Delegate plans to use the money to invest in its SaaS platform and overseas expansion

The way Jacqueline Ye tells it, Delegate was born out of illicit Kopi dates. Ye was a woman who knew what she wanted. She wanted to start her own business and she wanted Melissa Lou as her Co-founder.

The Kopi must have been pretty good (or, more likely, Ye was just persistent). Three years later, the duo’s company is a growing events-based marketplace that boasts 70,000 users and 1,700 vendors.

“This is the most functional relationship the both of us have had in our lives. We basically have a child together, but there is no romance, so there is no incentive to want to stay together except for the business. A lot of the skills in managing relationships I’ve learned with my relationship with Mel. And vice versa,” said Ye in a conversation with e27.

Today, Delegate announced it has raised a US$1 million pre-Series A from an unnamed family office and Yang Bin Kwok, the former CTO of Zopim (one of Singapore’s most visible startup success stories).

The money will be used to expand into the US and Australia and improve its PRO SaaS product.

Also Read: Malaysia’s healthy snacks e-commerce Signature Market raises a Series A round from RHL Ventures

Delegate is a platform for people to find vendors who may be a good fit to manage their event — be it a big celebration like a funding party, or a special night to propose to a loved one. This, in turn, makes it a good place for vendors to advertise their services.

Delegate takes five per cent from every transaction and its freemium SaaS product, PRO, is a subscription service.

The goal of Delegate PRO is to help vendors manage their business online. It offers services like lead generation, customer relationship management (CRM) and a payments platform. Ye and Lou are also flirting with the idea of building a calendar and installment payment services.

They also try to incentivise customers with deals and preferential prices. For corporate clients, the company has a concierge service to manage the relationship with vendors.

Finally, Delegate is also dabbling with blockchain. Ye and Lou were very clear about not pursuing an ICO, but they do want to use the technology to improve the rating/review infrastructure for vendors.

“A big problem vendors have is that they have an issue with qualified leads and they get spammed a lot. [We want to] build something that could be embedded on any marketplace, a reputation and rating system,” said Lou.

The perk of the blockchain is the reviews are immutable, which would help quality companies see fair rewards for their good work.

Raising from family offices

One of the interesting quirks of this round is Delegate provides another data point on a notable trend: Startups are looking beyond venture capitalists to raise funds.

This may mean launching an ICO (a trend that is dying), raising from High Net Worth Individuals, pursuing corporates or looking for family offices.

Every startup is unique, and they have their own specific reasons for raising funds from whomever they chose. But it seems, in 2019, avenues that were once hyper risk-averse are now proving to be reasonable avenues for fundraising.

For example, Delegate had a strict hard-cap at US$1 million, which almost immediately eliminated a portion of the VC industry. They were less desperate to raise money, so the funding was never going to involve a pumped-up valuation or a large slice of equity.

“We didn’t need a big chunk of money, we needed less than what [VCs] would be willing to put in,” said Lou.

“We feel our product has reached enough maturity to need a sum of money to provide a good company structure. To hire the right expertise to grow and scale the product.” she said.

In 2019, it will be interesting to watch the source money for startups.

Looking ahead

The next big challenge for Delegate is expanding into the US and Australia. The team chose those countries because — in the event space — the markets are similar to Hong Kong and Singapore. Delegate recently ran a product-market-fit experiment and discovered it was receiving a lot of queries from Los Angeles and Austin, Texas.

Obviously accomplishing this goal will not be easy, but, when asked what they want to be telling e27 in a year, Ye blurted out “We made it in America!”. Then the burden of the tape recorder led to an awkward chuckle.

In reality, the long term goal of Delegate is to be a place for people to regularly visit. The issue with the events industry is that people really only use the services when it’s an important moment: be it a wedding, a corporate anniversary or a gigantic money-maker like Echelon.

Also Read: B2B eProcurement marketplace Dropee raises US$341K seed funding from Vynn Capital

Lou said she hopes Delegate becomes more of a “household brand” and that it will be a go-to place for smaller scale events like birthdays, house parties and even romantic moments with a loved one.

“I want Delegate to be a household name like AirBnB is for alternative accommodation,” she said.

Not bad for an idea born out of some illicit Kopi dates.

Siew Dai please.

