He’s building a community with Singapore as pilot location.

Ideally, the insurance sector has a noble purpose of helping people in the time of adversity but an industry veteran thinks otherwise. George Kesselman, who has been in the insurance industry for over 10 years and has taken senior roles, felt that the noble purpose got derailed by misalignment of interests. “Distributors, shareholders, employees and customers have all differing objectives and what started off as a good intent of insuring customers’ financial well being, ended up ensuring financial well being of pretty much everyone but the customer,” he said.

George, 34, had worked in various departments of both life and general global insurers. His last two roles were as COO of AIG Indonesia and VP Claims Operations of AIG APAC. He believes that it is time to make a difference in the insurance industry. He founded InsurTechAsia, which is aimed at building a community of insurance practitioners, entrepreneurs and industry stakeholders across Asia. It claims to be the only one of its kind across the region which is made possible through a close collaboration between startups and insurers. The core of the community is non-for-profit as George believes that having the profit elements detracts it from the mission and limits the potential impact to the community.

With Singapore being the pilot location in Asia, George and his team gathered a community of over 200 people who are passionate about making a difference in the insurance industry. As this is non-profit, George said that the results are going to be measured by the impact in the years to come, rather than how much they have earned this year.

“So far, we’ve created a strong foundation in Singapore, and have successfully connected local startups to potential industry partners and investors, assisted overseas startups doing regulatory due diligence as part of setting up in Singapore, and helped corporate leaders understand the landscape and best ways to engage with startups,” he said.

To prepare for the official launch of InsurTechAsia, George started talking to a lot of startups while he was still in his last corporate job. He shared that he was completely ‘infected’ with the unbelievable level of energy, speed and passion that he didn’t know existed.

“While in corporate, you get so focused on your day to day job, fire-fighting and politics that the real world completely escapes you. Coming out of the corporate bubble was scary at the first but luckily I gave myself some transition time in-between while learning about the startup world and spending more time in it,” he said.

The timing couldn’t have been better, too. According to George, his employer decided to restructure the regional office and through a pure luck of a draw, he ended up picking up a redundancy package that he considered an absolute blessing. “It gave me an added nudge out of the corporate and at the same time provided with a level of comfort for a period of time. So I guess, in a way, my ex employer did end up helping to fund this,” he said.

Starting a new business has never been that easy, especially for a first timer like George who confessed of having 8 coffees in a day. “Meetings with lots of new startups and VCs seem to gravitate me to "grabbing a coffee". To keep the conversations going java kept on flowing leaving me quite zippy at the end of the day,” he said.

In the next two months, George shared that they are expanding the community across Asia with chapters opening up in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur.

 

It just raised over US$4.7million.

Smartkarma, a collaborative marketplace for investment research, aims to radically change the way institutional investors create, distribute and consume investment insights. Traditionally, research on financial markets has come from investment banks. This is changing post the global financial crisis due to a focus on cost cutting, increased regulatory scrutiny, and margin compression. There has also been a separation of research costs from dealing commissions by EU regulators under MiFID II, meaning investors will see the true cost of research for the first time. This has shaken the research industry to its core, but has provided an opportunity for the industry to find a better way to access investment insight.

In the same way that Spotify provides access to all its music on the platform, Smartkarma does the same with investment research.

“We have over 400 independent research providers with qualifications ranging from ex-Wall street analysts, to data scientists and academics. Our customers have unlimited, personalised access to all the Insight on the platform for one single subscription fee,” explains Raghav Kapoor, CEO and Co-Founder of Smartkarma.

Smartkarma claims of breaking down traditional silos and bringing efficiency to a global industry that has long suffered from opaque pricing and bloated cost structures. Its vision is to bring simplicity, efficiency and transparency to the investing world.

“While leadership has emerged in certain areas of bank-sector disintermediation, we notice that certain other areas are relatively unchanged. A prominent vertical we focus on is Capital Markets. This sits down-right-center in an investment bank, and has long been the source of high-margin business. Given the nuanced nature of underlying activity, and sophisticated audience, this area has been left largely unchanged,” noted Raghav.

Raghav shared that when they speak to their stakeholders, they described what they see as a sweeping change across capital markets, as they get replaced by digital marketplaces - bringing efficiency, transparency and collaboration in a space that's long suffered from conflicts, obfuscated pricing and bloated cost structures. This, he said, would also mean a shift from agency-principal to peer-to-peer networks.

“Existing models for consuming investment research were broken and this has been supported by high profile changes at leading investment banks,” claimed Raghav. He cited for example Nomura announcing a complete exit from European equity capital markets in April 2016; in January 2016, Barclays departing from Asian capital markets; And a year before that, Standard Chartered announcing the closure of its Asian Equities business.

“These closures, along with a focus on cutting costs and the finalisation of new MiFID regulations in the EU, have meant the industry is wide open for change,” said Raghav.

According to Raghav, Smartkarma was created to help investors optimize research spend and enhance returns, while accessing the widest range of global analysis of Asian markets available. By providing a much needed alternative to traditional research models, Raghav claims that this has resulted in Smartkarma becoming Asia’s largest independent and collaborative ecosystem for investment research in a short time span.

Smartkarma was founded in September 2014 by Raghav together with Jonathan Foster and Lee Mitchell, who all have roots in the investment industry.

Raghav, 34, is originally from India, but came to Singapore for junior college and went on to attend Cambridge University and later Stanford University. He began his career in finance with Citigroup and went on to launch a boutique brokerage house, Aviate Global (Asia), which was later acquired by Religare Capital Markets. He was ranked as Asia’s Number 1 investment idea generator from 2011 to 2013, based on the performance analysis of over a million top investment ideas.

Jon, 43, hails from the UK but spent most of his adulthood in Australia and Singapore. Jon has spent more than 15 years in Asian financial markets, specializing in Equity Special Situations on both the buy and sell side. Over his career Jon has built several specialist research driven businesses that differentiate themselves from the dominant players. Prior to co-founding Smartkarma, Jon was a Director at Religare Capital Markets, where he headed the Global Special Situations Group. He was also a founding partner and director at Aviate Global (Asia) prior to its successful sale to Religare.

