Intelak Hub, Dubai’s only start-up platform dedicated to the travel, tourism and aviation sector has announced the 10 finalists that have secured a spot in cohort 4 of the start-up platform’s Accelerator Programme, further highlighting the city’s efforts in reimagining and supporting entrepreneurial growth in these key sectors.

This announcement comes on the heels of last July’s tourism restart that welcomed international visitors back to the emirate, with a global call for innovative start-ups to find solutions under the theme, ‘Safe Travel in a Post-COVID World’ to five critical challenge areas impacting visitors, including, during the shopping experience, within payments and other high touchpoints, engagement and loyalty, personalisation, and accessibility. The Accelerator Programme received a record 30 per cent increase in applications this year versus in 2019.

Start-ups shortlisted for this year’s Cohort 4 of the Accelerator Programme make it one of the most diverse and inclusive cohorts the programme has seen to-date. With the historical signing of the UAE-Israel peace agreement that normalises relations between the two countries, Cohort 4 for the first time includes three start-ups from Israel, along with five from Europe and one each respectively from the US and Asia. Cohort 4 also features for the first time, three, all female-led start-ups and two social impact-led start-ups.

Over the next eight weeks, the finalists will be attending workshop sessions and  scaling their businesses under the close guidance of the Intelak Hub principal partners; Emirates Group, Dubai’s Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (Dubai Tourism), Accenture and Microsoft who will provide mentoring on go-to-market strategy planning and utilisation of partner ecosystems to test and implement their solutions. Capping off the programme, the finalists will also be provided exhibition space and exclusive pitching and investor opportunities for their start-up at GITEX Future Stars – a premier technology event in the region.

Intelak Accelerator Programme Cohort 4 Finalists

Secret City Trails: Self-guided city discovery games for locals and travellers to fall in love with any city. Users follow in the footsteps of the local creator, solve their riddles and unlock their stories.

Look@: The world's first selfie sculpture company that gives the user the best photo in front of a tourist attraction. It is fully autonomous, runs on clean, solar energy. Their mission is to bring a selfie in front of a tourist attraction into the 21st century.

Handiscover: The first community-based holiday accommodation booking website dedicated to people with physical disabilities. Using their simple accessibility classification system, it allows users to list or book a property easily, ensuring that it fits accessibility needs.

RightHear: An advanced accessibility solution that uses a unique three-component technology to help grant blind and visually impaired individuals the independence they deserve by providing them with tools to orient themselves in public spaces better.

FetchyFox: Transforms the airport journey into a safe, modern, effortless experience for all travellers. They offer a software solution that seamlessly connects the passenger to all of the ancillary services the airport has to offer.

TAIGER: Provider of state-of-the-art information access and knowledge extraction of artificial intelligence systems. Their Semantic and Natural Language Processing (NLP) middleware enable them to build custom applications that exploit the meaning of information to understand better and serve users' needs.

Bridgify: A travel tech company that delivers hotels and OTA's a white label product. It provides a scalable platform to empower OTAs and hotels, it creates a personal full-trip itinerary in an efficient user interface, thus simplifying the traveller's experience.

Enroute: Developer of personalized commerce platform installed into ride-hailing and mass transit applications. Their service allows passengers to ride for free as they shop and interact. Using smart algorithms, Enroute creates a unique shopping experience for passengers based on ride details and user profiles.

DeepNeed: An AI-based predictive analytics platform for large and medium retail chains which allows their clients to predict their customers' loyalty in a day of purchase with high accuracy, create advertising campaigns to retain churn customers and real-time monitor its efficiency.

AllRead Software: A deep learning-based information spotting technology able to read in a single shot the relevant structured alphanumeric text appearing in an image using convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture.