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JFDI, the Singapore based startup incubator, had its Demo Day yesterday and it attracted more than 200 attendees. Many of those present were investors with big international names like 500 Startups’ Dave McClure, MIH Group (Naspers), Global Brain, plus regional investors such as Golden Gates Ventures, Red Dot Ventures, Crystal Horse Investments, and more. It was a great event with well rehearsed pitches and a valuable chance for folks to build their network.
I liked this part of the opening message from JFDI’s co-founder Hugh Mason to the investor-centric crowd:
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Please don’t come into this space (Southeast Asia) for just one, two, or three years. Come here for ten, twenty years. That’s how investors should look at investing in this region. There was a saying that it takes a mom and dad to bring up a child, but it takes an ecosystem to bring up a startup. So everyone of you here are important in helping startups here grow.
Below are the seven startups that graduated from JFDI this semester:
Our Health Mate
Problem: There are more than 20 million Indians working overseas and they usually send money back home. Part of this money is intended for healthcare services but most families at home may not have access to these services or they wish to scrimp on it.
Solution: Our Health Mate aims build a website that is linked up to thousands of clinics in five major cities in India. Indians working overseas can make payments and fixed appointments on behalf of their family members on this website. To monetize, It charges both the clinic for referral fees and the user for booking fees.
Collabspot
Problem: Salespeople usually communicate with clients via email. Current CRM tools are not built to work with emails. As a result, salespeople have the pain of doing data entry work to transfer information in emails to CRM tools. This reduces productivity.
Solution: Collabspot works as a plugin into Gmail that pulls data from Gmail to your CRM apps. This reduces the mundane data entry work and makes salespeople more productive. Collabspot monetizes on a per user monthly subscription model.
Collabspot secured seed funding last week.
UserScout
Problem: Researchers usually have trouble finding relevant participants to take part in their surveys. They usually advertise on job sites, forums and places like CraigsList to find participants. And thereafter, researchers need to use a survey form to further qualify the relevance of participants. This makes getting test subjects a laborious and costly task.
Solution: Formerly called Referoll, UserScout is a web platform that allows researchers to post jobs, criteria and survey questions. This speeds up this process of offering relevant participants. UserScout monetize by offering premium features to researchers and it also charge a fees on the amount transacted between the researchers and participants.
Duable
Problem: Chinese is a tough language to learn. Not many can successfully self-learn the language using existing learning material. And many a time, the material given is limited and users end up learning by rote.
Solution: As we explained in our review earlier this year, Duable is a browser plugin that generates Chinese translations of key phrases in familiar native texted articles. As users can go to any website and turn on the plugin feature, the learning resources is borderless. Duable monetizes based on a monthly subscription from its users.
Klinify
Problem: Clinics usually keep paper copies of their patients’ records. This results in two main problems for doctors: one is the difficulty in retrieving the right document for the right patients and the second problem is the waste of space in storing paper.
Solution: Klinify has a document management system that scans the medical profile and digitizes it. The whole system takes just twenty minutes to set up and it doesn’t change the workflow of the doctors. Klinify monetizes by charging clinics on a per patient visit basis.
Krake
Problem: Small- to medium-sized enterprises who need to scrap the web for data have the pain of manually copying and keying the data into Excel sheets which is mundane, error-prone and time consuming in terms of finding data.
Solution: Krake is a web-scraping technology that enables people to easily “suck” (the founder used this word) data you want out of sites. In short, it reduces the time to a matter of minutes to get whole page of data into an Excel sheet. Krake monetizes by charging users according to their usage.
Scrollback
Problem: Forum chats are usually used in websites and blogs. However, they are not the most interactive way to engage readers and users.
Solution: Scrollback builds the technology that enables text chat similar to that of Facebook and Google group chat for each of the webpages. Scrollback plans to monetize by advertising and also premium features to community owners.
Two of JFDI’s startup graduates from the earlier batch also pitched and showcased their statistics and growth over the year. Flocations, a meta-search for travel packages that has received over $500,000 in funding, revealed that it sees strong growth and is directing more than $800,000 worth of monthly sales to travel agencies. Fetch+ is another proud graduate of JFDI that has done well in the past year, also raised money and achieving sales of over $400,000 with projected recurring revenue to triple every year. Both startups are looking for their next round of funding for their next stage of growth.