The Underdog Tech Award 2024 shortlist recognizes founders of the best tech startups launched outside of the world’s major tech hubs and startup communities.
The winners will be announced on 1st of April.
Chandramouli Samatham, Founder and CEO of Caare, a Visakhapatnam based start-up, has been shortlisted among 20 finalists from around the world for the Underdog Tech Awards 2024. Being selected from 294 applicants and representing India on a global level is an incredible achievement.
The Underdog Tech Award is a new international prize for founders of the best tech startups located outside of major tech hubs and startup communities. The award has been established to support successful technology startups that are thriving despite facing challenges such as limited resources, lack of access to funding, as well as inability to attend important industry events due to their location.
Ekaterina Smirnova, Head of The Underdog Tech Award says: “The Underdog Tech Award is a business award for the ‘underdogs’ of the tech startup world, which is what inDrive once was. All too often we hear about companies from the same global capital hubs and their founders, who have graduated from the same Ivy League universities. With this award we want to support companies from other regions and for their founders, who might not have graduated from Harvard, to believe in themselves and to know that they too can change the world. Together we are building a more diverse and inclusive world, which takes into account the interests of many different communities and people, including those living in some of the world’s most remote places.”
The Underdog Tech Award has a total prize fund of $60,000, and recognizes the winners with a monetary reward and other assistance, including training from industry experts and PR support.
The winners of the 2024 Underdog Tech Award will be announced on April 1st, 2024 at https://underdogtechaward.com/.
The panel of judges will include prominent tech entrepreneurs, members of academia and industry experts. Members of the jury include Fatma Nasujo, Global Head of Corporate Operations at Wasoko; Sean Kim, President and Chief Product Officer at Kajabi; Charles Eesley, Associate Professor and W.M. Keck Foundation Faculty Scholar in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University; Daniel Gándara, Vice President at MercadoLibre; Damla Buyuktaskin, Senior Regional Livelihoods and Economic Inclusion Officer for Asia Pacific Countries in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; and Arsen Tomsky, Founder and CEO of inDrive.
The Underdog Tech Award 2024 shortlist
- Victor Juarez from Guatemala:
Founder of TuConsejeria, a startup focused on providing comprehensive
psychological and mental health support to the Hispanic community, and specifically women,
youth, and young adults, tackling issues such as socialization,
family, citizenship training, sexual education, prevention of violence
(bullying), gender equality, and education, as well as helping users to
open up about their mental health issues.
- Basima Abdulrahman from Iraq: Founder and
CEO of KESK, a startup building the first green energy platform in Iraq.
KESK synergizes solar power and cloud computing technologies to build
alternative energy projects and generate new revenues.
- Elmira Safarova from Chile: Founder
and CEO of Rarus Health, a digital ecosystem that helps to improve
diagnostics, assist the families of children with rare genetic diseases
and generate data to accelerate the development of drug and gene
therapies.
- Omar Ahmed Abdelwahed and Ibrahim Karim Eid
from Egypt: Co-founders of
Valify Solutions,an Egypt-based RegTech company specializing in digital
identity infrastructure technology. Currently the market leader in Egypt,
Valify offers its services to financial institutions, telecos, e-commerce
platforms, as well as many others in various sectors.
- Carlos Andrés García
Iguarán from Colombia:
Co-founder of Numera, a platform enabling companies to automate their
accounting processes, making everyday tasks like sending and receiving
invoices, settling taxes and payroll, and generating timely and reliable
managerial reports from centralized data, simple.
- Amos Muthoni Kimani, from Kenya: Founder
and CEO of TausiApp, an application providing on-demand beauty services to
customers who don’t have time to visit a salon or spa. With TausiApp,
beauty professionals go direct to the customer’s location of choice, be
that at home, work, or elsewhere.
- Mostafa Dawoud from Egypt: Co-founder
and CEO of Dentolize, a fully-customisable dental practice management
solution that scales with clients’
needs and enables dentists to streamline their financial, clinical, and
operational processes. Dentolize can also be used for managing patients,
employees, other associates including insurance companies and suppliers,
inventory and much more, without the need for additional software.
