Over 150 people from Peru’s thriving startup community came to watch the nine regional finalists chosen to pitch from hundreds of applicants at Startup World: Lima, Peru Saturday night. The venue of Wayra’s accelerator in Lima’s city center was packed out as the startups battled to win the competition judged by Cesar A. Zevallos Heudebert, CEO & Founder, Asix S.A and Juan Gonzalo Begazo of EVP Finance & Administration at Ajegroup.
The competition ended in a score tie between Papaya.pe and Dipoo.pe with an external decision crowning Dipoo winner of Startup World, Lima Peru.
Because the scores were a tie Dipoo will remain the regional winner, but we would like to make an honorary award for Papaya and invite them along side Dipoo to compete in the Startup World grand finale Silicon Valley in 2013.
Dipoo is a mobile marketing app based on geolocation data which allows users to analyze consumer behavior and measure effectiveness of campaigns. Papaya sells movie tickets online and on mobile devices. Powered by Wayra, they have developed & published our WEB & APPs (iPhone, Android & WindowsPhone) in Peru,Colombia & Chile.
The standard of companies who pitched was extremely high and included Myband.is, Face-Me, Papaya.pe, Dipoo, Couchy, Don Gusto, World Rat, Sinco and Nisu.pe.
What we learned about the Peruvian tech scene
There are three main schools integral to Lima’s startup ecosystem; Telefonica’s Wayra who’ve just had their first batch of startups complete their incubation process; Wayra:Lima also had more applications than any other Wayra program in the world as over 1300 applicants applied for this year’s batch. They invest cash for 10% of each startup accepted on the program.
The other two beacons to Lima’s startup scene are 
Big thanks to Alejandro Narvaez of Nvzglobal, Gary Urteaga of Papaya and Arturo and Alvaro for making our stay run smoothly in Peru.
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