At 21, they built a job portal to help young people find their jobs.

To equip young people with the necessary real world skills, Oswald Yeo, Looi Qin En and Seah Ying Cong, found a way to setup a startup named Glints. The three are the youngest entrepreneurs in Joyful Frog Digital Incubator (JFDI) program.

Glints targets the young people to acquire directly relevant career skills and experience through internships, part-time jobs and real projects, while simultaneously easing the hiring process for employers of young people.

“Glints is focused on helping employers to hire young people for internships and graduate jobs. At the same time, we also developing a system with professional copywriters to help every company on our portal craft their job description in unique and interesting ways to attract young talents, helping them to do employer branding effectively,” said Glints co-founder, Oswald.

Glints which started as an internship agency has moved on to develop the portal after they have validated the demand for what they were offering.

“The problem we are solving is that of many young people not being equipped with real world skills for their career when they graduate. Particularly in Asia, employers have commented that many of their young hires have trouble closing the gap between academia to employment. Our larger vision is to equip young people with the necessary real world skills through internships and more on our platform,” said Oswald.

As he traces back their footsteps, Oswald said that ‘serendipitously’ they got acquainted to a local community of entrepreneurs and began running a startup-intern matching program for their companies. With an ‘extremely’ small budget for online advertising they recruited youths for these internships, only to receive overwhelming response.

“We had not only local youths but also youths all the way from USA, UK ,Germany, and even Czech Republic were keen to be involved in the business environment of Singapore and Asia. Almost every company we met has also always wanted an intern, but found it difficult to find one,” Oswald added.

According to Oswald, Glints has $50,000 from private angel investors and $25,000 from Joyful Frog Digital Incubator. And as the 100 days JFDI program comes to an end, they will be raising their next round of funding from venture capitalists to grow their team and accelerate the growth of the portal.

The founders

At 21, Oswald, Ying Cong and Qin En are fresh out of High School and Army. They are supposed to head to the states to study at Stanford, University of California Berkeley, and Wharton Business School. However, according to Oswald, running a startup has taught them a lot of real world skills that they would never learn from schools. And recognizing that there's lots for them to learn, they also decided to be part of IDA-supported Joyful Frog Digital Incubator (JFDI) for the mentorship they provide. Oswald said that they are the youngest entrepreneurs accepted into the program so far.

According to him, he and Ying Cong have also co-authored and published a book titled "Singapore Startup Guide" with renowned entrepreneur Derek Sivers. While, Qin En has published 13 Research papers in behavioral science with A*, and that is their second startup together.

Oswald also shared what Hugh Mason, CEO of Joyful Frog Digital Incubator has to say about them, "Glints stood out from the many young teams that applied to us because, frankly, they were so damn cheeky. Not in an arsey way but we sensed immediately that they have that fundamental naughtiness and healthy disrespect for rules that marks out some of the very best entrepreneurs. We liked that they nearly got jailed for running a business while doing their National Service!"  

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Company Profile

Name of the Company: Glints
Founders: Oswald Yeo, Looi Qin En and Seah Ying Cong
Website: https://glints.com/
Total Funding at hand: $50,000 from private angel investors and $25,000 from Joyful Frog Digital Incubator
Source of Funding: Private Angel Investor and Joyful Frog Digital Incubator
Start of Operation: Jan 2014

It works 24/7/365, never gets sick or tired, doesn’t have an attitude and never asks for a raise.

Founder of Unified Inbox, which recently made Singapore its international headquarters, is working on an algorithm that could potentially power the world’s first smart inbox assistant. This innovation could help to screen your calls and messages, sort your mail, and help manage your time.

Founded by Toby Ruckert, Unified Inbox wants to bring anyone's own Personal Executive Assistant who does all the management of calls and messages and more with the touch of a screen.

The cloud-based unified communication & social collaboration platform, centralizes external conversations, social engagement and internal team collaboration into one single experience across desktop and mobile devices. Given the amount of messages sent through and received from various channels, Unified Inbox want to help users manage their digital lives.

"While still in its closed beta phase, Unified Inbox has already secured top tier telecommunication companies, ISP and media partners for a global market roll out in 2015 as they see the huge potential of this Communication-as-a-Service platform as a simple, yet highly effective way of users taking control of our communications flow across email, Twitter, LinkedIn, or SMS," said Toby.

Unified Inbox, has several cloud solutions focused around unification and collaboration, which work cross-platform. Their first offering is a Unified Inbox mobile app, which allows users to manage all their incoming and outgoing messages centrally from within one interface. It has embraced the idea of simply “Getting Things Done” and aim towards better productivity of the information worker.

