Morocco will be hosting its first DEMO Africa Startup Launchpad this year. The event will take place at the capital Casablanca in October 2018.
Previous cities to play host to this pan-African startup pitch event include Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Lagos.
The African Technology Foundation (ATF) made the announcement, the managing partners of the Liberalizing Innovation Opportunity Nations (LIONS@Africa) partnership. They also announced that next year’s DEMO Africa will happen in Morocco as well.
“Over the last six years, the DEMO Africa conference has traveled through Eastern, Western, and Southern Africa, and launched leading African technologies while showcasing the continent’s evolving entrepreneurial ecosystems and startups,” said Harry Harre, the executive director of DEMO Africa.
“As codified within our conference charter, we are heading to Northern Africa for the 2018 and 2019 editions of the annual event, and we are excited to announce Morocco as our host country.”
Before the pitch day, there will be the DEMO Africa Bootcamp, which will provide the participating startups a chance to brush up their product and practice on their pitch presentations. The participating startups will also be offered training in venture creation, networking opportunities with global innovation grids, opportunities to form new partnerships, access to capital, and chance to learn international best practices.
Stephen Ozoigbo, the managing partners of the LIONS@Africa, added: “We are quite thrilled to witness the incremental progress around the North African entrepreneurial ecosystem, particularly Morocco, and we are quite grateful for the support of some remarkable local partners to ensure that the next two editions of DEMO Africa do an effective job of globalizing the regional ecosystems.”
DEMO Africa has grown to be known as one of the best go-to platforms for African startups seeking a global audience to their pitch of innovative solutions. The audience that typically attends this is made up of diverse stakeholders ranging from VCs, entrepreneurs, international media houses.
In the past six editions of DEMO Africa, more than 200 startups from the continent have pitched their businesses and went ahead to raise over $50 million in aggregate funding.