Singapore-based accelerator-cum-startup fund, Accelerating Asia (AA), has unveiled 11 startups selected for its fourth cohort.

The programme runs for 100 days and includes intensive weeks of masterclass modules, investor meetings and pitch coaching sessions.

Besides, AA also provides selected startups with a seed capital of US$148,000 (S$200,000).

To support startups in their journey, AA has also rounded up individuals such as Pieter Kemps, Principal of Sequoia Capital; Kuo-Yi Lim, co-founder of Monk’s Hill Ventures; and Jeffrey Paine, Managing Partner of Golden Gate Ventures to join its investor network.

So far, AA’s portfolio companies have raised over US$22 million in funding since joining the programme.

Also Read: Accelerating Asia plans to launch $50M fund in Q1 2021

“We selected cohort-4 from 500 startups from 30 countries, a record number of applications for us that shows the demand for a Singapore-based accelerator with an international footprint. With just two per cent of startups selected, the chosen 11 will be part of our largest cohort and are eligible to receive up to S$200,000 in investment from our VC fund,” said co-founder Amra Naidoo.

Here are the eleven startups in the programme:

Amar Lab (Bangladesh)

An end-to-end diagnostics test service that connects local and international diagnostic labs to clients.

Casa Mia (Singapore)

A co-living operator offering private bedrooms in shared homes.

DoctorKoi (Bangladesh)

A prescription management software that helps doctors generate prescriptions with a few clicks.

Drive lah (Singapore)

A mobility company that offers flexible and affordable access to cars nearby without the hassle of ownership.

HandyMama (Bangladesh)

Connects customers with trustworthy and verified cleaning and handyman services.

Independents (Singapore)

An AI-powered marketplace that matches individuals to the exact requirements of marketing projects.

KopiDate (Singapore)

A social platform that curates conversation-centred dating experiences for single millennials.

Mobiliti (Pakistan)

Provides state-of-the-art bionic lower limb prosthetics at affordable prices.

SWAP (Bangladesh)

A cross-category exchange platform for users to sell or swap their old phone, laptop, car, motorcycle and furniture in just 24 hours.

TransTRACK.ID (Indonesia)

A fleet telematics system integrator that provides data collection of transport.

Waitrr (Singapore)

A platform for restaurants that lets guests order and pay in a few seconds.

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Image Credit: Accelerating Asia

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Fave, a Malaysia-based fintech platform providing QR payments and loyalty cashback to restaurant and retailers, has been acquired by Indian merchant commerce giant Pine Labs in a deal valued at over US$45 million.

As per a joint statement, the acquisition will help the two companies accelerate their growth in Asia and unlock consumer opportunities across retail, F&B, fashion and FMCG markets.

Fave also noted that joining forces with Pine Labs will reinforce its market position in Southeast Asia.

As per the terms in the agreement, Fave’s founders will have their roles expanded to lead the overall consumer platform for the group across Asia. The company will also be hiring over 100 new employees in Southeast Asia and India to “accelerate cashless payments and smart savings across the region.”

The acquisition comes about a year after Fave announced a “strategic partnership and investment” by Pine Labs which saw the fintech platform become interoperable and integrated with the latter’s terminals.

Launched in 2016, Fave currently operates in 35 cities across Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. The company claims it has enabled six million consumers to save over US$400 million across 40,000 retailers.

Fave will launch its services in India as part of the deal.

Also Read: From startup to scale-up: How fintech startups can get on the front foot

“Consumers have tremendous choices in their payment types. They want to be sure that they save on every transaction. Fave helps consumers apply their best rewards, coupons, gift cards and cashbacks on all transactions in a seamless manner. Joel and the Fave team have built a loyal consumer base with their smooth checkout experience,” said B. Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs.

“Pine Labs has been a great partner and investor for us, and it only made sense for us to join our synergies together and work towards our shared vision of building a truly global consumer and merchant platform,” said Joel Neoh, Co-founder and CEO of Fave.

“India has the digital advantage with young demography, growing aspirational middle class with rising disposable income and increasing digital savviness. We are confident that the APAC e-payments landscape will continue to achieve exponential growth in the coming decade,” Neoh added.

According to Pine Labs, the introduction of Fave into its offerings comes at an opportune moment, with mobile payments growing to 2.7 billion transactions in March 2021. The company also recorded a significant growth of 171 per cent in mobile payment transactions over the last two quarters.