"It is designed to be a personal inbox management assistant, enabling its users to respond faster, more efficiently and build better business relationships improving their ability to connect with prospects, customers and other internal departments across multiple channels and devices from one single place. With functions like Swipe to Archive or Delete, Task-Delegation, Message Distribution or Deferring of messages by simple gestures, Unified Inbox gears up to become the future inbox management solution – no matter what the source of the message," Toby said.

Toby said that developing the platform took some time considering the complex nature of combining various communication channels and messaging protocols, with the first prototype having taken nearly three years to develop. He bootstrapped the company for three years before Markus Lehnert, the former Head of Strategy / M&A at a large European software company saw Unified Inbox’s potential and joined Toby as first investor and became a co-founder.

"Unified Inbox, has attracted further investment and government grants, allowing the company to complete its products and form its core team. Unified Inbox is now backed by internationally independent investors and looking to raise further funds for its expansion into the region," Toby said.

Currently, they are looking for information workers (professional individuals, SMBs or teams in larger enterprises with between 5-100 people) to trial our solution and provide market feedback.

The founder

Toby was born in 1977 and raised in Germany. He immigrated to New Zealand before travelling mostly in India, China and Europe.

He has a music degree and ventured into IT while still at school by doing part-time software testing for IBM. He then started a couple of e-commerce companies while still studying at university before coming up with the concept of Unified Inbox. He began developing the idea for Unified Inbox since 2010, after encountering the difficulty of keeping up with both internal and external communications while running his existing ventures across different locations and time zones.

According to Toby, initially, it was simply a matter of scratching your own itch. The online shops he had founded were getting emails, sms, phone calls, facebook and twitter messages from customers, suppliers and other business partners alike. There was no central overview to see all communication in one place and work together on those messages as a team. Later, they found that once you’ve got all in one place, you really want your personal executive assistant to manage it all. And this is what Unified Inbox is ultimately turning into.”

“Unified Inbox, provides a complete overview of all incoming and outgoing messages for a single person or an entire business, making it easy to be compliant on social media, achieve secure and complete backup across different channels and empowering information workers with better productivity with features like Unified Search, Unified Conversations or the concept of the “5 D’s”

With the increasing volume of communication and channels, media breaks have become the norm and it’s now nearly impossible to keep up with every conversation we’re involved in. With smart services such as InboxRank® and LifeModes®, Unified Inbox is getting ready to become your personal executive assistant to help you manage your inbox and digital life better," Toby said.

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COMPANY PROFILE

Name of the Company: Unified Inbox
Founder/CEO: Toby Ruckert
Website: www.unifiedinbox.com
Source of funding: Private investors (New Zealand, Singapore, India, Europe)
Start of operation: 2008, + Team 2010, + Beta 2012 + Headquarter (SG): 2014
 

For startups wanting to be featured, send your message to Lee Anne Babierra at [email protected]

Its total seed funding now exceeded $100,000.

Insufficiency of centralised platform to connect businesses together brought an industrial design and business administration graduate to put up museCrowd.

museCrowd, billed as the first in Singapore, is a business-sourcing platform allowing companies who require jobs to be done to post a project for suppliers to bid through a tender/bidding system. It also aims to encourage more collaborations and create more business opportunities among the business community in Singapore's business ecosystem through its easy to use bidding/tendering platform.

“museCrowd started because of a lack of a centralised platform for businesses to connect with one another. Suppliers were cold calling companies that were not really interested in their services. Similarly, companies that needed help with some projects were having difficulties searching for suitable suppliers for the jobs. museCrowd aims to be the connecting platform for both companies and suppliers, where companies can source for suppliers for their projects easily, and on the other hand, suppliers no longer have to cold call for sales leads as they can get targeted sales leads through museCrowd,” said co-founder Nancy Lai.

Jacob Toh and Nancy Lai, both 26 years old are the founders of museCrowd. Jacob, graduated from NUS in 2013, with 2nd Upper Class Honours with Double Degree in Business Administration and Real Estate. He also held leadership positions in various businesses. While Nancy, also graduated from NUS in 2012, with 2nd Upper Class Honours in Industrial Design and NUS Undergraduate (Merit) Scholar.

According to Nancy, the platform started in 2011 when they were still students in NUS. They were incubated under NUS Enterprise. Post graduation, they got extensive media coverage that attracted Angels and VCs attention. Currently, the startup is funded by 2 venture capitalists and an angel investor.

“museCrowd currently have more than 200 suppliers on board with us, and have closed projects with combined value in excess of SGD40,000 prior to museCrowd's targeted launch,” said Nancy while noting that its combined total seed funding exceeded $100,000, which puts them at valuation of nearly SGD1mil..

Their future plans include local market testing of their Beta site in Mid-June 2014. It’s expansion plans in the future includes regional expansion and rolling out chargeable value-add features to improve the tendering/bidding system.

