18 Malaysian startups poised to breakout in 2015

2014 turned out to be quite a mixed bag for Malaysia’s startup community. On one hand, homegrown online payment company MOL Global listed in the US, but hasn’t quite lived up to expectations. Popular taxi hailing app GrabTaxi raised round after round of funding, the latest of which – aUS$250 million series D round – was arguablly record-breaking with regards to the size of the amount. Also, Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC) and its talented CEO Cheryl Yeoh burst onto the scene earlier this year, and they’ve done much in attempting to “fill the gaps and connect the dots” in recent months.

Additionally, the 2015 budget featured a slew of measures pertaining to entrepreneurship.

On the flipside, however, local authority figures haven’t been entirely supportive of the progress technology has wrought. Both Facebook andYouTube have faced the threat of banishment – though no real action was taken against them – and Uber faced the wrath of the taxi association, which declared it to be illegal.

Where they have lent their support, it is half-hearted. 70 percent of the Axiata Digital Innovation Fund – a joint venture between Malaysia Venture Capital Management (Mavcap) and local telco Axiata – for example, wasearmarked for the bumiputera entrepreneurs – those of the Malay race – only. Meanwhile, the aforementioned 2015 budget was not evenly distributed either – 70 percent of the US$153 million set aside by governmental agency TEKUN for entrepreneurship will go to local Malay entrepreneurs as well. MaGIC’s budget was also slashed for the coming year.

Despite taking two steps backward after a step forward, Malaysian startups have shown their resilience and innovation – several have proven themselves to be a step above the rest, and Tech in Asia has taken note of them. Here are 18 of Malaysia’s finest startups that we expect will make it big in 2015.

Shoppr

The team behind the Tinder-like shopping app came together through an interesting series of events that started with a blank cheque. They have so far won a handful of startup competitions, such as AngelHack Kuala Lumpur and the MYDD AT&T Hackathon, and feedback has been “overwhelmingly positive,” according to CEO Kendrick Wong.

With ambitions to become the leader of mobile fashion discovery and shopping in Southeast Asia, they are currently raising a round of funding to achieve just that, and within two weeks of opening the round, they already have a couple of offers from VCs. Wong is hoping to seal the deal soon.

Kaodim

A Malaysia-based service marketplace, Kaodim was founded by not one but two former lawyers. Currently, the marketplace for services in Malaysia is still very much dominated by static directories, listings, and online advertisements, which gives them the first-mover advantage.

In just a month since its official launch, the platform has around 500 vendors on board, with 400 job requests being made and, correspondingly, 1,300 quotations returned, many of which the duo claim have translated into jobs and new clients for these service providers. Now, the founders are looking at raising funds to accelerate Kaodim’s growth. This is what they’ll be focusing on in the coming year, given that they’ve already found product-market fit.

YouthsToday

YouthJam: one of YouthsToday’s biggest events.

CEO Jazz Tan, whose father passed away ten years ago as a victim of gangsterism and drugs, founded YouthsToday in 2013 with the aim of moving young people off the streets.

An online platform for projects spearheaded by youths, YouthsToday works with several government agencies and multinational corporations who target the younger crowd – such as Maybank, AirAsia, and Sony – to get their support for youth-run projects in areas of entrepreneurship, technology, and creative arts. In return, these clients receive significant brand mileage in related events.

Over the past year – from January till November – the team has managed to secure 14 major clients, bringing their revenue to a grand total of MYR 700,000 (US$208,000), which is close to thrice their revenue in 2013.

Tapway

Did you know that 94 percent of total retail sales are being generated in brick-and-mortar stores, according to market research firm eMarketer? For this reason alone, Tapway – which CEO Lim Chee How dubs the “Google Analytics for the offline world” – makes a whole lot of sense.

According to Lim, offline stores simply don’t have access to actionable data that they can use to improve the customer experience – and Tapway provides just that. The team deliberately kept a low profile as they ran beta tests in the past few months, but have recently come out with guns blazing, winning the ‘Best Startup in Malaysia’ title in the local leg of the Seedstars World 2014 competition, and recently pitching at Korea’s DreamPlus Day 2014.

Now, they’re looking to raise between MYR500,000 (US$154,000) to MYR800,000 (US$247,000) to capture the Malaysian market and continue to come up with more creative solutions.

