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The B2B platform for F&B and agribusiness is chosen based on ‘investability’, impact and growth potential

The Startup Weekend Jakarta 2015 ended on Sunday with Do-Cart getting first prize, followed by Konsaato and Future of Indonesia as runners-up. The event was held at co-working space Freeware Spaces in  Kemang, South Jakarta.

Organised by venture capital firm Grupara Inc. and accelerator Techstars, the three-day startup coaching event and competition was participated in by 120 participants divided into 20 teams. Exceeding the targetted quota of 100 participants, despite being dominated by Indonesians, it also had participants from the US, Japan, and South Korea.

Winners were chosen by judges Aryo Ariotedja (Managing Partner at Grupara), Stefan Jung (Managing Partner at Venturra Capital), Steven Vanada (VP of CyberAgent Ventures), and Tim Marbach (CEO & Founder at Asia Venture Group) based on ‘investability’, social impact and growth potential.

The champion Do-Cart is a B2B platform for F&B and agribusiness that helps small and medium businesses meet vendors through an online portal. Cutting the involvement of middlemen, businesses are able to buy goods directly from farmers at a fair and honest price.

Runner-up Konsaato is a crowdfunding platform for live concerts, in which fans can help invest to bring their favourite international artists to town. The platform focusses on bringing Japanese artists to Indonesia, and vice versa.

Meanwhile, Future of Indonesia is a collaboration platform for civic engagement where users can post proposed solutions for social problems. Users can vote for the best solutions, and it also includes a gamification element to encourage participation.

All the winners received shopping vouchers from HappyFresh, Maskoolin and Doku, as well as three months’ worth of free office space at Freeware Spaces.

Also Read: In photos: Harbolnas fever at Zalora’s warehouse

Current trend: Crowdfunding and productivity hacks

e27 observed that although participants are in a wide variety of business sectors, there seemed to be a common theme among most of the participants.

Productivity hacks were one of the most popular kinds of service. There was Chicken Time, an app that notifies your colleagues and friends if you wake up late, and Sch-Work, an Asana-like platform for government officials.

There are also Total Autocare, which reminds users to service their cars, and CanCook, which helps generate recipes based on what is available in the users’ refrigerator.

Crowdfunding was also a big theme at Startup Weekend Jakarta. Apart from Konsaato, there was also Bricklik, a crowdfunding platform for property investments.

There were also Kiyoo, an online marketplace for rented furniture and Workstree, a platform for creative freelancers that enables clients to also hire their services as a group.

While Ariotedja praised the variety of ideas coming in this year, he also stressed the importance for participants to master key presentation skills such as elevator pitch.

“I see that many of them still have tendency to ramble at the beginning of their presentation. And for some participants, it also took us a while to understand what their business is all about … They have to be able to explain their product in one to two sentences,” he said.

“I hope that they will continue what they have started in this competition,” he closed.

“Enjoy 2-for-1 tickets to Echelon Indonesia 2016 now. Do not miss out on Indonesia’s biggest international tech conference!”

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The O2O marketplace for modular kitchen furnishing will use the funds to accelerate product development and expand sales, marketing and team

Modular kitchen

CapriCoast.com, a Bangalore-based online-to-offline (O2O) marketplace for modular kitchen furnishing, has secured US$3.5 million in Series A round of funding, led by Accel Partners India and Singapore-based VC firm RB Investments.

The funds will be used to accelerate product development and expand its sales, marketing and hiring efforts, as per an official statement.

Also Read: Sofa so good: India’s CustomFurnish.com raises US$4.5 million

Started early this year, CapriCoast allows users to select from thousands of modular kitchen furnishing and wardrobe designs. The startup is currently working with 50 showrooms across 15 cities in India and aims to reach 200-plus showrooms across over 50 cities by early next year.

CapriCoast recently partnerships with Sleek International (an Asian paints subsidiary) and Spacewood – both leading manufacturers of modular furniture in India.

