24 Entrepreneurs From 12 Countries Selected at 61st International Selection Panel in Morocco
Endeavor selected 24 High-Impact Entrepreneurs leading 18 companies across 12 countries at the 61st International Selection Panel (ISP). Endeavor now supports 1,160 High-Impact Entrepreneurs from 735 companies in 24 emerging and growth markets. The entrepreneurs were chosen at a panel held from October 5-7th in Marrakesh, Morocco.
“Seeing the network come together in an amazing setting like Morocco demonstrates how far we’ve grown in recent years,” said Endeavor Co-founder and CEO Linda Rottenberg. “Endeavor has truly become an unstoppable force that continues to inspire the best entrepreneurs to dream big.”
The ISP is the culmination of a rigorous multi-step selection process. At the ISP, top local and international business leaders interview candidates about their businesses and high-impact potential, and then vote on whether or not candidates become Endeavor Entrepreneurs. Post-selection, Endeavor provides entrepreneurs with customized services, including introductions to local and international business mentors and volunteers from Fortune 500 consulting firms. Endeavor Entrepreneurs have had a significant track record of creating thousands of jobs and building sustainable growth models in their home countries.
Endeavor will host one more International Selection Panel this year in Mexico City (December).
Brief descriptions of the selected entrepreneurs and companies follow:
BRAZIL
Entrepreneurs: Fernando Steler
Company: DirectOne
Large enterprises, such as insurance companies with numerous siloed divisions, utilize many channels to communicate with their clients, making coordination across lines of business difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. DirectOne is a one-stop-shop for large enterprises looking to automate and streamline all customer communications. The easy-to-use platform, One to One Engine, helps large enterprises create and manage personalized customer communications and run data analysis that facilitates customer retention and relationship growth. Situated in the US$18.4B SaaS market, DirectOne has captured six of the ten largest insurance companies in Latin America as clients and begun targeting multinational financial institutions and telecom companies.
BULGARIA
Entrepreneur: Peter Mitev
Company: Chaos Group
Chaos Group is a computer graphics (CG) software development company that develops rendering solutions for the media, entertainment and design industries. A rendering engine converts 3D wire frame compositions into 2D images with light and shadow-simulating algorithms. Their flagship software, V-Ray (98.5% of revenue), is industry standard and compatible with 13 (15 by 2016) of the most popular 3D imaging platforms. Based in Bulgaria, Chaos Group has offices around the globe—in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Japan, and Korea—and has been used for the top CG projects across industries. Big clients include Gensler Architects and the design studios for Game of Thrones, Halo, Terminator, and many more. V-Ray is known for having the highest quality renders for its quick speed.
COLOMBIA
Entrepreneur: Hugo Cortes
Company: Eglobalt
With increased urbanization, congestion in Latin American has spiked to alarming levels; an individual spends roughly 30 minutes a day circling the block or lining in queues. Meanwhile, companies dealing with large volumes of transactions suffer from high costs associated with inefficient cash handling. eglobalt eliminates this longstanding frustration of drivers and shoppers through its self-service machines for parking and payments, reducing waiting time by 72%. By replacing human cashiers with machines, it also helps companies monitor fraud and non-payment, reducing their costs by 60% on average. eglobalt has established itself as a frontrunner in Colombia with 75% of the shopping centers in Bogotá using its parking technologies, and leading mobile operators such as Millicon International and Telmex using its payment solutions.
Entrepreneur: Carlos Alberto Santana
Company: Acsendo
Over 42% of SMEs in Latin America list building and retaining strong teams as a major challenge, according to a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Unlike with MNCs, talent management remains a foreign concept to smaller, resource-strapped companies. Acsendo founder Carlos Santana (37) wants to formalize and strengthen talent management within SMEs by providing them with tools to favor analytics over gut instincts. Acsendo offers SMEs access to a low cost, easy-to-use, and customizable platform for talent optimization; its data-driven tools allow businesses to streamline decisions around talent acquisition, retention, and compensation. The company has impacted over 40,000 employees from over 100 companies, reducing employee turnover per company by 20% on average.
EGYPT
Entrepreneurs: Mohamed Fahmy
Company: Integration Services Technology (IST)
IST’s omnichannel contact center solutions integrate clients’ back-office systems with all major modern communication channels (phone, email, mobile, video, and social media) to drive efficiency while enhancing functionality. The veteran systems integrator helps large enterprises deliver a seamless multimedia customer service experience, while preserving existing infrastructure, through its combination of consulting and integration services, software innovation and feature-rich modular applications. Boasting the region’s highest number of skilled engineers and strategic partnerships with global technology giants like Cisco and Genesys, IST has become the preferred systems integrator of over 100 leading financial institutions, telecom operators, transportation companies and governments across the GCC, Egypt and Turkey.
