Why pay more when you don't have to?

SingX is a Singapore-based financial technology start-up which aims to be the Airbnb of cross-border global payments.

"It aims to disrupt the Global Payments market with a peer-to-peer remittance platform which will, over time, eliminate the need to convert one currency to another and further reduce transaction costs," says SingX principal founder and CEO Atul Garg.

SingX's online remittance service will allow users to pay a fraction of typical bank charges, says Garg. The company has launched its first service which allows Singapore-based consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to transfer funds to India, to be followed by Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia and other countries.

SingX's peer-to-peer technology will match consumers' currency exchange needs, eliminating the need to convert from one currency to another. "It offers live foreign exchange rates. These are rates at which banks transact with each other, and customers are only charged a low handling fee of 0.5 percent, which is disclosed upfront," says Garg.

Garg shares he started the business because he could not bring himself to exchange money at airports due to exorbitant mark-ups ranging from 5 to 15%. He felt that it was unfair for money changers to take away that percentage of someone's money for simply exchanging currencies. He shares that, similarly, he was reluctant to use his credit card to make purchases overseas knowing full well that credit card companies mark up foreign currency conversions by three percent. Eventually, Garg says he and a group of likeminded professionals conceptualised a new way to transfer money overseas cheaper, faster and easier.

SingX is targeting consumers and SMEs, the segments Garg and his team believe are underserved and are paying the highest rates for remittances. The business' platform is simple and user-friendly, and customers can register for free to open an account on the company's website.

Regarding the assistance SingX has given its customers, Garg shares that story of a software programmer in Singapore whose family is in India. "As a sole breadwinner, he remits more than 60 percent of his monthly paycheck to his wife in India to manage the household, kids and his parents' expenses. With SingX, (the programmer) saved on the hefty FX markups and fixed charges (cable fees and commissions), which he used to incur," says Garg. Moreover, SingX's same day transfer ensured that the money the programmer sent reached his wife in time, including when his father was hospitalised. "To quote what (the programmer said) about why he uses SingX: 'Why pay more when you don't have to?'" says Garg.

Regarding SingX's future plans, Garg says the immediate action point is to introduce remittances in more currencies to SingX's customers based in Singapore. "There are also a number of products being developed by our R&D team that will expand our services to allow our customers to cross borders in a cheap, fast and convenient manner," he says. 

Latize believes in the power of data-driven decisions.

In this age of information, data abound and are plentiful for businesses to use to grow their operations. One company seeks to help other enterprises make the most of the data available everywhere.

Latize is a Singapore-based data company which works with organisations to capture, transform and utilise data to make smarter, better business decisions.

“I co-founded Latize on the vision that every decision in any business should be a data driven one, and that every business user should be empowered to make that decision,” says Vikram Mengi, Co-Founder & CEO of Latize.

To achieve this, Mengi says, Latize’s Ulysses data platform transforms masses of enterprise data into a set of fluid, interconnected, and most importantly - easy to understand data points. “This transformation infuses intelligence into the data that allows the data platform to provide answers to questions, even when the user does not know exactly what to ask,” says Mengi.

Fellow Latize co-founder K. Biju and Mengi have spent several years in the field of information management and saw first-hand that the more IT applications an enterprise implemented, the more fragmented, more siloed enterprise data became. Thus, it made it considerably harder for business users to make good data driven decisions, says Mengi.

“There is a significant opportunity to increase productivity for enterprises, irrespective of their industry,” notes Mengi. “Data driven decisions could lead to more business opportunities, lower risk of fraud and even build better security.”

According to Mengi, Latize sets itself apart from other companies in that while there are a lot of big data companies out there, Latize is truly unique in being able to help businesses capture the right data, rendering it usable to everyone, and leveraging it to achieve positive outcomes.

“This is evident in how we look at information. Firstly, we focus on infusing the intelligence into the data itself, rather than depending solely upon pattern recognition algorithms or data scientists. This allows us to work with all types, shapes and sizes of data,” says Mengi.

“Secondly, we provide end to end solutions – from data acquisition and cleansing to data transformation and decision making with algorithms,” Mengi continues. “We also offer plug-ins for customer facing applications that business users use for their day to day work.”

As an example, Latize has been able to recently assist a governmental agency targeting top tier US based multinationals for business outreach.

“In this case, the Marketing & Sales team had identified the key executives within the target companies as prospects,” says Mengi. However, the challenge was how to reach out to and engage those prospects in a relevant way.

To help address this challenge, Latize Ulysses has collected, curated and harmonised information from different publicly available sources like LinkedIn, Bloomberg, HBR, Business Week.