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AI tools can help you get the message across without breaking a sweat

We’re living in a time of unprecedented convenience. Today, automation has brought unparalleled ease to how we conduct our business and studies online.

Although the art of giving presentations has remained largely unchanged since the early incarnations of Microsoft PowerPoint hit our computers back in 1987, the likes of AI and machine learning have begun to make their marks on the industry — empowering us to build engaging content along the way.

Here, we take a look at exactly how AI is beginning to bring convenience to the art of building presentations.

Dedicated tools

Occasionally, creating the right presentation for your audience requires solving a difficult question about perspective.

The problem is that as the presenter, you’re too close to the content to know if it’s striking the right chord with your audience or if it just manages to miss the mark.

Luckily, AI doesn’t suffer from such crises, and one tool in Beautiful.ai works wonders in picking up the slack of setting users up with a well-formed, engagingly crafted presentation that features the right blend of carefully selected images and bullet points.

Beautiful.ai utilises AI to learn about the subject you’re discussing in your slides and sets about automatically crafting your presentation as you enter the raw data. This means that the tool will automatically select a fitting smart template that caters for the level of information you’re looking to convey, as well as tapping into an extensive library of stock photos and media to further compliment your creation.

As you add further information, Beautiful.ai adapts the presentation it’s building to suit the subject in real-time. As a result, you just have to concentrate on the points you’re trying to get across.

This highly intuitive AI-based tool can also work with existing pre-formatted templates, meaning that you can also build a presentation up by using a specific design as a starting point. Numerous platforms like PoweredTemplate can help you with the task.

Test tube templates

Beautiful isn’t the only AI-based program to bring users their own intuitive PowerPoint presentations.

There are plenty of systems located in the cloud that is capable of building beautiful presentations without the user even having to click a button.

Programs like Zuru and SlideBot are able to look at the raw information in existing slides and automatically populate them with images based on the keywords they find within the content. The tools can also apply design rules to format each slide, leaving you with a well-crafted presentation that’s been intelligently built from the bottom up without the need for user input.

The AI technology embedded in both Zuru and SlideBot is intuitive enough to understand the golden rules of prominently positioning images while minimising the text that surrounds them.

These tools can make for a significant benefit when it comes to keeping your content on-message. A recurring problem when it comes to creating presentations is the risk of deviating from the initial points that you’re trying to make. With Zuru and SlideBot’s use of supporting the keywords that they find, you have a tangible reference point to ensure that you don’t shoot your presentation off on a tangent – the tools also make for a significant time saver should the worst occur and you get tasked with building a PowerPoint with little-to-no notice.

Also read: How artificial intelligence is disrupting education

Adaptive learning

Arguably the largest benefit of AI and machine learning technology is its capacity to learn as it adapts to your presenting style.

AI’s fundamental role in this field is to compliment and bring convenience to the user. The more that a presentation’s creator tweaks the slides that an AI program has churned out, the more it learns for future reference.

Think of it as a more robust form of predictive text. With the support of a program that’s adaptive enough to learn from the shortcomings of its service, the more it will bridge the gaps in its understanding.

If you’re regularly tasked with creating slideshows, the AI will soon learn the formats that you prefer and the scale of images and text boxes that work for you also. Convenience is at the forefront of technology’s future, and the world of PowerPoint is no exception.

PowerPoint assistants

The use of AI can stretch way beyond the aesthetics of presentations, too. Towards the end of 2018, Microsoft launched a nifty new feature called ‘Ideas.’ Microsoft Ideas has been designed to act as an AI infused personal assistant to Office users, and has the power to review your PowerPoint presentations as part of its broad-reaching range of services.

Also read: 3 ways to to instantly establish trust during your investor presentation

At the click of a button, Ideas will be able to take a look at your slides and suggest subtle, or more significant, changes based on your design, content and grammar. Significantly, Ideas is also capable of reviewing your charts, and offering ‘ideas’ for making them look more readable or exciting.

Of course, it’s worth saying that AI assistants aren’t currently flawless when it comes to advising users on improvements to their work, but given the significance of getting large-scale presentations right first time, sometimes that extra pair of digital eyes can make all the difference between harnessing a captivated audience instead of a room full of clock-watchers.

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Photo by Alex Litvin on Unsplash

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Malaysian startups Glueck, AVANA, and Finology offer unique products that have reshaped the B2B ballgame

When it comes to tech innovations, the most popular and widely used products—hardware, software, or digital platforms—are those that are enjoyed largely by the general consumers.

