The year of the start-up was 2015

In fact, 2015 was the year of the start-up in Thailand, driven by stakeholders throughout the tech ecosystem.

 

Telecoms boost acceleration programmes

Mobile-phone operators have been playing a key role in boosting the start-up eco-system for many years. They are continuing to put a lot of effort into the creation of many more potential start-ups. They have also expanded in size and capability every year as well as encouraging tech start-ups to make their pitches on the regional and global stages. 

In 2016, Advanced Info Service (AIS) plans to extend its start-up pitching throughout the year with the aim of seeking more services to serve its 40 million users, maintaining its annual event-based start-up programme, AIS The Start-up, which it initiated in 2011.

Suvit Arayavilaipong, senior vice president for product management, said AIS was to play a role as a business enabler for start-ups by taking on some of them as business partners.

Apart from welcoming more start-ups to pitch their projects in hopes of being business partners, AIS aims to build the success stories of Thai start-ups so they can be successfully commercially deployed in abroad. The target next year is to get a couple of start-ups into countries in Singapore Telecommunications’ business environment, which boasts 575 million users throughout Asia, Suwit said.

Total Access Communication this year continued its start-up acceleration programme, DTAC Accelerate Batch 3, and established a co-working space of almost 500 square metres to support start-ups. 

Chief executive officer Lars Norling said this year saw good signs for the telecommunications industry, since many participants in the programme pitched their innovations for the first time.

The goal of the DTAC Accelerate programme is to promote creativity and business innovation in the mobile Internet ecosystem through the introduction of new and colourful applications that enhance the lifestyles and improve the quality of life of Thai people. 

 

Media tech start-ups

The media industry is also playing an important role in helping to get start-ups recognised widely. This year, digital marketing medium Thumbsup and the co-working space HUBBA have jointly invested in Techsauce Media, which is set to play a role as the media focus on the start-up community. 

Techsauce Media has three business units, for media, research and events. It was only founded this year, but it already has a track record of hosting start-up events under the Thumbsup brand. 

Techsauce Media arranged the ninth Start It Up Conference, which had 800 participants. It was the biggest tech start-up event in Thailand to date. Next year, the short-term goal is to scale up the start-up conference into a tech conference with 3,000 to 4,000 participants. 

“It will not be and event for only start-ups but will allow enterprise and technology providers to come to support the start-up ecosystem in Thailand,” said Techsauce Media co-founder Oranuch Lerdsuwankij. “Techsauce Media will play a role as connector. We are Thai, so we understand the pain of Thai start-ups. The things we do are to help address Thai start-ups’ problems.” 

The long-term goal of Techsauce Media is to expand its footprint in the Indochina region including Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. It will start to pilot programmes next year. To do so, it will have to raise funds, since Techsauce Media itself is also a start-up business.

 

Start-up hero 

Founded in 2012, Ookbee’s dream was to be a Thai version of Amazon. It started out by getting Bt57.84 million in funding from InVent, the investment arm of InTouch. Now Ookbee is planning a Series C round of fundraising, aiming for US$10 million (nearly Bt36 million) in the first half of 2016. It targets doubling its revenue next year while increasing its user base by at five to six times.

Currently, Ookbee’s has more than 30 million active users in its five communities – comics, fiction, feel-good stories, music, and magazines. 

Ookbee started out as an e-book and digital publishing platform, but now has expanded as a community platform for content creators. It has also expanded to other countries in Southeast Asia including Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. 

Apart from providing digital goods such as e-book, Ookbee also provides physical goods. In a joint venture with one of its investors, Cosmos, it has opened Ookbee Mall, aiming at to turn active users of its digital goods into customers for its physical goods. 

Ookbee is one of the pioneer start-ups, and Natavudh “Moo” Pungcharoenpong, co-founder and CEO of the company, has became a start-up hero who inspires a lot of younger people to be as successful as him.

“So many people love the story, but I always tell them that everyone can actually be much bigger than Ookbee,” he said.

 

Community for start-ups

Co-working space also has an important role in supporting the start-up ecosystem, since it is not only a place for working but also a community where start-up stakeholders can meet up, including founders, programmers, designers and so on. 