Due to Ulysses’ semantic intelligence, says Mengi, it automatically surfaced all the existing relationships and connections across the diverse data. “Through the intuitive system interface, our client’s business users can now directly access the data, discover new relationships and quickly draw actionable insights,” Mengi notes.
 

Say goodbye to towers of resumes.

Having worked in the HR and staffing technology since 2007, James Galvin noticed recruiters were spending too much time on manual processes, such as going through hundreds of resumes and manually finding suitable candidates themselves – rather than spending that time to effectively grow their business. He also believed too many talent acquisition specialists were hiring based on gut feeling rather than data and analytics, which leaves too much room for error and bias.

Enter TalentDash.

TalentDash is a recruitment technology platform that specialises in talent-mapping. Essentially, it uses big data and market intelligence to locate and find ideal talent for startups and SMEs around the world, doing all the sourcing for you, quickly and accurately. The efficiency of the platform helps to reduce time-to-hire, giving users the means to directly contact both active and passive candidates within days of uploading your criteria.

TalentDash brings the most qualified and suitable candidates to employers’ doorstep, giving them a pool of people to choose from, as well as the contact information of these candidates. This is done in just 5 days, effectively reducing time-to-hire and raising the quality of hires.

It consolidates information about jobseekers, based on the preferences and search parameters that employers upload on our platform. The talent found is then presented into visual, easy-to-understand formats. The platform lets you be as broad or niche as required, including criteria like competencies, professional background, years of experience, and location.

TalentDash also lets users locate talent from specific companies or avoid professionals from particular companies. It then allows them to decide on the level of accuracy they want in their results – from a very broad list of potential candidates, to very targeted results.

"Once you have set your search, you can sit back and relax and know that within 5 working days you will be presented with a range of information on the talent that fits your specific criteria. It really takes the hassle of talent sourcing away from business leaders," Galvin said.

Founded and based in Singapore, Lynx Analytics’ mission is to create and demonstrate revolutionary business outcomes with the power of big data graphs.

It delivers critical B2B outcomes by deploying data science and business domain experts, graph-based algorithms, and a proprietary end-to-end enterprise platform.

Miklos Sarvary, then Dean of Executive Education at INSEAD in Singapore in 2010 convinced Gyorgy Lajtai, one of his MBA students to co-found, lead and head Lynx Analytics Pte Ltd with a team of 3 other professors. They banked on the idea of using big data graphs to power business decisions representing a fundamental shift from the incumbent way of capturing and analyzing enterprise data today.

The company was founded by a group of international INSEAD scholars, who published the world’s first social network study in 2007 - seven years ahead of Facebook’s own research on the same subject.

To develop the technology and to test it at a ‘real-world’ scale, Lynx decided to strategically focus on the Telecom, Mobile Advertising, Financial Services verticals first - all the while keeping an eye out for new complex problems to solve.

Lynx recently raised US$10m as our first-round seed funding, which values us at US$66m. "We heard that this ranks us as one of the highest-valued local technology startups in Singapore, or even regionally, for the first round. Of course, if it is true, we are flattered and hope for the great ecosystem here to replicate other success stories as well," Sarvary shared.
 

Deliveries are made within an hour.

When businessman Fajar Budiprasetyo flew into Jakarta for the first time – on a Friday afternoon – just to be stuck in traffic for three hours on his way into town, a business idea struck him inspired by his "heartfelt dislike for shopping."

"You combine this infrastructural challenge with my very heartfelt dislike for the activity of shopping and love of cooking and you have the core of HappyFresh’s service offer: fresh groceries to your doorstep – picked for you by a professional shopper and delivered to your doorstep at the time of your choice, even as fast as within the next hour," Budiprasetyo said.

In 2015, HappyFresh began its operations in Indonesia and Malaysia with a committed mission — to provide a simple and smart online grocery shopping solution. This allows time-strapped customers living in traffic-congested megacities in Asia to have more time with families and loved ones instead of pushing their way through a crowded supermarket after a long day at work.

HappyFresh is Asia’s leading hyperlocal FoodTech company that enables consumers to shop in their favourite grocery retailers via the mobile and web platforms, using technology to enable delivery within an hour. Founded in October 2014 by an international team of e-commerce and logistics experts, HappyFresh partners with established retailers to offer customers more choices at a wide range of price point. HappyFresh is headquartered in Jakarta, Indonesia and has operations in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Bangkok, Thailand.

In 2015, HappyFresh completed a US$12m Series-A funding led by Vertex Venture (Vertex), the venture arm of Temasek Holdings, and Sinar Mas Digital Ventures (SMDV), the venture arm of Sinar Mas Group of Indonesia.

