A great cup of coffee can boost productivity. It is also the stuff in which team culture are made of. Thus, having a great cup of coffee in the office is always a good investment for both employers and employees. However, the purchase of an expensive coffee machine though exciting at first has always ended up with the machine sitting there to collect dust. People just get bored if it is not with the right coffee taste.

A Singapore startup founded by Eugene Chen and Keyis Ng on May 25 intends to change just that. By opening a new web and mobile platform – coffee lovers can shop for Australia’s best coffee beans, freshly roasted with just a click. This startup is known as Cafebond and it targets Singapore growing market for specialty coffee, aiming to be the supplier to this demand by making specialty coffee more accessible.

To date, Cafebond has made accessible the taste of coffee from 14 of Melbourne’s top cafes-cum-roasters, such as Small Batch Roasting Co and Code Black Coffee Roasters. On another list, the startup also include deliveries from World Barista Champion Sasa Sestic’s Roastery and Cafe as well as Ona Coffee in Canberra.

Cafebond.com offers a web and mobile platform that crosses geographical borders as it connects coffee lovers with the best coffee brands in the world. It aims to bring better coffee tasting experience to office workers, so that they can taste and buy unique specialty coffee beans and blends from roaster-owned cafes from London to Melbourne, Singapore to Beijing, in one easy checkout process. But above all, these coffee beans are sold at an affordable price.

“What Cafebond does is bring the shipping cost down to make these beans more affordable,” said co-founder and CEO Keyis Ng, “Because to ship a 250g bag of beans from Australia to Singapore using DHL or TNT will easily cost up to S$30 to S$40 dollars, which is more than the cost of the beans,” Ng shared, explaining that the flat delivery fee regardless of the size of the order, is made possible using a consolidation shipping algorithm.

The startup is invested by Quest Ventures, China’s leading venture capital firm and is incubated with Infocomm Investments, the investment subsidiary of Singapore government’s tech agency IMDA (Info-communications and Media Development Authority).

Cafebond.com is also one of the four startups hand-picked by Microsoft Singapore to be co-located within its Asia Pacific Headquarters and is currently part of DBS Hotspot 2016, the startup support programme by DBS Bank which is one of Asia’s largest bank.

For more information, please visit https://www.cafebond.com/

By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media

Looking to redefine the standard of living, California-based HOMMA is a startup that sets out to innovate our concept of housing. It aims to craft the vision of a new lifestyle and reimagine our daily living. But for the sake of a better picture, just think of it as “a housing-version of Tesla”.

To accomplish this, HOMMA looks to create an AI-based software and service that will connect homes. The startup is founded by Takeshi Ted Homma who has been an entrepreneur since his student days working with the early internet doing web design and development. Following this, he also played an active role at Sony and Rakuten. It is later in 2015 that he made the decision to quit and pursue this startup, named after himself, HOMMA.

“It took 100 years for the telephone to become the IPhone. 100 years later and Ford Cars have evolved into Tesla. But what about homes? Have they changed in the course of a 100 years?” Takeshi Homma, the founder of HOMMA explained in an interview with The Bridge, “Actually, I really thought someone would appear and solve this problem, but no one showed up so I’m going to do it.”

Thus, with the motto written on their website, “Redefining our standard of living,”, the startup aims to work on an ambitious project that will create a new vision of the future with regards to the necessities of life. Additionally, they also aim to solve the connectivity issue that arises due to devices from different manufacturers and multiple apps for different purposes.

The startup recently launched their seed round funding on October 24. The seed round was participated by Mistletoe, B Dash Ventures, Genuine Startups, 500 Startups Japan, East Ventures, Draper Nexus and architectural firm KMDW. On the other hand, individual investors included Hiroshi Mikitani, the co-founded and CEO of Rakuten, Tomohito Ebine, the founder of Opt, Shintaro Yamada , CEO of Mericari, Hirokazu Mashita, founder and director of M&S Partners, Hiroaki Yasutake, Kotaro Chiba, co-founder of Colopl, Hollywood-based film producer Masi Oka.

For more information, please visit http://hom.ma/

By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media

Following The Void in the United States and Zero Latency in South Australia, a company based in Puchong, Malaysia is about to bring the world a new reality – First ever Virtual Reality theme park in Malaysia.

EXA Global – a wholly owned subsidiary of Havson Group Berhad – is working towards bringing immersive virtual reality  gaming experience to Southeast Asia. The company which has a licensing model for retailers, malls, cinemas and theme park operators has recently announced their upcoming plan to open the country’s first virtual reality attraction that will commence early next year.

The gaming experience in EXA is completely jaw-dropping. Players are put in an essentially empty room, wearing headset and carrying gaming equipment, and before they knew it, they are fighting critters, scurrying through an unknown environment , handling incoming attacks, assist and interact with each other, and completing goals. Best of all, the equipments are untethered, movements are not restricted, hence giving a “free roaming” immersive experience to the players.

