Team HypeHash grabs ‘Silicon Valley Investor Pitch’ at AngelHack!

HypeHash, a group of young app developers emerged winners at the recently held AngelHack Colombo 2016, the local leg of the prestigious AngelHack Global Hackathon Competition. 

AngelHack is the world’s most respected and largest tech-developer ecosystem, helping to drive open innovation of tech products, platforms, and brands with extraordinary smarts, scale, and speed. AngelHack Colombo 2016 was facilitated by IdeaMart in order to provide a ‘first-time ever opportunity for Sri Lankan entrepreneurs and developers’ to go global and be recognised in Silicon Valley, thereby extending the skills and talent of Sri Lanka to the globe.

HypeHash’s winning development was to build the ‘world’s first trending hashtag based merchandise platform’, whereby users can instantly check if there are any products for sale relating to trending topics around the world. For the purpose of the competition, HypeHash partnered with Manusath Derana to retail Manusath Derana T-shirts and caps which were launched to collect money for flood victims in Sri Lanka. The platform to build this app was provided by IdeaMart, the local hosts of the AngelHack competition. HypeHash has over 1,100 international designers and product sellers and over 2,130 fans pre-registered for their MVP within just five days since their launch.

As the winners of the local competition, HyperHash has now been invited to attend AngelHack’s prestigious 12 week HACKcelerator program to turn their hackathon idea into a startup reality. During the HACKcelerator, one lucky team will be flown out to San Francisco, for AngelHack’s fifth Annual Global Demo Day and will pitch their digitally disruptive product to some of the world’s largest accelerators and investors in the world such as Guy Kawasaki former Chief Evangelist Officer at Apple, 500 Startups, Y Combinator, while meeting with leading social entrepreneurs. HypeHash has already attracted major European investors such as Ville Oehman from the BANSEA and two highly reputed angel investors from Sri Lanka to scale their operations to a global scale.

Speaking about winning the local competition, HypeHash Founder and CEO Ravihans Wetakepotha said, “We couldn’t be more proud to have won the first ever local leg of AngelHack and are very excited about attending the Silicon Valley Global Demo Day in the USA at the legendary Brava Theater. Our thanks go out to Derana, Lanka Comic Con, Lanka-Reload for partnering with us and to IdeaMart for providing us with the platform to develop this app. We hope to gain several valuable insights from attending this prestigious global competition and look forward to expand our horizons globally while partnering with IdeaMart in Sri Lanka.”

AngelHack is the world’s largest and most diverse global hacker community and is organising the Global Hackathon Series for the ninth year which, for the first time ever, will be held in over 50 cities and infiltrate some of the most untapped tech communities worldwide. The competition is expected to attract over 14,000 developers, designers, and entrepreneurs, which will double the amount of participants from last year’s series.