Meet our MEST Africa Challenge South Africa Country Final Judges
On July 29th, 2020, the MEST Africa Challenge: South Africa finals will bring together the best and brightest entrepreneurs from around the country to pitch their startup ventures to a panel of expert judges.
Join MEST, Microsoft, and South African ecosystem partners Founders Factory and Silicon Cape in the search to find South Africa’s next great tech startup!
Judges for the country finals in nine different markets across the continent — Ethiopia, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Rwanda, Ghana, Tanzania, Senegal, Nigeria, and South Africa, include local investors, business leaders, and community players. Here is a closeup of the MEST Africa Challenge South Africa Country Finals judges, who will select the winning pitch to make it to the MEST Africa-wide finals to compete for $50,000 in equity investment.
Roo Rogers
CEO Founders Factory
Roo works at the intersection of business innovation and societal/human impact, creating and executing transformative growth strategies across all sectors with a particular focus on financial, technology, healthcare, education, and consumer industries. As a creative and business leader, Roo takes a unique human-centered approach to venturing, which has brought success in both Silicon Valley and economies such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kenya, Rwanda, and South Africa.
As a practicing entrepreneur, Roo has created five successful startups including a film production company, an independent eco-friendly car service operating in New York, and a patented new-to-the-world beverage. As of 2018, Roo currently leads Johannesburg-based venture development company Founders Factory Africa (FFA) as CEO. FFA’s mission is to build and scale 140 tech-enabled businesses across all 54 countries in Africa — over the next five years. Roo held strategic partnerships with Google, Facebook, Paypal, Intel, Samsung, 3M, and Johnson & Johnson, as well as investment firms and PE funds (Blackrock, TPG Rise, Sequoia). Roo has worked with DFID, USAID, DFAT, and Nike Foundation on the development of the SPRING accelerator program — supporting innovations to transform the lives of adolescent girls across the developing world.
Lebo Mokgabudi
SA Country Manager, Catalyst Fund
Lebo Mokgabudi is an award-winning Digital Financial Services expert with over 10 years experience in building payments and financial inclusion solutions in Africa and Asia. She was part of the Fundamo team that expanded mobile money usage beyond Kenya, advised regulators and central banks on financial inclusion policies, and experienced the transition when the company was acquired by Visa. Lebo founded Budi Shoes, an e-commerce platform, and merged her entrepreneurial and corporate experiences to invest in tech start-ups across Africa. She holds an MBA and a Bachelor of Commerce, Information Systems degree and is currently the SA Country Manager for Catalyst Fund.
Nick Allen
Savant
Nick is the founder and executive director of Savant, South Africa’s only commercial Hardware Technology Incubator, Seed Fund, and Venture Capital Fund. An engineer with an MBA, Nick has spent 17 years working with startup companies that are based on strong scientific and engineering intellectual property with global relevance, initially with Cape Town-based Life Sciences incubator Acorn Technologies, and subsequently with Savant. At Savant Nick has supported companies with technologies ranging from sports safety equipment to food science and advanced materials. Companies supported by Savant have successfully launched products onto both local and international markets.
Ashwin Ravichandran
Managing Director, MEST
Ashwin Ravichandran is currently the Managing Director at MEST and works with 60+ African tech companies based out of the MEST Africa incubator network in Accra, Lagos, Nairobi, and Cape Town and 60 entrepreneurs in training to support them in launching their startups across the continent.
Ashwin joined MEST in 2015 as a Technology Teaching Fellow and has since served as the Incubator Manager for MEST Accra and Director of Portfolio Support and Country Director of Ghana. With a background in Computer Science and Engineering and previous experience working in the innovation team at Honeywell and building startups in India, Ashwin brings extensive technical knowledge to his executive management experience at MEST.
In his role as Director of Portfolio Support, Ashwin has overseen the growth and development of highly successful MEST portfolio companies such as Complete Farmer, Asoriba, Leti Arts and Kudobuzz, working to maximize their growth and success in terms of business development, product management and raising further rounds of funding.
MEST Africa Challenge South Africa Country Finals
Join MEST and Microsoft on July 29th for the South Africa Country Finals of the MEST Africa Challenge. The top tech startup from the South Africa finals will go on to compete against winners from eight other countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Côte D’Ivoire, Senegal, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Rwanda, for the chance to win $50,000 in equity investment and to join MEST’s Africa-wide startup support network. Register for the event, here.
