By Trefor Moss
The next big technology startup may come from the Philippines,
with entrepreneurs there seeking to address the everyday challenges
of people in developing countries. Here are five Filipino startups
to watch:
Awesome Lab/RetailStork
A startup incubator with a difference, Awesome Lab hires
aspiring Filipino entrepreneurs and gives them a creative
environment in which to work on tech projects. It now employs 15
people, having opened in 2014.
"We wanted to create a safety net where failure is an option,"
said Matthew Cua, the 26-year-old president of Awesome Lab. Silicon
Valley encourages failure as part of the learning curve, "but in
the Philippines failure is something you avoid like hell," Mr. Cua
said.
The Awesome Lab team works on commissions, and recently built an
intuitive drinks dispenser for Coca-Cola which releases a can of
soda whenever a customer smiles. But the ultimate objective is for
the entrepreneurs to develop their own startups within the secure
environment the lab provides, and then when they're ready spin them
out of Awesome Lab, which retains shares in the new venture.
RetailStork, which builds smart shelves for retailers providing
data about shopping habits, is about to become the first startup to
leave the Awesome Lab nest, said Mr. Cua. "Awesome Lab will be one
of those places people came from," he said. "By then we'll have
built a brand, and we'll have a legacy."
Kalibrr
"What OK Cupid does for dating, we want to do for jobs," said
Paul Rivera, founder & CEO of Kalibrr, a startup which aims to
reinvent the business of job-seeking online. The 32-year-old ex-
Google employee began developing Kalibrr as a "talent marketplace"
where job seekers can pass online qualifications to improve their
CVs, and then connect with companies that pay Kalibrr to put
forward the best candidates to compete for its vacancies. Kalibrr
has so far enrolled 3,000 companies and 60,000 applicants, but is
now adding 1,000 applicants a day as it ramps up, said Mr. Rivera,
who dreams of disrupting a Southeast Asian online jobs market
currently dominated by Jobstreet Corp, owned by Seek Ltd. of
Australia. Kalibrr recently raised $1.6 million in a second
rounding of funding, Mr. Rivera said, and plans to expand into
Indonesia in Q3.
Lenddo
Credit is unattainable for millions of Filipinos: the country's
banks have plenty of money, but they won't lend to people with no
credit history. Lenddo aims to remedy this by bridging the gap
between banks and would-be borrowers. Originally from the U.K.,
co-founder & CEO Richard Eldridge first hit on the idea of
starting Lenddo while running an outsourcing company in Manila.
"My workers would keep coming to me asking for loans to pay for
education, or home repairs, or medical bills," he recalled. "I
realized that micro-lending here was all done personally -- the
banks wouldn't lend."
After initially conceiving Lenddo as a micro-lender in 2011, Mr.
Eldridge soon refocused the company's efforts on building
algorithms that use social-media footprints to build credit scores
for people with no financial track record. The company has now
helped six of the Philippines' top 10 banks make over 80,000 credit
decisions, Mr. Eldridge said, and has expanded into Colombia and
Mexico.
mClinica
A career in big pharma with the likes of Pfizer, Roche and
Johnson & Johnson taught mClinica founder & CEO Farouk
Meralli how little drug companies know about their customers in
developing countries.
"I always saw a problem with 'last mile data'," said the
29-year-old Canadian, "and my idea was to create a company to solve
that."
The Philippines was the natural home for this project, he said,
and since setting up in 2013 Mr. Meralli has built a network of
around 1,500 local drugstores -- half of the total nationwide --
and enrolled them in mClinica Connect, a loyalty scheme through
which customers give their mobile phone number to their nearest
pharmacy in exchange for discounted medicines and medical
information.
The stores themselves benefit from increased customer loyalty,
Mr. Meralli said, while the big pharmaceutical companies -- who are
mClinica's paying clients -- get higher sales and rich market
data.
"We see it as a massive public health intervention, but through
the private sector," said Mr. Meralli, who is now gearing up for
rollouts in Indonesia and Vietnam.
SALt Corp.
Anyone who took high-school chemistry knows that metal
electrodes placed in salt water form a circuit capable of
generating tiny amounts of electrical current, but Aisa Mijeno
found a way to boost the power substantially by redesigning -- and
then patenting -- the circuit's metal components.
The result was the SALt Lamp, which runs for eight hours powered
only by one cup of salt water or seawater. It also has a USB socket
for charging phones, a reassuring addition in the disaster-prone
Philippines. She is now partnering with NGOs to help distribute the
lamp on a large scale across the developing world, and plans to
market a high-end version to outdoor product companies. The first
5,000 models will be ready for field-testing by June, Ms. Mijeno
said, and a production line is being set up in her home region of
Batangas, south of Manila.
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