3 Asian founders who created and run profitable tech businesses by following their heart

The Asia Startup Network serves to help impressive early stage Asia based tech startups grow quickly and expand globally, amplifying their positive impact in the world. We do it through two not-for-profit initiatives, Mentor for Hope and Makan for Hope. This newsletter serves to feature purpose driven early stage Asia based tech startups. Feel free to reach out to me, Elise Tan at elise(at)asiastartupnetwork(dot)com, if you wish to be introduced to any of the founders featured.

Samantha Lim, founder and CEO of Cloud Tech, Singapore (Edtech)

About the Founder

Samantha previously worked at Amazon Web Services as a Technical Trainer. During her time there, she volunteered and led multiple initiatives within ASEAN to teach coding and cloud competency to youths, ranging from primary to tertiary education levels. Through organising these initiatives, she found her passion in educating the younger generations, especially the under-privileged, and equipping them with life skills to boost their self confidence.

She started Cloud Tech, an educational platform targeted at primary to university students who are keen to learn coding and cloud competency skills. This platform consists a Learning Management System (LMS) and a gamified platform for users to learn coding. Cloud Tech also provides in-person training and curriculum development services. Their customers include AWS, secondary schools and polytechnics in Singapore.   

"We have enjoyed a positive P&L since inception and annual revenue is now 6-figure. We have grown the team from 2 employee at the start, to 4 full-time employees and an intern. We attained 100% customer retention from 2020 to 2021 and onboarded 200% more customers, with more in the pipeline. Our Learning Management System is currently in beta stage and has received positive feedback from our existing customers. In our initial test of market interest, schools offering Computing as an academic subject all expressed their interest in procuring licenses to our gamified platform to learn python when the beta is out." shared Samantha.

Fundraising Status
They are looking to raise S$500k to S$1 million from investors who have networks within the EdTech space in Singapore, Malaysia, USA and Europe, as they plan to expand to these markets.

Surbhi Krishna Singh, founder and CEO of FireVisor, Singapore (AI, Manufacturing, Solar)

About the Founder

As a manufacturing process engineer, Surbhi personally faced the issues they are now solving with FireVisor. She noticed technology in general is advancing at a fast pace but the manufacturing industry is still tuck with legacy software and redundant processes. In her previous work, she specialised in line improvement projects and she saw first hand how her projects would dramatically improve the lives of operators, technicians and engineers, and that allowed them to focus on creative tasks and not repetitive ones. This became her chief motivation was to bring the power of technology and data science to process engineers. She started FireVisor with her cofounder, Long, whom she met at Entrepreneur First, in Singapore.

They have achieved a hockey stick user growth rate within a year of launching the product, and their product has proven to be more superior in accuracy, speed and other performance metrics compared to the other competitors in the solar industry.

Do you know?
Manufacturing companies are losing 15-30% of sales revenue as Costs of poor quality (COPQ). The solar manufacturing industry is losing US$10B every year, while the semiconductor industry is losing US$55B every year because of high COPQ. Reducing these huge losses could transform marginally successful companies into hugely profitable ones. 

Understanding the root cause of every defect requires analysis of engineering data.As data generated daily from different manufacturing systems is voluminous  it takes 50% of a process engineer's time at work just collecting, cleaning and organizing failure data coming from various sources before they are able to analyze it. This process is also like firefighting and highly reactive in general. In most instances, engineers collate the data and pool together all their resources to fight one issue, while the root cause still persists in the line and defective products are being produced.  

Solution
FireVisor's defect detection and AI analytics platform understands manufacturer’s data to reduce product failure and improve productivity. Their goal is to predict defects before they even happen. FireVisor is making factories self aware factories of the future. Powered by their own data, companies will increase margins and save 15-30% of sales revenue. For a mid-sized company in Singapore, 1% reduction in defects means saving US$17.6M or more every year. Additionally, we are reducing the huge volume of scrap generated from factories every day by preventing defects.    

Fundraising status
They closed their seed round of S$880,000 in Feb 2019 and now raising another S$500,000.   

Mikko Laaksonen, cofounder, Singapore (Cybersecurity)

Mikko believes that having a decent level of web security need not be achieved with expensive and unaffordable tools. Hence, he founded Responsible Cyber in 2016. Their main product is a cyber platform called IMMUNE; a 360° fully-integrated cybersecurity platform delivering all the tech, with none of the jargon, empowering Small and Medium Businesses to stay one step ahead of black-hatted criminals. 

Since inception, their company has achieved 800% growth in team size. Recruiting talent in cybersecurity is a challenge in Singapore but they have managed to address it by re-training employees from other industries. It has been a success so far.      

They also provide cybersecurity as a service (Governance & Policies, Access Control Management, Secure Coding, Patch & Vulnerability  Management, Monitoring & SIEM, Backups & Incident Response, Third Party Management, Data Loss Protection, Threat Intelligence).

Responsible Cyber is part of the ICE71 Scale Program, supported by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) and Info-Communications Media Development Authority (IMDA). ICE71 runs a range of programmes designed to support individuals and start-ups in cybersecurity, from idea development to creation, acceleration and scaling of their start-up business.

Fundraising status
NUS Enterprise and Singtel Innovate have invested in their seed round previously.