Having enjoyed dates, coffee and a meal together, the four most recent graduates of Intelak, the UAE’s aviation, travel and tourism-focused incubator presented their startups to investors during yesterday’s Iftar Demo Day.

During the pitch presentation, the four teams – Avendy, Bonflite, Cargonow, and Hotel Data Cloud – presented their businesses to angel investors, venture capital funds, and industry experts.

The presentations and well-articulated businesses reflect not only the great ideas of the teams, but also the enormous support that Intelak has provided the startups over the past two months. This includes intensive training and mentoring with experts from Intelak’s three Principal Partners: Emirates Group, GE, and Dubai’s Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (Dubai Tourism).

Other ecosystem partners also provided advice and mentoring on the aviation, travel and tourism industry. In all, the four presenting startups attended 20 business workshops with some of the best international and local business trainers, and completed 100 hours of mentoring. The teams also received AED 50,000 each in seed funding, distributed at key milestones during the incubator period.

An important aspect of Intelak, which has to date awarded AED 1 million in funding to the entities it has incubated, is that it takes no equity stake. However, one winner from the first cohort by dnata.

The four winning startups that presented are:

• Avendy: A chatbot that provides quality suggestions and input to travelers to Dubai in less than 10 minutes, via licensed tour guides.
• Bonflite: An “Amazon of the Sky” solution for air travelers to purchase and collect duty free items in a hassle-free environment at any point throughout their travel itinerary.
• Cargonow: A logistics business that aims to solve the problem of manual and tedious booking processes, outdated prices or lack of visibility within the delivery process of freight transportation.
• Hotel Data Cloud: A platform that helps hotels win back control of the descriptive content of their listings by establishing a globally consistent standard with automated distribution to all channels.

As Intelak continues to expand its impact, this fifth competition round was the first to welcome international startups to apply. This step reflects the incubator’s support of the UAE’s vision to establish the nation as a global hub for startups and entrepreneurship. Startups in the UAE and across the world are invited to apply for the sixth cohort, which currently is open for registration.

Meaning ‘taking off’ in Arabic, Intelak supports young entrepreneurs to become part of the innovative ecosystem in the UAE. Since 2016, Intelak has garnered over 1,000 applications; more than 80 teams have participated in the pre-incubation boot camp; and 20 teams have received thousands of hours of mentoring from the Principal Partners.