GrabTaxi

Who hasn’t heard of this Malaysian taxi app? GrabTaxi has been grabbing headlines for the better part of 2014, and is indeed the favorite to win the Southeast Asian market.

Here are some numbers that show GrabTaxi’s stunning progress over the last year:

• Number of taxi drivers in the network increased by almost 300 percent to 60,000
• Mobile app users grew by 500 percent to 500,000 users
• Mobile app downloads increased by 400 percent to 2.5 million
• Three taxi bookings made every second, an 800 percent improvement

Presto Grocer

Ten years ago, zero online supermarkets were available in Malaysia. Today, retail group Presto Grocer has changed that. The way they went about it, according to co-founder Azrin Zuhdi, was unusual – she and her other co-founder Daniel Ruppert decided to open physical grocery stores first, prior to going online. The reason: to establish their brand name.

Now, with four outlets in Klang Valley and a newly revamped website, the team is ready to take over the rest of Southeast Asia. One of the countries they intend to hit is Singapore, where incumbent RedMart is in pole position. Zuhdi believes, however, that the online grocery market is big enough for multiple players. Having managed to raise an undisclosed amount of seed funding, they are looking to raise their series A round to make this a reality.

iMoney

Other than GrabTaxi, iMoney is the next household name that everyone in Malaysia’s startup ecosystem knows and loves. Similar to the former, CEO Lee Ching Wei has had an outstanding year, having raised US$4 million at avaluation of US$20 million.

Currently, the personal finance platform sees over 1.5 million unique visitors a month, which is several times more than the 100,000 unique visitors that Ching had aimed to reach by the end of 2013. His next goal: to roughly triple the web traffic to five million unique visitors a month by the end of 2015.

Socialwalk

Many a successful entrepreneur will point to serendipity as a key factor in their wins. The same undoubtedly goes for the founders of business matchmaking platform Socialwalk, who chanced upon the idea through one of their clients three years after establishing an event registration business.

According to COO Eileen Feng, the platform today has 170,000 members spread across the world, with its top three regions being Asia, Middle East, and Europe. Having raised a grant from Malaysia’s CIP500 seed fund in 2011, as well as MYR1 million (US$309,000) in seed funding from Crystal Horse Investments back in 2012, Feng and CEO Tham Keng Yew are looking to conquer Europe and the US, and are raising a series A round to do just that.

Flexiroam

Bill shock: the bane of all travelers, for business or holiday alike. For some reason, telcos tend to charge customers a huge multiple of local costs the moment they stepped out of the country – something that Flexiroam founder and CEO Jefrey Ong found strange.

So he set forth to create a product that would allows users to keep their original number, together with unlimited data and voice calls, all for a per day flat rate. This product, which they called the Buzz Sim, turned out to be their bestseller, and the team has inked partnerships with about 580 telcos around the world so that no matter which country you go to, you will always be able to access the local networks for data and voice calls.

Having established a firm customer base in Malaysia, the team is now looking to move into Singapore first, followed by Indonesia and Thailand. While they have received some VC interest locally, Ong felt that the valuations were too low. The fledgling company is now looking for backers beyond Malaysia’s borders to aid in its expansion to those three new countries.

Lovesprk

Is there such a thing as “hassle-free romance?” Apparently so, at least according to Lovesprk co-founder Tanuja Rajah. The dating concierge service was indeed born out of this belief, which claims to take care of all the details, from planning to making reservations, and provides the option for add-ons such as bouquets of flowers, a specially-picked gift, or even a chauffeur-driven limousine for the night.

Lovesprk earns by receiving a commission from each ‘date experience’ purchased. Their concierge service – which couples can choose “to enhance an existing pre-planned date, or to create a bespoke date from scratch with the help of Date Consultants” – comes at an additional cost. Their goal now is to expand this service across Malaysia, and had inked a partnership with Korean dating app Between earlier this year to accelerate this.

AgilityIO

Many startups find themselves stifled by the lack of technical talent. Chok Leang Ooi observed this while he was working in New York and Silicon Valley. Seeing the opportunity in the “talent gap”, he decided to found UX design and software development firm Agility to fill it up.

Its name reflects the agile software development process that the team has mastered working with around 50 startups over the past three years, and Ooi claims that this is their main advantage over other development firms. Of the startups they have helped, some of the bigger names that have gone on to succeed include personal finance site NerdWallet, sustainable fashion site Modavanti, and Boston-based SparkCommerce.