We’ve seen everything from ride hailing apps, to social media networks, to smarter personal devices, but what we are often clueless about are products that exist to improve other businesses.

What transpires in the business-to-business ecosystem, however, is unique and quite revolutionary.

From cloud and aggregator-type marketing platforms, which collate and synthesize sophisticated finance data, to facial analysis systems that extract and curate consumer insights, to social commerce enablers that help sellers unify online transactions in one easy-to-use platform—tech startups catering to the business-to-business (B2B) ecosystem have upped the ante in the recent years.

We spoke to three top B2B-focussed tech startups in Malaysia to see the types of innovation they are spearheading, and how they are faring in the Malaysian digital ecosystem.

How Finology solves roadblocks in the finance sector

What started as a simple idea among the founding team in 2010 derived from the observation that information on banking products were lacking online, the team behind Finology decided to launch Loanstreet.com.my in 2012 as their first product.

At the time, Finology realised that banks needed support to help make the transition to a digital world and to market their services online. Loanstreet.com.my is a solution for Malaysians to compare and apply for housing loans.

This pioneer product is essentially a popular aggregator-type marketing platform for banks and insurers to market products online, and for consumers to discover, compare, apply for, or purchase them.

By 2015, Finology had expanded the parameters of their services with an end-to-end digital onboarding and instant loan approvals system called Loanplus: a cloud platform for property developers and real estate agents to pre-qualify their customers’ loan at the point of booking.

Having partnered with 18 banks, Loanplus provides single point loan eligibility checking among the partner banks in less than 10 minutes, and can even handle tracking of loan application status.

It doesn’t stop there. Under their consulting services, Finology also offers Fintech and Insurtech solutions through XpressCover, a system that allows insurers to rapidly build, deploy, and widely distribute new insurance products with minimal programming interventions; and XpressLend, an omni-channel loan originating system with instant approval capabilities for banks and alternate lenders.

“The team at Finology takes time to study the issues and challenges of both consumers and clients and have a strong R&D where they can prototype, test and pilot solutions,” said Pranjal Kamra, founder and CEO of Finology.

Kamra explained, “more recently, with increased industry knowledge, the company has been able to spot opportunities and gaps in the market where they can provide transformative solutions and showcase them to prospective partners.”

Currently, Finology has clients in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Middle East.

Sci-fi flicks turned into a groundbreaking startup idea

Steven Spielberg’s 2002 sci-fi thriller Minority Report featured tech in the year 2054 that included a graphic processing unit (GPU) capable of processing and analysing images.

According to folks at Glueck, the Spielberg movie became one of their biggest inspirations for the facial analysis system they developed.

Named after Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, developers of the “Social Prediction Tables”, Glueck Tech has stayed true to its inspirations with its sophisticated computer vision, artificial intelligence, and deep machine learning algorithms, which help measure people’s interests and responses to stimuli in real-time environments.

They realised early on that the global Out of Home (OOH) advertisement industry lacked a comprehensive “audience measurement tool,” and 60% of customers have not completed an intended purchase caused by poor customer service experience. This translates to an estimated $83 billion in lost sales for retailers.

Their solution is simple: using face demographics and facial recognition with emotion analysis to perform analytics and extract insights for Indoor Out of Home advertisements for media clients, and customer experience analytics for retail chains, malls, service centres, and banks.

“In the current market, the major players sell ‘rate cards’ promoting that their sites generate high amounts of viewership to derive higher revenue,” said Alberrt Alexander, co-founder and CEO of Glueck Tech.

“Our technology provides an accurate audit of people count, dwell time, demographics, and sentiments. By leveraging on our technology, they can derive increased and sustained competitive advantage in OOH advertising, prevent revenues from stagnating, and increase and optimise inventory space, among many others,” he said.

Helping sellers navigate through multiple platforms

A major hurdle faced by many online sellers using social media and chat platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp is that it’s hard to keep track of all transactions transpiring across multiple channels at the same time.

This is especially true for Southeast Asia not only because of SME trends, but also because of buyer behaviour where purchases are often triggered in platforms frequented by potential customers.

To facilitate and make these transactions more seamless for both the buyer and the seller, AVANA has developed a platform for social commerce providing social sellers with an easy-to-use system to help them better manage their orders and inventory.

