Finance for Jobs (F4J) project, through its component the Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Matching Grant (EE-MG), signed a grant agreement with Ibtikar Fund on June 2017, for the purpose of developing a pipeline of investible projects in the Palestinian Territories.
The grant is designed to improve the number and quality of investment-ready entrepreneurial start-ups, by enhancing the capacity of these enterprises to develop and absorb funding.
F4J's support will include provision of Business Development Services to seven start-ups; SocialDice, Mecal Men, Rocab, Bambinotes, Kenz, Mashvisor, and RedCrow.
Four startups have received support so far; RedCrow, SocialDice, Bambinotes, and Mashvisor. Furthermore, F4J has also supported Ibtikar’s internal technical development to assess and manage new ventures.
RedCrow is a startup that helps people point out dangerous incidents and places through a mobile application and an online platform. The information that people receive helps them decide whether it is safe or not to move from one point to another, and help decision makers mitigate risks on a tactical and strategic level. The system is supported with maps that show the locations of various real-time incidents, which include but not limited to, explosions, air strikes, shootings, clashes and it could also warn of extreme weather like floods and sand storms. The company currently operates in Palestine, Egypt, and Jordan and will be expanding further in the MENA region during 2018.
Following up the F4J/EE-MG support on the advancements of the Natural Language Processing (NLP), RedCrow has received an investment of approximately $100,000 from the UNICEF Innovation Fund, which will help them be one of the first to develop and integrate Arabic NLP to their platform.