4YFN 2023 Award Winners
4YFN
4YFN partners with the world’s largest and most influential connectivity event, MWC. Plus, we connect you to our global online community of founders and investors.
4YFN hosts a prestigious global competition aimed at identifying and celebrating the world’s most innovative digital startups. This competition serves as the pinnacle of recognition for startups at MWC Barcelona 2024, ensuring international exposure. As part of their prize package, the 2023 finalists were granted the opportunity to showcase their accomplishments through the GSMA Foundry platform. Allow us to introduce you to our three outstanding finalists below!
Payflow
Payflow is the leading company in On-Demand Salary and Flexible Compensation in the European Union and Latin America, offering the most comprehensive Financial Wellness platform in the market. Through an intuitive application, users can access a portion of their already earned salary, save in automated virtual piggy banks, and receive financial education through their interactive classes platform. Additionally, they can save on taxes by using the Flexflow card for Food, Transportation, Childcare, and Training. As a social benefit, it is completely free for employees and a strategic ally for Human Resources teams, as it enhances productivity and boosts the employee experience. They have surpassed 800 clients and operate in Spain, Colombia, Portugal, and Peru.
DeafTawk
DeafTawk provides quality Sign Language Interpretation round the clock 7 days a week through a mobile application that is available on both Android and iOs platforms. DeafTawk started in Pakistan in 2018, and has now expanded to Sri Lanka, Singapore, Denmark, and other SEA and European countries. DeafTawk bridges the communication gap between 466 million deaf individuals across the globe. DeafTawk facilitates deaf individuals to actively participate in society, access necessary services, and gain a better understanding of their rights and available resources. This inclusive participation will contribute to a more inclusive and equitable society, where deaf individuals have equal opportunities to thrive and improve their lives. We want to expand our reach and provide real-time sign language interpretation services to a larger number of deaf individuals globally. We do this by partnering with companies to make their services inclusive for the deaf, create employment for the deaf persons and empower them financially. DeafTawk is developing AI driven sign language interpretation to provide more affordable and reliable solution.
Microverse
Microverse is an online school for remote software developers where students learn collaboratively with peers around the world. Microverse believes the place where people are born shouldn’t determine their opportunities in life and provides access to global opportunities by offering world-class education. At Microverse, students learn to work remotely with people worldwide. More than 3,000 students from 150 countries have joined the program since its launch.
Payflow – Delivering Salaries on Demand
Payflow enables a company’s employees to access the money they have earned on-demand, rather than waiting for a monthly pay cheque. As a result, almost 500,000 employees now have far more financial flexibility and are less reliant on expensive short-term credit. By working with Payflow, approaching 800 companies in Spain, Portugal, Colombia and Peru now offer this flexibility as an employee benefit. The service is free to workers, while each business pays Payflow a flat fee of about US$2 a month for every employee that can access the app, regardless of how many withdrawals are made. Payflow says its app is enjoying high usage rates.
In Europe, about 45% of the employees covered by the solution use it each month, with an average monthly withdrawal between US$50 and US$60. In Latin America, 70% make withdrawals, averaging about US$30 a month. Payflow has also launched a payment card that workers can use to pay directly from their salary for various tax-free benefits, such as food, public transport, education, and childcare. At the same time, Payflow is encouraging employees to save – its app enables the user to automatically direct some of their salary into a ring-fenced savings wallet each month.
As well as giving workers more flexibility, Payflow’s app can generate multiple benefits for employers. By making the link between work and reward both explicit and immediate, Payflow says it has reduced absenteeism by an average of 11% for its business clients. Payflow says the service also improves employees’ loyalty (reducing churn by more than 20%) and speeds up recruitment by 27%. In the near future, Payflow plans to expand into at least one of Latin America’s largest markets.
Delivering Salaries on Demand
Monday 6 Nov 2023 | 4YFN | Case Study | Payflow |
4YFN 2023 competition winner, Payflow enables a company’s employees to access the money they have earned on-demand, rather than waiting for a monthly pay cheque. As a result, almost 500,000 employees now have far more ...
DeafTawk – Helping the Deaf to Communicate
The world’s 466 million deaf people can find it hard to communicate and access the information they need to take advantage of educational and employment opportunities. But a combination of mobile connectivity and artificial intelligence (AI) can address this problem. More than 68,000 people regularly use DeafTawk’s mobile application and AI-based technology, which provides interpretation services for those with hearing loss. The start-up enables deaf people to quickly connect with an interpreter via a two-way video call or translate text and audio into sign language, whenever they need to. In the past, deaf people have to had to book an interpreter five days ahead of when they needed one.
DeafTawk charges customers an interpretation fee that reflects the length of the call. DeafTawk, which pays 80% of the fee to the interpreter and retains a commission of 20%, now employs about 3,200 human interpreters, covering six languages: Urdu, English, Spanish, Chinese, Singaporean and Malay. It also provides an AI-based solution that can translate text and audio in three languages (English, Spanish and Urdu) into sign language with more than 95% accuracy. An avatar performs the sign language translation.
In the 12 months up to the end of July 2023, DeafTawk generated US$1.5 million in revenue and made a positive EBITDA. It is growing fast, with month-to-month increases in revenue of about 25%. As it expands, DeafTawk is in discussions with major transport hubs, such as airports and railway stations, and media channels, about deploying its technology to help deaf people access the information they need.
Helping the Deaf to Communicate
Monday 6 Nov 2023 | 4YFN | Case Study | DeafTawk |
4YFN 2023 competition finalist, DeafTawk uses mobile apps to provide real-time translation of text and audio into sign language. The world’s 466 million deaf people can find it hard to communicate and access the ...
Microverse – Building a Bridge Between Talents and Opportunities
Rather than migrating across the world in search of better-paid jobs, skilled people can increasingly use connectivity to work remotely from their home country. By offering full-time web development courses, Microverse is helping students in the developing world acquire the communication and coding skills they need to work in well-paid roles for employers in the developed world. The start-up has used a mixture of advanced technology and peer-to-peer learning to enable 3,000 people from 150 countries to complete a year-long course in web development. To make the education affordable and accessible, Microverse doesn’t charge its students anything upfront. They only pay back the US$15,000 cost of the course when they get a sufficiently well paid job.
Since Microverse began advertising for students in 2018, about one million people around the world have applied to join the programme. Each student participates in team-based activities each weekday morning using video calls. These activities are monitored by Microverse’s software, which checks when students join, how actively they participated and whether their contributions were on topic. As well as teaching the students to code, the course is designed to help them practise how to run very efficient meetings, how to communicate well with others, how to give and receive feedback to each other, while working remotely.
Backed by almost US$20 million in funding, Microverse is now considering how best to scale up its infrastructure, resources, and support systems. While it conducts this review, Microverse has paused the enrolment of new students until 2024. The start-up is exploring whether it can offer shorter courses, in addition to the year-long programme, to give students more flexibility and help software engineers in existing roles secure better paid roles. It may also begin offering courses in other subjects, such as cyber security, design, product management or digital marketing. Its overarching mission is to help talented people in the developing world to realise their potential.
Building a Bridge Between Talents and Opportunities
Monday 6 Nov 2023 | 4YFN | Case Study | Microverse |
4YFN 2023 competition finalist, Microverse has helped 3,000 people from across the world acquire the skills they need to secure well-paid coding jobs. Rather than migrating across the world in search of better-paid jobs, ...