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Company Profile

Name of the Company: museCrowd Group Pte Ltd
Founders: Jacob Toh and Nancy Lai
Website: www.musecrowd.com
Major Investors: 2 VC firms and 1 angel
Total Funding at hand: $112,000
Start of Operation: 2012

For startups wanting to be featured, send your message to Lee Anne Babierra at [email protected]

This startup is on its final stages of closing $500,000 fund.

Realizing that most communities meet on message-boards and forums, which haven't changed much in fifteen years — they don't work well on mobile, don't tap into the potential of social networks and aren't very engaging, young entrepreneurs Aravind Ravi Sulekha and Gaurav Jee Srivastava founded a platform that they claim a “complete rethink” of what forums should be like. It’s called Scrollback.

Scrollback hosts chat rooms for online communities which is unique in some way as it keeps archived contents. According to Aravind, most chat room services throw away their content (the archives) because they are hard to navigate and are not search engine friendly. Scrollback,on the other hand, uses artificial intelligence (ML and NLP) to understand, categorize and optimize chat archives for browsing and for search engines.

“We think they should feel like WhatsApp, but tailored to large groups of strangers. We think they should play nice with each community's other online assets — be embeddable on their website, read and post from their facebook page and twitter hashtag, etc,” said Aravind.

Scrollback, founded in August 2013, is now on the final stages of closing a seed round of S$500,000 led by Jungle Ventures.

According to Aravind, almost 500 communities are actively using Scrollback, including several Mozilla communities, conferences, blogs and nonprofits.

Currently, they are focusing on building a user base as their product has significant network effects.

“We plan to do this by building more virality into the product itself and by presenting Scrollback at offline community events and conferences,” said Aravind.

The Founders

Aravind Ravi Sulekha, 29, has been programming since the age of 12, and has degrees in engineering at IIT Kharagpur and management from IIM Ahmedabad. He has headed product management and development at four startups before Scrollback.

Gaurav Jee Srivastava, 31, also attended IIT Kharagpur. He co-founded one of the largest college festivals in India and ran a successful campus startup. He has over seven years of experience in finance with multiple accreditations, and excels in engaging communities.

The Backstory

According to Aravind, Scrollback was founded with the aim of building a community website around electronic gadgets. They found that current forum software was insufficient for the kind of engaging, real-time community they wanted to build.

“We brainstormed ideas for our community site and presented it at a few events and conferences, and we realized that other communities wanted them too.

We were bootstrapped for about six months, after which we were accepted to the JFDI accelerator program. It provided a small amount of funding, a lot of mentorship and the opportunity to present to over 130 investors. We subsequently raised money from angels we met there,” said Aravind.
 

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COMPANY PROFILE

Name of the company: Scrollback
Founders: Aravind Ravi Sulekha, Gaurav Jee Srivastava
Website: scrollback.io
Major Investors: Jungle Ventures, JFDI, Meng Wong
Total funding at hand: SGD500,000
Source of funding: Jungle Ventures
Start of operation: 1 August 2013

For startups wanting to be featured, send your message to Lee Anne Babierra at [email protected]

Will it become the AirBnB for short-term commercial space rental?

AdHocSpace bills itself as the first online portal in Asia which helps venues market their unused spaces to companies who requires spaces for their events.

"Clients who require spaces only need to have a single point of contact to get quotes from multiple venues. Currently, our focus is only on spaces like meeting rooms, training rooms/seminar rooms and auditoriums, with extension to other space types in the next 12 months," said founder Melverick Ng.

Melverick adds that AdHocSpace manages corporate training space booking from end-to-end automatically and electronically, from receiving the enquiry, to quotation generation, invoice generation, calendar management and even payment management. It aims to be the AirBnB for short-term commercial space rental.

Currently, they are looking for future expansion into other space types, other disposable services required during trainings (catering, equipment rental) and also regional expansion.

The Founder

Melverick Ng, 42 years old is a local serial entrepreneur who has successfully built and grown a serviced office from a small space with only 5 rooms to over 80+ rooms in Mountbatten Square in a short span of 6 years. Coming from an IT background, he has always been interested in Technology startups even before the Tech Boom. Currently, he is overseeing the serviced office operations and running a small angel fund Alacrity Capital, on top of a few other technology startups.

"There are a lot of venues in Singapore which have unused spaces during their off-peak hours, be it meeting rooms, training rooms, classrooms or even auditoriums. However, as venue rental is not their core business, most of these venues do not have the proper channel or even the manpower to manage any adhoc bookings. On the other hand, clients who require a training room or meeting room on an adhoc basis for their events/trainings are facing difficulties finding suitable spaces/trainings for their event," he said.

According to Melverick, AdHocSpace did not start out with the intention to be developed into a full fledged tech-startup where the whole booking process is managed from end-to-end. It started out as a marketing platform where venues can list their spaces until Melverick saw the opportunity of marketing the unused spaces for venues to get in extra revenue.