“Our O2O marketplace model addresses the problems that customers face today while buying modular furnishing – obfuscated pricing, delayed delivery, limited choice and lack of transparency,” said Jawad Ayaz, Founder and CEO of CapriCoast.

Also Read: Indian furniture e-tailer MebelKart buys sports platform 53central

RB Investments has a diverse portfolio of investments, primarily across Southeast Asia. In India, its funding in CapriCoast follows investments in companies such as Spuul and 5aSec, among others.

“CapriCoast is well aligned with our investment philosophy of investing in companies who are tackling a complex, multi-faceted problem that if addressed right provides a rapidly scalable business opportunity,” said Rajesh Bothra, MD of RB Investments.

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 “We come shopping in Hong Kong [for startups],” says William Bao Bean of SOS Ventures and Chinaccelerator

Image Credit: Chinaccelerator

This is one of the articles belonging to e27’s Meet the VC series, where we chat with venture capitalists in the startup space to find out more about how they do what they do. This is Part 1 of a two-part interview. 

If applying for funding for your startup is akin to applying for college, William Bao Bean is the street savvy, on-the-ball admissions officer you want to have vouching for your startup and opening the doors into the programme. The programme being Chinaccelerator, China’s longest-running, mentorship-heavy accelerator in Shanghai.

William Bao Bean is one of five partners at SOSV, an early-stage VC firm that runs Chinaccelerator. The US$250 million venture fund he says, puts “our money where our mouth is,” investing between US$50,0000 to US$5 million in over 120 programmes a year. The five partners each run an accelerator, which is global by sector.

“We have a different model, so we don’t compete with anyone. We partner with a lot of local accelerators,” says Bao Bean.

How is the SOSV model different? Top accelerators like Tech Stars split city by city. Y Combinator is strictly Silicon Valley-based and 500 Startups is also based in Silicon Valley, though it has microfunds placed around the world.

The SOSV model

SOSV consists of software-centric Chinaccelerator in Shanghai, hardware accelerators Hax in Shenzhen and Hax Boost in San Francisco, biotech accelerator Indie Bio in San Francisco and Ireland and food business accelerator Food-X in New York.

“The idea is to bring the best companies from around the world to China [for Chinaaccelerator]. If they want to go global, they come to us. We pull from each of the markets, because Asia is where it’s at,” says Bao Bean.

This help is a lifebuoy for foreign startups trying to navigate the murky market of China, where giants Baidu, Alibaba, Xiaomi and Tencent are staking claims in every industry.

Chinaccelerator recognises the challenges startups face and leverages ecosystems such as WeChat.

“We have 26 companies using WeChat to lower customer acquisition cost. Everyone else is paying for users. In the US, you raise VC money and you buy engineers. In China, you raise VC money and you pay for marketing. With WeChat, you get quality content. Not only do they get users, they are monetising users,” says Bao Bean.

Also Read: WeChat to charge its 560M users for big e-money transfers

The CV Behind Bao Bean, abbr.

At one point in Bao Bean’s career, he wanted to work for the US government. So, when he left liberal arts-centred Bowdoin College in 1995, he packed his bags and moved from Maine to Taiwan for a year-long internship with the US Commerce Department.

“That experience kind of cured me of the desire to work for the US government,” laughs the astute straight shooter, who grew up in New Jersey and is now based in Shanghai.

e27 chats more with the startup guru on China’s market and more. Here are the edited excerpts. 

Also Read: In 1999, very few people knew what I was doing: Gobi Partners’ Ken Xu

Demo Day Batch 8 team

So what happened after you realised you no longer wanted to work for the US government?

Back then, there were only three ways to get a work permit in Taiwan: Teach, work for the government, or work at an investment bank.

So after working in the government, I became a tech analyst for Sinopac Securities in Taipei, introducing international investors to Taiwan-listed companies. This was in 1996, when tech was just taking off. I did a year there. It was exciting, but not, ultimately, where to figure out how to be a stock analyst.