Agility opened an office in Singapore earlier in August with the aim of growing their business across Southeast Asia, and the team is engaged in talks with startups in Thailand and Indonesia as well, with several accounts currently in the pipeline.

WaryBee

The initial prototype of WaryBee.

Malaysia is probably not the first country that comes to mind when talking about safety. In particular, its capital Kuala Lumpur has become infamousfor its rising crime rate. It is for this reason that Ray Teng created safety wearable WaryBee, which comes in the form of a necklace or bracelet, with the triggering device hidden in a tiny pendant on the jewelry.

To mass produce this wearable, Teng took to Singapore telco StarHub’scrowdfunding platform, Crowdtivate, to raise funds. The campaign didn’t do too well, however, only achieving S$3,000 (US$) out of the initial aim of S$50,000 (US$40,260). Teng reveals that he has received feedback that the device is too big to be visually appealing as a piece of jewelry, but is determined to shrink its size by half in the coming year.

TableApp

Food blogging might seem like a dream – who doesn’t want to eat free food and write about it? But having started out on this path, Benson Changrealized it wasn’t as easy as it seems. Unable to compete with the hordes of Malaysian food bloggers, Chang decided to create an online restaurant booking site called TableApp instead.

To his surprise, the concept proved to be very popular among the local restaurants in Malaysia, and to date, Chang and his team have managed to get 120 restaurants on board, with 50,000 diners using it so far. While the team will continue to focus on Malaysia, Chang reveals that Bangkok is the next city on the list.

EasyUni

By any measure, higher education is a significant investment for parents, which means that research is essential. With information on universities and colleges scattered all over the web, Edwin Tay decided to build a platform – called EasyUni – to facilitate comparisons between institutions.

While the portal started off with 100 institutions spanning five countries – with their audience consisting mainly of Malaysians – today EasyUni has traffic coming in from over 202 countries. In addition, the portal’s listings have also swelled to include 27 countries, making up about 2,000 universities and 70,000 courses. Tay is now looking to raise its series B round of funding.

Predictry

Amazon has tapped into consumers’ desire to be told what to buy and built a billion dollar business around it. Product recommendation engine Predictry wants to help small businesses do the same. According to CEO Seng Teong Chua, the engine was by far the easiest product he ever had to sell. “I didn’t even need slides. All I needed to ask was, do you want the Amazon trick? I’ll give it to you,” he says.

The team has been receiving a lot of interest from around the world, particularly from Asia. This is fortunate for Chua as he intends to focus on Asia, and in the near future, Europe.

Soft Space

While smartphone penetration in Asia might seem rather low compared to other developed countries, don’t be fooled – the total volume of smartphone owners in Southeast Asia together numbers in the billions. This is what Chang Chew Soon, founder and CEO of mobile card payment solution Soft Space, betted on when he founded the startup – and it paid off in spades.

In Thailand alone, Soft Space has processed over US$1 billion in transactions since the platform was launched in January 2013, and more than 10 banks across Asia Pacific have already signed up. Chang’s secret sauce: a focus on payment behavior in Asia, and getting full EMV – which stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa – accreditation when they first started out.

The team is now looking to move into North Asia, and are currently in discussions with banks in Taiwan and Hong Kong. At the same time, Chang reveals that they are looking to take their technology – in the form of ewallets and contactless payment solutions – and security to the next level.

Wedding.com.my

Weddings might appear sweet and lovely on the surface, but only those who organize them understand the wheeling and dealing that goes on beneath. Kelvin Leow, who founded online wedding network Wedding.com.my together with his wife Petrina Goh to combat the dark side of this industry, calls it a “cutthroat business.”

The platform today actively plays a middleman role between vendors and the 300,000 or so soon-to-be-married couples who tie the knot in Malaysia each year. Since the website was revamped in September 2013, it receives about 100,000 visitors per month. Their next goal: to go regional in the third quarter of 2015, starting with Singapore and Indonesia

TrustedCompany

Throw a stone into a crowd, and you’re almost certain to hit someone who has been scammed online one way or another. One of the greatest challenges online merchants face when trying to solicit business is in earning the customer’s trust. Open review community TrustedCompanywants to help both parties involved. On one hand, its reviews will help consumers identify trustworthy and reliable online merchants, while on the other, it will validate the merchant’s trustworthiness.

