Last week in Cairo, 33 startup technology companies from across the Arab world pitched their businesses to panels of the Middle East's most prominent venture capitalists - see stories from the event here, and here.
The panels evaluated each startup and gave them a score, rating them by their potential and readiness for investment. Then they chose a top ten.
With no further ado, see the ten most promising startups in the Arab world, and my take on the whole situation, after the jump:
Top Ten Arab Startups
Download the list and company descriptions here
Droubi - Has invented and patented a new method of dental surgery
Glocalizer - Provides free wifi access in public places, supported by advertising, sponsorship etc
Applied Research Institute - Research into new technologies in water treatment and organic food
eSpace - Location-based mobile applications
MobiLaps - Develops network applications for internet service providers
Talasim - Humor-focussed user generated content site
Aboker - Technology to produce biofuel from environmental waste
Vertex - Builds customised three-dimensional virtual worlds, for education, real estate etc...
SilMinds - Hardware acceleration technology thats speeds up corporate computing processes
Kindisoft - Security services for web developers who are building applications in the Adobe Flash format
Many of these guys have real potential, and it is worth checking them
out if you are interested in the tech scene in this part of the world.
But some of them will not fill your heart with optimism. Believe it or
not, some of these companies do not even have websites (Droubi,
Glocaliser, Aboker), which is absolutely ridiculous for a technology
company in 2009.
Not that having a website is necessarily good news. This is what the Mobilaps website looks like:
Would you buy web technology from that company?
eSpace have a website, but it is returning a 504 "gateway timeout" message when you try and load it. There is a website
for a company called Vertex Technologies
, based in Jordan, but it makes no mention at all of anything to do with 3D virtual worlds. (UPDATE - It is possible - very likely, actually - that this is actually
, the Dubai-based animation studio that
recently got funding from Intel Capital
).
This means six of the top ten companies would basically tell an investor to stay away if he tried googling them. Doesn't seem like a genius business move to me...
