Endeavor Selects 40 Entrepreneurs from 15 Countries at the 80th International Selection Panel in Milan

MILAN — July 1, 2018 — Endeavor selected 40 entrepreneurs leading 22 companies from 15 countries at the 80th International Selection Panel (ISP) in Milan, Italy, held June 27-29 and hosted by Endeavor Italy. Endeavor now supports 1,698 entrepreneurs leading 1,059 companies in 30 growth markets around the world.

Top business leaders and investors from the region and around the world, including Oskar Miel (Rakuten Capital), Luis Lora (Allen & Company), Diego Piacentini (Italian government), and Fabio Cannavale (lastminute.com) among others, served as panelists at the event. Panelists were drawn from Endeavor’s extensive network of board members, mentors, and supporters.

At the ISP, panelists interview entrepreneur candidates about their businesses, evaluating them on their potential for high-impact growth, and deliberating on which candidates should be selected to become Endeavor Entrepreneurs.

The ISP is the culmination of a rigorous multi-step selection process to identify innovative and driven entrepreneurs who are committed to advancing an ecosystem of entrepreneurship.

Once selected, Endeavor Entrepreneurs gain access to comprehensive customized services, including introductions to local and international business mentors and volunteers from Fortune 500 consulting firms who will help them address key needs.

Endeavor Entrepreneurs have had a significant track record of creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, generating billions of dollars in revenues, and building sustainable growth models in their home countries.

“The ISP is the heart of Endeavor’s model, and is the only part of Endeavor’s model that has consistently remained the same over the past 20 years. It’s where the magic of the Endeavor network happens,” said Endeavor Co-founder and CEO Linda Rottenberg. “From experienced, world-class panelists to the largest number of entrepreneurs at an Endeavor selection panel ever, the Milan ISP brought together some of the top talent in entrepreneurship from across the world. Congratulations to the Endeavor Italy team on a great event, and a huge welcome to the newest Endeavor Entrepreneurs!”

Endeavor will host ISPs in 2018 in Detroit (July 30-August 1), Buenos Aires (September 5-7), Athens (October 22-24) and Cape Town (Stellenbosch) (December 11-13).

Learn more about the companies and entrepreneurs selected below.

BRAZIL

Company: Hotmart
Entrepreneurs: Mateus Bicalho & João Pedro Resende
Description: Individuals who create and sell digital content such as courses or e-books often lack the tools to manage their businesses. Hotmart gives these producers a single location from which to manage each aspect of their digital business from customer engagement to content distribution. By connecting with Hotmart’s network of 950K+ affiliate publishers (the largest such network in LatAm), producers can launch affiliate marketing campaigns to grow awareness of their products.

Company: Quero Education
Entrepreneurs: Bernardo dos Santos, Renata Rebocho & Lucas Andrade Silveira
Description: Quero Education is an online marketplace for higher education that helps students choose, enroll and pay for discounted college programs in Brazil. Quero Education has more than 40M unique site visits per year, 150K student enrollments over the last twelve months, and revenue growth from $500K to $20M over the past four years.

BULGARIA

Company: Tiger Technology
Entrepreneur: Alexander Lefterov
Description: Businesses across different industries are seeing exponential growth in their data volumes. Now more than ever, companies need a fast, scalable, secure and cost-efficient way to migrate their data into the cloud. Tiger Technology provides high-performance, secure data management solutions for companies in the Media & Entertainment, Surveillance and Enterprise IT sectors.

CHILE

Company: Recorrido
Entrepreneurs: Lennart Sönke Ruff, Julian Valentin Deutschle, Tilmann Heydgen & Simon Josef Narli
Description: Recorrido is an online bus ticket search and booking platform with a built-in rating system. The platform enables travelers to access accurate information about travel options while empowering bus operators of all sizes to showcase, monitor, and optimize their services.

COLOMBIA

Company: SOS Asistencia
Entrepreneurs: Tatiana Arcila, Esteban Arcila & Andres Arcila
Description: SOS Asistencia offers assistance services for home insurance providers, retailers, institutions, and individuals. Aiming to professionalize the historically informal Latin American assistance market, SOS guarantees its skilled technicians will arrive within an hour of customers’ service requests to provide standardized services with pre-set prices.