The team raised a US$1 million series A round in 2014. According to co-founder Frederik Krass, the platform has seen a 40 percent month-on-month growth in terms of users, and almost 500,000 site profiles have been created since inception. Having achieved a measure of success in both Southeast Asia and India, TrustedCompany is now looking to spend the latest funding raised in expanding across the world to South Africa and Brazil.

Best Travel Startups 2015

The ‘travel tech’ space is vibrant.

With so many travel startups gaining traction it can be difficult to keep up with all the new products in beta or early release. For me there are a few standout products worth noting this year. Some of my favourite new travel startups are disruptive, some create a digital marketplace and others find value in under-utilised sources. All of them deserve your attention.

1. Must

No one sees the world like you do…

Must is a free lifestyle photo recommendation app. It’s aim is to get users discovering, capturing, and sharing new experiences across the world. By categorising the coolest and most memorable experiences (see, eat, stay, do, drink and have) the app will create your ‘absolute musts’ to satisfy wanderlust. Launches this month.

2. AnyRoad

Quietly disrupting the offline world of professional tour guides with technology.

AnyRoad is to tour companies, what Airbnb is to hotels. It’s model brings technology to the remotest parts of the world, and brings unique bookable tours directly from independent guides. This point-to-point booking experience really works well and the sheer number of tours speaks volumes for its continual growth. High five to AnyRoad for also donating 5% of their revenue to non-profits.

3. Carry

The sharing economy turns the courier industry to ‘peer-to-peer’.

Carry turns unused space in your carry on luggage into potential income. Carry’s marketplace connects people who want to ship something with travelers who can carry the packages for them for a fee, at a noticeably reduced shipping cost. Security concerns aside (which Carry seem to have addressed at length), this is one of the smartest travel startups I’ve seen this year.

4. Yonderbound

The first ‘travel knowledge monetization platform’ paying commissions to reviewers

Yonderbound serves up an inventory of 380,000 bookable properties, but unlike other OTAs they share 70% of profit with anyone who creates review content (called a Yonderbox) on their platform. Net revenue is calculated by subtracting from a gross sale price (what you or your friends paid) the credit card fees, the processing fees (payment gateway, merchant bank and middleware) and the net rate Yonderbound paid for the property. Pretty interesting model and certainly a hot travel startup for this year.

5. Hotels By Day

Yes, ‘Daycation’ is now a word.

Hotels by Day are trying to create a new category of hotel booking. Imagine you need to unwind and relax during a work trip but do not need an over night stay – just book the day and check-out before 7pm. Starting with a very modest US based inventory, the company is well funded and has pretty ambitious plans to get more hotels involved. It will be interesting to see how the market could potentially be educated that this type of service exists, and how channel / property management systems all over the world handle a ‘day cations’ as a model.

6. Party with a Local

Established for a few years, but a really great travel startup…

This app had me at ‘hello’. Do you want to party with fun people when you’re travelling? Yes, so do I. Party with a Local is a geosocial networking application and social discovery platform for the iPhone. Using physical proximity, users can join in locals’ parties, events and meet new people. Works very well for more socially inclined millennial customers travelling through ‘party’ cities. Go download the app while I smash this Jägermeister.

 7. Wanderlust.ly

Intelligent travel budgeting to booking…

Deadly simple concept here. Plug in your budget, preferences and interests and Wanderlust compiles a number of packaged trips (flight through to accommodation) to match your criteria. Looking forward to seeing this launch.

8. Hopper

Stunning data driven app providing analysis of billions of flight prices to save money.

Hopper’s aim is to help consumers make smart travel choices backed by big data and quantitative analysis. Billions of flight data points are analysed to show you when the best time is to book flights and alerts them when their ticket price may go up or down. Absolutely debunks the ‘book early to save’ money on flights myth.

9. LocalFu

On demand travel plans written by locals.

Localfu is a marketplace for personalised suggestions from locals. Whether you’re going on vacation, moving to a new city, or simply looking for new things to do, Localfu connects you with the right people for a $5 fee.

