Orange Corners Baghdad Program Returns with the New Cohort 5!
Orange Corners Baghdad has excitingly started the new cohort with a bootcamp at KAPITA’s headquarters in Baghdad Al-Mansour.
The bootcamp marks the first stop in the incubatee’s journey to reach a market-ready business. After the launch of the fifth cohort’s campaign in February 2022. We’ve received a great number of applicants and 50 startups were shortlisted to move on to the second stage of the program.
The bootcamp sessions are 4 days in total. Two for intense training sessions and two for the pitch presentations. It is usually quick paced and aimed to get the 50 semi-finalists to go through their business plans and prepare a pitch deck for their business by the help of specialized mentors. Then later on, the startups will present their pitch deck to a panel of jury.
During the bootcamp, the startups were matched with mentors in different fields of expertise. They covered the important questions that needed to be present in the pitch decks. These topics included:
Problem statement
The solution
Business model
Market size
Validation
Partners & the founding team
Startup’s needs
The startups received training by the following mentors:
Ali Al-Bawi, Chief Executive Officer at Donic
Ibrahim AL-Zararee, Senior Performance Lead - Careem
Al-Hassan Kahttab - Senior Operations Lead - Retention and product configuration at Careem
Mohammad Jamal, R&D Manager at KAPITA
The pitching days included 50 pitch deck presentations, each startup had around 10 minutes maximum to pitch their businesses and exchange Q&As with the jury. Finally, 20 startups were shortlisted to joining the next stop of the program including the training sessions.
The jury were Ali Ihsan - Chief Executive Officer at ALAWJ MEDIA, Mohammad Jamal - Managing Director, Research at KAPITA, Muhannad Hameed - Head Of Marketing at Alsaree3 Group Ltd, and Hussein Albayati, General Manager at Careem.
And with the help of the program coordinators at KAPITA. The bootcamp days were successful as the trainers shared their enthusiasm towards the promising startups that have joined the 5th cohort.
This cohort we will change things up by introducing tailored training curriculum to fit the startups needs and with the addison of the Orange Corners Innovation Fund (OCIF), the final 20 startups will be up to receive all the necessary equipments to help make their businesses market ready.
This program is made possible by the generous support of the Embassy of the Netherlands and Asiacell.
About Orange Corners Baghdad:
Orange Corner’s Baghdad is an initiative of the Dutch Embassy in Baghdad. The economic priorities of the Netherlands in Iraq are agriculture, water and entrepreneurship. KAPITA supports the community of young entrepreneurs in Baghdad by building youth capacity, and developing successful businesses. We incubate 20 startups for six months: starting with providing a co-working space, training and developing their business, events and masterclasses, a positive environment and an opportunity for investment.