitoring. Its 100 percent smokeless biomass cookstove cooks food times faster and burns 70 times less of processed proprietary water-resistant Goodlife Biomass Pellets produced from forest and agricultural waste.
Pineapple: A fully decentralized insurer. With Pineapple, members pay premiums into their own wallets rather than a central pot. When claims occur, they are distributed to all wallets in the community, which collectively help pay for the claim.
Trend Solar: Assimilated a 4G Android Smartphone and Solar Home System to provide affordable access to energy, internet, and mobile in an all-in-one solution that seeks to address the needs of 640 million+ people currently living off-grid in Sub-Saharan Africa. TechCrunch reviews several hundred startups from across the region, selecting the top 15 companies to compete on stage. Our partner for the event was Facebook Start.
Trend Solar: Assimilated a 4G Android Smartphone and Solar Home System to provide affordable access to energy, internet, and mobile in an all-in-one solution that seeks to address the needs of 640 million+ people currently living off-grid in Sub-Saharan Africa.
TechCrunch reviews several hundred startups from across the region, selecting the top 15 companies to compete on stage.