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Image Credit: Fave

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Southeast Asian tech giant today confirmed its plans to go public in the US in partnership with Altimeter Growth, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

The Singapore-headquartered Grab expects it to be the largest-ever US equity offering by a Southeast Asian company.

The combined entity expects its securities will be traded on NASDAQ under the symbol GRAB in the “coming months.”

The proposed transactions value Grab at an initial pro-forma equity value of approximately US$39.6 billion at a PIPE size of more than US$4 billion.

It will provide the company with approximately US$4.5 billion in cash proceeds.

Grab group CEO and co-founder Anthony Tan dubbed the move as “even more critical” as the region recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It was very challenging for us too, but it taught us immensely about the resiliency of our business. Our diversified super app strategy helped our driver-partners pivot to deliveries and enabled us to deliver growth while improving profitability. As we become a publicly-traded company, we’ll work even harder to create economic empowerment for our communities, because when Southeast Asia succeeds, Grab succeeds,” he said.

Also Read: Ex-Traveloka, Grab execs’ one-year-old online fresh grocery startup Segari raises seed funding led by Beenext

“We’ve always believed in long-term partnerships to drive impact at scale. We work closely with governments to support their national agendas and have partnered with some of the world’s best blue-chip companies. Altimeter is investing in a way that demonstrates our aligned values, with a three-year lock-up on their sponsor promote shares and unprecedented contribution of shares to our new GrabForGood endowment fund,” he added.

“They’re joining our journey for the long-run, together with an incredible day one cap table of renowned institutional investors and sovereign wealth funds. This is testament to the global investment community’s belief in the long-term value proposition of Grab’s super app strategy and the exciting growth potential of Southeast Asia,” Tan continued.

Within the past months, leading Southeast Asian tech companies such as Grab and Traveloka have reportedly been preparing for their public listing in the US through SPAC.

SPAC itself has been predicted to become a popular, alternative way for tech companies to go public in 2021.

Grab said that its decision to go public was driven by “strong” financial performance in 2020, which it managed to achieve despite the pandemic.

Grab posted GMV of approximately US$12.5 billion in 2020, which it claimed to be surpassing pre-pandemic levels and more than doubling from 2018.

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Image Credit: Grab

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Tribe, a blockchain accelerator backed by the government of Singapore, has received a strategic investment from Korea Investment Partners (KIP) and Mandiri Investment Management.

Greg Kidd, an early investor in Twitter, Coinbase and Square, besides Hong Kong-based Stellar Partners, also co-invested.

This marks KIP’s first direct investment into Singapore.

Tribe will use the funds to grow its accelerator and academy programmes into newer markets, including the US, Korea, Indonesia and Hong Kong.

Additionally, Tribe has also announced a partnership with American drug giant Pfizer to provide startups with support like technical expertise, resources and access to networks. Its other notable partners include HSBC, Infineon Technologies, Citibank and Ubisoft.

Founded in 2018, Tribe works closely with global corporations, government agencies, blockchain companies and late-stage startups to build a community that promotes blockchain collaborations and innovations.

Its goal is “to generate greater public awareness of the benefits and relevance in the everyday use of distributed ledger technology through the usage of decentralised applications (dApps) or backend digital solutions”.

Also Read: In brief: Singapore’s blockchain accelerator Tribe goes virtual for batch 3

“We are supporting a range of cutting-edge blockchain startups from around the world, with a total valuation of over US$1 billion, that are solving global problems from food security, education efforts to medicine deliveries,” said Tribe CEO, Yi Ming Ng.

“The pandemic has placed a spotlight on the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, and in the process speeded up its digital transformation,” added Bei Goh, Digital Client Partner Lead Emerging Markets Asia, Pfizer, added.

“There is huge potential for blockchain in the pharmaceutical sector, from the tracking and authenticating of vaccines and medicines to making supply chains more efficient. Being a part of the Tribe ecosystem gives us access to promising blockchain and other deep tech startups as well as insights into the latest trends across the industry,” he shared.

Tribe also said that its participating startups have raised US$70 million since joining the programme. Some of its acceleratees are Accredify, AID:Tech, TADA and xfers.

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Image Credit: Tribe

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We recently celebrated World Health Day on 7 April. It’s an opportunity to focus attention on some of the remarkable efforts of governments in our region to communicate with their citizens using platforms like Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Like many other things during the pandemic, public health campaigns had to move online to reach people at scale with crucial updates.

