Held at Hong Kong’s RISE, PITCH is said to be the world’s largest pitching competition

Singapore-based logistics startup Haulio announced that it has come up as champion of PITCH at this year’s RISE tech conference in Hong Kong, held from July 8-11.

Often dubbed as the world’s biggest pitching competition, PITCH saw over sixty startups competing over three days.

“As the first Singaporean startup to win PITCH, RISE has been a tremendous opportunity to set Singapore and Haulio on the world stage. It has already opened valuable doors for us to form strategic partnerships in the region,” Haulio CEO and Co-Founder Alvin Ea commented in a press statement.

“Haulio’s win this year further cements that the haulage problem we’re solving is global and real. We’re excited to partner with stakeholders to transform this global problem and bring this space into the digital future,” he continued.

Also Read: In an increasingly complex industry, HAULIO takes on a massive challenge

The company said that since its launch on May 2017, it has been working with industry partners and stakeholders to overcome various industry challenges, with the aim to build a digital and interconnected
haulage industry with greater productivity and operational efficiency.

It has helped to digitalise the movements of over 150,000 TEUs containing 2.5 million tonnes of cargo.

In May 2018, Haulio raised S$1 million (US$736,000) in a seed round investment. The funding round was led by PSA unboXed and included the participation of 500 Startups, NUS Enterprise, and several logistics industry angel investors.

The funding followed an S$75,000 (US$55,000) pre-seed funding from PSA unboXed and 500 Startups.

Haulio is also one of the transportation services that Singapore-based taxi company ComfortDelGro has invested in recently.

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Image Credit: Haulio

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Don’t waste your time and resources fighting lawsuits when you could be focussing on build your startup

A business is a legal entity, and because of that, it will be subject to the laws of the land. It takes a lot to register a business the right way, but it’s imperative to do so. For a savvy con-artist, a legal loophole is the most natural thing in the world to exploit.

It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of doing something because it’s more comfortable, but that only marginally obeys the law. While it might save money in the short term, the long-term impact could be devastating.

Building a business is more than just having a dream and following it. You need to protect the business against anything that could occur, and that means being aware of what legal issues might arise. Bulletproofing a company legally requires that you follow the major pillars of the law.

Ensuring that you’re covered helps to give you peace of mind and makes sure that you can spend more time building the business and less time worrying about potential legal problems.

Incorporation as a tool

Incorporation, as defined by The Business Dictionary, is a method by which an intangible, artificial legal entity called a corporation is produced. The process of incorporation provides a level of abstraction between what belongs to the company and what belongs to the individual, i.e., you.

Also Read: Screwing up IP law is an easy way to doom your startup

You don’t want the company’s actions to affect your private assets and vice versa. Additionally, any transactions regarding the business won’t have any hold on your assets. This separation is essential to protect your property by separating it from what the corporation owns.

Intellectual property considerations

Some businesses deal in the production of new ideas. In many of those businesses, employees are required to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement as well as an acknowledgment that whatever they produce for the company becomes owned by the corporation. Drafting these agreements is a crucial step to protect the business against competition from its own former employees as well as leveraging its new creations on the open market.

Remaining on the right side of the law

A vast majority of corporations are limited liability companies, meaning that there’s an invisible line between what the company owns and what its shareholders own individually. In most states, corporations must conform to a series of steps to remain “in good standing” with the state. If they don’t fit those steps, that invisible line dissolves, and the owner and shareholders may all face fines on their private assets.

Get the right insurance

Business insurance coverage is one of the most important steps a business owner can take against liabilities. For some businesses, getting the lowest auto insurance is also a concern that registers significantly.

Chron mentions that a single mishap could potentially wipe out all the assets of a particular business, and having insurance guarantees against that mishap. In the case of a natural disaster, insurance may be able to cover the cost of replacing inventory or infrastructure. Insurance can also help a business’ reputation with their clients.

Employee rights and wages

Employee contracts need to be well-crafted to both protect the business and ensure that the employee knows exactly where he or she stands. Forbes advises that contracts allow the company to set boundaries and limitations on expectations.

