After one full-year of running the accelerator and completing two successful batches, we’re excited to announce Iterative’s 3rd batch of companies for Summer 2021.
Some interesting notes:
- This round, 330+ companies applied. Our team spent over 130 hours in interviews and selected the 10 companies below to invest in and back.
- While the main criteria for acceptance is the exceptional founders themselves, this batch, we’re excited to back a new emerging trend as the region grapples with “the new normal” - LogisticsTech.
Without further ado - here is Iterative Summer 2021:
- AcadArena (Philippines) – Home of campus gaming in Southeast Asia
- BotSync (Singapore) – Warehouse robotic automation
- Friz (Singapore) – Neobank for freelancers
- Hawkr (Malaysia) – Airbnb for food
- JiPay (Singapore) – Creating a super app for domestic work
- Kludio (Bangladesh) – Fullstack cloud kitchens
- RIDA (Singapore) – Realtime delivery aggregation
- Shipmates (Philippines) – Local courier marketplace for the Philippines
- SUPABAZA (Malaysia) – Online supermarket for Southeast Asia
- Zi.Care (Indonesia) – Electronic medical records in Indonesia
Acadarena
Home of campus gaming in Southeast Asia
Why We’re Excited
AcadArena is building campus gaming in Southeast Asia, starting in the Philippines. They leverage games to develop the next generation and shape the future of youth engagement for brands and schools. Thanks to rapid growth in mobile penetration, SEA is a $100B+ online economy with 400M people online of which 80% are gamers. This population already generates $6B in annual revenue for the economy.
It turns out that 1/3 of these gamers are youth many of whom are already using AcadArena. AcadArena already powers 300+ schools annually through their product to address community, career and competition and are already trusted by schools and brands to engage this audience. We’re biased cause we’re gamers ourselves, but we think esports will only continue to grow a platform that engages students both online and offline is exactly what brands are looking for to market to the next generation.
Founders
Ariane Lim
CEO
Kevin Hoang
Chief Strategy Officer
If founder-product fit is the defining characteristic of a great startup, it doesn’t get any better than AcadArena’s team. Ariane has been in esports for the past 10+ years (Garena, NetEase) in every role (production, partnerships, marketing, programs, etc). Justin (who’s still finishing school) for the last 8+ years as an editor, ops manager, producer writer, and Kevin for the last 6+ years at WGA and Twitch. We’re stoked to have this awesome founding team as part of the Iterative family.
Botsync
Automating material movement across warehouses and manufacturing sites.
Why We’re Excited
Botsync is a robotics startup that builds heavy duty autonomous mobile robots to automate point to point goods movement for the logistics and manufacturing industry. Their robots can move pallets and other payloads between 300 and 1000 kg, and are designed to be implemented in new facilities with next to minimum changes to the existing infrastructure. This enables companies of all sizes to implement automation without stopping their existing operations. Rather than explain in words how useful their platform is, you can just watch a quick 2.5 min video here.
We think it’s inevitable for warehouses and manufacturing facilities to become 90%+ automated in the future and starting with the movement of goods on the floor just makes sense. Amazon’s already doing this, we’re excited for Botsync to help the rest of the world with their warehouses.
Founders
Botsync’s team is stacked with one of the best technical teams we’ve seen. Hardware is hard, but between Rahul, Prashant, Nikhil, and Singaram, they’ve covered and are deep enough into hardware, software, supply chain, and manufacturing to build a successful robotics business.
Friz
Neobank for freelancers and digital entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia.
Why We’re Excited
Freelancers don’t fit the mold of traditional banking. Because of unstable incomes, freelancers often get rejected by banks for personal loans, credit cards, working capital loans, etc. Friz underwrites them in new ways using proprietary data sets. What’s particularly interesting is that Asia has the majority of the global flexible workforce: 65% or 88M freelancers live/work in Asia and all are earning incomes above the median. This is a demographic and trend that’s been growing 17% annually with no end in sight.
Founders
Ash Rhazaly
CTO
Nirali and Ash both come from fintech backgrounds, with Nirali’s Mastercard experience and Ash’s technical background from DBS bank, there isn’t a better power-team to provide financial access to what is clearly going to be an important segment.
Hawkr
Marketplace for home cooks.
Why We’re Excited
Hawkr creates micro cloud kitchens and enables home cooks to provide food service to their communities that’s as efficient and cost effective as commercial kitchens. COVID has caused many commercial kitchens to downsize as well as brought out many more local food entrepreneurs to attempt starting side businesses. Hawkr’s infrastructure and flexibility allows them to test this new flexible way to make an income - you can choose to cook for others on your own schedule. Asia’s food and community culture is the perfect testbed for this new marketplace. While we’re excited for all the fantastic dishes that Hawkr’s going to unlock, we’re even more excited to help Hawkr enable the next wave of foodprenuers make stable incomes for their families.
Founders
Li Yen Tan
CEO
Edward Tan
COO
Li Yen and Edward both come from hospitality backgrounds from both the US and Malaysia. Li Yen while young, started and sold a jewelry business to afford a ticket and stay in the US - that’s the type of hustle it’s going to take to get this marketplace off the ground. We’re excited to support Li Yen and Ed on their journey.
Jipay
Creating a super app for domestic work.
