There’s been a severe funding gap between male and female entrepreneurs for many years. It’s a gap that She Loves Tech has set its eyes on closing. Since its humble beginning in 2015, She Loves Tech has become the world’s largest startup competition and accelerator platform. It’s also the largest competition for women-led and women-impact tech startups and is active across 70+ countries on six continents. The competition follows several stages: screening and preparation, local rounds, boot camps, a global round, and an international summit and winner showcase. Now that the Sri Lankan round has ended, the winner will receive mentoring before participating in the global finals.
Revisiting She Loves Tech Sri Lanka 2022 and its finalists.
She Loves Tech Sri Lanka 2022 kicked things off in partnership with Hatch as the main organizer and Patamar Capital as the main local sponsor. Following the screening process, the final shortlisted startups went through an exclusive pitch preparation curriculum and mentorship sessions. These initiatives helped prepare them for the local rounds of the competition.
This year nine women-led and women-impact startups were selected as finalists of She Loves Tech Sri Lanka 2022. At the local finals, they pitched their startups to a panel of judges who were veterans of the local tech industry. The board of judges for this round consisted of the Co-Founder and CEO of Hatch, Brindha Selvadurai Gnanam, CEO and Director of Softlogic Invest, Niloo Jayatilake, CEO and Director of Loons Lab, Pulani Ranasinghe, Head of Operations at Patamal Capital, Satchith Kurukulasuriya, and startup investor, Sonia Hirdaramani.
Each finalist was given 5 minutes to pitch their ideas at the She Loves Tech Sri Lanka 2022 finals and 3 minutes to have a Q&A session with the judges. But only one of these nine startups got the opportunity to move to the global stage. Let’s first take a closer look at the top three finalists.
The second runner-up: AutoRoto
Pitched by the Co-Founder and CEO of AutoRoto, Sajitha Dissanayake, the startup offers automatic rotoscoping software. Rotoscoping involves cutting out a person or object from raw footage and then merging the cutout person or object with a different background. Typically, this process is done manually, with the artist having to go frame by frame to adjust the outline of the selected object as motion happens. Yet, this manual process is highly time-consuming. On average, it takes a professional an entire day to rotate about 15 frames. AutoRoto does all of this automatically. Thus, enabling artists to rotoscope objects and people out of whole chunks of footage with only a few clicks.
The first runner-up: MCQ Meds
MCQ Meds is an educational tool specifically designed for medical students. Pitched by Co-Founder and CEO Hashma Imnisar, at She Loves Tech Sri Lanka 2022, this product is currently Sri Lanka’s only online tool for med students. It offers students a comprehensive question bank to help them study for their exams. First, the startup gathers question banks from the medical faculties of local and international universities. These questions are then provided to students on a subscription basis. It currently has a question bank of 7000+ questions, growing each week, alongside their answers and explanations.
The winner: Mabs Circle
Pitched by Co-Founder and CEO Jehani Muthukuda, at She Loves Tech Sri Lanka 2022, the startup showcased its product, Mabspace. Their product is a job posting platform connecting part-timers with startups looking to hire them. It brings together Sri Lanka’s startup ecosystem that struggles in hiring and Sri Lanka’s undergraduates looking for flexible part-time work options while studying – solving two existing problems with one powerful solution. Jehani and her team will receive mentoring from Patamar Capital to help them further their pitch and product as the winner of the local round. They will then go on to the next stage of the competition with all the other global finalists.
What’s next for She Loves Tech 2022? The Global Finals
At the She Loves Tech 2022 Global Finals happening on the 5th of November, the finalists will receive the opportunity to showcase themselves and pitch their products and services to She Loves Tech’s global audience. It should be noted that startups participating in this will have the opportunity to win up to USD 50,000 in funding and other prizes. Soon after their global finals, She Loves Tech will hold its Global Summit. It’s also Asia’s global flagship for women and technology. All the global finalists will be able to fly to Singapore to participate, and the top international winners will be provided the stage to showcase their businesses in front of She Loves Tech’s global audiences.
She Loves Tech is the opportunity women-led and women-impact startups from all over Sri Lanka had their eye on when applying. The competition was a powerful display of Sri Lankan women displaying their innovation and expertise. It provided more young women with role models to follow their dream careers regardless of any glass ceiling. Although a chapter has come to an end, a new one begins. She Loves Tech announced that they are currently building their venture capital fund to invest in startups that go through their competitions—enabling more women entrepreneurs to grow their startups and further closing the funding gap.