Also read: eCommerce: Revitalising conventional forms of trade in Malaysia

Essentially, their platform is a social commerce enabler which collates activity and transaction data for social sellers present in multiple social platforms so that they can manage their business in one unified interface.

AVANA is the brainchild of its two co-founders, Luqman Adris who was an aerospace engineer and self-taught programmer, and Soh Yien Yee who started an online community for online blogshops when she was still in university.

The two met while working together in a digital marketing agency, where they built enterprise software and managed social media campaigns for Malaysia’s major shopping malls.

At that time they realised that businesses of all sizes rely on social platforms but do not have enough insights to track ROIs. They also noted the rising number of small sellers using at least one social media channel for sales but who do not have the capital to invest in automation tools used by larger businesses.

“We traded stories and decided to do something about this by developing a cost-efficient platform using our combined experience of software development for e-commerce and social platforms,” said Soh, co-founder and CMO of AVANA.

How are these B2B game-changers able to fair in the Malaysian context?

Malaysia’s vibrant, dynamic economy owes much to its young, growing population. As such, its high rate of technology adoption among citizens vastly help businesses innovate.

For Glueck, starting up in Malaysia is strategic because of the plethora of incentives designed to help grow the digital economy.

“We were a recipient of a government grant in our early stages while MDEC on the other hand helped us gain exposure regionally in Southeast Asia ,” said Alexander.

Glueck—whose business has accommodated customers from as far as Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, India, and Japan—credits Malaysia’s good support through business matching and market expansion programmes such as exhibitions, business trips and accelerator programmes. This has helped connect Glueck to various regional ecosystems.

On the other hand, Finology thinks that the startup ecosystem exists for those who have a steely determination to succeed. Malaysian tech entrepreneurs can get the support and resources that they need from both private and public institutions, but this needs absolute commitment and a rock-solid business model to acquire support and achieve ultimate success.

Also read: How Malaysia helps bolster the less glamourous side of tech

AVANA’s experience with starting out in Malaysia only differs from Glueck’s and Finology’s in that it is largely defined by the advent of technology from the consumer’s perspective. Since the idea behind their product was derived from social commerce, which is a manifestation of consumer behaviour, they credit much of their success to Malaysia’s adoption of the B2B market.

AVANA’s business operation has expanded to Indonesia and has provided solutions for customers in as far a Hong Kong and Taiwan. They believe Malaysia’s neutral market elements make it easier to scale regionally.

“The Malaysian startup ecosystem is definitely more robust compared to maybe 5 years ago, with more access to assistance, mentors, VCs and also peers from Malaysia and also within the region. It is the perfect place for you to start and experiment with a startup, since it has most of the market elements that you would usually encounter when you start elsewhere in Southeast Asia,” said Soh.

Where to go from here?

Glueck believes that there is still a lack of sufficient financial support for the Malaysian startup ecosystem. Without local support in financing and market expansion help, startups may find it difficult to sustain their businesses.

On the other hand, Finology believes that Malaysian entrepreneurs are more adaptive, with Malaysia having the potential to produce more world beaters — if we can improve our ability to develop and attract talent.

Despite this, all three startups are fairly optimistic. AVANA believes that Malaysia is now reaping the rewards of its efforts to help grow the startup ecosystem, seeing that we have gained a lot of great, innovative startups largely because of those efforts. More importantly, better government support can only mean more quality startups.

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As per the partnership, Go-Jek unit Go-Pay will work with Coins.ph to enhance cashless payments and banking services in the Philippines

Indonesia’s on-demand transportation, payments and logistics giant, Go-Jek, has announced that it “is making a substantial acquisition of shares” of Philippines-based blockchain-powered fintech company Coins.ph.

The transaction details have not been disclosed.

The companies have also announced a partnership, under which Go-Jek’s payments platform Go-Pay and Coins.ph will work together to encourage cashless financial transactions in the Philippines by combining Go-Pay’s technological expertise, scalability and experience in Indonesia with ​the blockchain firm’s deep local knowledge.

​Ron Hose, Founder and CEO of Coins.ph, said​: “Coins.ph and Go-Jek share the same vision that has made each a success in their markets, empowering their customers by giving them lower-cost and more convenient access to services. Together we have a tremendous opportunity and by leveraging Go-Jek’s resources and expertise, we can give Filipinos even more convenience, choice, and access to the services they want.”

