Hemas Slingshot Startup Battle winners announced at ‘Disrupt Asia’

Hemas Slingshot Startup Battle winners

Hemas Slingshot, the startup incubator and seed accelerator programme of Hemas Holdings PLC, announced the winners of the Hemas Slingshot Startup Battle at the culmination of Disrupt Asia 2017 earlier this month. 

Olivescript, via its product ‘Clardia’, a comprehensive Family Health Assistant that helps keep track of key health parameters, clinched the winning title while ‘DirectPay’, a fin-tech startup in the Finance and Telecommunication industry in Sri Lanka were announced Runners-up. 

Held for the second consecutive year, ‘Disrupt Asia’, an initiative of the Information & Communication Technology Agency (ICTA), launched as a first of its kind startup conference and showcase for budding entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka, witnessed the gathering of the local startup community comprising of more than 400 participants.  The startup battle at the event provided a competitive platform for startups to pitch their business concepts. The battle was also a perfect platform for startups to attract investors and other stakeholders to support the project to develop it to its full potential.

“Hemas Slingshot was developed with the aim of providing entrepreneurs the opportunity to pitch disruptive and innovative business concepts and inventions that fall in line with Hemas’ core pillars of wellness, leisure and mobility and help make them a reality. The standard of startups, resulting from an enhanced level of innovative thinking and effort put in by entrepreneurs today is a constant delight to experience, and it gives me great pleasure to note that this year’s entries too were no exception,” said Dr. Himesh Fernando, Director of Innovation at Hemas Holdings PLC. 

“ICTA has done a great job in putting this event together and we look forward to working with them in the future as well in an attempt to fuel the local startup ecosystem,” he added. The shortlisting process for the Hemas Slingshot Startup Battle entailed a search for the most promising startups across any industry. In order to be shortlisted, the entries should ideally have progressed from concept stage into being a working product or prototype. 

Following this, several entries were entered into the Semi Final stage in June 2017. The four startups that were then identified as those at the forefront of the battle advanced onto the Grand Finale which took place at the culmination of Disrupt Asia 2017.