Get in the Ring (GITR) South Africa has announced transport startup Go Metro as the regional winner of the Cape Town batch. Founder of Go Metro Justin Coetzee will represent Cape Town in Rwanda as part of the regional finalists in September 2014.
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Over 2 000 startups from around 50 countries will compete for the grand sum of €1 000 000 (R15 000 000) in November. Apart from the global competition, GITR says to encourage the global entrepreneurial movement and is currently the largest investment competition in the world.
Go Metro captures and curates transport data to make significant information freely available to residents of Cape Town, South Africa. The solution is a mobile app and service that is free to use, and captures, manages and presents transport information for the rail network in Cape Town.
Go Metro has also named as one of the top African startups in DEMO Africa 2013 and was more recently chosen as one of PwC’s top 10 South African startups in the Vision to Reality programme.
GITR — South Africa saw eight of the most promising Capetonian startups compete last week. During the battle each of the eight startups were paired, two contestants facing-off through five rounds with different pitching topics namely Team, Achievements, Business Model & Market, Financial & Investments, Freestyle Pitch.
On-demand courier delivery service Wumdrop came in second spot, with data communications NerveData and adaptive elearning startup Daptio named the runners-up.
Chatting to Ventureburn, Coetzee notes that the experience highlights the emerging maturity in the Cape Town startup scene. “All the companies were doing really really interesting things for a wide cross-section of society. It shows that Cape Town startups are starting to solve hard problems at major scale. This is a very exciting time to have a startup in Cape Town,” he says.
Coetzee also says that this opportunity is a massive boost in confidence for Go Metro’s vision:
“Going up against other strong startups that have been very successful recently, such as Snapplify, Ekaya and Wumdrop — and coming out on top was a validation of our initial vision and traction. I think at the end of the night, it was clear that we were the startup on stage that could have a meaningful impact that reached millions of people in hundreds of cities in the world. And that was what was exciting to the judges and the audience.”