Entrepreneurs: Hussein Rifai & Ahmed el Adawy
Company: Inertia Holding Group
For middle-class homebuyers in a pinch, Inertia Holding Group (IHG) offers modern yet affordable housing options in upscale Egyptian neighborhoods. Despite half a decade of revolution and economic crisis, IHG has remained profitable by accomodating the cost-sensitive homebuyer, a growing segment in a country of 89 million people. Serving as the backbone of the Egyptian economy, real estate investments jumped in value from US$992 million in 2001 to US$3.9 billion by the end of 2012, reflecting an annual growth rate of 27.5%. Riding this upswell, Inertia has amassed a diversified pipeline of ten projects valued at over US$1 billion. IHG strives to achieve US$66 million in revenue by 2018 by developing a self-sustaining real estate investment fund and expanding into nearby Arab markets.
GREECE
Entrepreneurs: Giannis Anastasiou
Company: FrezyDerm
FrezyDerm, founded in 1986, designs, manufactures and markets clinically tested and certified, dermaceutical products (face, body, hair), topical medicines and nutritional supplements in Greece, that improve quality of life for babies, kids and adults., FrezyDerm’s product portfolio of 200SKUs, recommended by a network of 7,000 physicians and sold in 4,500 pharmacies, is distributed throughout the European Union. The company was also named one of the top ten fastest growing in Greece in 2014.
Entrepreneur: Alexandros Chatzieleftheriou
Company: Blueground
Blueground is a technologically-enabled property management company, headquartered in Athens, Greece. For owners looking to rent their property, bluegound manages the entire rental process, which includes pricing, marketing, booking, check-in/out, payments, cleaning, and replenishing supplies. blueground also manages the process of ensuring properties are legally able to rent to tourists, equips properties with digital smart locks, and conducts inspections after each guest stay. Guests that stay in properties managed by blueground have access to high-quality properties, accurate information, easy online booking, hotel amenities, 24/7 customer service, and a mobile application offering tips for attractions, transportation, and restaurants. The company manages 200 properties in ten locations in the country and has its sights on expanding into neighboring Mediterranean countries including Turkey, Spain, and Italy.
LOUISVILLE
Entrepreneur: Joey Rivera
Company: Rivera Group
The modern criminal employs firewalls, not firearms; viruses not violence. Modern organizations are at war with increasingly sophisticated groups of cyberattackers that threaten to steal their data and risk their reputations. In 2014 alone, a total of 800 million records were breached worldwide, with hacked organizations sustaining an average US$11.6 million in losses. To help organizations navigate the volatile terrain of cyberspace, Rivera Group’s Eagle6 software enables clients to obtain a hawk-like view of their enterprises to spot hackers quickly, and limit the damage they can do. In a global cybersecurity market predicted to reach US $156 billion by 2019, Rivera has already established client relationships with America’s largest government agencies and private organizations.
MEXICO
Entrepreneur: Juana Marcela Ramirez
Soluciones Hospitalarias Integrales SA de CV (SOHIN)
SOHIN’s three services provide Mexican patients and their families with a suite of integrated services that reduces stress and simplifies the complexities of treating a chronic disease. These same services reduce costs and increases policyholder satisfaction for insurers by educating patients and providing access to medication and more accurate laboratory testing. By helping patients understand their condition, the particulars of their situation, and the most effective course of action, SOHIN reduces wasteful and expensive treatments that are often unnecessary, and, in some cases, counterproductive. SOHIN’s Genetics business unit offers a wide variety of molecular tests for better diagnosis and treatment of various cancer types. Boasting partnerships with GNP, AXA, and MetLife in Mexico, SOHIN has access to 70% of the medically insured (ten million people) in the country.
MIAMI
Entrepreneur: Seth Cassell & Anton Diego
Company: EveryMundo
Miami-based EveryMundo, founded by Anton Diego (34) and Seth Cassel (35), empowers global travel and hospitality enterprises with the tools and techniques to leverage the value of their brand, drive direct customer acquisition, and realize revenue opportunities. EveryMundo uses proprietary technology and techniques to build and manage global customer acquisition campaigns with linguistic nuance, maximizing traffic acquisition and conversion. The company engages consumers in their native languages to create deeper and longer-lasting consumer relationships for their clients and facilitate expansion into global markets in a cost effective and sustainable manner.
