RM250,000 funding for startups

Praveen (fourth from left) with representatives of the ambitious Malaysian startups GrabGas, Vase and Local Usher at Digi Accelerates’ Demo Day finale in Bangkok.

DIGI Telecommunications Sdn Bhd will be investing more than RM250,000 in equity funding in GrabGas, Local Usher and Vase.

The three startups recently graduated from the company’s maiden accelerator programme, Digi Accelerate.

The programme closed with a Demo Day in Bangkok, which saw the startups join teams from Myanmar and Thailand in a competitive pitch session to 65 local and international venture capitalists.

“They have done a lot of work in the past four months to validate their business models, and now the real challenge is to be single-minded on building a repeatable, scalable and sustainable business beyond borders.

“The ambition should be to build traction and generate revenue in the first year, then they are on to something potentially big,” said Digi chief digital officer Praveen Rajan.

Praveen heads up Digi-X, the telco’s innovation lab exploring new digital services that will serve Digi’s 12.3 million customers or graduate them into new ventures beyond telco.

Local Usher is a platform to discover and book unique recreational experiences in Malaysia, now looking to expand into Asean. Launched in August 2015, the startup has grown tenfold in the past six months, and is already recording positive cash flows.

GrabGas is a web and smartphone-based on-demand cooking gas delivery service that addresses a real gap in Malaysia.

Launched in April, it has grown more than twelvefold with services currently covering Petaling Jaya, Puchong and Subang Jaya, averaging at 65 orders a day.

Vase is a centralised portal for conducting surveys and providing actionable on-demand insights for its clients.

The company was launched in June and has grown its total respondent base by elevenfold in the past three months.

Praveen said Digi-X would continue to provide both funding and hands-on support for these ambitious startups; enabling a conducive support system to grow their businesses, which includes commercialisation opportunities with Digi and Telenor, tapping into 200 million potential customers globally.

During the Digi Accelerate bootcamp in Bangkok, the three teams spent four months learning from Silicon Valley experts, receiving direct mentorship from established regional technopreneurs and pitched to global and regional venture capitalists. This is what the founders had to share about their experience:

“Joining the accelerator really helped us gain insights and connections in markets outside of Malaysia. Having lived in Bangkok for four months, we have managed to build relationships with the locals and people from the oil and gas industry.

“The accelerator has helped us build the foundation for our market entry into Thailand and other possible Asian markets. We now have an idea of who to approach and how to make GrabGas a market fit for the locals,” said GrabGas co-founder and chief operating officer Jeson Lee.

“Through the accelerator, we met a lot of amazing people who provided us with great feedback on our product, both from a user perspective, and from a development perspective. It is fair to say, without the feedback from our mentors and the various really cool people the accelerator brought us in contact with, Vase would not be at the stage we are today,” said Vase Technologies chief executive officer and co-founder Julie Ng.

Local Usher co-founder Sabrina Cheng said: “It was a great experience to join the accelerator. We learned important, practical tips on how to scale our business, and also gained access to a larger customer market. Both aspects are crucial for a startup like us that want to enable more people to enjoy fun trips and activities around them, and to expand our business into Asean!”

In the past three months since its inception, Digi-X has been broadening its involvement in the startup ecosystem with Digi Incub8, its pre-accelerator programme, and Digi Accelerate.

More recently, it launched an ideation lab with MaGIC and Uber to help Asean startups grow their business ideas, as well as committed to partner the Education Ministry and MDeC in the #mydigitalmaker movement, an initiative to create future digital makers by exposing Malaysian youth to the creative and innovative aspects of digital technology.