Lee Mitchell, 40, is from Melbourne, Australia. Lee’s career has focused around trading in Asian special situations. Lee has built and led a number of teams, inspiring his colleagues with creative and intelligent best sales practices. Prior to co-founding Smartkarma, Lee was a sales trader at Aviate Global when it was bought by Religare, and was a director at Religare Capital Markets within the Global Special Situations team. Prior to Religare, Lee held the position of Head of Sales Trading at Churchill Capital Australia.

Over the next 3 months, the founders injected enough personal capital to cover all costs for the first year of operations and fund the creation of a world-class team. They raised their proof of concept round in January 2015 and set about executing.

In their early days, they worked out of Raghav’s attic, steadily yet quietly building blueprints for Smartkarma. For this task, they interviewed hundreds of senior industry people to understand what research and investing meant to them. This ultimately led them to formalise their Advisory Council.

Smartkarma recently announced the results of their second round of funding, which raised USD 4.7 million, bringing our total amount raised to USD 7.5 million. The investment was led by a number of institutions including Wavemaker Partners, Jungle Ventures, a group led by Mr Koh Boon Hwee, former Chairman of Singapore Telecommunications as well as several prominent industry leaders such as Mr Tan Chin Hwee.

Smartkarma launched out of beta in April 2016. In just over one year since launch, Smartkarma has grown to be over three times the size of the largest Asia-based bulge bracket research team. With customers that span the globe including the Americas (40%), Europe (25%), and Asia Pacific (35%), Smartkarma is on a mission to challenge conventional thinking and change how market participants view, value and drive idea generation, fostering a new standard of industry dialogue and cooperation.
 

It aims to be the OKCupid of online job hunting.

Venn, an online recruitment and talent discovery platform for Gen Y and Millennials, has launched in Singapore with leading global brands on board. It is a new Singapore-based startup looking to be the OKCupid of online job hunting. Founded by ex-banker and Viber advisor Candice Aw in 2016, the Singapore-based startup aims to complement the traditional recruitment process by leveraging its AI-powered matching algorithm that connects job seekers with businesses. Venn takes into account factors including the candidate’s personality, interests, and cultural fit.

Venn is already being used by the likes of Grab, Spotify, Uber, DropBox, Carousell, Zalora, Paktor, Chope, Honestbee, iFlix and Sephora.

Venn claims to be a fresh, completely new way for people to find jobs in Singapore. Herein, users have to answer a list of questions ranging from personal skills, ideal companies to attributes that make you happy at work. Not only does it personalizes the job search experience, but it is also ensuring a better fit between recruit and recruiter.

Venn is founded by Candice Aw, a 34-year old Singaporean entrepreneur. A former banker and sales trader with Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered Bank, and a communications professional, Candice left the world of financial services and accidentally fell into startups such as Chope and Viber because she liked creating new things and changing the status quo. Her belief: how you think is more important than what you think. Venn came into being because Candice liked connecting people and saw that the dating and recruiting process had a lot in common. Inspired by OKCupid, Candice created a proprietary matching algorithm to match people to the right jobs. When she isn’t hustling for Venn, Candice can be found jumping off a plane, hiking in a remote corner of the world or trying new adventure sports.

According to Candice, the process of job hunting and the search for a partner actually have a lot in common. “Recruiting is so one-way at the moment and I’m sure there must be a better way of doing things. Venn is a direct result of my pain points around the traditional recruitment process, as well as my love for connecting people,” she said.

Candice shared that her first idea revolved around a Tinder-like platform for professional networking. She was playing around with various dating apps, analysing each platform’s user experience and design. But while looking at the more engaging sites such as OKCupid and eHarmony, she i realized that this is something which can be applied to the recruitment and job discovery process.

Venn said she is not trying to disrupt the traditional job search process; rather, it looks to compliment it by offering businesses a new and effective way to find the right talent -- particularly millennials and Gen Ys.

One of Venn’s big goals it to help ensure a better cultural and professional fit. She also wants to contribute in addressing Singapore's businesses challenged to find the right talent.

Citing data from the Ministry of Manpoer, Singapore's unemployment rate in Q1 2016 stood at 1.9 per cent. “With skilled labour in short supply, firms are finding it harder to identify and attract talent,” she said.

According to Venn, businesses also need to cope with the problem of job-hopping. Citing another data from Global recruiter Randstad, she said that 79 per cent of Singaporean millennials (those born between 1980-2000) are looking for opportunities to switch careers, placing extra pressure on HR departments to keep the age group motivated.

Correspondingly, a global study by PwC, she said, found that 25 per cent of millennials expect to have six employers or more during their career.

Venn is currently privately held. They are looking to take on 500k to accelerate its go-to-market efforts, tapping into clear and present opportunities. Being a former banker herself, Candice said that money will not be hard to get for Venn but they are actually looking for strategic investor - not just people who put in money, but also people who can open up markets for them and connect them with different people.

“A lot of investors have told me that because I used to be a banker, they would be willing to invest. I think it’s because they know that bankers always care about the bottom line and we have our eyes on the money, which gives them the faith”.

 

It just raised US$500,000 funding at the end of 2015.

Long-term lease contracts which normally involve a 3-year lock in period, a 3-month downpayment and also 3-month advance payment can be a substantial drain on cashflow. It can be detrimental to day-to-day operations at a small business. But fret no more as startup FlySpaces offers an alternative. It addresses the need for short-term contracts with flexibility, choice, convenience and transparency.

Founded in October 2015, FlySpaces empowers businesses as a digital marketplace that provides short-term work and meeting space solutions to entrepreneurs, start-ups, SMEs and mobile professionals. Whether the need is for an hour, a day, a week or a few months – FlySpaces has a network of hundreds of spaces to discover across key South East Asian cities.

For venue owners, FlySpaces acts as a digital marketing platform that connects you to a vast user base, allowing you to optimize and monetize your space.

“We provide the largest inventory of spaces, including all amenities and prices up front to empower our customers to find the perfect fit themselves. We want to disrupt the short term office space sector by aggregating all options and creating a easy to use plug-and-play type platform, said co-founder and CEO Mario Berta.

According to Mario, through their blog and regular newsletters, FlySpaces created a userbase of nearly 10,000 members.

The founding

Before founding his own company, Mario was a former Rocket Internet Executive at Zalora, Lazada, Easy Taxi, and Food Panda.

