MENA | Page 6

The best ideas hit you at the most unlikely of places- that's how the trope goes, and that's exactly how Kuwaiti entrepreneur Mohammad Almunaikh describes the genesis of his startup, Ghinwa.

The Bahrain Development Bank (BDB) has kicked off the US$100 million venture capital fund of funds to support startups in Bahrain.

The investment has brought with it a new look and added capabilities for the enterprise, and will help move Hopscotch's offerings to a digital platform.

On the sidelines of Unbound Bahrain, key players in Bahrain's ecosystem have their say.

As a mobile app that made use of AI to auto-summarize meetings, Wrappup fits it neatly with Voicera's own offering, which leverages a combination of voice recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning to provide attendees of a meeting with a full recording and transcription, as well as high accuracy meeting highlights.

"When you get smacked in the face, and things start falling down around you, it makes you stop, take a look at what you have become, and analyze your complete body of work up to this point."

Haider Ali Khan, CEO of properties portal Bayut.com, believes that his enterprise can be considered as a "driver of change" in its sector- and that's a statement you probably won't argue with once you hear its growth story.

Google is taking a step towards increasing the employability of the MENA's youth population.

Across her business journey, there's one strategy that Al Barami has always held strong- that of never underestimating the power of technology.

While many of tech's top disruptors are born, or raised, in Silicon Valley, there are a myriad of others across the globe looking for a way into the booming growth of new tech in the United States.

Flat6Labs Beirut's first seed program cycle supported a diverse group of entrepreneurs working on solutions across industries including hardware, fintech, edtech, adtech, hospitality, video production and enterprise solutions.

Enhance, a UAE-based tech startup that builds marketplace businesses to meet the needs of Middle East and Africa consumers, has closed seed funding of US$1.5 million.

Since the first ever STEP event in 2013, organizers say attendance has grown from 100 attendees to over 6,000 at STEP 2017.

The startup claims to be gaining traction steadily since the time it participated in the Barclays Egypt and Flat6labs-powered 1864 fintech startup accelerator, and it had also won first place in the startups track at the 10th MIT Enterprise Forum Arab Startup Competition held in Bahrain.

Co-founded by entrepreneurs Yousef Wadi, Kanaan Manasrah, and Shadi Al Shalabi in early 2017, Nestrom focuses on "delivering high-end, easy to deploy agricultural software products and solutions," and says that they aspire to "transform all farms into smart farms."

"If you don't have fun, you cannot succeed in business. My motto is: work hard, party harder."

MAGNiTT, a platform that tracks and reports developments in the MENA entrepreneurship space, starts 2018 by taking a look at the year gone by and how it treated the region's startups.

Collaboration with investors in other geographies strengthens the performance of the local ecosystem, therefore, supports local startups' growth.

For countries in the process of transitioning to becoming knowledge-based economies (as many Middle East nations are), it would be safe to say that investing in digital automation and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and breaking down the "geeky" stereotypes associated with these areas will be crucial first steps.

Two major avenues Hachem sees telcos losing returns on are SMS (Short Message Service) and digital advertising, which are the services Monty Mobile is focusing on.

Dubai Studio City, a support hub for media and broadcasting companies, in association with regional entrepreneurship enabler in5 has launched a video competition for the region's creatives.