10. Plansify

Real travel advice from travel experts…

Another marketplace for personalised travel advice, but at a much higher level. Plansify offers connections to genuine travel experts who can help planning volunteering in South Africa to living as an Expat in Berlin. Communication is done through their platform or via a 1hr Skype call.

The 10 Best New Free Tools for Start-ups and Small Business

The best things in life are freemium.

Whether you’re a start-up or small business looking to keep costs down, free online tools and services are always useful. Here’s the 10 best new free tools for start-ups and small business I’ve recently come across.

1. SocialRank

Quickly analyses your Twitter followers to engage the ‘Best’ and ‘Most Valuable’

I really like this service. SocialRank is an easy way to identify, organize, and manage your followers on Twitter. When you’re running successful Twitter profiles it’s difficult to identify the ‘Most Valuable’ or the ‘Best’ followers. SocialRank’s provides analysis of both: helpful for individuals and brands looking to activate a potentially un-engaged, but very ‘valuable’ followers and the customers that strike a great balance between engaging with you and having the reach or importance. Nice app to reward your best customers with.

2. Peek

Have an unbiased everyday user take a look at your website and give feedback

Peek is a great tool for anyone interested in user-centered design. Add your URL and an hour later a video is available where an everyday user talks through their experiences using your website. Just be prepared for a bruised ego!

3. Slack

Gets all your internal communication channels into one searchable place

Slack’s mission is to get all communication into one place – instantly searchable, available wherever you go. You create internal channels and tag communication so that it’s shared with the right people at the right team. Slack lets you send messages, files and comments, inline images and video, rich link summaries and integration with the services you use every day, like Twitter, Dropbox and Google Drive. And it’s free.

4. Mobile App Development Cost Calculator

Protip: It’s going to be expensive. This just helps your CFO come to terms with it.

Building for mobile is expensive. This handy tool takes you through a Q&A about your mobile product and estimates the cost of building it. Very useful for guidelines spending for native apps.

5. Pitcherific

Train and develop your elevator pitching with this simple and free tool

I find public speaking a bit like skydiving: nerve-racking but highly rewarding. Learning to pitch properly is all about practice, refinement and practice. Be that in the boardroom or in conference venue. Pitcherific is a great tool to help you craft your pitch, practice your delivery and record your improvement.

6. Hive

Unlimited free cloud storage with a social element mixed in

Between Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, Box, and OneDrive the cloud business seems pretty crowded. Hive is a new entrant into the market combining an unlimited free cloud service with a layer of social. Last year they raised $500,000 in seed funding from Bigcolors, a German IT infrastructure company Link11 GmbH, and some angel investors. Worth taking a look purely for the ease of sharing large files.

 7. Ad Spend Calculator

Analyses your LTV + CAC to tell you how much you can spend on ads

The guys at Qwilr have created this handy free tool to calculate how much your business
can afford to should be spending on advertising. The tool takes you through a quick Q&A to calculate your Life Time Customer Value your Customer Acquisition Cost and Costs per method (PPI, PPC and Signup), and then suggests a spending guideline for each method. Probably works best building a SaaS model, but works for other industries too.

8. Product Management by Intercom (Free E-Book)

Des Traynor and John Collins share their lessons in building great web products

Four chapters: ‘Evaluating your product’, ‘The thing about new features’, ‘Which new features to build’ and ‘Getting the feature used’. This book helps you make better decisions on which features to improve on, which features to not and how to build a better product.

9. Pablo

Online image design tool created for social media posts

Pablo is one of the better text over image web tools. When you’re too rushed to open up Photoshop, pop onto Pablo to add text and crop images to the right dimensions for your social media posts. Pocketbook

10. Mention

A Real-time media monitoring application that kicks ass

Mention does what any real-time monitoring tool should and it’s free to use on a basic plan. It monitors millions of sources (including multilingual sources) and connects directly to your social media accounts to post from one central place. What’s really good features are it’s sentiment analysis tools and priority inbox. Definitely something worthwhile to cut down noise from homonyms and spam.

Bonus 11th – Musicisum

Has nothing to do with business at all, but I love guitar and this tool kicks-ass

Rabea Massaad is a legendary guitarist and this new web tool is a creative and interesting way to learn the ‘real’ art of playing modern electric guitar. From advice on holding a pick, all the way to becoming a shredding master this is a fun way to learn. The first lessons are free and then reverts to a paid subscription model.