I weaseled my way to Bear Stearns in 1997, and, from there, I kind of learned how to become a stock analyst, covering connected consumers, digital home. Some of it was analog; i.e. home gateways, interactive television.

I got hired at Bank of America in 2000, where I wrote a 350-page paper about the digital home. Bill Gates read it!

That’s pretty cool. How did you learn that?

Microsoft told me, they ordered two boxes of it. Anyway, the entire Internet world then exploded. The first bubble was crazy. I came back out to Asia with Deutsche Bank covering basically what become the digital home.

I covered China telecom equipment. I was the first analyst to cover ZTE. I covered UT Starcom, got a lot of people into it, got them out before they crashed.

In 2004, I started covering China’s Internet. Back then, the total market cap for the entire China Internet sector was like US$3 billion — microcap stock— it was the early days and there was good growth. Within two and a half years, it went to US$18 billion.

I started covering Tencent when it was around US$6 a share. I think the stock price now is something around US$150. I saw it go from [jump], but I wasn’t allowed to buy, because I was on the sell side.

I wanted to switch to the buy side and put that money to work. You can either go hedge fund or VC. So, I went VC. I don’t know if this was the right decision!

What are the hesitations with being on the buy side, as a VC?

With hedge funds, you’re trading hour by hour. At the end of every minute you know where you are. VCs don’t know whether they fucked up for like five years. So there’s a big difference! VCs don’t get paid that much either!

Also Read: This is how 500 Startups, Sequoia and others want you to pitch 

Did you do anything to direct the transition?

I’ll tell you something crazy. Between the end of 2007 and 2008, I liquidated every stock I had. Because my thought was, you have to focus. I wanted to do VC and I had no experience, I never operated or invested, so I had to focus. I took my money out of stocks and put them all into angel funds.

[Talk about good timing: 2007 to 2008 was the peak of the equity market before the Global Financial Crisis; Lehman collapsed in September 2008.]

Right now I have 39 angel investments and 16 VC investments. I see. . . I can’t even add right now . . . 55 different ways to f**k up! [laughs] All the SOSV investments are my investments, based on the structure.

So, yeah, so SoftBank was our client at Deutsche Bank, and they wanted to do something in India. My colleague and I started SoftBank China & India.

I ran China, it was a US$105-million fund [all together]. We were the third in China and the second regional one. We invested in some good companies and had some exits, but we didn’t do a second fund. I just did one fund there for four years before switching over to Singtel Innov8, where I ran China, focusing on early stage.

Singtel Innov8 was global, about a US$250-million dollar fund.

Let’s chat SOSV.

SOSV is fundraising now. It’s a US$250-million fund. The GP puts up half the money — this is unheard of anywhere in the world — the people in the fund put up the money.

Our MD is putting up most of it because I don’t have that much money [laughs]. Usually it’s 1-3 per cent, and here it’s 50 per cent.

So, you’re stopping over in Hong Kong [en route to Israel and Australia]. What are your thoughts on the startup scene here?

We come shopping in Hong Kong [for startups]! That must be a campaign, come shopping in Hong Kong. [laughs]

The local programs and accelerators here are awesome, but we help them go out.We’re partners with Cyberport. Hong Kong is penalised because it’s a really small market, but China has a large local market.

In Hong Kong you have to go global from Day One, or else you’re f**ed.

What startups in Chinaccelerator are from Hong Kong?

In this last batch, we have two companies. Snapask, which has a serious global presence — Hong Kong, Taiwan, Shanghai. The other startup from Hong Kong is BitMex, which is a team on fire. I’ve never seen growth like that.

[Snapask is an app that provides students with immediate help from a real tutor. BitMex creates a derivative denominated in Bitcoin where currency controls don’t apply. Chinese investors can’t buy Alibaba stock for example, because it’s listed on the NYSE and denominated in USD. The average Mrs Wong can’t change RMB into USD and buy something outside China, due to currency controls, BitMex solves this.]

Foreign companies have what I call an unfair advantage in two sectors.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where the conversation with Bao Bean continues on how foreign startups can thrive in China. 

