Category: Startup
Airfrov, a Singaporean online shopping app connecting buyers with travellers enters Indonesia
Airfrov, a platform that connects buyers with travellers for requesting products from abroad is now expanding its market reach to Indonesia – a strategic move responding to the opportunities in the increasing numbers of travelers that are crossing Indonesian borders.
Based in Singapore, the startup launched in 2015 has been operating for a year and a half, before it began expanding its businesses into Indonesia that has started since last August.
But entering Indonesia, Airfrov will be facing competition from existing peer courier services such as BisTip and Neetip.
“This trend of bringing back overseas products is getting popular, but there are some issues concerning the conventional process, for example, the limited number of products that can be sent, the long duration of delivery, the payment guarantee, and the high delivery fees,” said Airfrov, CEO Cai Li.
In response to the competition, Airfrov intends to set itself apart from other P2P courier services, through offering a safer solution that prioritise the needs of users.
Through its website and mobile application, Airfrov offers a simple way to shop abroad. Requesters simply post the desired items and offer a price quote, while Travelers abroad who are interested will meet the demand.
Additionally, the company will handle the payment from the requester and keep it until the items have been paid for. Travellers will receive their money only after the products have arrived in the requesters’ hands.
Besides, Airfrov also features information on the latest trends and popular existing products abroad.
“We are currently focusing on building the best user experience for our users in Indonesia and a strong local team to understand the people’s culture and local trends more deeply,” said Airfrov CTO Robi Ng, who is an Indonesian.
In this aspect, Airfrov also continued their efforts through approaching users who have used their services in order to get input related to Airfrov development as well as maintaining relationships in order to re-use the service and recommend it to people nearby.
Airfrov is said to have more than 95,000 active users, some of whom reside in Indonesia. Its soft launch event held in August has claimed to have received more than 1,000 offers from 150 travelers.
In an effort to continue increasing the number of users in Indonesia, Airfrov has partnered with Martha Tilaar, a homegrown cosmetics company. This partnership is in part due to the potential of the beauty school student who requires imported beauty supplies not found in Indonesia.
“Those who need products that are outside the country is expected to see Airfrov as a solution,” Cai Li adds.
By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media
Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6O8Bt1I78Y&feature=youtu.be
Apache Zeppelin secures US$ 4.1 million Series A funding round led by Vertex Ventures
ZEPL, an enterprise analytics company, has closed a US$ 4.1 million Series A funding round, led by Singapore-based Vertex Ventures. The round also saw participation from other investors which included Translink Capital, Specialized Types, and Big Basin Capital.
This funding round also debuted with a fresh new brand – ZEPL, similarly founded by the creators of Apache Zeppelin to replace the formerly known NFLabs.
“Our new brand identity, ZEPL – Zeppelin RELP – reflects our mission to provide an interface for modern day analytics workflow,” said Sejun Ra, the co-founder and CEO of ZEPL.
“For decades, enterprise analytics has been mired in silos – data silos, skill silos, team silos – that regardless of computational power, hindered speed and efficiency of analytics,” Sejun explains.
He continues, saying that “And though recent advances in Hadoop, Spark and other compute frameworks, alleviate some of the data silos issues, the myriad of choices further compounds the skill and team silos.”
In this case, Apache Zeppelin attempts to break down those walls providing a pluggable and open-source solution that enables data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts to use and share the same interface to source, process and analyse various data types.
Besides, using its JDBC Interpreter, Apache Zeppelin supports a majority of the modern day frameworks, from Spark, Cassandra, MongoDB, Elastic Search as well as standard relational databases such as Oracle and MySQL.
The data product is also integrated and available with various services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Dataproc, as well as most of the major Haddop distributions.
“We have been watching the organic growth of Zeppelin for some time, and are incredibly impressed with the demand and adoption of the technology, by everyone from small teams to the largest Fortune 100 companies,” said In Sik Rhee, the General Partner of Vertex Ventures that will be joining ZEPL’s company board.
Vertex Ventures is a network of funds that invest in and guides technology companies to an exit event, with Singapore’s state investment fund Temasek Holdings as a primary limited partner (LP).
“Enterprises have been clamoring for a way to seamlessly apply analytics across their organization. The team at ZEPL has a clear vision to drastically change the way companies leverage analytics to further their business goals, and we are pleased to support them as they expand Zeppelin’s reach,” In Sik Rhee adds.
With this new funding, ZEPL looks forward to expanding the Apache Zeppelin experience to enable the delivery of a single platform for end-to-end data analytics workflow.
According to ZEPL, Apache Zeppelin is fast becoming the standard big data visualization interface to explore and conduct deep data analysis. It also sees a significant adoption by corporate across different industry verticals, ranging from finance to high technology enterprises.
“Our mission is to transform the way people engage with data, and make big data analytics accessible and easy to use by anyone within an organization,” said Moon Soo Lee, creator of Apache Zeppelin and co-founder and CTO of ZEPL. “By building on top of Apache Zeppelin’s extensible, pluggable, open interface, we believe we can tear down the walls that currently limit how organizations leverage and communicate analytics.”
By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media
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