Category: Startup
Malaysian YouthsToday gets US$33,719 grant at Korean startup competition
Malaysian startup YouthsToday.com has received MYR 150,000 (about US$ 33,719) in forms of grants and investement at the K-Statup Grand Challenge, an acceleration program initiated by the Korean government for foreign startups.
One of the biggest success stories was the Malaysian startup, YouthsToday.com which is a platform that connects students to corporate sponsors for events. It is also a portfolio company of the venture capital firm, Gobi Partners.
“We could not be happier to make it through to the final phase of the programme,” said YouthsToday Chief Executive Officer, Jazz Tan. “What is next for us, in a word is expansion. We are hoping to bring more South Korean team members on board and continue networking and reaching out to Korean universities and students.”
The startup has now established in 20 Korean university campuses and is valued at more than US$ 1 million as it serves tens of thousands of university students.
YouthsToday is among the top 20 startups, selected from a pool of 2,400 companies that have also applied for the Korean government’s programme. Others include Fingertips Lab, Prekesh, Traversal and Imagga which occupy the top 4 positions in the Korean startup challenge.
Overall, the top 20 teams originated from 10 different countries and represent industries ranging from custom cosmetics and advance online security to biotech and Internet of Things (IoT).
“These startups will receive the support they need to continue their time in Korea, with free office space for another six months, approximately US$ 30,000 each in additional to government grants, and further investments from VCs and other investors,” YouthsToday said.
These benefits follow suit the advantages received by the teams during their initial acceleration period, which included a contribution of monthly stipends at roughly US$ 4,100 for living expenses, office space, as well as mentorship from major Korean tech companies.
“This was our first acceleration programme bringing international startups to Korea and it’s been an incredible success from start to finish,” said Director from the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, Dr. Chang-Yong Ahn.
Having launched this year, K-Startup Grand Challenge is the first international acceleration programme by the South Korean government. The government’s intent with the programme was to increase diversity in the South Korean startup ecosystem.
“We need more diversity in South Korean startups, and the K-Startup Grand Challenge proves that international startups can succeed in South Korea if they have the right support,” said Shift director Juno Kwon, one of the four South Korea-based accelerators that took charge of mentoring the startups in the programme.
Among local accelerators involved in the programme were Shift, SparkLabs, DEV Korea and ActnerLab. Each took charge of 10 startups, providing professional mentoring, networking and other support.
Commenting on the event, DEV Korea CEO Rock Oh also said, “I truly believe that South Korea will become an international startup hub, especially with government support, directed through smart programmes like the K-Startup Grand Challenge.”
By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media
31VENTURES of Japan leads investment in Dronomy, the Israeli construction drone-software startup
Japan venture capital (VC) firm 31VENTURES has recently made an investment with Dronomy Ltd., an Isreali-based construction technology startup that provides a drone-based solution.
Mitsui Fudosan’s 31VENTURES has led the round along with other existing investors which include Battery Ventures, Lool Ventures, and Oryzn Capital which had also participated.
The announcement about the funding came on Friday, December 9 through the corporate VC fund – 31VENTURES Global Innovation Fund, an investment platform which is jointly operated by Global Brain Corporation for speedy investments.
No financial details were disclosed about this funding rounds. Though it is known that this funding round will allow the company to launch its solution into international markets and to ramp up its acquisition, starting Q1 2017.
Founded by two physicists interested in autonomous drone flight, current CEO Ori Aphek and VP of R&D Dr. Guy Raz, the venture identified the gap in the ability of construction companies to frequently and accurately monitor their construction sites.
The Tel Aviv startup leveraged upon this. providing the solution of a software company that builds actionable knowledge into construction projects through the analysis of unique and frequent project data collected by autonomous drones.
These pieces of information collected and analysed are shared via the cloud to relevant construction projects.
Commenting on the investment, Akira Sugawara, the GM of 31Ventures said, “It did not take us long to realise the outstanding business potential of Dronomy, which led us to make our first-ever investment in an Israeli technology company.
“The construction market, its challenges and the opportunities it encapsulates are well known to us. We were impressed to see how Dronomy and its remarkable team understand and address these challenges,” Sugarawa further adds.
Construction companies, developers, and subcontractors are beginning to realise the benefits of incorporating these unique technological solutions as part of their business processes.
