Month: September 2016
Singapore-based Digital Property Agency, Greyloft Concludes Seed Funding With US$1.1 Mil
When it comes to buying or renting a home, the process can be quite a hassle. Witnessing this, a Singaporean-based real estate startup, Greyloft seeks to bring the experience of house hunting online. In its most recent fundraising round, it secured an amount of US$1.1 million with the round led by DSG Consumer Partners and Wavemaker Partners.
Aiming to bring the whole realty journey online, Greyloft is a licensed real estate agency experimenting with the uses of technology to achieve the facilitation of house rental processes online. In other words, Greyloft aims to become a one-stop platform for users to make a smarter decision on deciding where to live.
Founded in September 2016, the story behind the company started when the founders, Mr. Narayanan and Mr. Agarwal experienced the troublesome house-hunting processes themselves when they came to Singapore to pursue their studies in the National University of Singapore.
Henceforth, the startup embodies their goals to bring transparency and simplification to the process as well as working towards the common goal of being “Asia’s preferred brokerage”. To accomplish this, the startup is working on a combination of software tools with its own in-house real estate agents who aid home seekers with paperwork, moving in and support after the customer moves into the new property.
Instead of going to multiple agents when you want to purchase or rent a house, Greyloft provides customers with as much information about the properties in their interested location sufficient enough to facilitate decision-making.
“A lot of the data that our customers need is already out there. However, it’s hard to make sense of it all, and they tend to refer to unreliable sources for information. We are building a team of data scientists and researchers to develop technology that will help cut through this clutter and present them with relevant information and data,” says Archit Agarwal, Greyloft co-founder
The startup also plans to extend it reaches from rentals to property sales. Greyloft will put funding toward product development, build data-driven online research tools for customers and tools that make the offline segment of real estate businesses easier for both the users and the agent. The funding will also be intended for recruitment purposes, building up its product team and agent staff as well as to boost the brand through various marketing efforts.
The company monetizes by charging a commission on successful transactions. Siddhesh doesn’t provide specific numbers but tells Tech in Asia that Greyloft’s revenue has grown 18 percent month-on-month since January 2016.
For more information, please visit https://www.greyloft.com/
Contact Info:
Name: Vivian
Organization: Unicorn Media
Singapore-based Startup, Refash Raises US$ 294K In Seed Funding Round
A startup enterprise based in Singapore, Refash has recently announced that it has raised S$400,000 (approximately US$294K) worth of fundings for its starting seed round. The funding round was led by Singapore’s Tri5 Ventures and Malaysia’s Tinkbig Ventures.
For those uninitiated, Refash was named after the concept of “refashioning” which means the reinvention of a new type of fashion trend where people can still spot a different outfit daily without burning a hole in their wallet.
The idea was also borne out of the alarming environmental consequences of trending fashion where 41.5 million kilogram of clothings were being disposed by Singaporeans annually.
Hence, Refash hopes to hone and grow the acceptance of Singaporeans in the practice of buying and using second-hand clothings by mediating the process and provide a solution to resell clothing surplus efficiently, easily and quickly.
In other words, Refash aims to help women clear their wardrobe through providing a retail platform for women to buy and sell their clothing items efficiently. The startup also look forward to refashion the concept of “buying” for shoppers, enforcing the idea that they do not have to hold on to the clothes forever.
“The disposing of so much clothing is a real waste, literally. Rather than just throwing away, I believe in the immense potential in the problems we are solving – bursting closets, clothes wastage and rising landfills to dispose these clothes”, said Refash CEO and Founder, Aloysius Sng in e27.
Hence, by creating a system which facilitates fashion resell, users who wish to clean out their closets just have to pack their unwanted items and the rest is handled by the Refash team where the team will then sell the items on their platform and outlets.
“People who want to clear their closets of unwanted clothes just need to pack and have them picked up by Refash. We will do the rest,” Aloysius Sng adds.
Since its launch in January 2016, the idea has been proven profitable as the six-months old enterprise has already earned a revenue of S$250,000. Selling more than half of the 40,000 “looking-brand new” clothing items which it has processed. Additionally, the startup has also successfully cashed out at least S$150,000 to its sellers.
Reportedly on e27, Refash plans to use the fundings on enhancing its technology, both on the front-end platform as well as their back-end inventory system. It also plans to build on its business networking group of resellers to facilitate quicker movement of the items.
Besides that, Refash with Tinkbig Venture on board. also has the ambition to expand its market to Malaysia by the end of the year.
About Refash:
Refash is a Singaporean-based fashion portal that sells second-hand fashion, helping women get rid of clothes they no longer want to keep. Refash collects clothes from sellers and processes them which includes taking snapshots of the item before listing them on the website for sale.
UniFa Wins Japan Regional Championship And Is Now On Road To Startup World Cup For US$1 Million
Ten Japanese startups go head-to-head in the regional round of Startup World Cup, participating in a series of pitch contest as they fight for the chance to be their national representative in order to participate in the grand finale which will be held in Silicon Valley, San Francisco next year.