Digital health promotion is by no means new. But for many governments in the Asia Pacific, it was the first time they were using the Facebook family of apps as a marketing channel for public health promotion at scale. With mounting pressure on healthcare systems, they had to react quickly to contain infection rates on the ground while communicating credible information to citizens as fast as possible.

We saw a number of governments in the region rapidly test and learn different approaches to digital health promotion. From launching bots for Messenger to leveraging free advertising credits to drive people to health information from trusted sources — they led the charge on innovative ways of harnessing technology to fight the pandemic.

Responding to a global crisis

Early in the pandemic, messaging emerged as a key public engagement channel. The Singapore government was among the first to develop an official Gov.sg WhatsApp channel which now has over 1.2 million opt-in users. It continues to provide up-to-date information on the spread of COVID-19 in the country, along with relevant details on infection control measures.

Our teams also worked with the Philippines Department of Health to launch a Messenger bot to share updates on COVID-19. Taiwan’s Center for Disease Control, which has been lauded for its pandemic response, also launched a COVID-19 bot on Messenger — both to serve as a local channel and an international channel sharing the latest updates with Taiwanese diaspora around the world.

Also read: KiWi New Energy: Making green energy available to all

All of this happened in partnership with health experts, third-party developers, creative agencies, as well as government and public advocacy teams. In fact, even our internal creative teams joined meetings with departments of health to help apply creative best practices to health updates. Some of this early work led out of Asia Pacific and has now turned into a global framework for pandemic response.

Moving forward with the power of innovation

This year, providing effective and accurate vaccine communications is top of mind for public health authorities. As we transition into the vaccine confidence and access phase of the pandemic response, governments continue to leverage digital platforms to get the word out about COVID-19 vaccinations.

As vaccine access and eligibility is different across the region, we are also seeing governments develop more customised messaging experiences. Earlier this year, the Ministry of Health in Indonesia reached out to discuss building a WhatsApp chatbot to support their vaccine rollout to health workers. The world’s first WhatsApp vaccine chatbot was built in nine days. Health workers were able to use this two-way messaging chatbot to select location, date, time, and get people to register for vaccinations. Within the first five days, 500,000 healthcare workers had accessed the bot.

Similarly, the Indian government built the world’s largest WhatsApp chatbot last year with the goal of sharing authentic news, expert information and official updates. They also established MyGov Corona Hub. They are now updating the chatbot to support their massive vaccine rollout program by incorporating vaccine-specific FAQs and will launch more features soon.

Also read: Malaysian tech companies making waves in Indonesia, shine on a global stage

As we collaborated on these campaigns, we also saw the value of personalised advertising in public health promotion strategies. Studies have shown that the effectiveness of the advertisements may be greatly improved by targeting messages based on sociodemographic characteristics.

For example, as schools and colleges reopened in Pakistan, its Ministry of Health wanted to inform parents, teachers, and students about the precautionary measures needed to enable a safe environment for studying.

The MoH created a short animated video showcasing steps to stay safe in school. They utilised a combination of placements, including Facebook and Instagram Feed and Stories amongst others, to maximise opportunities for visibility.

The simple animations, catchy jingle, and easy to understand language used in the video helped keep the broad nationwide audience engaged. Key messages about washing hands and steering clear of touching the eyes and mouth were delivered within the first few seconds. Captions made it easy to grasp the messages even with sound off.

The campaign helped reach over 13 million people and led to increased awareness of health safety measures during COVID-19.

The role of startups in plugging technical gaps

There are many such examples from the region. I’m truly impressed by how Asian governments have adapted their technological capabilities and innovated relatively quickly to reach their citizens at scale. In the process, we have all learned the power of collaboration. I’m inspired by the broad ecosystem that has sprung up to tackle technical gaps and health service needs, especially for underserved communities. Small technology startups and developer businesses have moved fast to meet public needs, iterating as they go, in partnership with public health officials.

Also read: HKSTP invites global tech ventures to the Global Matching 2021

I want to share the story of Amio, a free Messenger chatbot created by three Kiwi doctors to address questions and bust myths about COVID-19 for communities in New Zealand and Australia. In the first month, over 250,000 messages were exchanged. Another example is a startup called Reach52, which focused on providing affordable healthcare to underserved communities. They moved quickly to build a COVID-19 Information and Symptom Checker on the Messenger platform to help curb misinformation. In the first week alone, their solution reached over 6,500 people from rural communities across the Philippines and Cambodia.

It is important to reflect on these stories as they help us learn more about the kind of public health messages that work well, where we can improve, and how we can tackle future public health crises together.

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