Mario co-founded FlySpaces with Guillaume Martin, who serves as COO. He was a former management and strategy consultant for a boutique European consulting firm, Chappuis Halder, which is focused on financial services

As a Rocket Internet executive, Mario was aggressively building new companies such as Easy Taxi and constantly looking for new office spaces. Guillaume at the time was also expanding the management consulting company he was working at into Singapore and finding it difficult to find a suitable office space. It was at that time that both were looking for more flexible options that could fit their business model and joined forces to create FlySpaces.

Mario and Guillaume first started working with space partners in Manila and Singapore to get as many on board as possible. Then with a wide inventory of spaces both by category and location they knew they were confident that they had a strong business plan and sought out venture funding. They successfully received US$500,000 seed funding from investors, which are Narra Ventures Capital, Cebuana Lhullier, ReAPra Ventures, and Future Now Ventures.

“In the time frame of 6 months, we have opened services in 3 cities (4th coming soon!), served 150 clients, and generated a total revenue of $136,000 as of March 2016. In February we made a profit, which as a tech startup is incredibly rare to be profitable after less that 6 months!,” said Mario.

Starting from Philippines before entering Singapore in January, FlySpaces plans to expand to other 3 Asian cities by end 2016 – Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and Bangkok.
From 2017 and beyond, it plans to bring the product in Hong Kong and other cities in South East Asia like Vietnam, Cambodia, and others.
 

It now has $2.5million total funding.

99.co, a Sinapore property site, just recently made headlines in the startup scene after anouncing that it has received an investment from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and leading venture capital firm Sequioa Capital, bringing its total investment to $2.5 million. It last raised a round in May 2015, getting US560,000 from Fenox Venture Capital, 500 Startups, Golden Gate Ventures, Kathrein Ventures, and East Ventures.

To satisfy our curiosity on what makes this startup attractive to big investors as mentioned above, Singapore Business Review spoke with its Founder and Chief Executive Officer Darius Cheung.

Here's what we found out:

99.co was founded in January 2014 by technology veterans Darius Cheung, Dominic Ee, Conor McLaughlin and Anuj Bheda. They had been on the consumer side of trying to buy property and rent in Singapore. Frustrated and surprised by how complex the process was in such an advanced country and how difficult it was to find accurate transparent data and information to make such an important decision, the founders decided to set out to solve the problem.

99.co aims to provide full and transparent information to the consumer to help them make better renting or buying decisions, as well as enabling agents to offer a better service to consumers through their tools. For agents, 99.co delivers highly qualified leads and arms them with online and mobile tools to make their work more efficient.

99.co’s core strategic goal of empowering consumers to “Find A Home They’ll Love” is also 99.co’s central brand positioning. Understanding that finding a home is more than just seeking a residential unit to live in and is one of the most important and personal decisions in someone's life, the central vision is to empower the consumer with information and tools to help them make the best home renting or buying decision for them, and at the same time making agents more efficient by ensuring the enquiries are more qualified and targeted, and empowering them with mobile tools so they can help customers anytime anywhere. They believe they can revolutionise the industry to the new mobile age, bring up the quality and reliability of service.

99.co empowers consumers by enabling powerful search through its native search algorithm ListRank which was launched in November 2014. ListRank collates more than 30 data points, assessing the quality and fullness of information of listings, to present back the highest quality matches for the searcher. This operating model, where no agent can pay their way to the top of the search results but in fact enables the best information to be surfaced first, ensures real estate agents provide the best possible information to the consumer. ListRank, available only on 99.co, attempts to effectively elevate industry standards in filtering the best, most accurate search results.

99.co is also accessible on web and via iOs and Android apps, incorporating live chat functionality to ensure rapid response from agents. Round-the-clock help and assistance is readily available via 99.co’s happiness team.

In January 2015, 99.co successfully raised Series A funding of SGD2 million and was touted by Singapore Business Review as one of the Hottest Startups In Singapore of 2015. As of May 2015, Darius also serves as an angel investor in multiple startups and is Venture Partner at Golden Gate Ventures, Entrepreneur-In-Residence at INSEAD, as well as on the Board of Directors of Action Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE). Darius has won a slate of accolades including BusinessWeek’s Best Young Entrepreneurs in Asia in 2008, Singapore Youth Award in 2010 and Singapore Computer Society’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015.

Who is Darius?

Darius is a Singaporean serial entrepreneur and angel investor. Darius is an alumnus of the National University of Singapore – a graduate of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering with a minor in Technopreneurship and participant in the NUS Overseas College programme. Darius founded mobile security startup TenCube which utilises its native technology to allow mobile phone users to protect their data including lost or stolen devices.

TenCube was awarded Grand Champion of Startup@Singapore and received seed funding from the National University of Singapore. In 2010, TenCube was acquired by McAfee for SGD25 million.

In January 2013, Darius founded Billpin, a bill-sharing mobile app which provided the impetus to leap into the home rental space. In October 2013, Darius launched Homie.com – a digital platform for finding flatmates. Realising the need for a much more comprehensive search engine for all things property including rental and purchase of government and private residences, Darius launched 99.co in January 2014.

It provides solutions that integrate with email service provider.

Digital advertising spending is growing rapidly in Southeast Asia, but Stanford University graduate, Paul Tenney, argued that marketers in the region are still struggling with basic campaign management. The majority of marketing technology solutions, which are mainly based in the US and Europe, do not address the specific and niche challenges found in Southeast Asia markets, he said. “For example, segmentation among the countries and languages can turn a single campaign in the US or Europe, into six or 12 campaigns in Southeast Asia – an executional nightmare,” he explained.

During Paul’s stint here in Singapore with a US email marketing provider, he saw that current solutions for marketers and ecommerce companies in Southeast Asia could not meet their needs. He decided to start Ematic Solutions in 2012 which was aimed at helping marketers easily build and deploy high-ROI email marketing programmes, using an artificial intelligence engine that works smoothly with a company’s existing systems which essentially simplifies email marketing for businesses in Southeast Asia.It is a SaaS provider headquartered in Singapore, offering cloud-based solutions that help digital marketers efficiently build and deploy sophisticated, high-return on investment (ROI) email marketing programs. These platforms seamlessly integrate with a company’s Email Service Provider (ESP) (eg: MailChimp) and leverage a powerful suite of plug-and-play apps that massively increase conversions by driving database growth and improving customer engagement.

