Disclaimer: KrASIA is a media partner for the Tech In Asia Jakarta Conference.
During the Tech in Asia Conference 2019, thousands of startups fought over the opportunity to attract the interests of many investors present at the event. Only five made it to the final stage of the Arena Pitch Battle organized by Surge, the accelerator program from Sequoia India.
They pitched their ideas to the judges and the audience, with a presentation of eight minutes followed by a Q&A session. The judges were Rajan Anandan, managing director at Sequoia Capital; Pieter Kemps, investment advisor at Sequoia Capital; Anandamoy Roychowdhary, director of technology at Sequoia Capital, and Melisa Irene, partner at East Ventures.
The five startups were Meiro from Singapore, Simak-Online and Halofina from Indonesia, and QueQ and Wisible from Thailand.
Simak-Online, an edtech startup, was the winner of the competition and took home the USD 5,000 cash prize. The second and third position were held by SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform Wisible, and fintech Halofina, respectively.
For this week’s “Early Stage”, KrASIA takes a look at these five startups that took part in the Arena Pitch Battle.
Simak-online is an integrated information management tool for educational institutions. The software offers features for teachers, schools, parents, and students. For teachers and organizations, it provides school data information, storage for documents, in addition to financial data management and curriculum and syllabus administration. The firm claims to help schools to save around USD 8,000 per year, while it helps teachers save time — 125 hours on average — on administrative duties.
For students and parents, the system helps to manage information related to the study schedule and teachers for each subject. Parents also can also find out information about school fees through the system. The platform has been implemented in 410 schools in Jakarta, and around 310,000 students and 20,000 teachers have joined the system. It targets to comprehend 3,000 schools with a targeted revenue of USD 1.6 million by the end of 2020.
Halofina is a fintech company that focuses on digital financial advisor and investment products for the B2C market, particularly the millennial generation. For digital financial advisory, Halofina provides content and recommendations to users regarding financial planning. Meanwhile, for financial products, it is positioning as an aggregator platform, partnering with many investment management, digi-gold platform and peer to peer lending services. Since it was launched in mid-March 2019, the platform has been downloaded on iOS and Android. It has more than 9,000 registered users and 1,000 active users, with a transaction value of around IDR 730 million (USD 51,647).
QueQ is a Thailand based platform founded in 2015 that assists users to book their place in a queue in advance, within 2 kilometers near merchants or restaurants. The platform provides to managers and supervisors a dashboard with information related to customers, peak time, statistic data, and comparison between other merchants.
QueQ has collaborated with 70% of top chain restaurants in Bangkok, according to the company. It also addresses other potential sectors market, such as bank branches, telco outlets, and medical centers. In the medical sector, QueQ has partnered with 30 hospitals and 13 clinics, and there are more than 100 hospitals on the waiting list, the company informed.
The company claims to have 1.7 million registered users, of which more than 35% are monthly active users. The platform booked over 15 million places in a queue by September 2019.
Wisible, founded in 2018, is Thailand-based SaaS that assists salesperson and sales teams in various regards, such as sales forecast, sales track and report, and customer information. The platform leverages big data to do predictive sales analytics to boost efficiency. Wisible is powered by AI, which provides its clients with recommendations to gain more deals, the company said.
Meiro is a Singapore-headquartered customer data platform that collects, cleanses and consolidates customer data into specific profiles for business users. It addresses industries such as banking, finance, entertainment, media & telco in Indonesia, HongKong, Singapore, Australia, and the Czech Republic. The company claims that only after 10 months after the launch of its platform, it now processes 400 million customers’ events per month and holds 40 million customers’ records.
”Early Stage” is a series where the writers of KrASIA highlight startups that caught our eye for the week.