"We recently announced the successful signing of a funding round with Samena Capital, a principal investment group focusing on the Subcontinent, Asia, Middle East and North Africa, leading a strong consortium of new and existing investors including Vertex Ventures, the venture arm of Singapore-based Temasek group, Sinar Mas Digital Ventures, the early stage investment arm of Sinarmas Group of Indonesia, as well as Endeavor Catalyst, the venture arm of Endeavor International. The investment will enable HappyFresh to continue its focus on building a sustainably profitable company. To that aim, the company will concentrate on its three primary markets in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand," he shared.

This current funding round of HappyFresh follows the earlier US$12m fundraising the company had completed in September 2015, which was one of the region’s largest Series-A rounds, led by Vertex Ventures and Sinar Mas Digital Ventures.

It wants to change the misconception on using dating apps.

DateTix is a dating app that is focused on helping people meet in real life instead of spending most of their time virtual dating. DateTix was first founded in Hong Kong, and has recently entered the Singapore market to change the dating habits of Singaporeans.

Unlike most dating apps, DateTix’s aim is for its users to migrate from just using and chatting on the app to meeting their matches face-to-face. On the app, users can host and/or apply for dates at various dating hot spots, including restaurants, bars and live events such as concerts.

This makes it easier for users to arrange for face-to-face dating because they have a plethora of options to choose from, and can even find someone with the same interests based on the location and date activity they choose to meet at. This makes DateTix more than just a dating app – it’s a social networking platform where singles can make meaningful connections based on not only their demographics, but also their interests.

DateTix was founded in 2013 by Michael Ye, 36, in Hong Kong, and has recently expanded into the Singapore market. Michael is the current CEO of the company and drives the company’s strategic vision and global growth, as well as leads the design and development of the core online dating marketplace. With an MBA in Entrepreneurship and Finance from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and his extensive experience in investment banking, Michael wants to create the world’s leading online marketplace for dates, and facilitate healthy face-to-face interactions amongst Singaporeans.

DateTix was started because Ye realised that while there are many dating apps in the market, people were not actively meeting one another, nor were most of them getting into serious relationships through these platforms. While dating apps have helped singles reach out to other singles beyond their own social circles, many only meet and form meaningful connections with only a handful of other singles. The ease of access to a plethora of options has made singles very passive when it comes to arranging face-to-face dates. The idea that dating apps are sleazy has also made people cynical about the possibility of meeting someone special through these apps, and in turn, about current state of dating.

Michael observed this in Hong Kong and also in Singapore, so he decided to launch an app that is more focused on encouraging singles to meet rather than to just remain chatting online. The DateTix app does this by introducing a limit to chat time. Users can only remain chatting on the app until their actual date, so that they can spend time getting to know each other in person instead.

DateTix was started in 2013 with seed funding from Michael and his family and friends. In October 2015, DateTix successfully raised A$3 million in an oversubscribed equity offering, is supported by high quality professional institutional investors in Hong Kong and Australia, and is now a publicly listed company that trades on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) under the ticker DTX.

In order to build an initial seed user base in Hong Kong, Michael organized monthly networking events that required attendees to create a profile on DateTix.com in order to get discounted event tickets. He went to the pain of inviting virtually every single one of his friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, and strangers one by one to sell tickets. The result was thousands of high quality seed users in just a few months.

DateTix has well over A$2 million in cash to fund future growth and expansion.

We plan to grow our business through a combination of geographic expansion and product innovation. Our plan is to be in all tier-one cities in China by 2017, before expanding to major cities outside of Asia. We are also constantly innovating our product and introducing new products and services to enhance our user experience and grow revenues.

Our vision is to build the world’s largest online marketplace for dates. We want to make it easy for people to meet like-minded new people around them, wherever they are and whenever they want.

It's the biggest seed funding in Southeast Asia.

When Spacemob CEO Turochas "T" Fuad saw that the co-working space industry is becoming highly cluttered, he thought that the chaos is actually a business opportunity. He founded Spacemob in October 2016 and decided to make a difference by giving out access to training courses and other benefits like healthcare, payroll-processing and corporate travel discounts.

"We are a co-working space with a difference. We go beyond providing a desk, in-house amenities and networking opportunities, to giving our members the tools they need to take their business to the next level," Fuad said.

One of their members is Machineast, a creative studio working on 3D illustration, typography and design. "We can offer our members a discounted rate on courses in design, marketing, technology and data. So in a sense, as our members grow, the space grows with them. They can progress from flex desk, to fixed desk to a private office. We have an in-house cafe serving fresh healthy food everyday, and many break out corners. There is a buzz about the place that we think is unique," he added.

The business, started in October 2016, just closed a record US$5.5m seed funding round led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia, and is the largest seed funding round figure ever recorded in Southeast Asia.

