Seven Uruguayan entrepreneurs were selected to attend the seventh Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES). The number of Uruguayans who will go to the United States is seen as high compared to those chosen from countries in the region, from which two to five entrepreneurs per country were selected. More than 700 entrepreneurs from 170 countries at any stage of development will be present at the meeting that brings them together every year in the cradle of innovation. It will take place in Silicon Valley, California, from June 22 to 24.
President Barack Obama will be one of the speakers at the summit that will promote entrepreneurship as a way to address global challenges.
The chosen ones
A few days before the meeting there are mixed feelings, ranging from fear to joy and expectation. Most of the entrepreneurs were invited to apply by the U.S. Embassy in Uruguay, others heard about the opportunity and tried it on their own, according to what they told El Observador.
Rosario Monteverde and Magdalena Rodríguez are the creators of Pro Internacional -a company that provides integral web solutions- and Gpsgay, a social network for the LGTB community. Silicon Valley is familiar territory for Monteverde, who attended the final of the Intel Challenge for her app Gpsgay. They applied to the event because "they had nothing to lose". Today they find themselves between the previous stress of the organization and the immense joy for what they will experience.
For Rodriguez, something that added up when it came to being chosen was being women. They developed Pro International together in 2007, then GPSgay was born as an offshoot of the first. Both ventures were selected to be represented in the United States.
Another entrepreneur chosen was Marcelo Lanfranconi. He will attend the GES to represent Paganza, a service that allows the payment of monthly expenses through an application. The solution has existed for four years in Uruguay and is constantly growing.
Okaratech is a software company founded by industrial engineer Leonardo Cristalli. Its goal is to turn its clients into "agro-intelligent" companies. Okaratech offers a platform of software tools to manage all business data, support their processing and transform them into useful information to make the best business decisions. The venture is currently operating in Uruguay, Argentina and Bolivia.
Another Uruguayan venture is based on sustainability. It is ZHÚ, innovation in Bamboo and is led by industrial designer Analaura Antúnez. It began in 2011 when Antúnez won a scholarship to train for two months at the China Bamboo Research Center. There she learned about the cultivation, processes, technologies and uses, all related to bamboo. It occurred to him to "do something" with all this and he began to undertake.
On the other hand, Antúnez said that simply applying to the GES helped him a lot. The application process consisted of presenting five slides and answering key questions, including who his entrepreneurial hero was. Antúnez answered "Captain Planet", pointing out his environmentalist nature. He believes this answer was decisive in selecting his venture.
Victoria Suárez is the entrepreneur who will travel to the United States on behalf of ReservaTelo, the motel reservation app. Days before the GES, nerves prevailed in the entrepreneur, who said she had difficulties to raise funds for the ticket. The app, which today already has 6,000 downloads between Android and iOS, will be presented at the Global Summit and analyzed by experts.
Daniel Perciante will present one of the projects developed by his company Nettra, which offers solutions that make a city "smarter" through the application of technology. The company developed six months ago a monitoring system for water wells. The idea is to ensure that the wells are giving water through the information obtained by sensors placed in them. This is very necessary in the livestock field, in dairy farms for example, where water is needed permanently. Perciante was contacted by the U.S. Embassy to apply. He decided to present this system to the contest for being the most recent and the one which could generate more impact.
A door to the world
All the entrepreneurs consulted by El Observador see GES as an opportunity to meet investors and entrepreneurs who can open the doors of their ventures to the world.
Rodriguez and Monteverde will go to GES with the idea of expanding their network to the U.S. market. They believe there is a lot of potential there and, like Perciante, they think it is "where they can make the leap. They will seek to establish contacts with investors, which for them can lead to further meetings or also to the financing they need.
At the same time, the Global Summit is close to gay pride day, so they plan to attend the June 28th march in San Francisco, the most gay-friendly city in the world.
Paganza's creator aims primarily to educate himself about methods of acquiring users, as well as to look for a model to follow from other startups in the same field. Paganza aims to make the "problem" of paying bills easier. It wants to position itself as a solution whose experience is one of excellence, turning the "problem" into something pleasant to do. Likewise, the entrepreneur will seek to use GES to boost the app's growth in Latin America. Paganza's next step will be to grow in the region. For this they need capital, so they are in constant contact with venture capital funds to facilitate growth. "It's a huge networking opportunity," Lanfranconi said.
The founder of ReservaTelo will travel with a clear objective: to learn and open her head. At the same time, she will seek to climb internationally.
One of the speakers at the event, which Suárez will attend on the first day, will be Uruguayan Verónica Alonso Pérez, co-founder of IEETech. IEETECH is a social enterprise of young entrepreneurs who created Chipsafer, a platform that allows tracking and early detection of anomalies in the behavior of livestock at any time and place with the aim of isolating the focus of such anomalies as soon as possible.
Both Suarez and Perciante will attend an event hosted by Facebook, which they understand will help them learn how to scale their business and what needs to be done to be successful.
Among the objectives of Nettra's director is to meet people from the entrepreneurial environment and investors. He perceives that his company is growing at a slow pace because the market is small. He argues that the way to grow in the region is with external investment.
Cristalli will see at GES what is happening in agribusiness and will be able to meet the people involved. He said that there will be 34 agribusiness technology ventures with which synergies can be created. He stressed that he is looking for investors, partners and strategic alliances. He said that his business will be able to expand naturally because they offer a global platform, which was created for producers and farmers anywhere in the world. "It is a global platform that contextualizes data according to the production environment of the product to transform it into concrete information to make decisions. We don't do anything that works only for Uruguay, Argentina or Bolivia," said OkaraTech's founder.
The bamboo entrepreneur said that one of her objectives will be to attract the attention of investors, as well as to create alliances that will help internationalize the project. She plans to stay more days, for which she has already scheduled meetings with projects ranging from ecotourism to industrial design. "I looked for this opportunity and now I have to take advantage of it and enjoy it," Antúnez said.
Source: María Inés Fiordelmondo for El Observador Portal
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