Egyptian startup, Fresh Source, wins third prize in TiE Women Global Pitch Competition

10x Industry

Mita Srinivasan
10x Industry
Published:

Egyptian startup, Fresh Source, wins third prize in TiE Women Global Pitch Competition

The six finalists were selected from 41 winners from 37 TiE chapters including 5 winners across MENA by a stellar line-up of judges from the startup ecosystem

Egyptian startup, Fresh Source, came third, winning $10,000 in a six-way pitch for the $100,000 prize money at the 2021 TiE Women Global Finals hosted by the Dubai chapter in partnership with Gitex Global. The top prize was won by ZeroCircle, winner from TiE Delhi NCR, who walked away with $75,000 while TiE New York/Toronto’s winner, AltTex, won second prize of $15000.

The winners were selected by a stellar line-up of judges from the startup ecosystem that included Fadi Ghandour, Najla Al Midfa, Dr. Saeeda Jaffar, GV Ravishankar, and Raja Al Mazrouei.

The finalists were selected from the 41 winners that travelled to Dubai from 37 TiE chapters including 5 winners across MENA that were selected by TiE Dubai from more than 100 applications received from the regional startups.

As the result of local competitions, the 40 winners covered industries that cover life sciences & healthcare, fintech, healthtech, retail and ecommerce, arts, leisure, sports, hospitality, technology, media and telecommunications, consumer products, enterprise technology, environment, agritech, legaltech, and edtech. All the projects address social and sustainable problems with passion and determination, according to the judges.

Prashant (PK) Gulati, TiE Global Board Trustee and President Emeritus, TiE Dubai commented, “Empowering women to pursue entrepreneurship is one of TiE’s key objectives. Across the globe, the technology industry is widely known to be male dominated, however, in the UAE alone, 35 percent of technology entrepreneurs in the MENA region are women, representing progressive growth of women in this sector.”

According to McKinsey & Company Women at work report, more than 23,000 businesses are run by Emirati women with a combined worth of approximately $45–50 billion. Moreover, as per the latest statistics women’s increasing participation in the workforce could add an estimated $2.7 trillion to the region’s economy by 2025.

The TiE Women initiative is built on the Pillars of: learning, mentoring, access to funding, scalability, safe space and community. The competition celebrates and salutes women’s courage, grit, and hard work while giving them a platform to learn, network and grow.