Fuad shared that the company is currently about to open two Spacemob sites in Singapore and Jakarta come 1Q17. "The plan is to have 30 Spacemob sites across Asia Pacific within the next 36 months. And soon to launch is a members’ directory that provides an in-depth profile of each member and the services they offer and seek - this will be key to fostering collaboration and innovation. Finally, the team are in the process of developing RFID-tracking technology to maximise space efficiency," he ended.

Sports forecasting uses virtual currency.

SportsHero is Asia’s first real-time fantasy sports app and social prediction platform. The app is the "new incarnation" of FootballHero, which already counts over 250,000 users. It allows sports fans to make better predictions on the outcomes of games by harnessing the power of all the other sports fans in its social community with validated prediction results and social sentiment. SportsHero covers football (soccer), and baseball (Major League Baseball), with Tennis, American Football (National Football League), and Basketball (NBA), with hockey (NHL)and Cricket (IPL) in development.

The app has an average daily engagement time of approximately 10 minutes per user. SportsHero users can predict the outcome of the game using virtual currency, leave to watch the game, and come back to check on their results. Particular emphasis will be placed on local leagues and teams, with a view to building the overall sporting culture and ecosystem in each market.

"We’ve observed that when people watch a game, part of the fun is the excitement of the game but also being able to predict, from a skills-based intuition, who you think is going to win, what’s going to happen next," Dinesh Bhatia, CEO and co-founder of SportsHero said.

SportsHero is also a social competition platform where top ranked fans stand to win daily, weekly, and monthly prizes. Fans can interact with fellow sports fans on the SportsHero network in a number of ways to make any game more interesting and competitive. Brands can tap SportsHero to engage its user base, opening official accounts with sponsored content.

SportsHero raised US$2.4 million in funding in May, led by Australia-based Nevada Iron Ltd. (ASX:NVI). SportsHero looks to accelerate its listing on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) later this year via a reverse takeover of Nevada Iron. 

It pulls data from wearable consumer sensors to give an overview of a person's health.

Biofourmis is the pioneer in people-centric healthcare analytics that uses cognitive technologies to learn an individual’s physiology. It is focussed on building personalized health models leveraging physiological data gathered in real-time so that users get personalised and actionable health insights at any given time.

Biofourmis aims to make healthcare data understandable and actionable to people. "If you look at the technology trend, wearable devices and biosensors are proliferating and people/clinicians are leveraging on such new technologies to monitor patients remotely. However, there is tsunami of data being collected by an individual/patient (approx. ~100,000 TB of data during a human being’s lifetime) and available technologies use traditional population-based approach to analyse the data, which is mostly inaccurate and generate false alarms. Moreover, people are not motivated to comply to these technologies as there is no engagement," Kuldeep Singh, founder and CEO of Biofourmis, said.

To further help them in their mission, Biofourmis built Biovitals. This data analytics engine personalises an individual’s health and builds health models which quantify an individual’s physiology so that adverse medical events can be picked even before any symptom occurs. This engine supports variety of remote monitoring applications making it smarter and efficient. Biovitals is capable of performing data discovery, personalised health models, predictive analytics, patient risk-stratification, real-time contextual insights, personalised AI wellness coach, data visualization and so on.

"If you look at one of its clinical applications, this technology solves the biggest problem in healthcare – you discharge a patient form the hospital but you are still financially at risk. What do you do next? It enables prevent hospital readmissions. So this personalised platform can be used for carious applications, ranging from remote monitoring of chronically ill patients – or post-operative care, to preventive application, which is the wellness," Singh added.
 

No need to worry about increasing manpower to manage additional orders.

The dining experience no longer extends to customers walking in and out of a restaurant, bistro, pub, or any F&B outlet. Chances are, customers will search, book, order, even pay online, from the convenience of their smartphone.

This is where Eunoia comes in. Eunoia provides a digital platform which helps F&B operators manage their business processes, including customer management, inventory, payment processing, from a single and convenient dashboard.

"The name Eunoia means “beautiful thinking” – we strive to bring good experiences through deliberate thinking and action. We believe in alleviating current problems and creating better experiences for everyone in the F&B industry through technology," Wee Zihuan (Zwee), founder and CEO of Eunoia said.

The benefit to customers is clear – it makes eating out convenient and more accessible. The benefit to F&B outlets, meanwhile, includes increased traffic, customer satisfaction, and most importantly, cost savings to their operations. Amid a cut throat F&B industry, Eunoia saves restaurants 30 to 40 percent in monthly costs.

Eunoia currently has $800,000 in seed funding, led by Golden Equator Capital.
 

The platform already works with K-12, higher education, and enterprises.

