Mache.A S.A, a startup company to be based out of Haiti has been selected into Start-Up Chile, a world-renowned business accelerator program being sponsored by the government of Chile. This year after receiving over 1500 applications from 61 countries, Start-Up Chile announced a list of 101 startup companies that have been selected to be part of its fifth generation.

Mache.A is a mobile and web based agricultural platform that aggregates the supply of small scale farmers and connect them to organic retailers and processors. The start-up company was most recently recognized as a semifinalist at the 2012 Dell Social Innovation Competion(DSIC) and later went on to win the DSIC Agriculture People’s Choice Award. Its founder, Saheed Badmus, is a Haitian American whose vision behind this project is to bring back investment into Haiti’s once prosperous agriculture sector by making farming profitable. Saheed recently received his Bachelors of Science degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of Maryland College Park and has been focusing his post-graduate career on furthering his idea behind Mache.A.

In Chile, Saheed and Mache.A will be setting up a local office to help in the completion of a prototype and launching a pilot program among local farmers. His arrival date is October 20. Through this experience, Saheed hopes to return to Haiti with a successful agricultural platform to help Haiti’s millions of farmers better market their products.

About Start-Up Chile

Start-Up Chile is a program created by the Chilean Government, initiated by the Ministry of Economy and executed by CORFO that seeks to attract early-stage high potential entrepreneurs to bootstrap their startups using Chile as a platform to go global. In line with the national goal of converting Chile into the innovation and entrepreneurship hub of Latin America, the program plans to bring 1,000 startups to Chile by 2014.

During the six months the participants must be in Chile– for which they receive US$40,000 of equity-free seed capital, a 1-year work visa, and access to local financial and social networks– the objective is to raise funds, hire talent, create networks, and to launch their businesses from Chile while leveraging and interacting fully with the local entrepreneurship ecosystem.

The program, unique in the world, and catalyst of similar initiatives such as Startup America, Britain, Brazil, and Greece, is the ideal opportunity for bootstrappers to receive funding without ceding equity while utilizing one of the strongest Latin American economies as their launching/development platform. Start-Up Chile has been featured in The Economist, BusinessWeek, TechCrunch, and Forbes, among others.

HL/ HaitiLibre