The success story

AdHocSpace, which has $100,000 internal funding currently has its own success story.

AdHocSpace started with just one person manning the phone line to take in enquiries, and managing the whole booking process for both clients and venues. In a short two years, AdHocSpace has grown to have over 35 venue partners with yields more than 60 rooms available for rental.

“On average, we receive close to 100 enquiries a month (without any active marketing done), and have closed over $500k worth of bookings for the past 2 years,” said Melverick.

AdHocSpace started with $10,000 self-funded by Melverick himself and it was used to create the initial website and the salary for staff. And early this year, an additional $100,000 investment was pumped in by Melverick, mainly to fund the marketing costs, the new website development costs and also to sustain two employees’ payroll.

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Company Profile

Name of the Company: AdHocSpace Pte Ltd
Founders: Melverick Ng
Website: www.adhocspace.sg
Major Investors: Alacrity Capital
Total Funding at hand: $110,000
Start of Operation: 2011/2012
 

For startups wanting to be featured, send your message to Lee Anne Babierra at [email protected]

Take up the challenge: 10,000 steps daily in 100 days.

Stepathlon is a pedometer-based, mass participation corporate initiative that motivates individuals to take 10,000 steps a day as recommended by global health authorities. The concept is a 100 day race around a 'virtual world' for companies of all sizes, across all industries and countries.

Stepathlon, which started in Australia has an initial fund of SGD 2.3million, is growing year by year. In their first year, Stepathlon had 21,237 participants representing 143 companies and 19 countries. In a matter of just one year, the numbers grew by 47% to 30,897 participants from 210 companies across 434 cities and 34 countries, revealed co-founder Ravi Krishnan in an interview with Singapore Business Review.

"We are growing and we aim to become – THE “Movement for Movement” across the globe," he said.

Now, the concept has arrived to Singapore all the way from India.

"In the fast-paced world today, have intensive work schedules that take a toll on both body and mind, leaving them with little time to invest in their own health and fitness. Stepathlon provides a simple, fun and relevant solution to maintain and establish a healthier and happier lifestyle by mitigating both time and space constraints," said Ravi.

Stepathlon combines awareness and engagement to create healthier, happier and more productive individuals and companies. It also has a 12 month program consisting of 9 Stepping Stones to health and happiness.

"Stepathlon creates opportunities for employees that do not have structured exercise schedules to invest in their health and wellbeing by focusing on the taking 10,000 daily. It's 100 days duration promotes habitual change in a supportive, fun and engaging manner. It combats the significant effects and costs of absenteeism and presenteeism (where an individual is physically present but unable to give 100% at work), which have negative impacts on both companies and employees. Furthermore, Stepathlon encourages teamwork and unites an organization across locations via common goals. Teamwork is enhanced when employees of all ages participate in the programme together," he added.

The founders

Ravi, 46 years old and a lawyer by training, founded Stepathlon together with Shane Bilsborough soon after he left IMG. Shane is a renowned Nutritionist and author of three bestsellers books on exercise diet and nutrition.

Being a former sportsman and keen sports enthusiast, health has always been among Ravi’s most passionate pursuits. He spent over 17 years in Indian sports marketing, beginning with setting up IMG in India which was a pioneer across several genres. Establishing a mass participation wellness based event was a natural progression.

"When Shane and I reconnected in 2011, soon after I left IMG, he introduced me to a concept that he had devised and successfully implemented in Australia. Almost immediately, I knew that the timing and relevance of the concept was ideal for the Indian market. The increasing pace of urbanization in India and the fact that our lifestyles today lead to minimal movement required a solution which could be easily and widely adopted."

According to Ravi, one of the key factors driving Stepathlon’s success is its teambuilding format. It is a team event across countries allows for individuals to be part of a global community, giving participants the opportunity to communicate within an ecosystem or network of like-minded people.

"The best reward for us is when Stepathletes share their experiences of how Stepathlon has changed their lives for the better. There have been a number of instances where employees at companies told me stories about how Stepathlon has brought about a change in their habits to make their lives better, healthier and more productive. Some people now only take the stairs instead of elevators, some conduct walking meetings instead of sitting around a boardroom table- I have many examples of positive changes that not only make people healthier but also make them feel better about themselves. That’s often half the battle. Small steps can make BIG differences," said Ravi. 

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Company Profile

Company Name: Stepathlon
Founder/s: Ravi Krishnan, Shane Bilborough
Website: www.stepathlon.com
Total Funding at hand: SGD2.3 million
Start of Operation: 2012

For startups wanting to be featured, send your message to Lee Anne Babierra at [email protected]

Here’s how you could end up paying less.

Singapore startup Haystakt bills itself as the world's first crowdpricing platform that lets anyone commercialize their creative ideas at crowd-determined prices.