GREECE

Company: Dust + Cream
Entrepreneurs: Vasilis and Leandros Karakatsanis
Description: Dust+Cream (D+C) is a cosmetics retailer with 60 locations across Greece. D+C’s target consumers are young Greek women who are looking for quality beauty products at an affordable price. The company sells everything from makeup to fragrances, both from its own brand as well as others. Focused on creating a dynamic retail experience, D+C stores are trendy with a fun vibe, and its sales personnel or “beauty experts” are always there to assist customers with the latest beauty trends.

INDONESIA

Company: ZAP Clinic
Entrepreneur: Muchammad Fadhli
Description: As members of one of the fastest growing middle classes in the world, Indonesians are spending more and more on beauty and lifestyle, and are increasingly demanding luxury experiences. ZAP Clinic offers safe beauty treatments with five-star customer experiences in a ZAP! The company currently (as of July 2018) serves 170k customers at its 37 locations across 12 cities in Indonesia.

ITALY

Company: Buzzoole
Entrepreneurs: Fabrizio Perrone & Gennaro Varriale
Description: Although 64% of marketing executives believe word-of-mouth is the most effective form of advertising, only 6% say they have mastered it. Much of this is because influencer marketing campaigns, where brands incentivize well-connected individuals to promote their products, require significant time investment and are difficult to measure. With Buzzoole’s AI functionality, brands can quickly launch influencer marketing campaigns by automatically connecting with compatible influencers to engage potential customers.

Company: Fatture in Cloud
Entrepreneur: Daniele Ratti
Description: Small businesses should not have big accounting problems, and yet, most of the Italian SME market still manages invoices and billing records by hand or on excel. In 2015, the Italian government introduced regulation mandating that all businesses must issue 100% of their invoices electronically by 2019. Fatture in Cloud (FIC) provides 30K Italian SME owners with an easy-to-use cloud-based accounting software that seamlessly issues invoices compliant with regulatory standards. In 2014, the EU also introduced a directive commanding all contracting authorities in the EU to accept e-invoicing as equivalent to traditional paper invoicing by 2020.

Company: FREEDA
Entrepreneurs: Andrea Scotti Calderini & Gianluigi Casole
Description: New media company FREEDA has grown to 2M+ social media followers through the production and distribution of videos, images, and articles designed to authentically represent millennial women. After beginning branded content sales in 2017, FREEDA has gained significant traction by partnering with brands to share original content aimed at this unique population segment.

JORDAN

Company: Al-Ameed Coffee
Entrepreneurs: Adel & Basel Daher
Description: Al-Ameed Coffee has specialized in roasting traditional coffee since 1973. Its signature Turkish coffee has driven local market leadership to capture 70%+ of the Jordanian coffee market. Brothers Adel & Basel took over company operations from their father beginning in 2004 and have since pushed geographic expansion, most recently with a Walmart US contract.

Company: Tarjama
Entrepreneur: Nour Alradaideh
Description: There are 420 million Arabic-speakers around the world, yet high-quality Arabic content is rarely found online. Tarjama combines machine-learning technology and educated translators to provide affordable, accurate translation for business of all sizes. To date, the company has translated over 200 million words in over 30 languages for more than 800 clients worldwide, including the UAE government, Google, and Facebook. Tarjama also trains and employs the largest network of Arabic-speaking female translators in the world, with a 70% female workforce.

LOUISVILLE

Company: LISNR
Entrepreneur: Rodney Williams
Description: LISNR is setting the new standard for device connectivity by using sound to transmit data. Utilizing its ultrasonic, inaudible data transmission technology, LISNR enables fast, reliable, and secure communication between any device that has a speaker or a microphone. LISNR’s proprietary technology is the industry standard and most deployed data-over-audio technology in the world, pairing over devices across 9+ industries, including auto, consumer electronics, POS terminals, mobile payment, IoT, and entertainment. LISNR has secured key customer partnerships, including Intel, Synchrony Financial, Land Rover, Ticketmaster, Visa, and Cisco and was named three times to the CNBC Disruptor 50 list, a collection of the 50 most innovative companies in the world.

