Exclusive

Hortonworks vice president and general manager of APAC/ME Kamal Brar shares how Singapore is transforming with data.

MoneySmart.sg’s vision is to be everyone’s personal finance coach.

Following a significantly oversubscribed Pre-Series A, CredoLab raised more than US$1million of funding to date.

$3.3m was from pre-series A.

Their total funding to date is at S$11.5 million.

Algomi’s Jesper Bruun-Olsen says 70% of bond trades are still completed by voice.

Her concept involves a “fitness ecosystem".

Senescence Life Sciences uses the world’s most advanced breakthroughs in neuroscience to combat brain ageing.

SeeChat will revolutionize customer service with the potential to power 1.4 million SMEs. Digital directories and e-commerce powered by SeeChat transform business to consumer communication and lead generation with chat and unified social media engagement. The platform is unique because most directories today are discovery platforms - one can find a business online but cannot interact with them instantly (besides landlines). However, SeeChat changes it, says Sekar. "We enable consumers to not only find a business on the directory but instantly chat with the local businesses without needing to know the local business mobile number," he says. "Each directory provider today has 100,000 to 500,000 listed local businesses and strong local business relations," says Swami Sekar, CEO, SeeChat. "We help these directory providers go digital, increase their revenue, and provide enhanced offerings that make lives of local business owners easier when reaching to new age consumers." SeeChat powers and brings digital directories to life with integrated messaging and payment solutions to help businesses get discovered, connect, and transact with customers from one platform. Around 180,000 local SMEs make up 99% of the enterprises in Singapore and contribute to nearly half of the GDP while employing 70% of the workforce, says Sekar. Globally, this number is more than 100 million businesses. These companies are facing huge pressure to reinvent their operating model with a need to ‘go digital,’ engage the mobile customer, and boost their productivity. Otherwise, they risk getting disrupted by app-economy and e-commerce players that are digital and available anytime.

Find out why Henry Tan was chosen as a judge at the SBR Awards.

FINALCAD’s MD Pierre Vauthrin says the industry has an ‘innate conservatism’ towards tech.

He will be one of the panelists at the ​20 Hottest Startups Panel Briefing 2017.

Vinnie is an entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist.

Jeremy Tan is proud to be branded as an underdog.

Catch her at the SBR Hottest Startups Panel Briefing 2017. Gillian Tee is the co-founder and CEO of Homage, a one-stop senior home care solution that combines trained and curated caregivers with smart on-demand technology, allowing seniors to age at home with grace, control and dignity. Homage is currently backed by top venture capital firms 500 Startups, Golden Gate Ventures and SeedPlus. Prior to Homage, she co-founded Rocketrip, a Y-Combinator and Bessemer Ventures-backed startup that's raised more than 18M USD and grew it till profitability. Based in New York City, Rocketrip is the first commercially available platform to save companies money on travel expenses by rewarding employee behavior used by fortune 500 companies around the world. Prior to Rocketrip, Tee helped manage tech startup investments at an investment firm in New York as well as held various business development, product management and technology leadership positions at Amazon and Accenture. Tee studied Computer Science in University of Melbourne and got a master’s degree from Columbia Business School.

FreightKart wants to disrupt the shipping services industry. Paper trails and rubber stamps, these are just some of the traditional requisites of shipments that FreightKart wants to do away with. As a startup at the core of shipping and logistics solutions, the group aims to change customers' perceptions about dealing with shipping services. "We live in an extremely fast-paced world, where everything is expected to be intuitive and real-time, otherwise you lose your audience," says Abbas Vakharia, CEO & Founder, FreightKart. "Currently, shipping services are perceived to be slow, unattractive and confusing. FreightKart wants to change all that and become the go-to shipping solutions provider - a few clicks and you have all the answers." FreightKart is the only company which has a real time, end-to-end portal which allows a customer to pose a query, compare price points and services, make a booking and do required payments online. "Essentially, we have the complete customer journey — awareness & discovery, interest, intent and then purchase all laid out on the portal as one seamless transaction," he says. "This is a huge disruption in an industry where paper trails and rubber stamps are used even today." The idea for FreightKart, shares Vakharia, took shape out of personal experience. "Over time, we had both experienced difficulties in our own dealings with shipping companies and their agents around the world," he says. Long waiting periods — for a mere response to a query or for negotiations — were turning out to be a major issue as business was being lost as a result. In the shipping industry, supply always outstrips demand, Vakharia notes, and if a service provider takes too long to respond, the client is just going to find someone else to meet his demands. "Moreover, even after the initial query is responded to, more often than not, the client requests more information or wishes to negotiate the rates," he says. "This too results in lost time. Thus, we felt that there was a pressing and unmet need for promptness in shipping processes." Freightkart intends to address three very important issues: Convenience, short response times and competitive prices, along with other features such as online documentation, cargo insurance and cargo tracking. All these services will be delivered to the customer via a feature rich dashboard which the customer can access on any mobile device, shares Vakharia. The development of the complete product had been bootstrapped initially. Six months ago, FreightKart was chosen as one of the eight teams to represent muru-D Singapore's second cohort. muru-D is the startup accelerator backed by telecommunications and media company Telstra. "That brought in much needed funding, giving us a decent runway and allowing us time to hit the market with an end-to-end, fully transaction-able product. Currently, we are looking for strategic investors with whom we can grow to the next level," shares Vakharia.