The hunt for the next Zuckerberg continued in Brazil last week as twenty startups battled it out in São Paulo and Rio De Janeiro in The Next Web’s global startup competition; Startup World.
QMagico and Crossfy beat off stiff competition to win the best startup award in São Paulo and Rio De Janeiro respectively. Finalists in Sao Paulo were Ledface, Agendor, Overmedia Cast, Decora.me, Meivox, Bloompa and Workana.
In Rio they included ResolveAí, PagPop, WeGoOut, Zona Universitária, Igluu and Leuis.
QMagico, co-founded by Thiago Feijão, Mateus Oliveira, Vinicius Canaã and Claudia Massei who presented the pitch, is aiming to bring world-class education to Brazilians through web technology focused on K-12 students.
São Paulo judges included Diego Remus, Partner, Editor – Startupi, Nathalie Trutmann, Innovation Director at FIAP, Pedro Sorrentino Business Development Manager Partnerships at SendGrid / SPBeta and Tree Labs founder who stepped in at the last minute.
Rio winner Crossfy’s elevator pitch: “Crossfy is the first platform in the world that integrates offline and online content. Through a CMS, the publisher chooses which image will be interactive in his issue, in meanwhile, the reader, with crossfy app, recognizes the interactive images on print in real time.”
Crossfy’s 28-year-old founder Amure Pinho gave us a demo of the app which gives you the same functionality as a smart phone detecting content through a QR code, but without the need for ugly QR codes which take up much printing space.
Rio De Janeiro’a judges were Alex Tabor, Co-founder and CTO at Peixe Urbano, Bruno Cani Stüssi Neves partner at Gera Venture Capital and Michael Nicklas, Managing Director at Ideiasnet.
We would like to thank our on the ground partners in both São Paulo; FIAP, Startupfarm, ABStartups and Rio De Janeiro; Peixeurbano and 21212.com.
Plus a special thanks to entrepreneur Rafael Kaufmann, investorOswaldo Oliveira, Frederico Lacerda of 21212, Christy MacLeod of Peixe Urbano for helping make sure our time in Brazil was well spent.