Avatech Held Its Third Demo Day

Avatech, one of the leading startup accelerators in Iran held its third demo day, showcasing its third cycle startups to investors, leading companies and mentors.

The event started with Mohsen Malayeri the CEO of Avatech giving a speech on the accelerator’s activity in the past years and their achievements in the last three cycles.

Said Rahmani, CEO of Sarava VC and Chairman of Avatech accelerator also gave a speech on the importance of paying attention to young entrepreneurs and their effect on Iran’s economic developments. Rahmani emphasized that the young entrepreneurs are Iran’s real assets and by supporting them the country can make sure they wouldn’t leave for other opportunities outside of Iran. The event continued with a panel on “investments on Iranian startups”. Majid Ghasemi, co-founder of Fidibo, the online ebook store, was one of the panelists. Ghasemi shared the experience he had with the domestic and foreign investors which he negotiated with for raising money for his company.

Avatech’s cycles consist of two parts: The first part is pre-acceleration which takes the first 2 months of the cycle and the second part is a 4 months acceleration. The accelerator accepts 20 teams at the beginning of each cycle and picks 10 teams for acceleration phase.

After the speeches and the panel, it was the presentation time for the 10 teams of cycle three. Unlike the previous cycles the presentations were in Persian so the teams were more relax and comfortable on the stage. But Avatech also gave out an English booklet of the teams with their essential information in it. And of course after the pitches the attendees who couldn’t speak English had the chance to talk to the teams face to face to get their answers. We think that with each cycle, the teams are getting more mature and Avatech is improving to level up to international standards. From the statistics and numbers, it was vivid that the teams were doing much better than the previous cycles.

We are not going into details with all the teams, but we handpicked 4 of them that we liked most:

Botick:

An online search engine for fashion products from both online and physical stores. Botick is a fast-growing platform for fashion products that helps people easily find their favorite trendy clothes or accessories while connecting them directly to sellers in shops. Botick also gives merchants the opportunity to present their products to new customers. The startup has a 60% average monthly growth rate with 450K unique visitors up until today. Botick has 18K products from 500 stores.

Revenue model: Premium subscriptions for sellers, brand stores, and shopping malls.

Germinal:

Germinal is an Iranian tech company building IoT products. Its first product is Findima, a device that helps customers not lose their items such as keys, baggage, and wallets. Germinal has crowdfunded their first Product Findima, via 2nate (an Iranian crowdfunding platform). They have sold 417 of Findima products in less than 50 days.

Revenue Model: Product sales, additional service for finding items using GPS.

NazarBazaar:

FullFekr:

FullFekr is an online platform which helps people find and talk to certified therapists in a safe, affordable and easy way, both on mobile and the web. Right now they have 70K users and 80 therapists.

Revenue Model: Commission from therapy sessions.