Currently, there are around 60 co-working spaces throughout the country. Not many of them focus on tech start-ups, but one that does is HUBBA. 

Amarit “Aim” Charoenphan, 29, co-founder and co-CEO of HUBBA, said that among the 60 co-working spaces, HUBBA was top of mind for start-ups. 

Currently, HUBBA operates six co-working spaces, three in Bangkok, two in Chiang Mai and one in Laos. It claims to have aided the professional and personal development of more than 10,000 people in the tech start-up community. 

Amarit said that simply offering a good environment for working was not enough to help start-ups become successful. HUBBA also plays a role as coach and business partner in a start-up’s journey from Day 1 on every step of the journey, starting from idea, to forming a team, to raising capital, to marketing.

In 2016, HUBBA aims to have 10 co-working-space locations. It will also offer more intensive courses to build human resources for start-ups including back-end developers, mobile developers, user experience designers, and data scientists.

It is also plans a Series A round of fundraising, targeting $1 million to $2 million. Earlier, HUBBA received pre-Series A funding of $350,000 from a group of venture capitalists and private investors. 

The money will be used to offer a new service called Fine My Node (findmynode.com), which is set to be an Airbnb for office space and was soft-launched early this month. It plans to have 100 locations by early next year. 

The concept of Fine My Node is to allow start-ups with large teams to find office space rather than using HUBBA’s co-working space. 

HUBBA next year also plans to expand abroad. 

The ultimate goal of HUUBA is to become a successful start-up with company valuation of $1 billion some time in the future.

“For me, we want to prove that co-working spaces work as a business, that they help support the Thai start-up and freelancing ecosystem by changing Thailand’s culture into more collaboration and that these hubs are where different people with different ideas, discipline, and expertise intersect and meet, can generate interesting relationships, project collaboration and better teams, products, and start-ups,” Amarit said.

 

School for start-ups

Disrupt University offers programmes combining the frameworks from top idea accelerators in Silicon Valley, classes taught at Stanford University in California, and the practical knowledge and tools used by start-up communities and tech companies in Silicon Valley. 

Disrupt University, founded and run by Krating Poonpol, has brought a lot of people into Thailand’s tech-start-up community. It was stablished in 2012.

Venture capital funds

The 500 TukTuks fund, an arm of the 500 Startups Silicon Valley venture capital fund, debuted this year with the aim of boosting Thai tech start-ups. The fund has set aside $12 million to invest in 60 to 70 Thai start-ups through three years, ending in July 2018. It focuses on investing in the early stages of start-ups, with $100,000 each. It has already invested in 10 Thai tech start-ups.

InVent, the investment arm of InTouch, continues to invest in Thai tech start-ups. It has an annual investment budget of about Bt200 million. InVent started out in 2012 by investing in Ookbee and continued with Meditech Solution and Computerlogy in 2013, and Infinity Levels Studio and Sinope in 2014. This year, InVent has invested in Playbasis (Bt50 million) and Golfdigg (Bt23.83 million).

Iyara VC, established this year, is set to be a Thai venture capital fund for Thai tech start-ups. It was founded by four people who have a long and successful history of implementing technology solutions in key industry domains including hotels, retail, restaurants, banking, and the public sector. 

Iyara VC is an angel fund that invests up to Bt3 million in each start-up. Initially, it has a total of Bt10 million. Over five years, it plans to invest Bt300 million in 100 start-ups. Its first investment was in household app Fixzy. 

Kasikornbank this year has actively supported Thai tech start-ups. This month, the bank established the Kasikorn Business Technology Group, which consists of subsidiary companies Kasikorn Technology Group Secretariat, Kasikorn Labs, Kasikorn Soft, Kasikorn Pro, and Kasikorn Serve, to develop technology related to digital banking and develop the strategy to invest in or partner with financial technology (FinTech) firms. 

Previously, KBank partnered with operators to support a tech-start-up pitching and acceleration programme. The bank has also arranged workshops to tighten the partnerships between the bank and FinTech firms. 

Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) has supported start-ups along with Amazon Web Services to host “AWS Innovation Insight on Cloud Computing for Digital Enterprise and Thai Start-ups”. 

