T&T's Reach was among the 25 fi­nal­ists at the re­cent­ly held PitchIT event in Mon­tego Bay, Ja­maica.They pre­sent­ed their mo­bile app de­vel­op­ment ideas in hope of emerg­ing vic­to­ri­ous and walk­ing away with the top prize of US$5,000 seed fund­ing to de­vel­op their busi­ness as well as a spot in PitchIT busi­ness ac­cel­er­a­tors across the Caribbean.

The team made it to the top ten in what was an in­tense, eye-open­ing ses­sion with teams from across the Caribbean, in­clud­ing Ja­maica, Bar­ba­dos and Guyana.

PitchIT Caribbean is staged by the Caribbean Mo­bile In­no­va­tion Project (CMIP) which is part of the En­tre­pre­neur­ship Pro­gramme for in­no­va­tion in the Caribbean, cur­rent­ly be­ing ex­e­cut­ed by the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies Con­sor­tium, with fund­ing from the Gov­ern­ment of Cana­da and the World Bank.

The event's aim was to en­hance the re­gion's mo­bile app de­vel­op­ment ecosys­tem.

Train­ing man­ag­er of the CMIP, Craig Pe­rue, in ex­plain­ing the for­mat of the com­pe­ti­tion, said: "We had ap­prox­i­mate­ly 300 peo­ple across the en­tire Caribbean–from Suri­name in the south all the way up to Be­lize who ap­plied and 150 peo­ple reg­is­tered for our train­ing pro­gramme and par­tic­i­pat­ed in 12 weeks of train­ing.

Eighty teams then en­tered the PitchIT Chal­lenge Com­pe­ti­tion with 25 emerg­ing fi­nal­ists.

"We don't sim­ply need more of the same. What we need is new busi­ness mod­els, in­no­v­a­tive busi­ness mod­els, new prod­ucts and new mar­kets and that is what we are here to ass­es."

Team Reach led by CEO Robert de Gannes and lead de­vel­op­er Akash Har­ri­ram pitched their in­no­v­a­tive prod­uct, an app that brings safe­ty and re­li­a­bil­i­ty in pub­lic trans­porta­tion.

"It was tru­ly ex­cit­ing and hum­bling to be se­lect­ed as one of the fi­nal­ists. It can be in­tim­i­dat­ing hav­ing your ideas and your dreams lit­er­al­ly ex­am­ined and pulled apart by these ex­perts, but in the end you learn so much that it's def­i­nite­ly worth it," de Gannes said.

"The most im­por­tant thing I want peo­ple to un­der­stand about us is that we've done due dili­gence.

"We've stud­ied the in­dus­try, spo­ken to clients and dri­vers and ba­si­cal­ly built a bet­ter taxi ser­vice from the ground up."

Reach is a taxi ser­vice avail­able via an app that al­lows clients to book a taxi to any lo­ca­tion in T&T.It fa­cil­i­tates mul­ti­ple bids on each re­quest so that the cus­tomer gets the most af­ford­able price.The com­pa­ny al­so does strin­gent back­ground checks on their dri­vers to en­sure best in class ser­vice.