Kirsty Sharman, global head of operations at influencer marketing company Webfluential, has won the Start-Up Tel Aviv South Africa 2016 competition. The competition was open to female entrepreneurs in South African with start-up companies.
She will be heading to Tel Aviv in September to take part in the DLD Festival Week (www.dldtelaviv.com), Israel’s largest international hi-tech gathering. The event will feature hundreds of start-ups, venture capitalists, angel investors and lmultinationals, including top technological talent and companies like Intel, Google, and Microsoft, Kimberly Clark, Amazon, GM, Amdocs, and Facebook.
The entries this year were of the highest calibre for the competition to date, according this this year’s judging panel. The leading women judges on the panel included Noluthando Gosa, former Investment Analyst and a longstanding member of a number of professional organisations, Tanya Kovarsky, PR and Communications Lead of Core Group and an award-winning parenting blogger, and Hillary Joffe, one of South Africa’s most talented financial journalists.
The panel of judges also included Toby Shapshak, Editor in Chief of Stuff Magazine. He commented: “Israel is widely acknowledged for its prowess as a mecca for startups and innovation. Startup Tel Aviv is not only a great competition for South African startups to be involved in, but also for the winner to get to Tel Aviv itself and experience that thriving epicentre of innovation. This year’s focus has been on women entrepreneurs, which I think is very fitting and appropriate and is clearly the new reality in South Africa, given how many strong entrants we saw.
“Webfluential is an interesting and unique company that is doing something very different with the social media market. Well done Kirsty Sharman and her team. It’ll be interesting to see what new ventures come out of her trip to Israel where she will meet other innovators and venture capitalists.”
“The Webfluential team is incredibly excited about this opportunity,” said Sharman, “not only to help our business gain insight and experience in the international space, but also to shine light on the South African Technology scene. Israel is one of the few markets that has perfected the recipe of exporting technology at scale. The opportunity to learn about that process from the world’s leading engineers, VCs and entrepreneurs is not something that comes along every day – so I feel honoured that Webfluential has been chosen to do just that.”