Starboard Founder and CEO Melvin Yuan
Starboard, a platform for founders to start and run their companies globally, announced today a US$3.5 million pre-Series A funding round led by Monkʼs Hill Ventures.
Other investors include Actium Partners, Iterative Capital, Bruno Poh (General Counsel, Lyte Ventures), Lelaina Lim (CFO, Eu Yang Sang International Limited), Michael Tor (Executive Director, UOB), Soh Gin Wee, Sulyana Binte Abdul Aziz, and Terrence Hoon.
The funds will be used to expand engineering, operations and customer success teams, supporting users in Singapore, Southeast Asia and the US.
Founded by serial entrepreneur Melvin Yuan (CEO), Starboard is a one-stop corporate services platform for business incorporation, compliance, accounting, and financial management. It helps global businesses set up, manage and run their US/Singapore companies from a cloud-based platform.
Also Read: Lanturn secures US$3M to provide online corporate services to organisations in Singapore
In other words, the firm is building a company OS (Operating System). It provides access to various corporate services, including accounting and bookkeeping, compliance, payroll, visa applications, company formation and structuring, ESOP advisory, and fractional-CFO services.
The company has onboarded many clients — from startups to SMEs and asset managers — and is currently rolling out its proprietary client portal as a web app, iOS and Android App.
“Founders often have to pull information from multiple sources about their business. Starboard is the ʻone place and one teamʼ solution for founders to manage their businesses efficiently,” said Melvin Yuan, Founder and CEO.
Starboard has also set up operations in Silicon Valley to enable clients from Singapore and Southeast Asia to manage their US subsidiaries. Yuan, a three-time founder, believes that US-based companies can quickly expand into Asia through Starboard, tapping into the market and talent pool with Singapore as regional headquarters.
Despite rapid digitisation, the market still sees many traditional corporate service providers (CSPs) that rely on pen-and-paper processes, limiting efficiency and scalability. In Singapore alone, 2,000 such providers are servicing over 290,000 SMEs.
Starboardʼs platform automates corporate entity management and governance workflow to increase productivity and reduce errors by CSPs. There is a huge opportunity to consolidate this massive fragmented industry.
In 2020, Lanturn, another Singapore-based one-stop online corporate services startup, raised US$3 million in a seed funding round from several investors, including East Ventures and CoCoon Ignite Ventures.
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