To be a frontier at VR, pioneering hardware and facility research in-house is unavoidable. EXA’s hardware research is provided by their wholly owned subsidiary, Dutajaya Media (DJM), an ASEAN leading VR tech company and the first VR R&D center in Malaysia.

Another notable sister company is Mediasoft, responsible for the VR gaming content in EXA Global. Founded in 2012, Mediasoft has grown to be the no.1 game company in Malaysia with more than 50 original titles. Mediasoft along with Tomotech, their Singapore-based arm that develops PS4 games, have developed and published successful games including JumpSmash and Rollspike series which have combined 10 million downloads worldwide.

Recently, Havson Group as a Malaysian representative, won Create@Alibaba Cloud’s Start-up Contest (CACSC), rising above 12 selected startups from Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia as the Champion. The event is the first ever global entrepreneur contest organized by Alibaba Cloud in partnership with Infocomm Investments, held earlier on 26th of August this year.

The company has thus far raised 3 seed rounds and plans to raise Series A soon.

For more information, please visit http://havsongroup.com/ or contact us.

by Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media.

Eyeing the huge unexplored niche and opportunity in child development space, many entrepreneurs in India have developed different kind of apps to cater the needs of new parents. Here are some of the most innovative startup which allow parents to learn about their child’s development, that is addressing this market are BabyBerry, Tinystep, mycity4kids and Parentlane.

BabyBerry: BabyBerry is a pregnancy and parenting app, all rolled in one. It helps parents to keep track of their baby’s overall growth and development by providing a 360 degree experience, covering things such as vaccination charts, growth milestones, and also convenient features such as the ability to buy evaluated and recommended products and services.

Tinystep: Founded in September 2015 by IIT-Kanpu alumnus Suhail Abidi, Tinystep is a platform that connects parents with a community of parents as well as child services providers. In a recent news this Spetember, Tinystep has raised approximately US$501k from Flipkart.

mycity4kids: Vishal Gupta founded mycity4kids in 2010, an online marketplace where parents can search for information related to kids services, from services for throwing kids parties to venues for family entertainment. This startup has raised US$3 million funds in its Series A round held earlier this year.

ParentLane : Parentlane is an app that leverages data science and machine learning to map child development and deliver personalized recommendation to the parent community engaging on the platform. This app mainly focuses on child development up till the age of 8 years old.

Hence, it is undeniable that social media covers almost every aspect of one’s daily life, that is including the connections and the sharing of experiences of being a parent.

With children product and services market in India exceeding US$20 billion, growing at a CAGR of at least 20 percent and parents using such services to obtain parenting tips, the growth of startups in this domain are very optimistic.

Contact Info
Name: Vivian
Organization: Unicorn Media

Various startups are setting out to solve real world problems, some are creating new solutions while others are revamping an industry.

One startup, is on a mission to do good to the world through social volunteering and this startup is known as Involver.

With the cause to help make a difference in various communities, Involver is founded by Kevin Chua and Chad Smalley back in October, 2015. The startup is working on an app that will connect eager volunteers to various organizations and their available projects. To date, Involver is partnered with more than 30 partners of NGOs, NPOs, charities and more.

Currently, Involver users who are looking for volunteer work can be situated either in Singapore, South Asia or Middle East with organizations such as HCA Hospice, Cerebral Palsy Alliance Singapore, Step Up Dubai, Inara, SMU BP Mentoring, MCYC Community Services Society, Habitat for Humanity and YMCA Singapore.

The main idea behind the startup is based on the idea that there is a barrier for those looking to do volunteer work who does not know how and where to start. In other words, social philanthropy lacks a platform. The same goes for even a corporations which may find it an uphill task to bring together a distributed workforce for contributions in terms of their corporate social responsibility (CSR).

But there is more to this than merely functioning as a platform for social volunteers and that is Involver adopts a gamified app interface using bright colors and beautiful graphics. Furthermore, users who go for volunteer causes can also achieve goals in this app which will unlock levels and badges.

Additionally, users can choose a cause they prefer, with categories available including Youth, Education, Environment, Poverty and Hunger, etc. Moreover, there is a feature where users can describe their attributions and specialties in order to get a more suitable position in the organization.

Ultimately, due to the mobile nature of their services, volunteering is made into a simple process by groups or individuals done simply through an app. Organisations using the app to recruit volunteers are only charged a nominal fee for helping with volunteer management. Involver estimate that through their service, they could potentially save charities and non-profits up to 5% of their annual sponsored funds.

About Involver
Involver is a gamified application that allows public and corporate volunteers to discover social causes and in turn contribute to create great social impacts. Involver serves as a platform for those who are looking to give back to the community. The application has also appeared as one of the top 5 finalist in The Venture, a global competition launched by Chivas that supports social entrepreuneurs.

For more information, please visit http://www.getinvolver.com/

Contact Info
Name: Vivian
Organization: Unicorn Media