Teamie is the first social learning platform in Singapore that creates a private learning network for the school, college or enterprise to engage users at a level similar to Facebook and LinkedIn, by bringing the power of social networking to education.

Teamie’s objective is to make learning collaborative and drive engagement through peer-to-peer or student-to-teacher discussions about the learning topics to improve learning outcomes and performance. It provides mobile access through the Android and iOS apps for anytime, anywhere access and in a way extend the physical boundary of the classroom. Its virtual progress analytics enables educators, students, parents, employers and employees to stay updated with progress on individual and group activity and performance.

CEO and co-founder Shivanu Shukla believes that learning is better when there is an opportunity to discuss, ask questions, share ideas about the learning topic instead of just consuming a video or a document alone. “The discussion around the learning content helps improve the understanding of the individual as well as the group as whole.”

Shukla manages the business affairs of Teamie, and is responsible for the product strategy and development, go-to-market strategy and sales. He works with educational institutes as well as enterprises, and helps them move their learning-teaching experience to an online and collaborative learning platform that leverages on the power of social, mobile and cloud.

Ashwin Kumar Singh, Teamie’s co-founder, added that “With social platforms becoming the de-facto mode of communication and collaboration, and mobile proliferation and cloud computing on the rise, we seized the opportunity to disrupt the learning platform space to make learning engaging, as well as bring a 21st century learning experience to the classroom and beyond.” Singh is an expert in cloud computing with experience in consultative sales and regulatory compliance. He has worked with government clients in Asia Pacific to help them effectively migrate their offline learning programs online.

Teamie addresses the challenge of engaging students in learning in an information-rich social media-driven hyper-connected mobile-centric world. eLearning has been around for many years, but the lack of engagement has reduced its effectiveness. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are transforming the way education is being delivered and pushing institutions to provide a more flexible learning approach. Teamie helps institutions and organizations in making learning more engaging & fun, accessible anytime anywhere; make learners part of a community, and help teachers with analytics to drive better performance.

The opportunity was clear and it was massive, and even before incorporating the company, Shukla and Singh invested their time and money, and started to build a product prototype. The idea was pitched to friends and angel investors, and the company was incorporated in March 2011 as an angel investor decided to back the idea, and invest in the potential of a social collaborative learning platform.

Just recently, Teamie raised its pre-series A round led by ACP and SPRING Seeds, together with Phystech Ventures, and their initial angel investor.

Since its founding in 2011, Teamie has raised around S$2.5M , including the seed investment and the recent pre-series A round led by ACP and SPRING Seeds, along with Phystech ventures and the angel investor.

The funding will be used to expand sales & support team in order to reach out and connect with customers, and upgrade marketing and R&D efforts, among others.

With customer contracts now in eight countries, and users in over 12 countries, Teamie has gained good traction within the Asia-Pacific region, making in-roads into large markets such as China as well. “We are now working with customers across three segments: K-12, Higher Education and Enterprises,” Shukla added.

Full sales course can range between US$2-10.

Skills easy (www.skillseasy.com) is an electronic publishing company that specialises in content development and distribution to help small and medium businesses develop their people. It offers the organisation free usage of the platform which can be used as their own Human Resource Management System (HRMS), with the option to buy off-the-shelf e-learning courses.

The programming was done by Ranosys, a Singaporean mobile company that concentrates on enterprise, mobile application development and Magento-based e-commerce solutions.

Alun Watson is the founder of Skills easy. His sales management practice and employee development training of over 20 years gained him the understanding of helping people and organisation at all levels and sizes. He has trained thousands of professionals in Asia and still continues to deliver Workforce Skills Qualifications (WSQ) through Singapore Media Academy.

Watson describes his new program as the "iTunes" for staff development. As some people see e-learning as complicated, overpriced, and difficult to source, Watson created Skills easy to solve these issues.

“I wanted to offer e-learning to corporate clients and it seemed that they are simply not geared up to do it. Some have done the odd course here and there but it is expensive and difficult to track their effectiveness. So I built a platform which enables any company of any size to have their own e-learning capability and a way to integrate so that it adds value to their people and it's free,” explained Watson.

In addition, Skills easy is offering a range of courses for about US$2-10 that can be useful for various organisation which integrates with their development program.
 

It’s a SIM sticker that is less than 0.5mm thick.

As a frequent traveller, Erik Ramussen needed a convenient and affordable method to communicate with global colleagues and clients. He finds buying local SIM cards in every country was not ideal given the high costs and the hassle of existing roaming solutions in the market. Erik was the CFO of Dangaard Telecom in Denmark, which was acquired by BrightPoint Wireless, and is therefore familiar with the telecommunications business. He saw an opportunity to relieve the pain points of frequent flyers who were paying high bills to stay connected and Interfone was founded in 2013. It now has a dedicated team of 10 employees. The shareholders include one Australian and two Danish investors.