- Roikhanatun Nafi'ah from Indonesia:
Founder and CEO of Crustea, a startup leveraging eco-friendly aeration
technology with smart IoT to support advanced aquaculture ecosystems,
helping increase pond farmers’ productivity and reduce operational costs.
- Chandramouli Samatham from India: Founder and CEO of
Caare, a company on a mission to make basic healthcare accessible to rural
and senior communities by offering a full spectrum of healthcare services
via its online platform.
- Ashraf Bacheet from Egypt: Founder of
O7 Therapy, a startup revolutionizing access to mental health services through
its digital platform and mobile app. O7 Therapy offers online therapy,
corporate wellness programs, and psycho-educational resources, empowering
Arabic-speaking people by building the Middle East’s largest mental health
institution.
- Royford Mutegi from Kenya: Co-founder
and Head of Programs at Vermi-Farm Initiative, which aims to empower
smallholder farmers with sustainable and innovative agri-tech solutions
that increase crop yields and reduce water usage, while creating market
linkages for their surplus produce.
- Sadman Sadek from Bangladesh: Founder
of Digital Innovation for Impact, a startup empowering smallholder farmers
by providing them with valuable meteorological, agricultural, and
technological insights that help them mitigate their exposure to climate
risks. The team specializes in cutting-edge climate modeling, assessing agriculture vulnerabilities
and anticipating long-term impacts, providing stakeholders with the
foresight they need to make informed decisions. .
- Akhlad Mohamed Alabhar from Egypt: Founder
and CEO of Egrobots, an agritech platform that enables farmers to produce
more with fewer resources. Through data and analytics, their solution
improves farm sustainability, reduces costs, and addresses food security
challenges. Egrobots minimizes resource wastage, optimizes water and
pesticide usage, and reduces chemical runoff.
- Julian Garcia from Argentina: Founder of Wiolit, a company working to reduce
food waste in institutional canteens by providing companies with a
platform through which they can monitor their consumption and adjust
production accordingly, empowering them
to meet their CSR objectives.
- Biplab Karki from USA: Founder of
Hyperce, a startup providing innovative and personalized e-commerce
solutions to businesses of all sizes, with a mission to address the
challenges of traditional e-commerce technology by offering scalable,
cost-effective, and highly customizable modern suite solutions that are
easy to manage.
- Mohamed Tarek Mohamed
Abdelzaher from Egypt: Co-founder of P-vita, an innovative startup recycling
agricultural waste to produce raw material for the cosmetics and food
industry.
- Felipe Castañeda from Chile: CEO and
Founder of GLIBER, a fintech providing gig economy workers with access to
a range of financial services, helping them to reach their financial goals
and their employers to reduce turnover.
- Constantine Fedosev, based in the USA: Founder of Visionary, an energy storage plus cloud
service for power grid companies that operate low-voltage distribution
power grids. Visionary’s solution
helps companies reduce their
capital and operational expenses by as much as 2-7 times,
increasing the effectiveness of local renewables by up to 8 times and
helping to manage distributed energy assets.
- Abdelrahman Rashwan from Egypt: Founder of
Credify, a startup empowering digital lenders with alternative data
insights, optimizing creditworthiness assessments at the point of application
and driving hyper-personalized marketing post-onboarding.
- Saúl Paniagua-Lapenta from Bolivia: Co-founder and CCO of VAKA, a platform that connects farmers with investors, helping the latter more easily finance agricultural projects and the former to boost their production capacity through increased funding and technical advice.
About the project
The Underdog Tech Award is a non-profit initiative of inDrive, a global mobility and urban services platform, which operates in over 700 countries in 46 cities. The inDrive app has been downloaded over 200 million times, and was the second most downloaded ridesharing app in 2023. The Underdog Tech Award is an international prize, launched in 2023, to recognize the founders of the best tech startups located outside of the world’s major tech hubs and startup communities.
Like The Underdog Tech Award, inDrive is committed to challenging social injustice. InDrive’s mission is to positively affect the lives of one billion people by 2030.
For more information visit www.inDrive.com
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