The boot camp will run for four months, starting on May 4.

The two teams, as well as qualifiers from Thailand and Malaysia, will gain experience from workshops with Silicon Valley experts and one-on-one mentoring with qualified, successful start-up entrepreneurs from the region, will receive opportunities to pitch to global and regional venture capitalists, and will potentially explore commercialisation opportunities with Telenor.

They will also receive a seed funding of up to US$50,000 (Bt1.75 million) to power up their businesses.

MyanZen is envisaged as a platform that will enable users to sell anything, anywhere and any time, while GoP is a one-stop platform for facilitating travellers and travel agencies.

Both teams won Telenor Myanmar’s first Telenor Accelerate programme, which received 39 applications. The 10 shortlisted teams presented their business ideas to a panel of five judges, which included reputable founders of IT-based businesses in Myanmar, and Telenor experts.

The panel will continue to mentor the two winning teams in the next phases of the programme.

“Telenor Accelerate was introduced in Myanmar to help local start-ups realise their potentials, and grow,” said Ronny-Bakke Naevdal, chief strategy officer at Telenor Myanmar.

“Myanmar has a pool of many talented start-ups, which we believe have a strong future given the right support, the exposure to advance their ideas, and potential commercialisation opportunities. We believe the two winning teams will be able to grab the opportunity.”

Start-up accelerators, also known as seed accelerators, are support programmes for early-stage start-ups – with a series of educational workshops and networking events that usually last three to four months.

During the programme, the participating start-ups usually move into a shared office space together and learn about business operations, execution, finance and so on under experienced mentors and other successful entrepreneurs.

At the end of the programme, the graduating start-ups typically participate in a “demo day” where they pitch about their businesses in front of investors and potentially receive seed funding to grow their business.