In the end, the regional champion turned out to be UniFa, a startup enterprise providing an Internet of Things (IoT) solution for parenting and child development which has won the judges’ votes amidst other competition. The panel of well-known judges was from Japan’s own technology and startup’s system, that is SNS founder Takafumi Horie, ABBA Lab CEO Osamu Ogasahara, and Gumi CE0 Hironao Kunimitsu.
Some of the competition that UniFa has headed up against includes Alpaca, a fintech startup based in Japan and US which leverages on artificial intelligence to create an automated trading platform, and D Free, a medical wearable that detects the user’s intestinal tract activity and alerts the user that it’s time for them to use the restroom.
UniFa, on the other hand, offers the solution of a small robot called Meebo, an application that is designed to track kindergarteners’ physical and mental growth. It functions as a smart thermometer, and a smart bed collecting data from kindergarteners in order to provide parents with a better idea of their child’s feelings and experiences. The robot is also said to be able to cut down the unnecessary workload of handling paperwork for kindergarten teachers, which thus would allow them to concentrate on the child’s education.
With this, UniFa will be able to bring their company mission, that is to lessen the communication gap between children and their parents to the global platform as UniFa has withheld a place as one of the top 16 startups from 14 countries that will go head-to-head on March 24, 2017, in San Francisco where the next wave of entrepreneurs will be born and the winner takes all.
About Startup World Cup:
Looking for the world’s brightest mind across the globe and groundbreaking solutions that will move ecosystems forward, Startup World Cup is an event organized by Fenox Venture Capital that is dedicated to launching and advising the world’s next wave of leading entrepreneurs.
For more information, please visit: http://www.startupworldcup.io/
Contact Info:
Name: Vivian
Organization: Unicorn Media
India-based SaaS firm, CloudCherry raises US$6 million In Series A Round Funding
After raising US$1 million in their seed funding round, CloudCherry, an enterprise startup based in Chennai, India has raised to new heights as they recently closed their Series A funding with a six-fold increase of US$6 million.
The funding was led by prominent venture capitals – Vertex Ventures and Cisco Investments plus existing investor IDG Ventures, which now only holds a minority stake in the corporation. This amount by far has made a record for the highest 2016 Series A funding raised by a SaaS startup.
Understanding that a quick, genuine response can always be a game changer to secure a happy customer, CloudCherry was established to help companies by providing a way to act fast on customer feedback.
Thus, CloudCherry set out to provide a platform for companies where companies can apply key metrics to gauge customer experience, capture customer feedback as well as get notified about customer insights in real-time to intervene and fix issues.
The startup enterprise currently works with companies in sectors of banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), hospitality, healthcare, retail, manufacturing as well as e-commerce whereby their clients include brand names such as World of Titan, HDFC Bank, Caratlane and Central Voonik.
According to Deal Street Asia, CEO and co-founder of CloudCherry, Vinod Muthukrishnan said that “With this funding and their support, we are many steps closer to making our presence globally and becoming the name synonymous with Customer Experience.”
In a separate statement, the CloudCherry co-founder has also expressed his ambitions for the company, as they are looking to expand their business outside of India, targeting the markets of United States, Southeast Asia, and West Asia.
About CloudCherry:
Founded in 2013, CloudCherry is a SaaS firm formed with the coming together of a group of management gurus, business leaders and experts in mobility, analytics and technology sectors. The company based in Chennai, India specializes in customer analytics technology whereby it collaborates with brands to provide real-time analytics of the company’s products as well as to help them track, measure and improve user satisfaction.
Apple Acquires First Indian Startup, Tuplejump
Tuplejump, a Hyderabad-based startup with the vision to simplify data engineering recently became the third machine learning expertise acquired by Apple.
Founded in 2013, Tuplejump was helping major companies to stock, process and visualize their data using its unique in-house software, with most operations from both India and United States. But what caught Apple’s eye was Tuplejump’s on-going project called “FiloDB”.
Turns out FiloDB is an open source project working to enable the automation of data pattern recognition without being explicitly programmed. More specifically, the project aims to build a program that can efficiently apply machine learning concepts and analytics to the massive amount of complex data as they streamed in.
After the acquisition, Rohit Rai and Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu, two of the three co-founders moved to work with Apple in May while the third co-founder Deepak Alur left to join Anaplan, a planning and performance management platform for businesses.
According to Business Insider, the purchase price was not disclosed though it is said to be lower than Apple’s last machine learning purchase, Seattle-based Turi Inc. which was purchased at the price of US$200 million earlier August this year.
Collin Johnson, a spokesperson for Apple, made their usual standard non-denial statement when questioned by TechCrunch regarding the acquisition saying that, “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
Nevertheless, Apple currently has their sights set on artificial intelligence, looking to expand into the machine learning industry. As along with Tuplejump, the iPhone maker has to date acquired three machine learning startups including Turi, a company that builds end-to-end intelligent applications in Python and Emotient, a company that uses artificial intelligence to recognize, analyze and respond to facial expressions.