Global ICT infrastructure provider Huawei has announced six startups as the winners of its ICT Incubator 2022 programme.
The winners will get seed money as the award in addition to the opportunity to meet global startups for knowledge sharing.
The announcement was made at a city hotel Wednesday. Huawei organised the event with the cooperation of Startup Bangladesh and the Innovation Design and Entrepreneurship Academy (iDEA).
The competition has two groups, namely, the Idea Stage and the Early Stage. The winners of the Idea Stage and the Early Stage, respectively, are Insure Cow (Champion), Durjoy DSS (first runners-up), and Relaxy (second runners-up); and Jahaji (champions), Palki (first runners-up), and We Gro Technologies (second runners-up).
The champions will get Tk500,000 as prize money and $125,000 Huawei Cloud credit; whereas the first and second runners-up will get Tk300,000 and Tk100,000 as prize money, respectively, in addition to $80,000 Huawei Cloud Credit. Apart from these, a co-founder from each company will visit abroad to meet successful foreign startups.
An independent jury panel of the iDEA project, Huawei Bangladesh, Startup Bangladesh and other renowned leaders of the startup ecosystem of Bangladesh, selected the winners.
ICT State Minister Zunaid Ahmed Palak joined the event as the chief guest. Li Jiming, ambassador of China to Bangladesh, was present as a special guest along with Professor Vincent Chang, vice-chancellor of Brac University, Pan Junfeng, CEO of Huawei Bangladesh, Sami Ahmed, managing director of Startup Bangladesh, Md Altaf Hossain, project director (joint secretary) of iDEA Project.
Around 180 participants applied for this year’s ICT Incubator program. Divided into two groups – The idea stage and the Early stage, 68 startups were selected to join the Incubator Bootcamp, where they were mentored and provided technical training.
After this, the participants presented their startup ideas before the jury panel. Based on the judgment of the jury members, a total of 20 startups from both stages were selected as finalists for the gala event. Finally, the top 3 from the Idea stage and the top 3 from the Early stage have been announced as winners at the gala event.
