World 2.0 is coming quickly, and our latest Pioneers have been working tirelessly to create it. From better email analytics and marketing to software that helps people optimize their savings to a Shopify for Africa, our Pioneers’ companies span a diverse range of categories and multiple continents.
Meet this month’s winners:
DyNotify - Muath Juady, Kinana Joudeh, Reema Riyad
eCommerce search for 100+ sites
Let’s say you need to buy a microphone to start that podcast you’d always wanted to. You open up Amazon to buy it and… there’s 100 options with different prices in front of you. Maybe you open eBay to see if you could get a better deal. Still too many options. You'll notice prices keep changing and it’s unnecessarily difficult to find the best deal, nearly impossible to track discounts.
DyNotify solves this. It allows you to search across dozens of websites like Amazon US, Amazon UK, eBay, Aliexpress and Flipkart in the same place. Filter results by options like price, rating and country. Get notified on great prices.
Bumpa - Adetunji Opayele, Kelvin Umechukwu
Shopify for Africa
After working with many small business owners in his previous company, Adetunji realized that there weren’t any non-technical eCommerce solutions tailored for the African market.
To fix that, he and Kelvin started Bumpa (formerly Salescabal). It’s an online store and inventory management system, simple enough to be set up and managed by anyone who can use a smartphone. Since joining the tournament, they’ve onboarded several logistics companies and launched mobile apps on both Android and iOS.
Cash Coach - Sam Abrika, Angela Coronado, Alexandr Priezzhev
Gamified money management
Saving money has become a huge concern for millennials. But money management is hard. You need to overcome the need for instant gratification, you need to think of ‘future you’ and think long-term. Why save when you could just eat out one more time?
Cash Coach fixes this problem by making money management fun. You can set the level of difficulty, track your progress with weekly spending objectives and monthly saving challenges, and compete against other users for increased motivation.
Aasaan - Navneet Kumar
No-code machine-learning
While there’s been an explosion of software libraries to easily build ML classifiers, you still need to have extensive knowledge of machine learning to use them. Even if you do have that knowledge, you need to spend a lot of unnecessary time fiddling with GPUs, your cloud infrastructure and deployment.
Enter Aasaan.ai. It allows you to build, label, train and deploy text or audio classifiers without writing a single line of code. You can use it for customer complaint tagging, sentiment analysis, and more, all according to your data. And if you’re wondering if it works well, a model trained on Aasaan.ai ranked in the top 24% of a Kaggle competition. But it took only 5 minutes to set up.
Palabra - Karen Serfaty
Segment.io for Emails
Making custom email segments is annoyingly difficult. Emailing “users who logged in last week who aren’t paying customers” would require a lot of setup on existing platforms, if possible at all.
Palabra allows you to merge all your users' data from websites like Stripe, Mailchimp, and Intercom and easily make specific segments to email people. So far, it seems like it’s working. Karen reached her first 100 users and had 40% weekly growth in the month of April.
Coinfu - Rj Bernaldo
TDD-based trading automation
One issue Rj found when building strategies is how often backtesting is an afterthought. Coming from a software engineering background, he decided to introduce one of the most helpful techniques he uses in his career to automated trading: the test driven methodology.
With Coinfu, tests are prioritized at the very start and are run every time the strategy is updated. This helps traders focus on concrete goals in order to remain focused and build performant strategies - all without writing a single line of code.
If these people and projects sound interesting to you, check out the full list: http://pioneer.app/winners. And if you’d like to earn your place on that list… just start playing: https://pioneer.app.