After graduating from Stanford University in 2002, Paul joined one of the premier enterprise email marketing firms in Silicon Valley and started a journey that took him around the globe helping Fortune 500 companies like eBay, Hewlett-Packard and Expedia build world-class, high-ROI email marketing programmes.

He landed in Southeast Asia in 2010 and has made Singapore his home together with his family. He is now a Singapore citizen.

What sets Ematic Solutions apart?

Ematic Solutions is focused on channel management. According to Paul, they analyse database health, quality and growth. This, he said, differs from numerous providers such as MailChimp, which focus on campaign management and emphasize content instead.

“By providing plug-and-play intelligence solutions, customers of Ematic Solutions can still use their existing best-of-breed campaign management tools to dramatically improve the performance of every campaign,” he noted.

Paul explained that the key to Ematic Solutions’ approach is quick and easy integration with zero disruption. “We understand that products need to be plug-and-play, easy to use and, ideally for intelligence solutions, be non-disruptive to existing marketing processes. This would allow marketers to increase their ROI in their digital marketing campaigns,” he said.

Funding
Ematic Solutions’ total funding to date is US$2 million. The company recently raised close to US$1 million in pre-Series A funding from MDI Ventures, a corporate venture capital fund backed by Telkom Indonesia, in February 2016. This followed an earlier seed funding round of US$1.07 million, closed in December 2015. Initially, funding was from friends and family.

As they aim to be the dominant player in the region through expansion, they are working on raising Series A fundling later this year. It just opened its Jakarta office in February 2016.

It wants to aggregate businesses via M&As.

Southeast Asia’s start-up scene is crowded with a horde of tiny online retailers which are barely managing to make ends meet. Singapore-based iFashion Group wants to give these start-ups a stronger fighting chance by acquiring promising businesses and providing support for entrepreneurs.

“Our corporate strategy is to aggregate businesses via mergers and acquisitions in its sectors of interest to create synergy among the businesses. We are looking to achieve rapid growth through values of collaboration, co-existence and synergistic resource-sharing,” said Jeneen Goh, Managing Director of iFashion.

iFashion was founded by entrepreneurs Douglas Gan and Kin-Wai Lau. Douglas has sold four tech startups in the web and mobile space and is currently Co-Founder and CEO of Vanitee, an on demand beauty startup that raised $5m in its seed round. Meanwhile, Kin-wai is a tech entrepreneur and investor that has taken 4 tech companies public. He has built businesses across Asia and is currently the CEO of ASX-listed Fatfish Internet Group.

“The online fashion and lifestyle space is fragmented and overcrowded with small businesses. Many brands are operated by small teams with limited resources and most brand owners do not know how to scale their business beyond a certain size,” Goh said.

Brands who become part of iFashion Group receive support to scale their business and reach economies of scale in the shortest possible time. They also receive access to capital and guidance from an experienced entrepreneurial team, as well as support for the brand’s day-to-day operations.

iFashion received an initial round of funding from Rimu Group. Goh shared that the company is working towards listing on the ASX early in 2017, after which, it will continue with acquisitions to reach a target group revenue of $40 million.

“With iFashion, the belief is that ‘bigger is better’. The synergy from bringing multiple brands together will be the strong driver for growth for these individual brands,” Goh said.
 

Fresh flowers delivered in 90 minutes and 30% cheaper.

Online, photos of magnificent flowers in bloom look amazing. The thought of giving it a gift to special someone is awesome. But, whether you are trying to impress your girlfriend, or surprise your mother on her special day, or cheer someone up on a bad day, is there any worse than finding your thoughtful way to send love had actually turned out to be a mess? Flowers die in days, prices are inflated, and the buying experience is frustrating. 

Two years ago, 27-year old Steve Feiner, a former staff of Google who moved to Singapore from New York, tried to send flowers to his girlfriend for her birthday. Unfortunately, the flowers didn’t get there till the day after and they looked terrible when they did. Mortified with the experience, he felt compelled to make a change.

“Florists today treat their customers like numbers instead of people. Instead of speaking to someone who could fix my own situation, I was left with an angry giflfriend and a terrible experience. Giving a gift is awesome, but the providers today make it almost painful. We return gifting to its formal glory and make it easy to send love,” he said.

Steve, together with a Singaporean local Wen Lee, founded a startup called A Better Florist last year. It promises to offer better product with flowers lasting longer as they are shipped directly from the farm. Steve also claims that their flowers are 30% cheaper because they cut out all the middle men. For a better experience, Steve said that that customers all have to do is pick their favorite arrangement, tell them when and where to send it, and add a quick note.

“We promise, the whole process only takes a minute, two tops. We'll even confirm your delivery with a photo so you know we got it right,” he said.

Steve serves as the CEO at A Better Florist. Previously he worked in San Francisco for Google as a Senior Associate for Global Business Strategy, then moved to the Singapore office with a new position as Problem Solver.

Jun is the Head of Product at A Better Florist. Previously he worked in product for several Venture Backed Startups. He is a graduate of NUS and a participant in the NUS overseas program.

The business started inside Steve’s apartment. No customers, no employees no nothing just an idea. The initial money was just his personal savings and has slowly grown from there. They also raised a seed round to help their business bloom.

Check out how it simplifies the process.

Finding the appropriate retail spaces to market your products can be a daunting task, but a local startup found a way to have it simplified.
Invade bills itself as Singapore’s first ever real-time retail booking system that allows businesses to rent and list their space in an efficient manner. The online portal allows businesses to browse through available spaces needs from short-term pop-up stores, to long-term retail spaces, as well as for different occasions including bazaars, event and fairs, shared spaces, mobile space and retail spaces.

The Invade team has in the past worked with over 100 major landlords and marketed over 800,000 sqft of pop-up and retail spaces over the past 6 years. In addition the Invade team has organised about 600 flea market events, catering to more than 100,000 shoppers. Through their experience, they discovered the various challenges that entrepreneurs face such as finding the appropriate retail spaces to market their products. At the same time, landlords also face the problem of increasing vacant and underutilised spaces in this slowing economy.
So to solve, this problem the team used their knowledge to create a system that would help businesses and landlords alike, by bringing them together in one platform.

Koh Cheng Guan, Invade’s co-founder and strategic marketing manager said that the platform aims to bridge the gap between businesses looking for space and landlords through an online platform.