As of now, the product is already being used by large MNCs to cut down on corporate travel expenses. Interfone launched its offerings to reach out to end consumers in Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

Interfone provides a SIM sticker that is less than 0.5mm thick and is attached to the back of a local operator SIM Card in a one-time application. It promises travellers high quality and cost-effective voice and data services while retaining their number, without ever having to buy a local SIM card at their destination.
Data roaming is available in almost 100 countries.

Currently, Interfone is running a crowdfunding campaign until mid September to reach out to early adopters in over 50 countries.

The founder

Eric, 50, is a data-driven professional who has held management positions within the toy manufacturer LEGO Group. He is also a seasoned operations and finance executive with over 25 years of experience in Europe and Asia Pacific. He has experience in the telecommunication industry from Dangaard Telecom, Europe’s largest value-adding distributor. During his time with Mayday Invest, a private equity company, Erik has assisted a number of companies building their platform for future growth including raising the funding to execute the growth plans. Erik is based in Singapore with his wife, while his two children are studying in universities back in Denmark.

It has a proprietary database with over 20,000 investors.

Singapore reported an impressive surge in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity in the first half of the year. It comprised the bulk of the deal volume in Singapore registering 339 out of 383 deals valued at US$40.5 billion. This is already 40% of the US$101.2 billion recorded last year. But while M&A activity and investment climate is good in Singapore and the rest of Asia, a team of professional investors from France and Switzerland argues that the M&A activities for mid-sized companies, with deal sizes ranging from US$10 to US$150 million, are ‘very fragmented’.

Tanguy Lesselin, the team leader, notes in particular that it is ‘tremendously’ challenging for investors to source for companies; for companies to find the right advisors to help them; and for advisors to identify suitable investors and acquirers. The market, he adds, is even harder to navigate when it comes to cross-border deals, as the universe of potential partners expands substantially.

To address the problem, the team composed of four entrepreneurs, founded Finquest in January. Finquest aims to render M&A market activities more efficient by connecting institutional investors, Asian mid-sized companies, and M&A advisors.

“There are roughly half a million mid-market companies in Asia. However, from our experience, these companies are too small to be listed on a stock exchange, but too large to have their financing needs met by early-stage venture capital firms, crowdfunding platforms, or peer-to-peer lending companies,” he said.

According to Tanguy, less than 1% of these mid-market companies are currently backed by institutional investors. Hence, they wanted to set up Finquest to help these companies access a pool of relevant advisors and investors.

Tanguy also believes that there is a need for smart matching that Finquest provides on its platform to bridge the gaps between the global investment community, mid-sized Asian companies and M&A advisors who facilitate the process.

“With economic growth in Asia continuing to outpace other regions, the world’s institutional investors are becoming more interested in exploring opportunities in this market. However, we observed that the lack of access and the market’s overwhelming size and complexity are blocking progress,” he said.

Tanguy, who serves as the CEO, boasts that their proprietary database has more than 20,000 investors, advisors and companies. According to him, the Finquest system is designed to guarantee investors’ privacy, information confidentiality and data security. No profile or deal information is visible on the platform until an introduction between two willing parties is made. Also, unlike most match-making platforms, they do not charge a commission on each deal, because they feel that it would create conflicts of interest.

“We chose a subscription-based business model to ensure a complete alignment of interests,” he added.

Finquest has machine learning techniques continuously fine-tune the algorithms to generate suitable matches between three groups: institutional investors, M&A advisors, and Asian companies. It has a team of analysts who then carefully curate the suggested matches from the algorithms to generate an actionable and credible short list of potential introductions for our clients.

The team

The team behind Finquest consists of four co-founders from France and Switzerland. Each of them has already been a founder and CEO of a few companies before. They have accumulated more than 20 years of professional experience in Asia Pacific, and completed a large number of M&A or structured finance deals on a global basis.

As each of the founders had experience with new companies, setting up Finquest was easier for them. They incorporated Finquest at the end of January, and in less than 30 days, they built a team of 12 people, set up operations in Singapore, Luxembourg, and Hong Kong, and created the first set of working features of the platform. The first version of the entire platform came out on July 4th 2016, as they had planned five months ago.

As for funding, the founders put up the seed money initially, and they were then invested in by business angels. They were able to raise funds in March 2016 from high profile CEOs in the banking software, fintech, private equity, social networking, private and investment banking fields.

