Qafila graduates from Intelak’s sixth cohort
Mita Srinivasan
Press Release
Published:

Qafila graduates from Intelak’s sixth cohort

Selection helped spearhead startup’s expansion into air cargo through access to industry expertise and funding

Qafila, the UAE’s first digital freight forwarder, joined Intelak’s Sixth Demo day that celebrated the success of not only the four startups that graduated from the 6th cohort, the last for 2019, but also brought together the previous cohort’s alumni to mark the end of 2019 in style for Intelak, the UAE’s leading aviation, travel and tourism-focused incubator.

The 6th Cohort cycle accepted submissions on 1st February 2019 and closed on 30 Aug 2019. The pre-incubation boot camp kicked off on 22nd September with ten startups from where four winners (including Qafila) were announced on 29th Sep 2019. Following that Qafila accelerated through the incubation from October till mid-December and culminating in the demo day on 16 December 2019.

Atif Rafiq, co-founder and CEO at Qafila, commented, “The whole experience has been really good for all three of us: Jithin Manoharan, my Co-founder, Imtiaz Hassan, our CTO and myself. We benefited immensely from the intensive acceleration program, industry connections, the networking opportunities, getting mentored by the mentors in the aviation sector and everything leading up to the demo day.”

Jithin Manoharan, co-founder at Qafila, added, “This helped us to understand what we need to do to prepare for investment. Our focus is to take forward some of the dialogue with the aviation cargo community in UAE and add even more advanced features to the future release of a full digitalized Air Cargo platform, delivering value to the customer’s businesses through digital innovation.”

More information on Qafila being incubated by Intelak can be found online here