Oasis500, a leading seed stage investment and business accelerator, and the first of its kind in Jordan and the MENA region, recently hosted SeedStars World – Amman, the global seed-stage startup competition.

Oasis500 hosted the “SeedStars World” competition in light of the remarkable success reaped from previous pitch competitions and emerging companies, consolidating Oasis500’s support and encouragement of entrepreneurship and creative ideas and investing in them. 40 startups applied from which 12 were selected, varied between e-commerce, e-solutions, gaming applications, and others.

“SeedStars World” is a global seed-stage startup competition for emerging markets and fast-growing startup scenes, selecting winners from 56 different countries in emerging markets in order to identify the best entrepreneurs and startups and then serve as a platform to bring entrepreneurs together and give them access to mentorship and investment opportunities in building the global startup scene.

The 12 startups pitched in front of a prestigious jury including; Oasis500’s Investment Analyst Faisal Al Bitar, Yousef Wadi, CEO of Arabia Weather, Nasser Saleh, CEO of Madfoo3atCom, Igor Ovcharenko, Seedstar’s Regional Manager for MENA and Anas Elayyan, ‏Head of Business Development at iMENA. Not to mention, Arabia Weather and Madfoo3atCom are two of the many startups that were accelerated by Oasis500.

Sustainability and scalability alongside the competitive analysis, are the main elements in the jury’s winner selection criteria. Yaqut’s CEO won the jury over and came in first place with a powerful description of his startup’s gamified and ad-subsidized Arabic eBookstore developed for smartphones and tablets, by showing their ability to identify a gap in the market for books in the Arabic language, in addition to their viable market to serve with a business model that is suitable and able to penetrate the market. Redtroops came in second and Play 3arabi as the third runner-up. The other startups who participated were: Cash Basha, Trevx, Trazec, TravoTech, Riskopy, Snackable News, Project IO, Mimix and Kama.

Seedstars World partners with an entity that is well connected to the startup ecosystem in each host country therefore Oasis500 was chosen as the location for the event. The Seedstars World pitch competition gave startups the chance to pitch their businesses for a chance to compete in the final pitching round.

Yaqut, the winner of Seedstars Amman this year, will be joining the global competition in Switzerland on March 3rd, 2016 for the final pitching round, to compete and network with internationally based startups, mentors and investors facing-off against 50-70 other regional winners. At the end a global winner will be awarded “The Best Emerging Company in the World” with up to 500,000 USD investment.