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 – 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.

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. 

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. 

Project Resources