With Dronomy, the process of mapping, monitoring, inspecting and sharing site details becomes an autonomous part of the daily site routine, leading to reduce in ever-occurring project delays, exceeding cost budgets, and disputes.
These can account for a significant percentage of a project’s overall costs. Besides, construction companies can also use Dronomy to build a knowledge corpus that can be shared over the cloud to all relevant stakeholders.
“We are consistently receiving extraordinary feedback from customers who experience what our solutions can do for them. This is now ratified by one of the world’s largest players in our market,” said Ori Aphek, the Founder and CEO of Dronomy.
“Our ability to make consumer drones fly low and close to construction sites, capture the right visual data, translate it into knowledge, and appropriately deliver this knowledge is what makes us different,” Aphek adds.
In September 2015, Dronomy has raised US$ 1.5 million funding led by Battery Ventures with participation from other VC fimrs and angel investors.
By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media
Singapore’s Senjo Group invests US$1.2 million in B2B startup Tjaara that is to launch in Middle East
Senjō Group, a FinTech investment firm and global payments operator, made an announcement on Thursday, that it has formed a partnership and invested US$1.2 million and an additional US$20 million trade finance in Tjaara Pte, Ltd., a Singapore-based B2B service.
Tjaara, literally translated to marketplace in Arabic has been in the research phase for nearly two years before being incorporated in August 2016 – acting as a global purchaser to unaligned wholesalers and businesses in the market as it aids the process on their behalf.
“Tjaara is a B2B service that offers product search, language translation support, ordering, logistics and finance management. We realised that a lot of smaller and medium-sized retailers were unable to navigate Mandarin-only manufacturer listings or access factory-direct prices.” Fred Then, the co-founder of Tjaara said.
The startup also negotiates, conducts quality control checks from factory to port, and even acts as an escrow service to manage the complicated buying process between Chinese manufacturers and foreign companies. It aims to create a healthy local economy and enabling competitive businesses.
Explaining the process, Fred said, “Tjaara was built to help our end-users unlock a larger variety of products and larger profit margins through economies-of-scale. Unlike typical agents, Tjaara is also able to assist with product evaluation by obtaining samples for end-users; this is possible because of our close relationship with manufacturers.”
Additionally, Tjaara also applies a group-buy concept to aggregate demands from customers to present a large consolidated order to pre-qualified manufacturers. Tjaara’s customers or Channel Partners largely consist of businesses or individuals who wish to monetize their relationships with end-users.
“It is known that Chinese wholesale e-commerce platforms like Alibaba offer lower prices for local purchases, and when non-Chinese IP addresses are detected, the price is typically inflated. This is why Tjaara will always get better pricing as all buying is done locally through our China operations. And by consolidating the orders of small wholesalers, we’ll get more bulk discounts.” Fred adds.
Presently an invite-only platform, the service is only usable by vetted customers and selected channel partners who are allocated 50 complimentary translation requests per month. Tjaara users can view translated listings or request for a search for products.
“We are extremely excited by the generous support offered by Senjō, and their faith in us,” said Fred. “The biggest plus of working with an experienced partner like Senjō is definitely their expertise in payment systems and existing global footprint and connections. This will make our lives a lot easier. We are looking forward to scaling to greater heights with their support.”
Senjō Group is an investment company specialising in global electronic payments, trade finance, and e-commerce. Headquartered in Singapore, it has regional offices in Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Luxembourg and the UK, and operations in most major markets across Asia, Europe, North American and Africa.
Senjō Group comprises five business units: Senjō Payments, Senjō Commerce, Senjō Ventures, Senjō Trading and Senjō Finance. As such, this is a complementary investment that synchronises with the firms existing business operations.
Commenting on the investment, Sam Evans, the VP and Head of Ventures of Senjō Group said that Tjaara demonstrates great potential in addressing market inefficiencies, even during less-than-ideal economic times. For even during falling global demands, Tjaara can address the means of SMEs that needs to save cost while maintaining product quality.
The soft launch of the service is slated in Q1 2017, while the plans for a full launch is scheduled in Q2 2017. The business initial market focus will be in the Middle East, or more specifically United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Egypt and North Africa.
A mobile app is also in the works to facilitate easier access.
For more information, please visit http://www.tjaara.com/
By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media
Calcutta Angel Network and Appliyifi back startup Vehico for providing automobile IoT solutions
Bengaluru-based Vehico that develop an Internet of Things (IoT) solution for the automobile industry has raised an undisclosed amount of angel investment from Calcutta Angel Network and Applyifi, an online platform for startup investments.