Also Read: Cryptocurrency usage will be mainstream — and seamless — in the future: Coins.ph founder Ron Hose

Hose and the extended team will continue in their existing roles, with no impact to customers.

Coins.ph enables anyone, including those without a bank account, to access financial services directly from their phone. Using Coins.ph, customers have access to a mobile wallet and services such as remittances, mobile air-time, bill payments, and online shopping at over 100,000 merchants. Coins.ph claims to have grown its customer base to over five million in under five years, processing over six million transactions per month (as of December 2018).

Go-Pay is the leading digital payment service in Indonesia, with partnership with 240,000 merchants across Indonesia, almost half of which are micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). The firm has also partnered with 28 financial institutions in the country with whom it works closely to facilitate access for the unbanked to financial products and services.

Aldi Haryopratomo, CEO of Go-Pay​, said: “Consumer transaction behaviour in Indonesia and the Philippines share many similarities, and together with Coins.ph, we hope to have similar success in accelerating cashless payments in the Philippines.”

Go-Jek Founder and CEO Nadiem Makarim​, said: “With the second largest population and a strong domestic economy, the Philippines is one of the most exciting markets in Southeast Asia. Supporting the success of a local fintech entrepreneurial champion like Coins.ph, with a similar ambition to empower society through innovation and technology, has always been part of our passion for growth. Today’s announcement marks the start of our long-term commitment to the Philippines and a continuation of our mission to use technology to improve everyday lives and create a positive social impact.”

According to a WeAreSocial 2018 report, Southeast Asia has one of the highest rates of mobile connectivity in the world, with Indonesia and the Philippines boasting higher mobile user penetration and mobile connectivity than the worldwide average. And yet, according to data from Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, in 2017, ​77 per cent of the Filipino population were unbanked, 60 per cent of adult Filipinos still conducted payments through cash, and over 80 per cent used over the counter services to send and receive money. Digitising these payment and remittance services is a crucial step towards digital financial inclusion.

Photo by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash

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But when they do start companies, Singapore entrepreneurs have a firm understanding of the need to sell across borders

Singapore is consistently considered one of the best places in the world to do business. The World Economic Forum ranked the city-state as the third most competitive economy in the world, slightly behind Switzerland and the US.

However, according to a new report from Stripe, local companies may not necessarily be experiencing that reality. Only 40 per cent of Singaporeans told Stripe, “It is easy to start a business in my home country.” This despite it only taking 2.5 days to start a company in Singapore.

Japanese had the highest perception of starting a business in their country, at 77 per cent, but it takes 12.5 days to start a company in Japan. Hong Kong had both the fast time to start a business (1.5 days) and ranked second in perception of starting a company (57 per cent positive).

That being said, once Singapore companies do get their enterprise rolling, they are keenly aware of the need to sell their product/services beyond the city.

88 per cent of Singaporean companies cross borders to sell goods — which is tied for the world’s top-spot with Hong Kong. This makes sense considering the similar economic infrastructure of the two cities. They both are small-but-wealthy markets with a huge logistics industry that has transformed the island cities into international trading hubs.

This bodes well for building a culture of international commerce.

Other countries that ranked high were Japan, France, Italy and Spain.

Also Read: From Kopi to a cool mil: Event marketplace Delegate raises US$1 million

One interesting fact is that China ranks extremely high for an economy of its size (74 per cent of companies sell abroad). The US is much lower at 45 per cent.

This is important because, according to Stripe, companies that move fast to sell abroad grow more quickly (7x for slower companies compared to 9x for faster firms).

“There’s a logic behind the urge to expanding internationally quickly: it correlates with longterm economic success and productivity. Over the last five years, firms that expanded internationally during their first year grew 141 percentage points faster in revenue and 15 percentage points more quickly in headcount than the ones that were slower to reach international markets,” the report reads.

Also Read: Go-Jek invests in Philippines’s blockchain fintech company Coins.ph

Unfortunately, choppy trade waters have made globalisation more of a challenge for online companies. 42 per cent of respondents said doing business is getting harder these days.

In the conclusion of the report, Stripe notes that this burden falls largely on SMEs, who do not have the finances to pay for a legal team that could help them navigate increasing government restrictions.

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