Tuesday, 2024 November 5

Advancing women leaders in the tech industry: Early Stage

To advocate for and advance more women leaders, Simona Ventures has collaborated with Gojek Xcelerate, a Gojek accelerator program with Digitaraya. This is the second batch of the Simona Accelerator APAC Women Founders program in Jakarta.

The program provides mentoring sessions to help female founders better understand Indonesia’s startup ecosystem, and addresses specific challenges faced by women founders through sessions led by curated industry experts and players.

Ten women-led startups were selected to be part of the program. Among the criteria they fulfilled were the ability to find the right solution to a specific problem, market positioning, traction and business model, the scalability of the business, organizational design, and social impact.

For this week’s “Early Stage,” KrASIA looked at five of these ten startups, which pitched to potential investors during Gojek Xcelerate Batch 2 and Simona Ventures’ demo day in Jakarta.

JioVio Healthcare is an international, Singapore-based medtech Internet-of-Things (IoT) company founded in 2016. It focuses on providing positive pregnancy, infant care, and parenting experiences using innovations in healthcare technology. JioVio provides personal healthcare kits for pregnant ladies and health facilities, with the aim of decreasing the death rate of pregnant women.

As part of its mission, JioVio helps distribute SaveMom, an IoT-based maternal healthcare solution by its parent company Olivewear (an IoT startup in the healthcare space). The solution includes the SaveMom mobile app, which is used by healthcare workers to monitor pregnant women and record their health data, and the Savemom kit which has five devices to collect medical data, with the aim of providing antenatal care to women in rural areas.

Event Banana is a Thai event venue platform. It connects event hosts to potential venues they can book and aims to revamp and modernize the event hosting process. In Thailand, locating or booking venues is still carried out offline and manually. Venues are mostly under-utilized with less than 15% utilization rate on average. The platform uses an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled search algorithm to bring the most relevant options to users. More than 1,800 venues and 200 caterers are on the platform. Event Banana offers multiple payment options for business customers.

Populix is a market research startup, founded at the end of 2017. Although the global market research industry is worth billions of dollars, there are some problems that need to be solved. For one, market research in Indonesia is very costly and inefficient. The data quality is lacking as well and collection takes a long time. Hence, Populix aims to ease research activities by providing a readily accessible pool of quality participants that users can segment, and who will answer user questions instantly, objectively, and at lower costs.

Kobe is a Singapore-headquartered influencer marketing platform. It has opened new market segments for consumer brands with 5,000 influencers in 14 countries, covering a 45 million audience population. Kobe uses AI tools that have been patented. The AI tools provide speed of access and measurable influencer solutions for brands. Within the first year of operations, Kobe crossed the seven figure sales mark. It has worked with over 200 brands including Pepsi, Changi Airport Group, and Calvin Klein.

1Export is a Philippines-based company established in 2016. It aims to be a seamless and efficient tech-enabled group that will help lower barriers for micro and small medium entrepreneurs to export their products to new markets. Currently, it has garnered over 200 suppliers of food and agricultural products. 1Export is working on automating document processing and also the creation of invoices for both buyers and suppliers to keep track of their transactions. It also plans to integrate AI with labelling appliances and easily identify the labelling needs of a certain product, for certain countries.

“Early Stage” is a series where the writers of KrASIA highlight startups that caught our eye for the week.

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