Entrepreneurs: Silvina Moschini
Company: Yandiki
Yandiki is a Miami-based company that is leveraging the power of the cloud to connect enterprises with on-demand talent. The platform offers access to talent from around the world in addition to workforce monitoring and collaboration tools, facilitating fluidity across internal talent channels (full-time, freelance, contract). For enterprises, Yandiki’s cloud-based platform improves the quality, reduces the time, and enhances the experience of sourcing, managing and collaborating with creative freelancers (designers, writers designers, writers, editors, copywriters, translators, web developers). For freelancers, Yandiki’s platform provides access to flexible employment opportunities at competitive pay.
MOROCCO
Entrepreneur: Leila Laraqui
Company: Linea Luxe
Linea Luxe makes handcrafted products at manufactured-goods prices. It specializes in luxury containers, including boxes & cases, displays, trays, trunks, and trolleys. Linea Luxe sources all of its wood and leather from France, Italy, and Morocco, using the same suppliers as Hermes and Louis Vuitton, but offers its products at one-half or even one-third of competitors’ prices. With its high-quality and stylish designs, its products have attracted Middle Eastern royalty, ranging from Morocco to Saudi Arabia. Expansion in the US market, investment in R&D, and growing an international sales team will drive growth in the near future.
Entrepreneur: Tarik Fadli
Company: Algo Consulting Group
Algo Consulting uses its patented biometric technology delivered through electronic kiosk (e-Kiosks), to instantly notarize and print documents that Moroccan citizens need to work, go to school, get married, or buy a car or a home. Retrieving these documents used to take months and now it only takes three seconds. Where fraud used to take years to be resolved, e-Kiosks can verify a citizen’s identity with 99% accuracy within seconds, making fraud nearly impossible to commit. Algo beat out international tech leaders to win a citizen registration contract for Guinea Conakry, worth US$175M over the next 15 years, netting Algo up to US$55M in profits. Just days later, the governments of Cameroon and Mauritania requested citizen, voter, customs, and visa registration solutions from Algo and its e-Kiosks. Algo will scale across the MENA region to secure $220M in revenues by 2027, and help restore trust between Morocco and its citizens.
PERU
Entrepreneur: Sebastiaan Saverys
Company: Stevia One
Extract from the stevia plant has emerged as the natural calorie-free alternative to sugar’s connection to heart disease and obesity, but its mass production in China (95% of the world’s stevia) is tarnished by chemicals, child labor, and pollution. Sebastiaan Savery founded Stevia One as the “complete” sweetness solution, naturally isolating stevia’s sweet-tasting glycosides on an industrial-scale that’s cheaper, environmentally friendly, and socially impactful. Targeting the $80 billion world sweetener market and 90% of global food trends toward natural products, Sebastiaan’s broader goal is to make every step in Stevia One’s production chain add value to constituents, from the farmers to the consumers and the land surrounding them, as it becomes the largest producer in Latin America.
Entrepreneurs: Sergio, Cecilia & Aldo Casaretto
Company: Crepier
Crepier delivers stylish, high-quality handbags and luggage for travel and business, bringing affordable luxury to Peruvians. Already featured in Peru’s fashion magazines, and featured at Lima’s Fashion week, Crepier products are sold in 20 brand-owned stores and another 80 ‘corners’ in department stores throughout Peru. Crepier the enjoys the highest sales per square meter in women’s handbags and luggage in Peru and this year, the brand has turned between 90-100% of its inventory each season. With a world-class supply chain in place, Crepier will be sold in Ecuador, Chile, and Colombia by 2017. By expanding their retail footprint and opening franchise locations, starting in 2016, Crepier will become a household name across Latin America by 2020.
SPAIN
Entrepreneur: Luis Paris
Company: Parclick.com
Parclick.com makes travel more convenient and less expensive for visitors commuting by car in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and France. Targeting customers staying for multiple days in a given city, Parclick.com allows drivers to find a parking spot in advance of their arrival in over 550 conveniently-located parking garages in 100+ cities. Customers can secure these spots online at a discounted price of up to 70% of the cost they would pay in-person.
SOUTH AFRICA
Entrepreneur: Schalk & Dewald Nolte
Company: Entersekt
Entersekt’s software converts most mobile devices into a second layer authentication tool, creating a powerful weapon in the fight against financial fraud. Most financial institutions today utilize a one-time password (OTP) authentication method, which doesn’t guarantee transaction security from phishing or man-in-the-middle attacks. Entersekt is the first company in the world to provide transaction authentication on mobile phones using certificate technology far beyond the native mobile encryption capabilities – this allows banks to verify transactions in real-time with their customers. Operating in the US$2 trillion payment authentication market, Entersekt has 16 patents and has completed over 400 million transactions without a single instance of fraud. Certified by Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, Entersekt aims to cover 100% of the South African market by 2017.