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Currently, LaunchPad is incubating six startups — SkootJobs, PayrollPanda, PunchinPanda, Teeyoot, Menyoo, and Pisheyab

LaunchPad Founder and CEO Asim Qureshi

LaunchPad, a Kuala Lumpur-based startup incubator that develops and nurtures ideas in-house, has received US$6 million in funding “to launch new tech ventures, invest in early-stage startups, and fund its existing startups”.

The investment comes from private investors, who had previously invested in LaunchPad Founder and CEO Asim Qureshi’s property business AIQ Global.

The deal comes less than six months after LaunchPad secured US$1 million in “pre-idea pre-seed funding” in December last year.

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LaunchPad was started as a platform for startups in developed markets with proven business models that can be launched from its pads in Malaysia into other Asian markets.

“When we set off, we were inspired by the Rocket Internet model of starting proven tech businesses. What we came to realise is that a lot of ideas proven elsewhere don’t necessarily work in Southeast Asia, and the space is becoming somewhat saturated. We have expanded our focus to more original ideas which allows us to potentially tap into the global market,” says Founder and CEO Asim Qureshi,

Currently, LaunchPad has six startups in its portfolio — SkootJobs, an online job platform; PayrollPanda, a payroll SaaS company; PunchinPanda, a cloud application to track attendance and time; Teeyoot, a T-shirt crowd-buying platform; Menyoo, a mobile dining application; and Pisheyab, an online job platform focusing on the Middle East market.

LaunchPad supports its ventures’ investments needs in the pre-seed to seed stage. Each startup gets access to shared resources, which include marketing, tech, accounting and HR, and critical hands-on support, all crucial to drive growth.

“Over the last months we centralised a lot of key business areas. This is a win-win situation as it frees up the venture builders, so they may focus on the essentials for their venture, while at the same time learnings are centralised for each of these areas which allows us to operate better as a group,” says Toine Vaessen, Venture Builder at LaunchPad.

Qureshi is an Oxford graduate and former Vice President at investment banks Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. He previous started ThinkProperty.my, which was acquired by iProperty in 2010.

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