“Like crowdfunding sites, we help anyone pre-determine demand, and achieve negative working capital before entering product,”said co-founder Joel Leong.

Leong adds that what makes the platform unique is the concept of economies of scale- the more people order, the more economies of scale gained, and hence the less everyone ends up paying.

The trick is simple, ordering a project on Haystakt is the same as saying you're willing to buy it at its currently listed price. However, as other people order after you, they help bring the price down for everyone - so it's very likely that you'll eventually pay less than the price you ordered at.

"Quantitatively, the increased access to knowledge and tools results in more creative producers. Consumer demand for unique and authentic experiences are increasing rapidly. Qualitatively, we love building platformed businesses and the Internet allows for a leaner form of distribution and business flow."

Leong founded Haystakt with Melvin Tiong. They were classmates back when they were in Raffles Institution. In order to launch the business, they taught themselves how to program.

The founders started the business by pitching the idea to investors. They soon got started with government funding and angel investment. They refused to disclose total funding.

When asked about the startup future plans to boost the business, Leong revealed that they are currently focusing on growing the supply side like looking for more people to start projects of their own.

"We intend to expand into 1 other SouthEast Asian country in the near future.”
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Company Profile

Name of the Company: HAYSTAKT
Founders: Joel Leong, Melvin Tiong
Website: www.haystakt.com
Source of Funding: Spring Singapore, Angel Investment
Start of Operation: 2013

For startups wanting to be featured, send your message to Lee Anne Babierra at [email protected]

Tired of bogus listings?

Fake listings and dodgy agents are just some of the things that house-hunters have to through before finding their dream place. Despite the availability of many apps that promise to make apartment-hunting more bearable, there seems to be a missing link. Jumping on the bandwagon is 99.co, a Singapore startup that plans to meet the needs of exasperated house-hunters in Singapore.

In an exclusive interview, 99.co's representative said the startup was set up in order to make the apartment rental process an honest, transparent and delightful experience for the tenants as well as landlords or agents.

"Finding a place to live is one of the most important, most expensive, and most tedious decisions one has to make.

Amongst the 99.co team, we have rented apartments over the past 2 decades, so we understand the pain and agony that one have to go through, such as fake listings by dodgy agents, inaccurate photos or insufficient information on the property and neighborhood," he said.

The trick is simple. 99.co offers its elegant map-based search and presentation of properties with listings vetted for quality and accuracy. Apartment seekers can see the distance of their prospect units from MRT stations and calculate the travel time. It also has a 1-click scheduling of viewings on behalf of renters.

99.co's founding team is made up of Darius Cheung, Ruiwen Chua, Anuj Bheda and Conor McLaughlin. Darius is a seasoned and distinguished Singaporean entrepreneur who founded tenCube, a mobile security company that was acquired by security giant McAfee in 2010. Ruiwen is a self-proclaimed hacker at heart.

He previously founded Hackerspace.sg and SquareCrumbs. Anuj debuted as a hacker at Chalkboard, and subsequently helped the non-profit Teach For India advance its cause with technology. Conor was part of the team at BillPin, before co-founding 99.co. He was also previously with Pixar and Lucasfilm.

COMPANY PROFILE

Name of the Company: 99.co
Founders: Darius Cheung, Ruiwen Chua, Anuj Bheda, Saurabh Mandar and Conor McLaughlin
Website: 99.co
Major Investors: 500 Startups, East Ventures, Fenox VC and Golden Gate Ventures
Total Funding at hand: S$700,000
Start of Operation: 2013

It raised around US$4M funds in just two years.

Forget about typing keywords on web to look for fashion products. ViSenze was created in an attempt to simplify the visual web by helping users find visual things visually without the need for keywords. Hence, the idea Visual + Sense becoming ViSenze.

In an interview with ViSenze's CEO Oliver Tan, he noted that 74% of online users today complain that keyword search engines are inadequate in helping them find things on web while 40% wished for their search process to be more visually intuitive.

Founded in 2012, Visenze is composed of a well-balanced team combination of two experienced entrepreneurs in fashion, Roger Yuen and Oliver Tan and two hard-core scientists Professor Chua Tat-Sen and Dr. Li Guangda.

This startup which seeded on the founders own money successively raised about US$4m in just a span of two years having Rakuten Ventures, Walden International, UOB Venture Management as their major investors.

Oliver claims that the uniqueness of ViSenze stems from a novel combination of 4 things: smart visual technology, deep domain knowledge of things we want to recognize, making our visual tools easy to deploy, and creative entrepreneurial ideas.

"ViSenze is not a just another visual technology company. Our aim to is solve real world problems and challenges of the visual web, and create new application opportunities creatively in areas done none before or rarely experimented before. We love challenges and creative applications", said Oliver.