Bank of Ayudhya has also been getting involved in tech start-ups. This year, it launched an activity called “Krungsri Uni Start-up 2015” to get university students to pitch their financial applications.

The crowd-funding model debuted in Thailand with the official launch of www.MEEFUND.com operated by First Coin Company with the concept of being a crowd-funding platform for transforming ideas into reality. MEEFUND aims to become a leading crowd-funding platform in Asia within five years. 

 

Start-ups of the year

Many Thai tech start-ups have succeeded in raising funds this year. 

Claim Di, the DTAC Accelerate 2014 winner, has been successful in receiving Series A funding of $2 million, led by CyberAgent Ventures and various investors, including Golden Gate Ventures, 500 Start-ups, 500 Durians, DTAC Accelerate, Double A, and two Thai private investors. This has brought the company’s total worth to $10 million.

Claim Di is a successful case of a tech start-up that transformed from a 20-year-old small business. Kittanan Anuphan, CEO of Anywhere 2 Go, developer of Claim Di, said the company aimed grow its revenue tenfold from Bt20 million this year to Bt200 million in 2016. 

To achieve this goal, the company will launch new services including Claim Di Assist, Claim Di Call, and Claim Di Bike; expand its services throughout the country; and expand into two or three markets outside Thailand. Its primary targets are Malaysia, South Korea or Japan, whose auto-insurance markets are similar in size to the Thai market and among the largest in Asia.

Anywhere 2 Go has grown by 15 times since the first-round investment in 2014.

Southeast Asian e-commerce service provider and online distributor aCommerce this year completed a major milestone in its fundraising with a $5-million injection by existing shareholders to fuel the rapid growth of the company, specifically in building out its tech platforms and growth of e-commerce in Indonesia. 

Investors include Ardent Capital, Indonesian conglomerate Sinarmas, and Southeast Asia-based Inspire Ventures; aCommerce previously raised $10.7 million in June 2014 – one of the largest Series A rounds in Southeast Asia. 

The goal of aCommerce is to transform e-commerce in Southeast Asia.

This month, aCommerce signed a strategic partnership with DKSH Group, with the latter acquiring a 20-per-cent stake in aCommerce for an undisclosed amount, giving the company access to DKSH clients and infrastructure across the Asia-Pacific region.

Priceza.com, a shopping search engine and price-comparison website founded in 2010, has been backed by CyberAgent Ventures, a global investor in online businesses, since 2013. 

The company aims to be the largest player in Southeast Asia after raising Series A funding of $2 million by early 2016. It aims double its 2015 revenue to Bt60 million next year.

In Thailand, about 4.5 million people visit Priceza.com per month, of whom about 2.5 million click on a merchant’s link to go shopping. The 2.5 million people shopping on Priceza’s partners’ websites account for 75,000 orders per month, which calculates to Bt500 million in monthly online purchases.

Thanawat Malabuppa, co-founder and CEO of Priceza, said that in 2016, all of its portfolios would double, including raising the number of users to 9 million, leading to 5 million transactions and partnerships with 1,000 online merchants. 

Next year, Priceza will spend the proceeds from Series A funding on teams, marketing and operations across the region with the aim of strengthening its business position in each market. Also, Priceza.com will increase its online price-comparison services for more product categories, from only e-commerce products to financial and insurance products.

The Priceza app has already surpassed 150,000 downloads and aims to hit 1 million by the end of 2016.

Priceza was the winner in the Retail & Supply Chain Management category at APICTA (Asia Pacific ICT Alliance) 2015. 

Golfdigg received investment of Bt23.83 million from InVent. It was also one of eight start-ups that participated in the InVent Accelerate programme last year.

Golfdigg, the developer of a golf-course booking application, won Advanced Info Service’s “The Start-up 2014” competition and, this year, a Thailand ICT Award in the Tourism and Hospitality category. 

The company aims to triple its revenue from Bt3.6 million this year to Bt15 million in 2016. Currently, Golfdigg has 20,000 members, handles 500 transactions per day, and serves 24 golf courses. By next year, it aims to double the number of members to 40,000 and increase the number of golf courses to between 50 and 60. From 2016 to 2019, it aims to raise Series A funding.