TotalEnergies' Startupper of the Year Challenge winners announced

Sebudisi Mafabatho, Matome Motalane, and Lisa Von Benecke from left to right | image supplied

- Matome Motalane for the Award for Best Startup under three years old with Mangau Animal feeds: Focused on producing organic livestock feeds to reduce disease outbreaks, making use of agricultural materials before spoilage by producing animal feeds becoming sustainable and scalable with zero-waste. Aiming to create an ecosystem with zero hunger, and zero poverty.

- Sebudisi Mafabatho for the Award for Best Business Creation Idea with She-Eco Roof tiles: She-Eco roof tiles are a composite material made from carefully selected recycled plastics combined with sand and UV stabilizing pigments and are manufactured through a well-researched proprietary extrusion process to produce highly durable building materials.

- Lisa Von Benecke for the Award for Best Female Entrepreneur with LC Dynamics: Solar PV window blinds replace venetian blind slats with solar PV cells, allowing them to generate electricity. The mechanism housing contains control circuits, a motor for tilting the slats for sun-tracking, a lithium-ion battery pack, a built-in LED light and multiple DC outputs such as USB and a variable DC output that can be connected to other solar window blinds, charge or power DC devices or connect to a grid-tied or off-grid battery/inverter system.

These young entrepreneurs will receive financial support amounting to R250,000. They will also benefit from personalised coaching for the development of their project from Gordon
Institute of Business Science as well as from increased visibility to make them known.

In South Africa, 1,280 applications were submitted, of which 586 were complete, and 15 finalists were able to pitch their project before the local jury. Each winner of this edition will have their project presented in front of a 'Grand Jury' in charge of choosing, in mid-May, the three "Grand Winners" of the African continent amongst the 32 countries.