With their internal gag "invisible solution (visual technology) meets visible problem (visual search problem in fashion)", the whole ViSenze team aims to make a difference in the visual world that is why they are recruiting like-minded individuals to join their exciting journey to address "Stop Searching and Start Finding Issue."
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COMPANY PROFILE

Website: www.visenze.com
Major Investors: Rakuten Ventures, Walden International, UOB Management
Total Funding at hand: US$3.9m to date
Source of Funding: Seed and Series A
Start of Operation: August 2012

For startups wanting to be featured, send your message to Lee Anne Babierra at [email protected]
 

It’s all about ‘the art of click'.

With over 20 years of experience in digital media, mobile advertising expert Emmanuel Allix wants to change mobile networking as you know it. Based in Asia, Allix jumpstarted with a Master’s degree in Telecom in France. Now, with his startup firm Art of Click, Allix plans to fill the gap between a mobile marketing agency and an ad network.

“The idea of creating Art of Click came from an observation as I had experience in a media agency for years and as well later in an ad network. I was always stunned by the gap between a brand or advertiser pitch talking about real marketing KPIs like “we want registrations” or “we want people to download our apps” or “we need people to buy products online”, and the answer from the ecosystem which was “let me sell you some clicks then,” he shared.

No one wants clicks, clicks are only the beginning of the campaign journey, advertisers want results. I was also amazed to hear: “we had a great campaign. We achieve 3% click through rate”. A person clicking on a banner doesn’t equal to brand uplift or recall, or purchase intend, which are traditional KPIs for marketers,” he added.
Art of Click focuses on Cost per Action (CPA) as it aims to move advertisers from the Cost per Click business model and encourage them to optimize their ad campaigns on post-click performance.
Aside from SIngapore, Art of Click is also operating in key Asian markets like Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South East Asia.

Allix concluded, “we became the fastest growing mobile marketing platform based in Asia Pacific and have now one of the most extended network of publishers in Asia-Pacific.”

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COMPANY PROFILE:

Website: www.artofclick.com

Major Investors: Wavemaker Lab and National Research Foundation Singapore (NRF) are our investors.

Total funding at hand: SGD 700K

Source of Seed funding: NRF, WML and founder

Start of operation: June 2011

Target fund for Series A: SGD 2 to 3 Million

Take a sneak peek into the minds of some top VC investors and successful startup founders.

Singapore Business Review recently held a luncheon briefing following the success of the 20 hottest startups to watch in 2014 list published on Feb-Mar issue.

The briefing, which took place at Intercontinental Singapore on April 16, was attended by over 120 guests mostly startups founders, lawyers, investors, and venture capitalists.

It was a meaningful half-day event with discussions focused on four main topics including interesting trends in Singapore startup scene, funding issues, winning strategies for startups and the future of e-commerce.

Here are some key takeaways from distinguished speakers: 

See how they're building their travel search empire.

Launched in 2005, Wego is a travel search site which partners with local and global airlines, hotels and online travel agents to get every traveller's need under one umbrella using highly advanced technology. It aims to save travellers' time so they can ‘pay less and travel more’.

It was launched by co-founders Ross Veitch (CEO) a former executive at Yahoo! and Craig Hewett (CCO) a former executive of the InterContinental Hotels Group.

“Some companies only offer flights or hotels, we provide both and provide suggestions that suit the users locale and destination,” shared Wego’s spokesperson.

Since its inception, Wego has launched over 50 local sites in more than 30 languages, providing a more tailored and personal user experience. In addition, Wego's data science team (Wego Scientists) have developed the ability to display travel deals a user is more likely interested in, using its unique algorithms that track past and current search behaviour, providing a more tailored and relevant search experience.

Wego claims that its engagement with its global social media community has reached in excess of 1 million at the end of 2013 and has continued to build with thousands of new followers each week.
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COMPANY PROFILE:

Name of the company: Wego
Founders: Ross Veitch and Craig Hewett
Website: www.wego.com
Major Investors: Tiger Management, Victoria Capital and the Crescent Point Group
Total funding at hand: In June, Wego secured US$17 million in growth capital through the completion of a Series C Preferred Share Offering. The investment was led by Crescent Point with contributions from Victoria Capital and existing shareholder, Tiger Global, bringing Wego's total capital raised to US$36 million.
Start of operation: The company was established in 2005 in Singapore

Check out how "SuperMommy" plans to take Tickled Media into another level.

Singapore Business Review recently caught up with Neetu Mirchandani, billed as the most followed Google+ personality in Singapore and 6th most influential Google+ female personality in Asia with over half a million followers, to talk about her recent hiring.

Neetu, the power blogger known as "SuperMommy" with over thirteen years of legal and media experience across the US and Asia, was hired by Tickled Media as the Vice President of Strategic Alliances and Communications for Asia Pacific.

