Washington, D.C. and Sao Paulo, Brazil (PRWEB) January 29, 2014
Today, 1776, an incubator platform located a few blocks from the White House, in partnership with SuperNova Labs, an early stage accelerator program for tech startups that provides business boot camps and product development mentorship, announced the winners of Challenge Cup for the Sao Paulo region.
Challenge Cup is a startup competition spanning 16 cities around the world and culminating in Washington, D.C. to find the world’s most promising startups innovating in the categories of education, healthcare, energy, and smart cities.
Twenty-four of South America’s most promising startups competed during the event on January 28th. The competitors also participated in an accelerator program for the two days preceding the competition.
Distinguished judges for the competition included Evan Burfield of 1776, Cris Concalves of Descomplicia, Luis Novo of SuperNova Labs, Fernando Bresslau of Aceleratech, Nayib Abdala of SuperNova Labs Colombia, and Cecilia Castro, Fabiana Zanni, and Henrique Tichauer of Pearson.
“As one of the 10 largest cities in the world, Sao Paulo is quickly becoming a hub for tech innovation,” said Evan Burfield, co-founder of 1776. “Tonight’s event displayed the energy and spirit of South America’s startup culture and we’re looking forward to the next presentations by these winners. Many thanks to SuperNova Labs for being such gracious hosts for this event.”
The regional winners include:
- Education: EduKar— An innovative way for people to invest in students’ training. EduKar offers financial support and various other services to complement their training in exchange for a percentage of student’s earnings for a specified after graduation
- Healthcare: Medicina— An alternative healthcare delivery model, based on online, high-frequency interactions to complement the traditional office-based, low-frequency model, increasing doctor productivity and patient satisfaction. It does so through a questions and answers platform that connects patients with doctors and general practitioners with specialists.
- Energy: SolarBrush—SolarBrush produces robots that clean solar panels in arid regions, such as deserts. Current methods of manual maintenance are both costly and dangerous in high heat and high voltage environments, but without maintenance solar panels reduce their effectiveness by up to 35%. In an ever growing race to create new energy systems and keep them running, Solarbrush has a market ready to capitalize on.
- Smart Cities: Mandae—An application that allows users to take a photo of anything they want to ship and have it picked up, packaged, and delivered via the appropriate carrier. With everyone from small carriers to Amazon looking for new delivery methods, Mandae is tapping into a market that is on a tipping point.
Next week Challenge Cup competitions will be held in Cape Town, South Africa and Tel Aviv, Israel. Challenge Cup Global Partners include: U.S. Chamber of Commerce, District of Columbia, Pearson, TechCocktail, iStrategyLabs, Microsoft, and The Aspen Institute.
To be accepted, companies must be less than three years old, have less than $3M USD in revenue to date, have a scalable product or service already in the market, evidence some level of traction (active users, enterprise customers, or revenue), and have raised less than $1.5M USD in capital. Companies can apply on: http://challengecup.1776dc.com/apply.
About 1776
1776 is a major initiative focused on helping entrepreneurs seeking to reinvent our lives as citizens. Located just blocks from the White House, 1776 convenes and accelerates startups from around the world by connecting them to the political, intellectual, social and financial capital that make Washington, D.C. unique. Visit http://www.1776dc.com or @1776dc on Twitter for more information.