“The system simplifies the complicated and time consuming process of looking for a space by providing all the necessary information businesses need to know, saving valuable time and the hassle of going through numerous websites and calling various people,” he explained while adding that the entire process from listing a space or browsing, booking to payment can be completed within minutes

The founders

Koh graduated from the National Technology University, from the School of Art, Design and Media, with an additional diploma for business development. Cheng Guan, a self-confessed workaholic is hands on with Invade, handles the marketing and branding aspects of the business, as well as a support in business development.

Prior to Invade, Cheng Guan was an Art Director at TBWA where he managed clients including ANZ, Lexus, Heineken and AIA. He is enthusiastic about creating effective platform that allows aspiring local entrepreneurs to shine.

Serving as business development manager is Kent Teo. He graduated from the University of London with a BSc Economics and Business Management., and seeks to solve the problem of the high numbers of vacant and underutilized spaces in Singapore. Kent takes delight in being hands on with Invade, he takes care of business development and operations where he manages the operations and client servicing team

Kent was always an entrepreneur, his business ventures include Space Invasion, Makers’ Market, Fleawhere.

Kent is passionate about creating exposure for locally made products as he finds that local brands are far too few as compared to Singapore’s counterparts abroad.

It secured US$1M funding from angel investors.

Singapore-based startup is making a buzz in the broadcast and advertising sector with a promising technology across TV, Radio, Digital Signage, Cinema, Mobile, Web and connected TV.

Launched in 2014, EYWAMEDIA, enables broadcasters and advertisers to enable audience consumption patterns, engage them real-time, create a content-ad strategy and finally create attribution, cross targeting and retargeting revenues using multiscreen technology.

Asked what makes it unique, EYWAMEDIA co-founders Ramasubramaniam Raja and Anshuman Chaudhary explained that their ‘rich’ IP driven technology leads the space of making a multiscreen engagement, attribution, cross targeting a reality across traditional to digital screens for broadcasters and advertisers. Apart from this, they added that their advance data science uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to define future content and ad strategies for their clients. “This helps in marrying the actual audience intent with the consumption they wish in their journey across screens,” they noted.

Raja, a software engineer by profession, founded EYWAMEDIA with serial entrepreneur and venture mentor Anshuman Chaudhary. Both founders are from India and have worked and lived in multiple geographies before setting up EYWAMEDIAin Singapore.

EYWAMEDIA was initially bootstrapped before it was nurtured at US-based Kyron Accelerator in 2013, which eventually led them to find Angel Investors. In October last year, it has secured over US$1 million in seed funding from Indian VC funds Mantra Ventures and ah! Ventures. The round also saw participation from US-based Viktor Koenig PE Fund.

EYWAMEDIA currently has 2 lines of business - first being the broadcaster model and then the adtech model. While broadcaster penetration is happening across India, Thailand, Philippines, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, USA etc, Chaudhary further explained that they are in beta with their adtech business as well connecting all programmatic exchanges, trading desks, agencies, brands, and others to enable them meaningfully target consumers across screens and not limit it to digital devices only. In a nutshell, what we are doing across the ecosystem of multiscreens has not been achieved before in totality. We are confident and when we really establish what we set out to, a new order will be created!! Till then watch out for us.

“There is a huge focus in rolling out strong IPR led products, hire the best people, scale revenues. In due course we look at plausible acquisitions and investors for reaching the pinnacle,” Raja said.

That’s just for 2016.

In an endless drive to catch people's attention, the online world has over the years become crowded with advertising pop-ups, banner ads and sponsored ads. Recent reports point to global advertising spending in 2015 amounting to US$650 billion. From a general perspective, entrepreneur Julian Corbett loves advertising as it feels so much of what everybody enjoys - from organizing the world information through Google, biggest sporting events such as the Super Bowl or Premier league, and connecting the world through Facebook – are all pretty much exclusively paid for by advertising revenue. And yet, this exchange is being challenged by consumers. "The dislike of ads is growing. It is ever more interruptive, it slows down the Internet, it invades your privacy...and we see consumers pushing back with ad blockers growing at exponential speed," he argued.

Julian wanted to bridge the gap between physical and digital adverting. With so much focus on innovation that has gone towards e-commerce, Julian, through his new venture called Ksubaka, aims to address consumers, digitally savvy or not, and provide them a meaningful experience in-store.

Ksubaka, founded in 2013, is Singapore-based with offices in London and Shanghai.

"Ksubaka is all about creating Moments of Joy for shoppers. The ability to provide a better experiential journey for shoppers where we can delight and reward people who are making purchasing decisions is an exciting mission," said Julian.

Ksubaka deploys 'playSpots' in stores where interactive apps that leverage the language of games are launched on interactive displays. They tell brand stories and invite shoppers to continue the journey on their phones. According to Julian, they have 10 strategically playSpots located throughout a hypermarket and have millions of shoppers who have experienced Ksubaka already.

"Every single store has over 1,000 shoppers a day engage on our playSpots. There is no limit to the scale of this approach as every new store is a new audience. By end of this year in China alone we will have some 30M shoppers monthly completing MoJos (Moments of Joy), making this one of the largest engagement platforms for brands there is," he noted.

Julian believes that if consumers are told a real story, and/or if they are given a real experience, as opposed to looking on YouTube at others having an experience, they connect emotionally. It allows them to have a far more effective and sustainable way of positively engaging audiences.

According to Julian, the concept of Ksubaka is very new as to date, advertising has been separated between above the line (media) focused on building brands and reasons to believe on one hand, and store that is below the line (trade) that is driven by promotion on the other hand.

"You want to get conversion at the point of purchase, but more often than not the tool to achieve that is buy 2 get 1 free and this not only erodes margin it devalues brands. Our solution bridges this and combines three pillars for increased sales and market share: 1/ real understanding of reasons to believe in a product through interactive engagement, 2/ ability to convert shoppers by having them pay attention and link from our displays to mobile for targeted promotions and 3/ data insights through real-time analytics and surveys that capture in the moment what are shoppers sentiment," he explained.

Julian started Ksubaka after having grown video game publisher Take-Two Interactive in Asia many fold. He was looking for new ways to grow the market and have better ROI on their substantial marketing spend. He shared that it occurred to him suddenly that they simply do not have the right kind of tools and management of experiences available in the location they know 70% of buyers change their mind. Thanks to his background in entertainment, technology, games and mobile, he thought he could create a media space that would be revolutionary.

