Haiti – Economy: Mache.A SA, selected by the “Star-Up Chile” business accelerator program
09/17/2012 10:13:48
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Mache.A SA, a Haiti-based startup, has been selected to be part of Start-Up Chile, a world-renowned business accelerator program sponsored by the Government of Chile. This year, after receiving more than 1,500 applications from 61 countries, Start-Up Chile announced a list of 101 startups selected to be part of its fifth generation.
Mache.A is a mobile and web-based agricultural platform that aggregates supply from small farmers and connects them to organic produce retailers and processors. The startup was recently recognized as a semi-finalist in the 2012 Dell Social Innovation Competion (DSIC) and subsequently won the DSIC Agriculture People’s Choice Award. Its founder, Saheed Badmus, is a Haitian-American whose vision behind this project is to bring investment back into Haiti’s once-thriving agricultural sector by making agriculture profitable. Saheed recently earned his Bachelor of Science in Agricultural Economics from the University of Maryland College Park and has focused his post-graduate career on pursuing his idea behind Mache.A.
In Chile, Saheed and Mache.A will create a local office to help create a prototype and launch a pilot program with local farmers. His arrival date is October 20. Through this experience, Saheed hopes to return to Haiti with a successful agricultural platform to help millions of Haitian farmers better market their products.
About Start-Up Chile
Start-Up Chile is a program created by the Chilean government, initiated by the Ministry of Economy and executed by CORFO which aims to attract high potential start-up entrepreneurs to start their startups using Chile as a platform to globalize. In line with the national goal of making Chile the center of innovation and entrepreneurship in Latin America, the program plans to welcome 1,000 startups to Chile by 2014.
During the six months, participants must be in Chile – for which they receive US$40,000 in no-equity seed capital, a one-year work visa, and access to local financial and social networks – the aim is to raise funds, hire talent, network and launch their businesses from Chile while fully leveraging and interacting with the local entrepreneurial ecosystem.
The program, unique in the world and a catalyst for similar initiatives such as Startup America, Great Britain, Brazil and Greece, is the ideal opportunity for bootstrappers to receive financing without giving up equity while using the one of the strongest economies in Latin America as a launch. development platform. Start-Up Chile has been featured in The Economist, BusinessWeek, TechCrunch and Forbes, among others.
HL/HaitiFree