Beyond their backgrounds in M&A, law, structured finance, corporate strategy, information technology, and marketplace management, they all have had a few unusual personal experiences. Gerard Belicha is an avid aircraft pilot; Antoine Denaiffe has crossed Eastern Africa in a 1970 military ambulance truck, Jérôme Pinneau did rock climbing, has five kids and three donkeys, and Tanguy completed a few single-handed offshore sailing races and a transatlantic race. 

They just raised $1million in funding.

Living out of a suitcase for three years years has been the norm for husband-and-wife duo Xin Lung Tai and Rebecca Chia, since they founded a global peer-to-peer shopping service ShopandBox in 2013. They were literally in a different country each month, be it spending time with their team in different countries, seeking out opportunities around the globe, or meeting up with shoppers and ‘Boxers’ from different cities. With only $40,000 funding from their own pockets, they didn’t have a physical office. They have a remote team based in four different countries and over 200 WhatsApp chat groups with their Boxers at the same time.

After starting their service while living in Melbourne and travelling to Singapore and Malaysia where the couple bootstrapped, they saw a huge spike and traction in shoppers coming on board their platform. They then raised their seed round and raised S$1 million in funding. This round was led by seed stage venture capital firm, 500 Startups, together with a group of angel investors.

ShopandBox is a platform that allows you to shop like a local for anything you want, from anywhere in the world with the help of a personal shopper, known as a ‘Boxer.’ ShopandBox is designed to empower shoppers to buy items that are either not available in their country or cheaper overseas.

Xin shared that ShopandBox started after they noticed that whenever they travelled overseas, friends would ask them to buy things that they couldn’t get back home in Australia. It seemed obvious to them that there was a gap in the market and they have gone a long way to fill it.

“We have created a thriving global platform that enables shoppers to purchase anything they want from around the world fuss-free without being subjected to exorbitant pricing and unreliable or unaffordable international shipping fees,” he said.

Xin said that at ShopandBox, they put the power back in the hands of shoppers who determine where they want to shop and at what price. Boxers do not mark up the cost of items and simply collect a small service fee as compensation for their time and effort.

“What sets us apart from the myriad of freight forwarding services is the very real connection between Shoppers and Boxers. We carefully match Shoppers with Boxers that share their interests so they get a completely personalised and specialised service. Half of our Shoppers come back for more and are constantly building bonds with their Boxers whom they totally trust to find them what they want,” he said.

How does it work?

Unlike existing e-commerce sites and freight forwarding services, ShopandBox delivers a completely personalised service from start to finish. In addition to buying your desired items, Boxers can recommend additional or alternative items, look for the best prices, give Shoppers access to local deals, help them shop and get past payment issues, all before checking and repackaging their items to save them money on international shipping rates.

With an exclusive partnership with DHL Express, ShopandBox offers door-to-door service in 1-3 days with lower rates than any other shipping method.

According to Xin, the cornerstone of the ShopandBox business model is its passionate Boxers who are situated in over 25 countries. “Many Boxers are part-time, casual workers who are earning some extra income. Many of the Boxers are stay-at-home mums, retired personnel and students. While Boxers come from all walks of life, they share a common love of shopping, they know what’s trending and where to bag a bargain,” he said.

Moving forward, the couple plans to expand their shopper market into countries where they have seen organic growth such as the Middle East, Brunei, Africa, and others. They also plan to launch an app within the year and to raise their Series A funding.

The founders

Xin, 31, serves as the CEO. He drives the company’s vision and strategy of providing a service where you can shop across the globe without any barriers. When asked whether he has any kids, he always answers by saying ‘Two kids, ‘Shop’ and ‘Box’. Xin left his career in management consulting that had taken him across US, Australia and Asia and decided to create a business which solved the pain of not being able to shop for anything, whenever he wanted, at the price he wanted to pay. His dream is becoming a reality as ShopandBox has since expanded to serve Shoppers from more than 146 countries that want to shop from the 25 countries where ShopandBox has a Boxer presence.

Rebecca, 30, leads the marketing and outreach efforts at ShopandBox. She met Xin while obtaining her degrees in Bachelor of Arts and Masters of Applied Commerce at the University of Melbourne. Rebecca sees ShopandBox as allowing people the opportunity to fabricate their own unique worlds with beautiful products, limited edition items and special finds from across the globe. She envisions ShopandBox as being the go-to platform for anyone, whether they live in Timbuktu or Antarctica, who wants to shop for anything. She loves the idea that you can now have ‘Shopping Pals’ all over the world.
 

He shared crazy things to make BitTitan successful.

Technopreneur Geeman Yip has been in the software industry for 20 years and was working on “cloud” when YAHOO! was a catalog. He was a developer at Microsoft for nearly nine years, and his name appeared on patents for the company. He was enjoying a stable, high paying job when one day, he decided to chuck it all and start afresh.