Julian was part of the team at the inception of RealD, a firm that develops the RealD 3D technology, used for projecting films in stereoscopic 3D using circularly polarized light. In 2010, it did a big exit on New York Stock Exchange.

"The first mandate for me was can we create advertising that people actually like and that shoppers would actively seek out. Gamified experiences were the obvious choice as “play” has been badly used to date " he said.

Through the help of his brother Giles, who has a massive background on building mobile companies and scaled platforms, most recently for the Orange Group, Julian is confident they have a solution that can truly scale massively as a platform and be deployed globally. Giles serves as COO of Ksubaka.

Being successful on some prior exits, Julian was able to provide seed funding for Ksubaka. They then raised US5M with some highly connected individuals with stellar backgrounds in traditional and digital advertising, platform and retail. They just announced a joint venture for China with Hong Kong-listed firm, Fullshare Holdings, that has injected 100M RMB ($21.2M) just for 2016 for Ksubaka to grow massively there.

Ksubaka is now in scaling mode, growing 100% month over month and bringing in the talent to grow the company to fulfill its vision. They are currently looking at 3 markets, 2 in Asia, that they intend to roll-out in coming 6 months.
 

Its network of partner restaurants trippled to 450 in just 3 months.

Convenience and efficiency have always been part of online ordering, and this has proved to be an irreversible trend in Singapore. People in Singapore tend to work long hours and time is their most precious asset. From laundries to groceries, digital technologies led by smartphones and tablets are fueling an even greater push for immediacy. In the restaurant segment however, local entrepreneur Tristan Torres argued that food deliveries sometimes are not well- recognized for its promptness and/or great customer experience. He wanted to change the mind-shift of consumers and prove that Deliveroo can meet the need of the current market in an average time of 30 minutes from premium restaurants to their doorstep. In addition, customers can track the status of the order creating a seamless customer experience.

Tristan is the General Manager of Deliveroo Singapore which started in October last year. It is a food delivery company which originated in London and catering quality food to customer’s home or office. Deliveroo was founded by William Shu and Greg Orlowski who have been childhood friends since the age of 7 and are both Americans. Greg comes from a technology background and William, the financial sector. The idea of a delivery service for premium food was first hatched by William Shu, when he moved from New York to London, and was surprised that it was nearly impossible to get quality food delivered. William, a passionate food lover, was determined to bring great restaurants closer to their customers. With his revolutionary concept and Greg’s technological prowess, the Deliveroo service was born. First launched in London, Deliveroo has since charted an exponential growth, with its delivery bikes being used in over 30 towns and cities across the UK.

In three months, Deliveroo Singapore has grown to having 26 permanent staff members and 220 riders. When they launched in November, they had more than 150 partner restaurants and serviced five areas. As of today, they have more than 450 partner restaurants and service fourteen areas in Singapore, mainly in Central Business District, Katong, Kallang, Tanglin, Bukit Merah, Novena, Bukit Timah, Queenstown, Ang Mo Kio, Bishan, Serangoon, Bedok, Tanah Merah, and Tampines. They aim to be island-wide by the end of 1st quarter.

In comparison meanwhile, food delivery startup FoodPanda has 720 restaurants as of today. It was launched in Singapore in 2012 with initial 51 restaurants in its network. Recent media reports said that Foodpanda is promising to drastically reduce delivery time in Singapore to 30 minutes through its own fleet of over 500 couriers, along with advanced delivery technology.

As Deliveroo has been wanting to go big since launch, Tristan shared that they had a massive outreach effort where they all wore kangaroo onesies and descended upon the Central Business District, delighting office workers with free cupcakes from the famed Plain Vanilla Bakery. 5,000 cupcakes were given away in 4 hours, all stamped with Deliveroo’s iconic kangaroo logo.

“Visually, it was a sight to behold, and it definitely caught the attention of many people. We attracted a big crowd wherever we went, people were happily taking photos with us, and devouring the cupcakes, he said.

Deliveroo is constantly looking for new innovations to change the way delivery services operate in Singapore.

Tristan cited 3 main points that make it unique in Singapore. First, Deliveroo, he said, is working with a wide selection of independent and high-quality restaurants in Singapore and has had more than 450 restaurants that has partnered with them, including Cedele, Chopsuey, Kinki Restaurant, Meat Liquor, Nandos, Potato Head Folk and PS. Cafe. Secondly, he claimed that Deliveroo delivers in an average time of 32 minutes, including the time the user places his order. Lastly, all the processes, he said, are managed by their back-end technology which means they are ‘extremely efficient’ in ensuring the customer gets proper food in a proper delivery time. “The experience is very transparent as the user has visibility on their food, from the moment the order is processed. They can track the order,” added Tristan.

Deliveroo raised a US$70 million investment back in July 2015. Recently, they announced that they had raised a US$100 million Series D investment on 24 November 2015. The new investment will aid international expansion and to establish the company as the number one provider of on-demand, high-quality food delivery. Over 5,000 restaurants are currently delivering through the platform worldwide.

Imagine an Amazon meets Kickstarter.

If you are looking for a place to discover unique brands or ​projects and interact with inspiring people from the global community, ZingoHub maybe for you. ZingoHub bills itself as a home to the world’s best emerging brands & ideas. Founded by a Singaporean-Pakistani and an Indian national who grew up in Singapore and have known each other for 15 years, the startup was born in 2015 as the two envisioned a world without borders made possible through an online commerce built on innovation and ideas. This first-of-its-kind crowdfunding + e-commerce platform which has operations in India is launching its platform in Singapore this March.

Haider Aly-Reza holds a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Warwick in United Kingdom. Prior to co-founding ZingoHub, he was as a Business Associate for Japanese Internet giant Rakuten where he was involved in supporting the assessment and setup of business opportunities in South-East Asia. Sayantan Das holds a double degree in Finance and International Studies from the University of New South Wales in Australia. Prior to co-founding ZingoHub, he was working with TripAdvisor as a Business Executive within TripAdvisor’s Sales and Operations division at its APAC Headquarters in Singapore. Sayantan’s responsibilities at TripAdvisor focused on driving revenue through analysis of market data and operations leads. The two met at United World College of South East Asia in Grade 6 where they regularly experimented in various entrepreneurial ventures from the young age of 14.

