Each year, the American VC and tech publication TechCrunch chooses 200 early-stage tech start-ups globally to invite and sponsor at their annual Disrupt conference in San Fransisco.
They are invited to participate in the Startup Battlefield 200 to receive pitch training from TechCrunch journalists and VCs and then pitch to investors attending the conference over a 3 day period.
This year, South African data analytics fintech start-up, Omnisient, was one of only 16 start-ups invited from Africa to participate. The company is 1 of 2 South African Startups that were selected to attend. The other one was FinanceGPT.
Chosen Amidst 3000 Global Candidates
TechCrunch reviewed close to 3,000 nominated early-stage startups from around the world to choose the final 200 to participate in their Startup Battlefield 200 competition at the annual TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Fransisco, USA.
This year’s Startup Battlefield participants span artificial intelligence (AI), software as a service (SaaS), fintech, security, sustainability, and space exploration.
“One of the cool advantages of being a first-party witness to the thousands of companies that come through our application pipeline every year is that we see emergent trends bubbling up far sooner than most do. It’s a huge privilege to be able to see the future this way and one of the most exciting parts of our job,” says Matthew Panzarino, Editor-in-Chief of TechCrunch.
Privacy-Preserving Data Collaboration Platform
Omnisient is the privacy-preserving Data Collaboration platform that provides cutting-edge cryptography, advanced analytics, and AI to enable Financial Services Institutions (FSIs) to leverage new consumer data sources in a secure and regulatory compliant manner.
Omnisient’s platform has already enabled local banks to use retail shopper data to identify 3.2 million individuals as credit-worthy who would have previously been denied credit due to limited background information.
Speaking about the fintech category of the competition, Panzarino added, “Fintech is going deep over the next year building infrastructure in huge but un-addressed world economies rather than over-indexing on the western markets.
Whatever holdover grip that foreign banking and social norms have on those systems is getting unraveled by startups that are creating new ways for populations in those markets to engage with finances.”
“We are in the midst of speaking to investors locally and overseas to raise Series A funding for international expansion and further development of our technology,” says Omnisient CEO, Jon Jacobson. “Being invited to join TechCrunch’s Start-up Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt is not only international recognition of the disruptive nature of our platform and the impact we are having in growing financial inclusion, but also a fantastic opportunity for us to fine-tune our pitch and share our story with an audience of US investors.”