This is especially important when it comes to dealing with employees since knowing their rights empowers them and allows them to make decisions that can aid their productivity as well as their well-being. Additionally, airtight contracts with employees give the business a solid foundation for future negotiations.

Write down everything

It might seem like overkill, but ensuring that everything is recorded can be essential in proving what a company has done. Having a paper trail can prevent or curtail lawsuits. It is imperative that a company documents every step it takes, regardless of how insignificant that step might seem.

Also Read: The importance of failure: 7 reasons why it makes us better entrepreneurs

Furthermore, having written agreements set out what the company expects and what is likely to happen if the employee or business partner doesn’t live up to the expectations of the contract. It puts all the signatories on the same level, considering what is at stake should the agreement fall through.

Bulletproofing using the law

While there is no guaranteed way to stop people from bringing suits against a company, setting a legal framework in place helps prepare the business for any lawsuits that may come their way. The law exists as both a warning and protection.

Having an experienced legal firm drawing up company documents and contracts is vital to the long-term success of the company. Legal battles should not impact the growth of a business because the company failed to protect itself adequately. The onus is on the business owner to ensure that his or her business can withstand any legal bullets that are fired in their direction.

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Before you even embark on building out your idea, think about whether this journey is for you

For many business leaders, a life of entrepreneurship is often more of a calling or vocation than it is a job. If you’ve been considering becoming an entrepreneur, the reasons for doing so may be many, but honing in on the right motivations for pursuing a path towards entrepreneurship can and should be a difficult proposition requiring much soul-searching.

The good news is that when entrepreneurship is pursued for the right reasons, it can be one of the most rewarding paths that a person can take in life.

Here are just a few questions to ask yourself to know if entrepreneurship is the right path for you, and why realistically planning for the future is one of the best things that an aspiring entrepreneur can do.

Are you passionate about your product or service?

While the rewards of starting a business are many, the truth is that entrepreneurs work very long hours for very little money in the initial stages of developing a company. Even when a company succeeds, founders need to work hard to ensure that their company will reach its full potential.

Also Read: There’s no such thing as motivation

Fortunately, a passion for one’s work can get entrepreneurs through any road bump that may arise through this process, but without passion or genuine interest in their field, individuals can burn out long before their company gets off the ground. If you’re truly passionate about your business idea, you’ll already be miles ahead of the competition.

Does your product or service have a good likelihood of succeeding?

As any successful business founder will tell you, one of the greatest assets an entrepreneur can have is a realistic plan for success. A realistic business plan will help entrepreneurs acquire funding for their business, it is true, but such a plan will also let individuals know whether their efforts will be worth the time and expense of creating a start-up and entering the marketplace.

To test the waters on an idea, try looking at the current market to see how similar businesses are faring in everything from acquiring clients to creating an IPO.

When you can develop a realistic expectation for how your company will succeed, you’ll be all the stronger when you make a case for funding to your investors, and you’ll feel confident in your ability to meet new challenges head-on.

What truly motivates you to create a company?

Years ago, psychologists developed the notion of “intrinsic” vs. “extrinsic” motivation. In study after study, psychologists found that people who developed a personal sense of satisfaction in their work ended up being far more resilient and successful than peers who derived their self-image from the opinions of others.

To wit, intrinsic motivation is based on a deep sense of personal satisfaction with one’s self and one’s work; extrinsic motivation derives itself from exterior factors such as social pressure or a deep (and often unhealthy) need for accumulating wealth or social status.

Also Read: Why mentorship is critical for startup founders to succeed

When our sense of motivation is based on what we want for ourselves, in other words, we’ll be far more likely to achieve our goals. When we’re pursuing a career path simply because we feel pressure from parents, friends, or society to do so, on the other hand, we’ll experience deep resentment and burnout in the long-term.

For these reasons, a decision to pursue a path of entrepreneurship is a major life step that should not be taken lightly. If you’re passionate and self-directed in your goals and planning, however, pursuing entrepreneurship as a calling may just be the best decision that you can make in life.