The fresh capital was raised in late October and will be used to strengthen the company’s product, scale up their technology infrastructure and for talent acquisition, to expand the team, Abhishek Chatterjee, the Founder and CEO of Vehico said.
Founded in early 2015, Vehico is owned and operated by Metaiot Technologies Ptv. Ltd. Before launching Vehico, Abhishek Chatterjee who graduated from the University of Calcutta has worked with IBM and Tata Steel.
Its flagship product, Vehico Fleet is a telematics-based fleet management and analytics solution which facilitates distance transmission of information that will enable automobile industry and users to remotely control and manage data in vehicles.
It offers fleet owners and car rental companies with real-time insights on the vehicle health as well as the driver behavioral patterns. This information data will allow the user to save money on fuel and vehicle maintenance which will avoid potential accidents.
“Using our predictive analytics enabled dashboard, they can plan, budget, forecast and allocate resources beforehand thus improving the overall efficiency,” Chatterjee said.
The company also offers Vehico Link, a hardware device that similarly collects and monitors the vehicle’s performance data ranging from driver to its surroundings. But the difference lies in part that it runs optimised edge analytics algorithms which will provide a precision point driver performance information.
“Within the next 2 quarters, we are coming up with advanced hardware, product improvements, and an API-based solution which anyone can integrate with their current solution. Our vision behind Vehico is to build a connected transportation ecosystem bringing better safety, security, connectivity and efficiency in the transportation industry,” Chatterjee said.
Vehico had received a small, first tranche of seed investment from the same angels in June this year.
About Vehico:
Vehico develops Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for the automobile industry. The company provides a one-stop solution to all fleet optimization problems through Vehico Fleet, an advanced fleet intelligence and data analytics suite designed for intelligent vehicle tracking, driver performance analytics, smart vehicle diagnostics and problem alerts.
For more information, please visit http://www.vehi-co.com/
By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media
DataStreamX raises US$465k to help businesses buy and sell real-time data
A Singaporean real-time data online marketplace, DataStreamX has managed to secure US$ 465,000 for its pre-series A funding on Sunday.
The round was participated by VC firm Wavemaker Partners, an incubator partner of Singapore’s National Research Foundation, JFDI, and an undisclosed angel investor.
Based in Singapore, DataStreamX’s marketplace contains data for weather, traffic, finance, ship movements, and more – in a single convenient platform.
The company help facilitates the flow of data, allowing businesses to monetize their data products while providing access to streams of new data sources for companies, developers, data scientists, academics and beyond.
It has an API for both buyers to stream data to their apps after they subscribe to it, and sellers to transfer data from their sensors to the platform and offer it for sale. The company profits through taking a cut in successful transactions.
Besides, DataStreamX also offers consultancy and training services for companies who are unfamiliar with how to get value out of their data and want to learn more about how to use their data.
This has become a big part of DataStreamX business – the startup provides an efficient way of organizing and analyzing your data and helps reduce the associated costs.
With this, troves of non-personal data, like real estate or advertising, can also share their collected information across border and industry.
“We’re building tools on three different fronts: a creation of data products, assessment, and consumption”, CEO of DataStreamX, Mike Davis said.
With the fresh funding, the startup will look into how it can help companies create useful products based on their data and bring them on its platform.
Besides, the fund will also be used for talent acquisition, to staff up on sales and marketing people as well as data scientists and data engineers.
“We want to develop a strong team of enterprise people,” Mike adds.
At present, the two-year-old startup has worked with more than 400 data vendors and 500 buyers on the marketplace, with 208 products listed.
For the coming year, DataStreamX hopes to reach annual recurring revenue (ARR) of US$702,000 by the time it’s ready for its series A, around Q4 of 2017.
Besides, DataStreamX also wants to create replicable use cases for the different industries and companies it serves. For example, financial data that helps fintech companies is currently a big part of the marketplace.
DataStreamX previously raised US$368,000 in seed funding from undisclosed private investors. The company is also a graduate of JFDI’s startup accelerator.
About DataStreamX:
With the vision to see an intelligent world where data flows between companies and across silos, DataStreamX works to help unleash the power of the world’s data and strive to provide a delightful marketplace experience that connects suppliers of data and consumers of data.
For more information, please visit http://www.datastreamx.com/
By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media