With the help of Nasir Alessandro Kausar, who serves as a founding president, the concept evolved as they wanted to build identities around the countless number of amazing brands, creators and innovators there are in this world. A model where a social marketplace rewards-based crowdfunding and e-commerce platform existed in harmony seemed like a perfect potion to dissolve barriers and give rise to a world of amazing brands, products and ideas.

Nasir holds a BS (Economics and Italian) and a MBA from the University of Wisconsin. Prior to co-founding ZingoHub, he was the CEO of Infinity Partners and also held senior level positions in Societe Generale and Citigroup.

The startup currently has raised 600,000 USD funding from private investors and a Singapore-based private Family Office.

ZingoHub is a full subsidiary of Singapore Company, Bazingo Inc. (www.bazingoinc.com).

It has crowdfunded 37 SMEs in just six months since launched.

As Singapore continues to pursue its vision to be a Smart Nation, financial technology startups are rushing to revolutionise the industry. P2P lending, a proven model in US, Europe and Australia and serving as a form of alternative financing to SMEs and alternative investment to retail investors, is gradually being introduced to Singapore. One of which is Funding Societies, a P2P lending platform for SMEs to secure loans for growth, and crowdfunded by retail investors.

Founded in February 2015 by Kelvin Teo and Reynold Wijaya, the platform was launched in four months. Surprisingly, in just six months, the team has crowdfunded more than S$3m for 37 SMEs by December 2015 with 0% default to-date. The founders claim that in a short period of time, their achievements so far have made them the fastest-growing and safest platform in SEA. They have also been recognized by several award-giving bodies in the region.

According to Kelvin, co-founder and director of Funding Societies, who is also a Chartered Accountant, they started Funding Societies while he and Reynold were in Boston doing their MBA at Harvard.

“We couldn't wait for our graduation in May 2016 to start for fear of missing the market (neither could we drop out due to family reasons). Hence, we hired our first team in Singapore and Indonesia all via internet (Skype, email and i-banking). The first time we physically met our team was in June 2015, five months after they've joined us,” said Kelvin.

The platform is then built to solve two problems: one is as SMEs' lack of access to financing for growth and two is because casual investors' lack of good, short-term investment. The founders knew that P2P lending is the answer to these problems.

“By leveraging on technology and credit research, we identify non-bankable but creditworthy SMEs looking for loans and enable retail investors to crowdfund these loans in exchange for good monthly returns,” said Kelvin.

The platform differentiates itself from others through technology and management practices. In terms of technology, Kelvin explained that the end-to-end investing and borrowing process are conducted via their online platform, with the use of e-signature, online know-your-customer (KYC) check and internet banking. Kelvin added that their innovative credit assessment method helps to keep defaults low (currently zero).

“We're also the first and only platform to use an escrow agency to handle funds, and to be a signatory of the internationally recognized Small Business Borrower Bill of Rights,” he said.

Two months after the Funding Societies was launched, they have raised venture capital from SPH Media Fund (Singapore), Alpha JWC Ventures (Indonesia, whose co-founder Chandra Tjan invested in Indonesian techstars Tokopedia and Traveloka) and several angels.

Moreover, Funding Societies have already launched a P2P lending platform in Indonesia called Modalku last January 13, 2016. They plan also to scale up in Singapore and Indonesia, while leveraging on technology and marketing.

The founders

Kelvin Teo, 29, a Malaysian and Singapore PR, who came to Singapore at the age of 15 on the ASEAN scholarship. He graduated as the valedictorian of NUS Business School, before working as a consultant at industry leaders Accenture, McKinsey and KKR Capstone. He's a Chartered Accountant and currently sits on the young professionals advisory committee of the Institute of Chartered Accountants Singapore. 

Reynold Wijaya 27, an Indonesian who graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Michigan with a Master and Bachelor in Engineering, before working as a leading executive in a reputable family business conglomerate in Indonesia. He's also the co-founder of Let's Go to School in Indonesia, a non-profit organization committed to help financially-challenged children resume education. Both founders Reynold and Kelvin are finishing their MBA at Harvard Business School, while running the startup full-time.  

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COMPANY PROFILE

Company Name: Funding Societies
Founders: Kelvin Teo and Reynold Wijaya
Website: https://www.fundingsocieties.com/
Source of funding: SPH Media Fund (Singapore), Alpha JWC Ventures (Indonesia, whose co-founder Chandra Tjan invested in Indonesian tech stars Tokopedia & Traveloka) and Angel Investors
Start of Operation: June 2015

For startups wanting to be featured, send your message to [email protected].
 

Beeketing provides marketing automation platform for e-commerce business.

When Quan Manh Truong (CEO), Phuong Anh Ha (CMO), and Duong Dzung (CTO)’s built a website builder platform as their first startup, it allowed them to work with 90,000 customers. With this numerous amount of people, they realized one problem - customers can easily build a beautiful website with web builders and they can also buy advertisements from Facebook or Google to get traffic to their website, but the conversion rate is still very low because they don’t have the marketing mindset. To help them make money from their business, they built Beeketing.

Beeketing is a marketing platform that aims to help e-commerce businesses to create sales & marketing campaigns effectively and easily through automation. It was named after the two biggest passions of co-founder Phuong Anh Ha - her pomeranian dog and marketing.

Beeketing aims to give online shop owners the power to sell effectively like Amazon. It is a platform of complementary apps so once customers use one of their apps, customers will be attached to the whole platform and it’ll be hard to move to another solution. Moreover, the platform focuses on building their products for a niche market: small & medium e-commerce businesses, so the whole platform is fully automated and tailored to their needs.

After 6 years of working closely with online sellers, the three founders believe that they know well how hard it is to get their business up & running, and to get everything in right places. They specialize in making visitors return and become loyal customers.

“We used to spend thousands of hours getting our business in shape, and we know that many people, many businesses out there are also struggling with this. Therefore, we want to use our experience, our expertise building really good stuff to help online shops reach success more easily,” said Quan.