Tickled Media, a local startup focused on digital publishing and backed by venture capitals LionRock Capital and Tigris Capital, has recently hired Neetu as the Vice President of Strategic Alliances and Communications for Asia Pacific.

Tickled Media is headquartered in Singapore and behind flagship brand, theAsianparent.com which reaches 1 million mums in Southeast Asia.

Neetu will be responsible for handling tactical business development efforts and overall profit and loss for Tickled Media across four countries (Singapore, Thailand,Philippines and Indonesia).

What makes you excited about your new position?

In my position as VP, I’m excited by the fact that Tickled Media is both digital and a startup. Digital is something new and dynamic and the benefit of working in a startup environment is that it allows me to mold the diverse and constantly changing culture to make effective changes.

Being a mother of two as well as a modern Asian woman, I can relate to the company’s vision and mission to support Asian moms as they strive to marry tradition with modern parenting philosophies. It’s exciting to take on a full time position with the company as I’ve seen how it has exponentially grown over the last few years -- and I want to be fully onboard as it focuses on regional expansion.

Combining my professional experience in corporate law and contracts along with my international background, I'm ready to join Tickled Media on its journey to expansion and take the company to the next level.

As the most followed Google+ personality in Singapore and 6th most influential Google+ female personality in Asia, what new can you bring to Tickled Media?

As a well-known personality in Asia, I am able to bring a familiar face and act as the brand ambassador to the various portals under the Tickled Media family.

What three goals are you focused on?

There are three main goals that I plan to focus on at Tickled Media. Tickled Media is a very data-driven company, so my first goal is to further this and to ensure that we put standard processes into place to ensure scalability.

The second goal is to look at lateral expansion and see which new verticals we can enter into in the parenting space. We have recently implemented a new strategy, wherein we plan to conduct market research projects to help our clients understand the Asian mum market better. The first project I will be spearheading is “The Asian Digital Mum Report.” Based on in-depth market research data from over 10,000 mums across Southeast Asia, the report is examines the lives of Asian mums in today’s digital world.

My third goal is to set up strategic partnerships. We've already taken steps towards achieving this goal by having recently set up a partnership with Google. We're also in the midst of closing a few more prominent partnerships which we will be announcing in the very near future.

What will you do differently in this position?

As my role is new to the company, there are no predecessors to follow. It's because of this that I only have the opportunity to excel and do my best to surpass expectations.

What changes are you planning for in the company?

As Tickled Media is already a thriving company, my focus will be to assist in broadening the company's existing reach and growth.

What are your key business philosophies?

For starters, one of my key business philosophies is to focus on productivity at every level of business and support innovation every day. Next, don’t be risk-averse; as they say, “The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all.” And finally, make a huge impact. Go big. If you’re going to do something, you should always give it 110%.

It’s now looking for strategic investors.

Started in 2009, JamiQ Pte. Ltd. is a social media listening, monitoring and analytics company based in Singapore. In simple terms, JamiQ helps its clients listen, monitor, and analyse data on what’s being spoken about them online including news sites, blogs, and forums.

According to chief marketing officer Ghanshyam Ahuja, his startup was started by a team of four members: two senior members and two young engineering graduates from NTU who pitched the project at one of the university pitching forum.

“They assembled together to build the product and got angel funding subsequently which helped them to launch the product after a year. They also got student grant for start-ups from University under iJAM scheme of Spring and has been generating revenues since then,” shared Ahuja.

One of its unique features is its multi-lingual capacity in mining and analysing social media sentiments. It is available in local languages like Chinese, Bahasa Malaysia, Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog and French with others Asian languages in pipeline.

Additionally, since all the technology and algorithms are built by them, it becomes easier for clients to work with in terms of customisation or integration with their internal IT systems.

“We have also built unique algorithms for geo-location analysis for detecting the country/city of the people discussing on social media. On business front, our uniqueness is being a lean startup and profitable from year three onwards. We have been self sustaining since the beginning of our launch,” says Ahuja.

Despite its recent achievements, JamiQ isn’t resting on its laurels yet. After serving more than 200 customers from APAC,Middle East,Africa,ME & LatAm JamiQ is set to expand further and is geared to take a good market share in rapidly expanding field of social media analytics.

Currently, JamiQ is looking for Series A funding and strategic investors to move to next level of building becoming a platform company.
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COMPANY PROFILE

Name of the company: JamiQ Pte. Ltd.
Founders: Michael Lim & Suresh Keerthi, Ghanshyam Ahuja joined the board in 2013
Website: www.Jamiq.com
Major Investors: Suresh Keerthi, Manish Agarwal & Ghanshyam Ahuja
Total funding at hand: USD 500K+
Target fund: USD 1.3M
Source of funding: Angels & Founders
Start of operation: 2009 (Incorporation 2008)

It’s the Wordpress for video games.

