Startup Istanbul is a 5-day event happening in the heart of Turkey. It brings together founders, investors, executives, startups, internet companies, angel investors and venture capitalists from Asia and Europe. The event’s main focus is networking. This year’s event will host more than 100 startups from 40+ countries, 200+ investors and around 1500 people in attendance.
This year 7 Pakistani startups have been invited to attend the event. Here we give you a little insight on what these startups are all about, along with some additional interesting information.
1. Milestone
Milestone is a complete Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for Education Institutes. It provides solutions to a lot of manual work and aims to bridge communication gap between an institute and the parents. The team is currently working in 142 educational institutes. Their solution is packed with features like student management, exam, result analysis, bio-metric attendance, parent portal, SMS, accounts, fee and 24/7 support.
The startup is headed by Rai Shahid, a former school teacher. He got the idea for milestone during his time as a teacher in a primary school. He noticed that student records, mark sheets, attendance logs, and fee management were done manually. The only digitization was done through Excel sheets. Shahid, who is also a Software Engineer by training, had lengthy talks with school admins and teachers to provide a solution to their needs. Milestone was eventually formed in 2014. The startup is being currently accelerated at PlanX at Arfa Technology Park, Lahore.
2. Virgin Teez
Virgin Teez is an ecommerce website focussed on selling hip and cool t-shirts online. An interesting aspect about the startup is its hybrid model of business operations. A certain amount of every sale is donated to charity.
Virgin Teez is the brain child of Moeez Javed. He came up with the idea for his startup in the wake of the devastating floods in Pakistan in 2010, an e-commerce focused on selling t-shirts which would donate 43% of all profits to charity. And in order to make things more transparent, its website shows all the supporting non-profit organisations it donates its profit to.
Virgin Teez has gone on to assist over 1,000 flood-affected children, purely through the sales of TShirts.
3. Jewelry Design Pro
Jewelry Design Pro is an online marketplace for buying and selling jewelry designs in CAD format provided by professional jewelry designers globally. It offers a huge variety of 3D Jewelry Designs.
It was co-founded by Abdul Raheem and Muhammad Nadeem in 2014 to overcome the shortage and limited variety of jewelry designs that consumers face. To overcome this shortage they decided to eliminate the gap between the jewelry designer and consumer by bringing together jewelry designers from around the world on a single platform where they can showcase their catalogs and sell their designs to consumers all over the world.
In addition to being an online marketplace, JDP also conducts training workshops for individuals interested in 3D Jewelry Design. They are currently incubated at PITB’s accelerator PlanX.
4. Interacta
An exciting startup from the LUMS Center of Entrepreneurship in Lahore aims to redefine conventional television broadcasting. Using Interacta, viewers of audience-driven shows (such as quiz competitions) can view questions on the app and participate directly without being physically present in the broadcast studio. On the flip side, broadcasters can also use Interacta’s app for advertisements, by promoting special offers or products that appear on the screen.
The startup has raised US$220,000 in seed funding.
5. AutoGenie
AutoGenie is an on-demand car maintenance service founded in October 2014 by 4 friends from Lahore. The website offers oil change, engine tuning, detailed checkup, token tax, challan assistance and other value-added services. These services can be booked along with the time and date of appointment on just a few clicks of a button.
It recently raised USD 100,000 from Pakistan‘s number one automobile online marketplace.
6. foona Review
foona Review is a social network and an online directory for food, bringing foodies and eateries together on a free platform where restaurants, recipes, reviews & experiences can be discovered and shared. The interesting name of the startup is a fusion of the words Food and Khaana.
foona Review first started as a free web-based search engine in 2006, allowing users to rate and review eating establishments. Having started off ahead of its time when social networking was not a norm, foona was put on hold and used the time to develop a network of supporters who believe in the need.
During Startup Intanbul, the foona review team plans to make a few big announcements, which include the launch of their new website built using ruby on rails, launch of foona’s iOS app. Most importantly, they are hoping to become Pakistan’s largest public directory of eateries with over 2,200 listings.
7. Security Wall
Security Wall is a startup that offers Information Security services. Security Wall has an extensive and a circumspectly drafted methodology towards Data Security consultancy, Digital Security & Web Application Entrance Testing while also focusing on Cyber Security Awareness, trainings and InfoSec services to local and international organizations. Their impressive clientele includes Adobe, eBay, Apple, Nokia, Microsoft,Yahoo, Sony, Google, Facebook, RedHat and Oracle. They have also helped out several Pakistani firms like Rozee.pk, DIDx.net and HCPServices.
Interestingly, the founders of this startup are very young – Babar Khan, one of the co-founders is currently in his first year of FSc. Pre-Engineering. It is one of the very few Pakistan startups geared towards cyber-security.
TechJuice is the media partner of Startup Istanbul and you can keep following us to get to know more updates about startups and funding news from Turkey.