How Beeketing works

Beeketing tracks and analyzes customer behaviors on websites to find out customers’ personal interest; study sales history to determine what products and categories are frequently matched together. From the tracked data, they will automatically run sales & marketing campaigns for online sellers such as: “Sales Nurturing” when noticing a visitor interested in a product but not buying, they will send warm-up and reminder emails on brand founder’s behalf to make visitors come back and actually buy. Or cross-sell, up-sell by analysing sales history, they automatically send better sales emails to buyers introducing products that match their personal interest to make them buy more.

After two of the founders lived in the US to talk to customers and investors and survived with less than $2k budget a month, their sacrifice paid off. They now have received funding from 500startups - one of the top accelerators in the US and joined their mentor program - 500 Batch 15.

To boost their business, the team plans to hire new talents to make more apps and integrate with other platforms. Quan notes that they aim to reach $1m in revenue next year so they’re seeking for investment to boost up paid marketing channels to acquire more users as fast as possible. They also plan to set up a sales & support team in the Philippines to make their service even better, and set up a small team in Silicon Valley to catch all the new opportunities and understand customers’ needs here, as their customers are mostly from US.
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COMPANY PROFILE

Company Name: Beeketing
Founders: Quan Manh Truong, Phuong Anh Ha and Duong Dzung
Website: https://beeketing.com/
Major investors: 500 Startups
Start of Operation: 2014

Its app connects you to over 500 beauty artists.

To bridge the gap between beauty artists and customers, Vanitee introduces a community marketplace for quality beauty services. From the folks behind VanityTrove, a beauty sample subscription service founded in 2012, Douglas Gan, Kuik Xiao Shi, Choy Peng Kong and Meters Ang created an online booking destination making it easy for women to discover services based on proximity and location, as well as by type of service.

According to Douglas, co-founder and CEO of Vanitee, the platform is their response when they found out from a lot of women they spoke to how difficult it was for them to find good quality beauty services in Singapore. At the same time, Vanitee also aims to uplift small, independent beauty businesses in Singapore, and elevate the standards of the beauty industry.

The team believes that there are so many young, talented beauty professionals out there who don’t have the resources or know-how to reach a wider audience. Through the platform, they aim to help the sought-after independent and emerging beauty professionals or artists.

“We support independent and emerging beauty artists, because it's so easy to see their authenticity and passion for uncompromised quality in their work. Our days are fuelled by the desire to give these beauty artists a voice and platform to grow their brand, showcase their work, built a unique online store, and run their dream business,” said Douglas.

As of December 2015, Vanitee has over 500 beauty artists on its app with more than 1,000 artists in the pipeline. These artists go through a rigorous 27-step verification process to ensure that they can fulfil 100% happiness guarantee that Vanitee promises their customers. These artists can start and run their business entirely from the mobile app. They can schedule and keep track of appointments, manage their client database, list their services and prices, and showcase their work – all on our app. While for users, they can quickly and easily look for beauty services and book them on the spot via the app – all in less than five minutes. They can pay via a credit or debit card and their card is only charged upon completion of service.

“We want the experience at Vanitee to be one of discovery, and we want it to be fun. Our fantasy is that overtime someone compliments you of your new look and you will feel compelled to share more about the amazing beauty artist behind it. We believe that a good quality beauty service can have a very real and tangible effect on our everyday lives. It's all about living beautifully both inside and out,” Douglas said.

In just six months, Vanitee have raised $5m in its first round of funding. The company’s latest round of $3m which was closed just last month was from serial entrepreneur Ivan Lee and Japan’s beauty portal @cosme. Cosme’s investments follow an earlier $2m injection by SEA’s beauty distributor, Luxasia, and angel investor, Robert Yap, who runs Asia’s leading logistics company, YCH.

With this total funding at hand, Vanitee is expanding into Malaysia in the first quarter of 2016 which according to Douglas will help them cement their position in as a leading beauty service booking app in the region. Douglas adds that 2016 will also see the team deepening the product, where they will be introducing new features that will create the best experience for their artists and consumers.

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

It has raised $1.5m in less than a year.

Like many commuters in Singapore, Terence Zou has had many experiences of the city’s occasional transport woes. Two Christmases ago, when he decided to leave his car at home during a shopping trip to Orchard Road, he was left stranded in town for a few hours not getting a taxi with all his shopping in tow as many empty cabs passed him by. He then thought to himself that there was clearly an optimisation problem and there must be a solution.

Enter Ryde, a local carpool app which was launched in April and has already raised $1.5 million in its seed-round funding recently. The application uses GPS technology to connect drivers and passengers going the same way. Ryde provides a sustainable alternative to solve the congestion and pollution issues facing cities today. It aims to make the sharing economy become a reality by forging closer communities. It also aims at transforming the daily commute, one ride at a time, using technology and leveraging on the power of social networks.

“The public transportation system in Singapore, trains, buses and taxis cannot handle the surge in demand during peak hours. RYDE aims to solve this problem by providing an alternative way to move around Singapore and also a great way to reduce our carbon footprint!,” said Terence.

Terence explained that with carpooling, it is something that benefits everyone. For riders, it offers a social, eco-friendly and cost-effective alternative. For drivers, this helps to offset the cost of petrol and parking. Sharing rides helps drivers save more while they do the right thing.

Ryde team started with a humble office and an idea. Terence mentioned that they were fortunate to assemble a group of investors who has given them additional resources to work on a product that they know can transform the lives of everyone.

Terence: “I have no regrets.”

As a Singaporean Harvard graduate, Terence is a strong believer of the sharing economy, where people access a wide range of products and services without actually owning them. Prior to RYDE, he worked in investment banking, hedge funds and private equity. Apart from a career in finance industry, Terence has also been passionate about teaching and sharing his experience with others. He has taught finance and economics at various institutions including the National University of Singapore and SIM University.

Terence shared that some people described him crazy when he left his previous stable job and traded it for a life in start-up. But as for him, life is never rosy in a start-up with all the challenges that it brings. But working on a meaningful cause with a great team is what keeps them all going and that he have no regrets.

“On a few occasions, we have gone out as a team to distribute flyers late into the night because that's when all the cars are parked at home. Sometimes, we were told “politely” to leave for some car parks under private management and on one occasion even chased by a pack of dogs! But we kept pushing. Distributing flyers has turned out to be a great team bonding activity,” Terence added.

As a certified social enterprise, Ryde is actively looking for corporate and institutional partners to join them to raise awareness of carpooling. Terence said that they have plans to expand overseas which they will announce details soon.  

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