The trio of friends behind Wrappup, a meeting productivity app developed in Dubai earlier this year, have no difficulty impressing judges when they pitch their concept at events.
Less than a month ago, this week’s Entrepreneurs of the Week, Rami Salman, Ayush Chordia, and Rishav Jalan, won the grand cash prize at AngelHack’s Global Demo Day.
AngelHack is a series of global hackathons – programming marathons – aimed at providing an opportunity to local Information and communications technology (ICT) start-ups and IT students to learn developer tools, meet co-founders, and receive funding and mentorship.
Every October, talented local teams from around the world are invited to Silicon Valley to raise investment and get introduced to incubators.
The story of Wrappup started in May when the three tech enthusiasts met at AngelHack Dubai 2015, a 24-long hackathon held at the Microsoft campus in Dubai Internet City.
Regardless of the pressure of a tight deadline, they managed to develop a working prototype of the Wrappup app which uses smart voice recording to capture meeting discussions.
The app then analyses the audio recording – captures, organises, and stores important parts of the discussion – to allow easy review of the content. Users are then enabled to tag and organise the most important points of discussion as contextualised notes and send them out to all meeting participants.
Since the prototype performed very well when the judges tested it, the team of Wrappup took home the top prize – an opportunity to join AngelHack’s HACKcelerator programme which includes a 12-week-long online mentorship programme and a trip to Silicon Valley to pitch to AngelHack’s investors.
They were the only team to win the $10,000 award from HP, at the heart of San Francisco’s hacker community.
Wrappup, which has its base at Impact Hub Dubai, is currently in private beta testing as a mobile app with a cloud-based web app by a number of multinationals, including Emirates Airlines, IBM, and Microsoft.
Bill Gate’s company has also accepted them in their Bizspark Plus programme, granting $120,000 in credit to ensure the product is deployed using Microsoft’s ecosystem.
Similarly, IBM has invited Wrappup to take part in their Global Entrepreneur Programme and granted $24,000 in credit to power the app with IBM Watson’s Natural Language Processing.
Do you know an entrepreneur who deserves to be our Entrepreneur of the Week? Please send your nominations to neil.king@itp.com and tamara.pupic@itp.com
For information, tips and advice on setting up a new business or insights from those who have taken the leap into the world of entrepreneurship, click on the Arabian Business StartUp section.
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