With zero experience in managing a business, he founded a company in 2007 that was very much a “one man and his computer” type of operation for several years. It was bootstrapped until only recently when he was able to raise $15 million from Series A funding led by TVC Capital.

Geeman started BitTitan as a cloud services enablement and managed services automation pioneer, enabling IT service providers to sell more cloud products, onboard customers to the cloud, and create reoccurring revenue in 2007. While a Singapore startup, it is also a global company dedicated to cloud services delivery market and serving 8,000+ partners including tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, Google, HP, IBM and Dropbox. BitTitan has nearly 200 employees worldwide, 30 of whom are based in Singapore.

“When I left to start my own company, I was on a high, brimming with so much optimism and excitement… I quickly discovered that starting a business is a lot harder than I ever thought it would be,” he said.

Geeman shared that he has done his fair share of crazy things to make BitTitan successful. He purchased his previous building, which was BitTitan’s first office outright and painted, installed flooring and wired the entire building himself. In the early days, he was also a bit of a ‘renaissance’ business man.

“Without a team, I wore many hats, including that of the sales, service, public relations, marketing, and support person – all at the same time. When I answered the phone, I used different voices and names while speaking to a customer before “transferring” them to another department,” he said.

“I had savings from Microsoft; I maxed out my credit cards; I moved in with my wife (then girlfriend) Magdalena to save money and became a dependent on her health insurance; later, I took a second mortgage out on my house,” he said.

With no help in funding, Geeman said that every dime he had was in the company, and he wasn’t taking any money out because he used 100% of their profits to fuel more growth. The $15 million in Series A funding marks the first time BitTitan has raised any capital since its founding in 2007.

Geeman shared that the early days of starting up his own company were characterised by both lows and highs. He considered it his ‘lowest low’ when he got broke and his ‘highest high’ when he was able to convince Dominic Pouzin to leave a steady career as a software engineer at Microsoft and join him on the journey that became BitTitan. Today, in addition to being co-founder, Dominic also serves as CTO at BitTitan. It was during his years at Microsoft that Geeman first met Dominic.

BitTitan will use the financing to further establish its position as a leading cloud services enablement provider, to augment its MSPComplete platform with more managed services automation capabilities, and to aggressively expand into new geographic markets.

It secured around $ 1.7M funding.

Closing a business deal with large-scale businesses can be a real challenge, especially for startups who have no proven track record yet. However, two MBA students made an impression when they scored the first bank partnership with Singapore’s largest bank lender, DBS.

Kelvin Teo, 30, and Reynold Wijaya, 28, founded Funding Societies in 2015, an online peer-to-business (P2B) lending platform in Singapore for Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to secure loans for growth and for lenders to earn good returns. They launched the startup in Singapore and Indonesia, while being physically in the US studying their MBA degrees. They later emailed DBS CEO Piyush Gupta and scored the first bank partnership as a student CEO.

Kelvin claims that Funding Societies, the first escrow arrangement for fund handling and the first 2FA electronic-signing process for P2B lending in Southeast Asia, has amongst the lowest credit default records. Founded in Singapore to provide alternative financing and investment, Funding Societies expanded to Indonesia in January 2016 under the brand “Modalku.”

The founders
Kelvin, a Singapore permanent resident, came here on the ASEAN scholarship and was a valedictorian of NUS, before serving as a consultant at Accenture, McKinsey and KKR Capstone and graduating from Harvard Business School. He's a Chartered Accountant and sits on the young professionals committee.

Kelvin shared that the first time he came across peer-to-peer lending (P2P) was in 2014. He thought it was crazy when his first buddy told him how P2P lending works until something happened that changed his perception. “Upon visiting several P2P lending companies in the US, I was blown away. I found that it could truly impact SMEs and societies. Not just our society in Singapore, but also societies across Southeast Asia. Hence we call ourselves ‘Funding Societies,’” he said.

Reynold, meanwhile, graduated from Harvard Business School and was a Summa Cum Laude from the University of Michigan with a Master of Engineering. He was a leading executive in a reputable family business conglomerate in Indonesia. He's also the co-founder of Let's Go to School, a non-profit organisation in Indonesia.

By leveraging on technology and credit research, Kelvin and Reynold identified non-bankable but creditworthy SMEs looking for loans and enabled investors to crowdfund them for good monthly returns.

The two started the business by bootstrapping and raising money from their families. After launching their platform in August 2015, they have raised venture capital in two months from SPH Media Fund (Singapore) and Alpha JWC Ventures (Indonesia), and several angels. Alpha JWC Ventures is co-founded by Chandra Tjan who invested in Indonesian tech stars Tokopedia & Traveloka The company has ~S$ 1.7M as of 2015.