Why We’re Excited
Jipay helps domestic helpers manage spend. Their expense card is a dedicated card for domestic helpers to do groceries and purchase items for the household. It allows the family to monitor transactions and overcome all the inconveniences of using cash, the default method today. No more reconciling receipts and no more trips to the ATM. In the near future, Jipay will also be providing additional financial services for domestic workers to make their lives even easier. There is 67M global domestic workers with the majority of them concentrated in Asia today, all using non-digital and hard to manage methods of payment. We think bringing them all online is going to be inevitable.
Founders
Dayana and David have one of the most global perspectives with experiences in the UK, US, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. They were exposed to the domestic work financial issues in Asia and immediately went to work to launch their cards. We’re excited to partner with them to financially enable domestic workers.
Kludio
Full-stack cloud kitchens.
Why We’re Excited
Kludio is a full stack food delivery platform leveraging cloud kitchens and technology driven logistics to help food brands get off the ground quickly. The most unique part about Kludio is unlike a cloud kitchen, they do everything - supply the staff, manage the inventory, do the cooking and assembling. Not just providing space and logistics. We like to think about Kludio as “AWS for food”. Just like AWS made it 10x easier for developers to put up production software into the wild, Kludio will allow brands to get off the ground faster as well as enable experimentation in geographies or menus that previously didn’t exist. We’re excited about the opportunity Kludio has to massively expand the market.
Founders
Touhidul Tishad
VP of Technology
Kishwar has held various roles at some of the fastest growing tech startups in Bangladesh (Pathao, Truck Lagbe) before joining forces with Tishad to launch Kludio. Kishwar’s mix of operational, growth, and marketing prowess combined with Tishad’s tech expertise makes them the perfect team to attack the Kludio opportunity.
Rida
Same-day delivery platform.
Why We’re Excited
Doing same day delivery is hard. Most ecommerce or retail businesses can’t do this by themselves unless they have a massive amount of resources to devote to logistics. Rida uses technology to provide a layer on top of existing 3PL companies that enables routing to these services in real-time allowing various shipping products (on-demand, 2hr, 4 hour windows, scheduled, etc) to be delivered with just an API integration. This saves merchants time, cost, and provides better service for customers. With the rise and now fragmentation of delivery networks in Singapore and beyond, we think an aggregate layer will be the next evolution of logistics tech.
Founders
Samuel Lim
CEO / CTO
Sam is the rare founder that can both serve as CEO and CTO. He’s developed the majority of Rida from the ground up while leading the vision and building out the current team for Rida. Previous to this, he was Cofounder and CTO of Plateable (a farm-to-table food delivery platform) where he first ran into issues of the same-day delivery problem.
Shipmates
Connecting online businesses with local couriers in the Philippines.
Why We’re Excited
Booking on-demand and next-day shipments with multiple couriers like Lalamove, Entrego, XDE, etc in the Philippines is hard. It’s not clear who’s going to be available, who’s reliable, what the best prices are or will be, etc. Philippines also is more complicated because of the need to Ship between multiple islands. Shipmates makes it super easy to immediately integrate shipping into businesses or shopify stores. Shipping aggregation services will exist in every geography, we’re excited to back shipmates to be the ones to dominate the Philippines.
Founders
Josh Supan
CEO
Both Josh and David have had multiple startups under their belts previously growing xpanse and shirt.ly on both the business and technical sides. Their previous experience growing an ecommerce business was what led them to focus on going deep into shipping to solve this for everyone. We love businesses and founders who solve their own pain points!
SUPABAZA
Online supermarket for Southeast Asia’s masses.
Why We’re Excited
While personal care, household appliances, electronics, and clothing have all reached >7% online penetration in SEA, online groceries is still at a dismal <1%. That number is even lower in suburban neighborhoods. To address the structural differences of suburbs versus the city, SUPABAZA is applying an agent distribution model to grocery logistics not dissimilar to what leading couriers in the region have moved to. Using agents for last mile distribution decreases costs and increases efficiency allowing SUPABAZA to reach customers that traditional online retail can’t.
Founders
Eugene Huang
CEO
Sim Sze Kiat
CTO
Eugene and Sim are both veterans in logistics - having cut their teeth as Head of Retail and engineering at Ninja Van. We’re excited to see them apply the tricks and best practices they learned at a leading logistics company to drastically improve the online grocery delivery model.
Zi.Care
Electronic medical records in Indonesia.
Why We’re Excited
Zi.Care is Indonesian health-tech company focused on digitizing that provides Electronic Medical Record Level 7 technology to the healthcare stakeholders (Hospitals, Clinics, Doctors, Patients) and empowering integrations of ecosystems for better healthcare services to the Indonesian people. Over 80% of hospitals in Indonesia still operate healthcare manually today - leading to long lines, inefficiencies in workflows, and worse yet, medical mistakes that can cause very bad outcomes. Zi.Care is already integrated into 80+ hospital systems today and we’re excited to help them get to the rest of Indonesia.
Founders
Jodi Pujiyono Susanto
Chief Strategy Office
Sanjaya I. Mayluddin
Chief Design Officer
Jessy, Jodi, and Sanjay are the perfect product, finance, and design founders to take on this challenge - with all 3 having technical degrees. Jessy has 10+ years of experience design HIS for the largest hospital systems in the country, Jodi has 12+ years in capital markets, and Sanjaya has spent 15+ years building large scale systems.
