South African influencer and brand matching platform Webfluential has been crowned winner of the 2016 Start-Up Tel Aviv South Africa competition.
As part of the prize, Webfluential’s Global Head of Operations Kirsty Sharman will be heading to Tel Aviv in September to take part in the DLD Festival Week. The DLD Festival week is Israel’s largest international hi-tech gathering, featuring hundreds of start-ups, VCs, angel investors and leading multinationals including top technological talent and leading companies such as Intel, Google, and Microsoft, Kimberly Clark, Amazon, GM, Amdocs, Facebook and more.
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“The Webfluential team is incredibly excited about this opportunity, not only to help our business gain insight and experience in the international space – but also to shine light on the South African Technology scene,” says Sharman. “Israel is one of the few markets that has perfected the recipe of exporting technology at scale. The opportunity to learn about that process from the world’s leading engineers, VCs and entrepreneurs is not something that comes along every day – so I feel honoured that Webfluential has been chosen to do just that!”
Judges for the event included former Investment Analyst Noluthando Gosa, PR and Communications Lead of Core Group Tanya Kovarsky, and financial journalist Hillary Joffe.
The panel of judges also included Stuff Publisher Toby Shapshak. “Israel is widely acknowledged for its prowess as a mecca for startups and innovation,” said Shapshak. “Startup Tel Aviv is not only a great competition for South African startups to be involved in, but also for the winner to get to Tel Aviv itself and experience that thriving epicentre of innovation”.
“This year’s focus has been on women entrepreneurs, which I think is very fitting and appropriate and is clearly the new reality in South Africa, given how many strong entrants we saw,” he added. “Webfluential is an interesting and unique company that is doing something very different with the social media market. Well done Kirsty Sharman and her team. It’ll be interesting to see what new ventures come out of her trip to Israel where she will meet other innovators and venture capitalists.”
