Six student teams from the University of New Brunswick’s Master of Technology Management and Entrepreneurship program pitched their startup ideas Thursday, with pet-sitting marketplace FURWARD taking home the $1,500 top prize.

The MTME program, managed under the umbrella of UNBs J. Herbert Smith Centre, offers students specialized training in how to commercialize technological innovation. The entrepreneurs were competing in MTME: NEXT, their degree’s concluding demo day. OMIMATIC, which plans to sell residential wellwater management systems for the African market, took home the $1,000 second place prize.

FURWARD is led by CEO Oluwaseun Rotimi, along with COO Safia Naznin and CTO Ilerioluwa Fadeyi. The trio earlier this year launched a website that matches pet-sitters with people who need their animals cared for while they travel or are otherwise indisposed, making revenue from subscriptions and commissions. They have aimed to differentiate their business from more generalized e-commerce marketplaces by offering unusual features like video check-ins and the ability to book a pet-sitter even on short notice.

“Our ask today is for strategic advice on how best to scale our organisation,” said Rotimi. “Also, we need your connections to insurance companies, to financial institutions. … And finally we’re raising a funding round of $450,000.”

Users on the site build out detailed profiles for themselves and their pets. When a pet owner wants to make a booking, they can either request a specific pet-sitter, or send the request to the pool of available workers.

“The more you pet-sit on our platform, the lower the commission we charge you,” said Rotimi “And while you’re sitting, we also provide insurance coverage for you.”

OMIMATIC, meanwhile, is the creation of CEO Shade Oyedepo, COO Semako Zannu, Chief Product Officer Olumide Kusimo and CTO Adebayo Onafowokan. They hope their water management systems will replace the manually operated borehole well systems common in the company’s planned beachhead market of Nigeria. The manual systems use pumps to force water from drilled wells into tanks at ground level, with a second pump moving the water into an additional, elevated tank so that gravity provides water pressure.

“This is a manual system, and it’s a legacy system that has been in existence for decades,” said Onafowokan. “What we are doing is to automate this entire water-driven [process]. All you need to do once you have our product is to install our water level-sensing module and our feedback and control unit.”

While OMIMATIC does have peer companies focused on the industrial and commercial markets, Oyedepo said Nigeria’s residential market is underserved. Onafowokan added that many companies from elsewhere in the world underestimate the commercial potential of Africa, meaning it often takes a company founded by African entrepreneurs to prove out new markets.

“Our plan is to go into partnerships with existing real estate developers,” said Oyedepo, adding that the strategy will be supplemented with retail and e-commerce sales.

“For those that are developing new estates, they will integrate our solution into the new estate. For the existing estates also, we’ve identified about 150 residential estates within Lagos that we want to start with, so we’ll be engaging with their Excos (community groups).”

The other startups that pitched included GUARDEE, which is developing a prepayment system for the jurisdictions in Africa where emergency healthcare providers require payment up-front; ZAPEQ, which is developing software to analyze attendee behaviour at large events like trade shows; Zotuen, which is a platform for homeowners and tradespeople to find each other; and Mulli, which is developing a sensor and software suite to train golfers.