by daily star.com.lb - Brooke Anderson

BEIRUT: A Lebanese startup that tracks customer shopping behavior through close-circuit television will head to Switzerland to compete for $1 million in investments. It was selected among augmented reality for mobile gaming, personalized travel tips, a food search service, a business payment system, refugee crowdfunding, security and data analysis, a platform for engineers and architects, an app to treat depression, a publishing platform for personalized books, and a childcare network.

These were some of the businesses that were presented at Seedstars World at the co-working space Antwork in Beirut Friday morning. After careful deliberation, it was Vision in Motion, a startup team with an aim to further improve on and solve the problems of tracking customers’ taste that was selected to head to Switzerland. “We liked that they had technology and real intellectual property at their core, There’s value at the IP. The founder is really good at what he does. He knows how to explain and pitch the business. He was the guy behind the tech. The last thing that was key was he had real traction. He’d sign Pepsi Co. regionally. That made him the clear winner,” said Riad Abu Jaoude, executive director at Middle East Venture Partners, a judge for the competition.

For the fourth year in a row, the Geneva-based Seedstars has selected one among 10 Lebanese startups to compete before a 10-member investment team to participate in an 80-person global competition for international entrepreneurs. The winning team will head to Lausanne in April to compete for one week, where the top team will then be awarded $1 million in investments. There are 12 other similar competitions across the MENA region.

The winner for Lebanon gets three months of co-working space from Antwork, $3,000 worth of logistics from Aramex, all 10 participants get $500 worth of in-kind prizes from Seedstars. Second and third place for Friday’s competition was the childcare platform Jaleesa and Living Book respectively.

The winner, Samy Khoury, a second-year engineering student at the American University of Beirut, said he started his company last year after realizing that businesses had cameras they invested in, just to see what happens when something gets stolen, but they don’t use them actively, which he saw as a wasted investment.

“With those camera, we can get more value out of investment. When we go to companies, they say it’s really cool.” How it works: they install a software on a server, which appears on a dashboard online. The software measures what they’re looking at, touching, when they’re stopping. It’s what they’re interested in. “Let’s stay you have a product you’re not selling. Why are customers not buying it? Is it expensive? Or not comfortable? This shows what area sells the most, or if there is a dead zone in the shop.”

The competition was stiff, as the entrepreneurs gave presentations of their companies in around 10 minutes and close scrutiny and questioning. They were asked about their competition, how their concept will make money and why it has the chance to make an impact.

It’s the type of high-stress, high stakes concise pitching that has existed for decades among the startup community, and has in recent years gained widespread general popularity with such reality TV shows as Shark Tank.

Seedstars is an internationally renowned competition that brings together top judges and competitors from all over the world in search of the most promising startup.

Switzerland has been rated as one of the world’s top five countries for entrepreneurship based on surveys from Wharton Business School, due to the government’s high spending on research and development, low corporate taxes and access to capital.

Lebanon, for its part, is considered a regional leader in innovation with its high rate of new businesses, well-educated workforce and its thriving startup ecosystem, despite the challenges of security, infrastructure and bureaucracy.

“Lebanon is a very interesting place. It’s becoming a hub for the region. The ecosystem is growing,” said Kamran Samadli, MENA associate for Seedstars. “I know a lot of startups expanding their operations to Lebanon and then to the whole region. With the right expansion, you can target all Arab countries.”