Also Read: Hong Kong’s mobile tutoring startup Snapask raises US$1.8M pre-Series A

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Image credit: William Cho

Restaurant discovery and express booking app Offpeak has circled Singapore for a while now. Since its series A round in June, it has expanded into Thailand and Vietnam, and now it’s time to enter the city state too. The company announced late last week it has entered the Singapore market, where it has already partnered with around 60 restaurants.

Offpeak provides restaurant suggestion and discovery based on your location through a mobile app (or a mobile-friendly website). Users book a table at the restaurant of their choice and receive up to 50 percent discount on their check. As its name suggests, the app offers discounts and incentives for customers to visit restaurants on off-peak hours, when those places are less busy and more likely to have chairs to fill. At least that was the initial idea – the app can be used to find the right restaurant at any time of the day.

The company places a lot of value on face-to-face communication with the restaurants it gets on board. It takes care of marketing and promotional campaigns for a lot of its partner restaurants, particularly those small businesses that are owned by a single person or family, director Tan Ee Ern tells Tech in Asia. “With most of the single-outlet [places], the owner is usually the one behind the till. So they’ve got their work cut out for themselves, we don’t want to stress them more,” he says.

Offpeak’s directors. Image credit: Offpeak

That’s why Offpeak doesn’t require any kind of backend integration to work, he explains. It doesn’t even touch the restaurant’s point-of-sale system – all the restaurant needs is the app to receive the booking, which can come as short-notice as 10 minutes before the customer shows up. Restaurant owners can decide what kind of discounts to offer and for its part, Offpeak can help drive customers to particular restaurants or types of restaurants through its social media and online advertising.

And the startup doesn’t even have to reach that many people, Ee Ern says. “Most of our restaurants say they’re busy, but about 30 percent [of their capacity] is usually empty tables. It’s this spare inventory that we want to help fill up. So it’s fine for us even if we don’t send thousands of people.”

Food knows no borders

The company has partnered with more than a thousand restaurants in its native Malaysia (it had about 600 back in June). In Thailand it has more than 250 partners signed up. Dedicated teams on the ground both in Thailand and Vietnam are busy signing up restaurants and handling the business’ day-to-day, while Singapore will be run from Kuala Lumpur for now.

“The idea for landing in Thailand and Vietnam specifically was because we wanted to shock the system,” Ee Ern says. The startup wanted to see if its platform needed to change at all for those countries to accommodate the local culture and demand. But it found it didn’t have to do much beyond localization. “As it turns out, food is quite universal,” Ee Ern says.

Offpeak isn’t the only company prowling these waters. Thailand-based Eatigo employs a very similar model and is already present in Thailand and Singapore, as well as looking for new markets to expand in. The startup raised its series A round just a week ago. Vietnam has local players like Foody, which isn’t quite in the same wheelhouse but does have a strong discovery element through its Yelp-like features. The startup raised both its series B and series C rounds of funding within weeks of each other in July.

Offpeak’s Singapore website.

Offpeak is not so much concerned about the competition as it is encouraged, Ee Ern says. “I think there’s still a lot of space to grow in the foodtech space, even with the bigger players like Foodpanda,” he says. “We love news like this. When we see our competitors or our equivalents raising funds, it just shows that the space is heating up. It also helps when approaching restaurateurs to sign them up.”

Offpeak doesn’t do exclusivity clauses, he adds. The startup is happy for a restaurant to use its app alongside others to bring in customers.

Going forward, there’s a lot of work to do, but also a lot of opportunity. “There are about 180,000 restaurants in Malaysia, about the same in Thailand,” Ee Ern says. Even with the startup’s 1,000 partners in Malaysia right now, it’s just scratching the surface. While it’s still not looking to monetize immediately, preferring to rack up users, Ee Ern says partners in Malaysia are starting to see the value Offpeak provides for them. But any monetization initiatives won’t take place until mid- to late-2016, he adds.

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