After four weeks, the Wema Bank Hackaholic 2.0 Bootcamp has wound down, with four startups represented by a pair each took home over N2 million in funding.
This was disclosed in a press statement by the Bank.
The four startups each took home a total of N2,187,500, selected across various industries while being guided by an acceleration curriculum under the mentorship of both faculty and tech specialists from GreenHouse Capital, who also served as event partners.
Winners of the event spent a period of four weeks in a Bootcamp and were selected from sectors including Fintech, Agritech, Edutech, Gaming, and Healthtech, standing out among over 100 entries.
The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the bank, Ademola Adebise, assured of the bank’s commitment to supporting innovative ideas.
He said, “We are happy to see the winners emerge and are positive that you guys will be the unicorns of tech solutions in the next couple of years.
“For us at Wema Bank, we will continue to support innovations and innovative ideas, support our youths, and support our women to thrive. We believe that is the way to go and significantly grow and support the economy.”
Sharing the bank’s strategic investment in technology, the Chief Financial Officer of the bank, Tunde Mabawonku, said, “We realized very early that financial service delivery has moved beyond bricks and mortar physical interactions, hence, at Wema Bank we repositioned internally, invested strategically and heavily in technology to drive Digital Optimization of our services.”
He added that the event was conceived from the need to expand its innovative resources, stating that it needed to “drive innovation from outside”.
Mabawonku said, “Second, we realized we can’t innovate all from within, we need to drive innovation from outside. We then created “Hackaholics” the Wema Bank Hackathon.
“The idea is to bring fresh minds, fresh ideas, fresh insights, into solving day-to-day societal problems leveraging technology. We are also working with third-party resource providers we can invest in to grow the solutions for societal impact.”
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The Chief Digital Officer, Wema Bank, Segun Adeniyi, noted that the event was targeted at creating an enabling environment supportive of realising ideas “into commercial value”.
Adeniyi said, “We aim this initiative at deepening the impact of innovation in the ecosystem and create an opportunity to drive that ecosystem. There is a plethora of start-ups and innovators out there who don’t have the right environment to upscale those ideas into commercial value.
“What we have done is giving some seed to them in funding, and more importantly, we have given them advisory. We have helped them to look at the ideas they have, flesh them into commercial value, help them articulate the problem, identify unique areas where and how they can solve those problems, and identify their target market.”
Bootcamp Winners
Fintech Category: Oladayo Awotukunbo of Plumpter, a Fintech brand that created a marketplace for secure payments to foreign parties and quick banking.
Gaming/Betting Category: Ernest Akinlola and Obayemi Okubajo of My Lotto Hub, a digital startup pioneering the aggregation of lottery operators and enabling lottery punters to manage all their operations in a single platform.
Agritech Category: Aderinola Amole and Olamide Oyinlola of FarmSquare, a brand that focuses on using the e-commerce model to simplify the demand and supply of Agricultural inputs in Nigeria.
Healthtech Category: Uche Udekwe and Joy Chioma of Natal Cares, a startup with a product that optimizes the healthcare value chain to reduce the high mortality rate for pregnant women and children.
