Tehran’s leading startup accelerator Avatech, held its 4th demo day on December 19th, 2016, and gathered local VCs, investors, mentors to showcase its startups.
The event started with Mohsen Malayeri, CEO of Avatech coming up on stage and welcoming the audience. Like the previous cycles, Malayeri talked about Avatech’s achievements in the past two years by giving examples of its previous alumni such as Faranesh, an online education platform similar to Lynda which offers various tutorial courses such as animation and film design, programming, building websites and business. According to Malayeri Faranesh has 150k users, 1300 educational courses in 11 different categories, 2,500 hours of educational content, 260 tutors, 27 full-time staff and has seen a 700% growth in the past year, up until now.
In the past two years, Avatech also changed its program to suit the needs of Iran’s; startup community. Avatech recently introduced Avacamp which is a free two-months program that provides workspace, mentorship and training to startups. The program is developed for boosting startups by helping them validate their business model, gain customer insight, understand their market and go to market strategy, optimize their product and build up their team. Startups will also learn about investors pitch and fundraising basics.
Avatech in the past two years
Malayeri also gave some statistics on Avatech’s activity in the last two years:
Said Rahmani, chairman of Avatech and the CEO of Sarava Pars also went on the stage to give a speech. Rahmani advised startups to build their businesses upon their hard work and their own investment rather than to be dependent on the investors’ money. He also mentioned that the right type of foreign investment can be good for the Iranian startup ecosystem but we have enough capital locally to fuel the startups.
Investment panel
There was also a panel on how to get an investment with Ali Fayazbakhsh founder of Harkat1, VC arm of MCI the biggest mobile operator in Iran, Hamid Rezazade CEO of Pichak, which developed famous apps such as Cooolkey, Recorduim and AppJs, Hamid Asadi co-founder of Navaar, an audio book platform, Housein Mafakherian co-founder of Karaya Group, an angel network.
Right now Avatech has two major programs running to make the teams ready for the market. The first one is the main acceleration program which takes place 2 times per year and its duration is 4 months. The other program that we explained earlier takes place 4 times per year and it’s an 8-week program.
You can find the previous demo days coverage by TechRasa here: 2nd demo day, 3rd demo day.
What are Avatech’s cycle 4 startups?
Hyperka is a location-based platform for grocery delivery services that gives the convenience of shopping to customers and enables them to order online from local grocers through a mobile app and website and have those orders delivered to their home/office in less than one hour.
Manishen is a platform for real estate with a focus on realtors. Manishen establishes effective communication between realtors and owners and applicants so that they can make better transaction.
User generated profanity is neither normal nor inevitable, so this startup builds a service that verifies and publishes people’s opinions faster than usual. In Persian, there is no technological impediment to block profanity comments. Publishing comment is consuming time and costly. NazarBin automatically modifies and publishes comments fast and easy.
Collentify is an automated collection management. It enables collectors to make an online version of their collection only by uploading pictures of it, in other words, the problem with traditional printed catalogs is that it takes so much time to find a collectible in it. Assume you have found a stamp in your collection with only some picture and no word and no signs on it. How can you find it in the catalog? With Collentify you only need a picture of the stamp. You give the stamp’s picture to the system and it identifies the stamp in seconds, giving you all the information as well as the price.
OTEX is an online platform to sell, purchase and also exchange cars. There is an feature in OTEX that let you hire a car professional inspector to check body and technical stuff of a car that you want to buy or even if it’s the car that you want to sell and you don’t know about the technical side and the real value, OTEX would provide you with the services to solve these issues.
Roonegar is an online platform for graphic designs. The first version of Roonegar is focused on business card design. In order to design your business card, you don’t need to look for a graphic designer. You can easily open Roonegar and search for your favorite design, choose it, customize it and put an order for printing.
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