The world spends 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames. For others it may be pure leisure, but for some luckier ones, this means big business. Gametize, a gamification technology and consulting company, makes use of game psychology to help brands and organizations engage their target audience, such as in marketing, learning, and training.

In an exclusive interview with the Singapore Business Review, founder Keith Ng claims that Gametize’s proprietary technology, Gametize Platform, is the simplest gamification platform to engage and motivate behaviors with fun challenges such as quizzes, photo, QR code challenges.

Like a Wordpress for mobile and web games, Gametize allows users to earn rewards, compete, and socialize through a mobile/web experience that can be white-labeled and published in just 5 minutes.

“Gametize Platform is licensed to major brands and enterprises such as DBS, Standard Chartered Bank, SingTel, and Singapore Press Holdings, and has won awards from IBM and Shell,” Ng shared.

Asked what makes the platform unique, Ng said by integrating game psychology into their solutions, Gametize increases audience engagement, backed by proven case studies.

Our platform can also be used by anyone, even with no technical experience, to create games in just 5 minutes. Users can earn rewards, compete, and socialize through a mobile/web experience,”While Gametize has achieved more than what its peers had amidst tighter competition for funds and market share, it isn’t resting on its laurels just yet.

“We plan to launch a series of Gametize powered apps in different verticals, such as personal development, language learning, coaching, and eventually our own learning games app store,” concluded Ng.

CEO reveals next big plans.

Incorporated in April 2012, Singapore startup fastacash™ aims to provide a global platform which allows users to transfer value (money, airtime, other tokens of value, etc.) along with content (photos, videos, audio, messages, etc.) through social networks and messaging platforms.

The company has developed a patent pending link generation technology that enables the value transfer with a secure link.

In an exclusive interview with the Singapore Business Review, Vince Tallent, Chairman & CEO, shared “given that our model is B2B2C, we embed our technology into our partners' (remittance companies, banks, mobile operators, social networks, solutions and by way of the various partnerships we have, we will be able to create a network of mobile wallets that can interact with one another through a common link generation technology.”

As a technology enabler, fastacash™ partners with companies and brands in the payments, remittance, consumer products, social and gaming industries to bring its technology to end users.

fastacash™ traces its humble beginnings from the founders’ own experience and need for a speedier money transfer transaction.

“One of our co-founders sent money from Singapore to India on a regular basis to provide support for his parents. He also spent a fair amount of time on the road for work and didn't have a convenient way to give his daughter pocket money.

At the same time, he was using social networks to stay connected with his family and friends through different social networks and so he wondered if there was a way to combine payments with social across mobile phones. Thats where the idea was born!,” said Tallent.

Asked about the company’s future plans, Tallent revealed that they are planning to launch their service in Russia and the CIS countries in Q1 2014. That is on top of their existing services in the UK and Indonesia.

"We have also recently signed more partners that will allow us to expand our global footprint", he added.

It’s speeding up its Asian expansion.

While car retailers and buyers are raising their eyebrows at the sight of skyrocketing car prices in Singapore, some personal transport firms are basking in the boom of car sharing to benefit Singapore’s commuters.
iCarsclub, a peer to peer car sharing online marketplace based in Singapore, allows private car-owners to rent out their vehicles to earn extra income and helps car renters to rent a vehicle nearby at a low cost.

In an exclusive interview with the Singapore Business Review, Marvin Mohan, marketing manager at iCarsclub, said ‘'peer to peer car sharing reduces car ownership and car usage, which eases the traffic and saves the environment. It also brings people together as they enjoy the spiritual reward of sharing their property to help others.’’

Formed in 2012, iCarsclub aims to reduce the resource consumption on the environment. Mohan stressed that his company does not own the vehicles nor maintain them. Instead, it allows owners and renters to connect and generate income from idle cars on the backdrop of soaring car prices in Singapore.

‘In doing so and over time, our members have grown to become friends and through the spirit of sharing, the community grows stronger,’ he said.

From Singapore, iCarsclub plans to head on to other Asian cities to boost its potential.

'‘Our growth has been great over the last two years and we expanded to Beijing in October 2013--with great success. With our venture capital money we are looking into expanding to many other cities including Shanghai and Shenzhen in the short term future,’' Mohan shared.

The company is also engaging with the Singapore government to open up the PCRS (Private Car Rental Scheme) ruling to 7 days a week.

'‘We are growing fast and have stellar support from the government here in Singapore and in China. The company is financially very healthy with strong financial backing from various investors. We want to cement our position as the largest peer to peer car sharing marketplace in Asia,’' he added.

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COMPANY PROFILE:

Name of the company: iCarsclub Pte Ltd
Founders: Eddy Zhang, Chengkun Xue, Jamie Wang
Website: https://www.icarsclub.com
Source of funding: VC
Start of operation: 2012-06