MEXICO

Company: Conekta
Entrepreneurs: Cristina Randall & Hector Cardenas
Description: Difficulties making payments is often cited as a main deterrent to the growth of ecommerce in Mexico, a market currently valued at $10B and growing at almost 17% per year. Conekta is a better online payments platform that helps businesses boost their sales by increasing the rate of completed and successful payments made by customers.

Company: Kavak
Entrepreneurs: Loreanne Garcia, Roger Laughlin & Carlos Julio Garcia
Description: Kavak improves the experience of buying and selling second-hand vehicles. Sellers can sell their car online in less than 30 days. Kavak’s proprietary algorithm uses real-time market data to give sellers a fair offer. Before purchasing a car, Kavak conducts a rigorous 240-point mechanical inspection and legal background check that only 1/3 of total cars pass. For buyers, Kavak offers competitive prices (15% less than car dealers), guaranteed quality, a three-month warranty, and seven day return policy. In addition, Kavak helps buyers get access to financing and insurance plans through key partners.

MIAMI

Company: Finconecta
Entrepreneurs: Jorge Ruiz & Mauricio Lorenzetti
Description: Finconecta is an enterprise software company driving the digitization of the financial services industry with its proprietary middleware platform, 4wrd, which connects financial institutions to fintechs via standardized API integration. Finconecta provides the technology infrastructure to connect legacy core banking systems to existing fintech solutions around the world and also offers digital transformation consulting to create a road map for financial institutions to implement digital strategies into their core infrastructure.

PERU

Company: Osaka
Entrepreneurs: Diego Herrera & Diego De La Puente
Description: Founded in 2001, Osaka is a premium Nikkei (Peruvian-Japanese cuisine) restaurant and Lima’s first such high-end chain to expand internationally. It was ranked #2 at the 2017 Summum Awards (Peru’s version of Michelin) and consistently tops the charts in each of the 8 LatAm markets in which it operates today. Osaka’s next step is a U.S. launch in Miami this year.

PHILIPPINES

Company: uHoo
Entrepreneur: Dustin Jefferson Onghanseng
Description: uHoo’s patented air sensor and accompanying software provide a complete air quality management solution to help customers create healthier indoor environments. uHoo alerts users of air quality problems, recommends remedial actions, and even integrates with smart air cleaning devices, lights, and building control systems to automate and optimize air quality management.

SPAIN

Company: Ladorian
Entrepreneur: Alejandro Gutierrez-Bolivar
Description: Ladorian offers an all-in-one solution for companies to digitize advertising in brick and mortar stores. The company provides the hardware, a POS integration software, a content management platform, and the content itself to retailers looking to increase sales through in-store digital ad content.

Company: OnTruck
Entrepreneur: Iñigo Juantegui
Description: OnTruck has built an on-demand logistics platform to connect businesses directly with road freight carriers. Its platform automates the matching of loads to a network of over 2,200 trucks in Spain and the UK, and provides real-time GPS tracking of all shipments. OnTruck clients include large multinationals such as Procter & Gamble and Decathlon, in addition to over 400 mid-sized companies in the UK and Spain.

TURKEY

Company: Kolektif House
Entrepreneurs: Ahmet Onur & Civan Batuhan Orhan
Description: Kolektif House is creating a smarter way of working, learning, and connecting by offering its 1,300 members access to work spaces as well as a wide range of events and educational programs. Kolektif House’s three co-working spaces in Istanbul are situated in central locations and are distinguished by their modern design. With flexible membership packages, Kolektif House has attracted a wide range of renters, from freelancers to corporate companies, creating a strong and diverse community of inspirational people available within arm’s reach.

URUGUAY

Company: VU Security
Entrepreneur: Sebastian Stranieri
Description: VU Security protects companies from identity theft, fraud, and other cyber threats with its cloud- based suite of eight different cybersecurity solutions. The company supports 38 corporate clients across 14 countries including private and public institutions, such as Santander, Bank of the Republic of Uruguay, Globant, and Axion Energy.