Denis Opudo
Accounteer startup emerged the winner at the MEST Africa Challenge which was held on 28th April 2018. The event took place at MEST Africa’s Lagos incubator in Ikoyi. Accounteer is a cloud accounting firm that allows SMEs to develop invoices, follow up on expenses and track their finances online without the stress of spending a lot of time on the manual process or losing their records. It charges a monthly fee of $10.
The win assured it of a place at the MEST Africa Summit that will take place in Cape Town in June 2018. It also gave it a chance to compete for an equity investment worth $50,000. The startup faced stiff competition from seven different non-MEST startups before becoming the winner. Apart from Accounteer the other startup that took part in the event included OsusuMobile. This is a fintech startup that provides micro savings and microloans to small-scale entrepreneurs. It does that via their mobile phones.
OVG Media was also a participant in the event. The startup is a digital video platform that provides content of high quality that is developed for the African market. Nebula Pay startup is a conversational payments platform found on Facebook and Skype. OyaPay startup allows customers carry out monetary transactions using QR codes even if they lack card or cash. The other startup that was present during the awards was PayPass which is an all-inclusive ticket buying platform. Jara startup was also present during the event. It is a platform that collaborates with retailers to reward shoppers and users with discounts. Finally, there was Wallet which is software that allows one to carry out their monetary transaction using their mobile phones.
There were a group of qualified judges that controlled the competition. They were eTranzact’s director Ike Eze, Managing Partner, Growth Capital by CCHub, Tunji Eleso, Business Fellow, and MEST Incubator Tech Daniel Isa. On the same day their competition also took place in Accra Ghana and another one took place on 30th April in Nairobi Kenya.