Indeed, if you love meeting challenges as they arise and derive a personal sense of satisfaction from developing your ideas and seeing them through, you may just find that life as an entrepreneur suits you perfectly. And that is entrepreneurship done right!

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Image Credit : Marina Gloria Gallud Carbonell

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Southeast Asia provides exciting opportunities for agritech startups. Investors are definitely not ignoring this

In Southeast Asia, the agricultural industry has contributed greatly to tackling some of the greatest challenges the region has faced.

According to the OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2017-2026, “The development of the agricultural and fisheries sectors1 has contributed to the improvements in food security, and both sectors remain a key part of food security policy for regional policymakers. In this way, agricultural and fisheries policy settings are interlinked with food security objectives.”

The region provides plenty of opportunities to explore and challenges to tackle for tech companies. Singapore is definitely not an exception in this matter; with its focus on innovation, we have seen several startups offering groundbreaking tech. These companies aim to make a change in various ways, from helping farmers improve yield to connecting F&B businesses to suppliers through an online platform.

Within the e27 startup database, we recorded at least 20 active agritech startups operating in Singapore.

While we aim to list down some of the most well-funded agritech startups in the country, it is also important to note that many of these companies are keeping their funding rounds undisclosed.

Also Read: Meet the 10 agritech, foodtech startups pitching for Future Food Asia’s US$100K grand prize

The following is a list of the most well-funded agritech startups in Singapore, based on their disclosed funding rounds as recorded in the e27 database.

We will start with the two companies that have raised millions of US Dollars:

Chemopower Technology Pte Ltd

Funding raised: US$10 million in Series A funding round from undisclosed investors (2016)

Chemopower Technology is a tech company which provides efficient and cost-effective solutions to identify chemical compositions via novel approaches.

The services that it offers include Data Analysis Service, Herb Data Inquire Service, and Universal Chemical Analyses Platform.

“To this end, ChemoPower developed a software that can reconstruct pure components’ spectra and its concentration without prior information using solely experimental data, without any simulation or peak matching,” the company explains in the e27 startup database.

“Our solution is built on the foundation of chemometrics: mathematical techniques based on statistics and optimisation method to find local/global optima of a system and is crystallised from the knowledge of more than 200 International Journals on chemometrics-related algorithms,” it continues.

The founding team was awarded the Gold Award for the High Performance Computing (HPC) Quest 2003 in Singapore, hosted by IBM.

Overdrive IoT

Funding raised: US$2.9 million in Series A funding round from Tin Men Capital (2019)

Overdrive describes itself as a true Internet of Things (IoT) platform that manages the information flow from a multitude of sensors, ranging from complex machines such as an automobile to a simple mobile device.

It also manages information flow from cloud platform that allows companies and developers to easily access the information to build smart applications.

In the automobile, transportation and logistics industry, Overdrive has a widely tested range of sensors that reads the engine diagnostics, driving behaviour and location of any vehicles.

For the B2B sector, Overdrive is enabling fleet operators and fleet managers to better manage their vehicle assets.

Also Read: Agritech is giving a globally vital industry a facelift, startups take center stage

In addition to Chemopower Technology and Overdrive, the following companies have also disclosed their funding rounds:

Brightree

Funding raised: US$350,000 in seed funding round by undisclosed investor(s) (2013)

Brightree provides an industrial IoT platform that is described as easily customisable for most industrial IoT applications such as marine, plantation, and factory automation.

Gaining experience from a remote oil well monitoring project for Schlumberger, the founders developed the unified platform for remote monitoring and ubiquitous control of industrial types of machinery. They formed the corporation with the assistance of the Singapore government’s Spring TECS grant.

The company provides innovative and quality satellite solutions with applications in remote engine monitoring and diagnostics, remote fuel management, agriculture plantation yield monitoring as well as asset tracking.

Zeemart

Funding raised: US$200,000 in pre-seed funding round from Neeraj Sundarajoo (2016)

Zeemart is a B2B sourcing platform for the F&B industry, with a mission to enable businesses make smarter purchasing decisions via its e-procurement platform.

Buyers will be able to view catalogs online and place order for suppliers to take. Suppliers are also given an app to manage deliveries. All the process is automatically recorded, enabling buyers to manage their time more effectively.

MapGage

Funding raised: US$50,000 in pre-seed funding round from an undisclosed investor (2016)

MapGage is a cloud-based solution that enables clients to integrate drone maps, blueprints, sensors, and field observations. It aims to increase the practical and operational value of drone-acquired data.

In addition to agriculture, its services are also used in industrial inspections, construction, infrastructure maintenance, and golf clubs.

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Image Credit: Skull Kat on Unsplash

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Be ready for a long and arduous journey

When I got to Singapore in 2011 and was starting Perx, the ecosystem looked a lot different than it does today. I am committed to the region for the long-term, so I really want to see the ecosystem expand and mature here. As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time working with incubators, speaking at tech events, and mentoring startups to help grow the ecosystem.

As I mentored companies, built my own or helped build others, I noticed that I was hearing the same issues and was offering the same advice, so I started to create a playbook to building a startup. I’m hoping that learning from my mistakes will help save you from making some of them yourselves and get you to your next milestone faster.

I’ve never been a one for writing, so I’m going to try a different format for this post… ie. Lots of bullets!

Identify your purpose

As a founder, there are two important things you need to do:

1. Be ready for the long journey

2. Hire great people to delegate as quickly as possible

You’ve heard this many times, start-ups are hard. There will be high-highs and low-lows. Having a purpose for yourself that you truly believe in will help you get through the many times you’ll want to give up.

Also Read: Traits in a startup founder that VCs look out for

But that’s not enough, where I think a lot of new founders make the mistake is not spending enough time to clearly articulate to their team what the company’s purpose is. This may or may not be the same purpose you have as an entrepreneur. Once you have identified this purpose:

• Make sure everyone in the company knows what this is and all interpret it the same way.
• Make sure you only hire people who believe in and are legitimately excited about this purpose.
• Your progress will accelerate dramatically as soon as you start to hire people that you can delegate to and get a load off of your plate. If people are aligned towards the goal, you can be confident that they can make decisions autonomously and will focus on the right things.

What problem are you solving?

Ok, so now you have a purpose, but what problem are you solving and is it really big enough? I’ve heard hundreds of company pitches and probably 99% of them were either too small or weren’t solving a painful enough problem. Or even worse, they were a solution in search of a problem.

My rule of thumb when trying to identify a problem is to ask these questions:

• How painful is this problem?
• If you were to shut down would your users be knocking down the door to get you to reopen?
• How big is the market the problem is solving? This doesn’t mean I want you to go solve the problem for everyone that has the problem immediately, more on that later, but you should see a path to large scale.

Who are your customers?

• • Figure out at least 3-4 personas of potential customers you think would benefit from your product

• • Start to test these personas, whether through product features, user studies, research or sales. At Perx, we tested new merchant personas almost every week to figure out who really needed our product.

Also Read: What makes a successful corporate-startup engagement? Here are 4 questions to ask yourself

• • Start to eliminate personas as they fail your tests. This may mean they don’t convert at high enough rates, they don’t find the problem that compelling, they have poor retention rates, or they are not ready. You don’t have time to waste on difficult personas, they can come later.

• • Once you find your “easy-money” personas, it’s time to double down. Focus your entire team on this customer. Plaster it everywhere in your office so everyone remembers. When everyone is aligned, you suddenly see that your product team knows what features to prioritize, your sales team knows what customers to sell to, your management will all be able to make decisions much faster.

Don’t worry about having a narrow focus. If you create a great product for this customer and scale them, you’ll find that a good portion of what you built will apply to the next persona you target and the next and the next.
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The article was originally posted on Monk’s Hill Ventures’ blog and was first republished on e27 on August 6, 2018.

Jon Sugihara is an Operating Advisor at Monk’s Hill Ventures. and has founded a number of companies in the US and Asia. Currently, he is the head of strategic partnership for the Next Billion Users group at Google. Previously, Jon held positions as Chief Product Officer at KODAKIT and RedMart. He first entered the Asian market as the founder of Perx in Singapore.

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