Three Asian founders who are democratizing access to Education and data
Hello!
Happy Easter and hope you are having a good long weekend! Thank you for reading our bimonthly newsletter.
The Asia Startup Network serves to help promising early stage tech startups expand globally and amplify 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 tech startups based in Asia. Feel free to reach out to me, Elise Tan, if you wish to be introduced to any of the founders featured here.
Three Asian founders who are democratizing access to Education and data
Admit Offer
Himanshu Barthwal, Founder, Admit Offer (Edtech, India)
About the Founder
Founder of Admit Offer, Himanshu Barthwal has more than 18 years of experience in the international student recruitment industry and business links and network with more than 500 universities/colleges globally. Previously, he founded an Overseas Student Recruitment consultancy in 2002 and helped over 10,000 students to realise their dream to study abroad.
While working in the international student recruitment industry, it dawned on him that many aspiring students from smaller cities and towns are highly disadvantaged. The student recruitment agents whom they depend on lack access to valuable and concise information about universities and college options abroad as well as courses, scholarships, enrolment processes and timelines, etc.
The international student recruitment market (post-secondary) in general is highly fragmented. Hence, Barthwal wanted to democratize access to information and started to aggregate all the information and resources from their existing university partners on their online portal. He created a platform, Admit Offer (AdmitOffer.com) where students can select from 250 universities and colleges in the UK, Canada, Australia etc. They are currently still adding new partners to their current database of more than 250 universities and over 15,000+ courses.
Today, Admit Offer simplifies college admissions for student recruitment agencies to post-secondary institutions in Canada, UK, Australia, USA, NZ and Europe and shares commission revenue per student enrolled.
Rapid growth during COVID
They have experienced tremendous growth during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic with over 500 student enrolments through their recruitment partners for Canada, UK for the 2019-2020 intakes. According to Barthwal, they made a 7-digit revenue from commissions during the period.
Fundraising status
They are looking to raise $2.5 Million to expand their student recruitment establishment and network across India Subcontinent including Nepal, Srilanka, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Philippines.
Air School
Fatima Rizwan, Founder of Airschool (Edtech, Singapore)
About the Founder
Founder, Fatima Rizwan, was born in Pakistan. Growing up, her family did not have the means and she did not have the exposure to travel and receive education from top institutions. Hence, she strongly believes that everyone should have an equal opportunity to access quality education and no one should be disadvantaged due to their background, geography, gender, or race. This is why she started Airschool, where experts can teach online independently and students can learn, participate and interact with each other from literally anywhere in the world.
Airschool makes it simple for experts to launch recorded and cohort-based courses, build an audience and monetize it. Ever since its inception, over 100 experts have launched courses through Airschool, with participation of students from more than 70 countries.
They have helped professors and teachers access the opportunity to earn more than 3x their previous income by launching courses through Airschool. Students from over 70 countries have taken these courses. Airschool is enabling independent teaching. Professors and teachers now have the option of moving away from traditional education roles and become knowledge entrepreneurs through Airschool. This makes it easy for them to scale their reach and make their content affordable. Students on the other hand, have access to a large variety of quality teachers online on AirSchool.
Fundraising Status
They have previously raised funding from Entrepreneur First for their pre-seed round. Currently she is fundraising for $1m with 20% of the round committed.
AirBoxr
Saptarshi Nath and Shubham Kaushal, Founders, Airboxr (SaaS, Singapore)
About the Founders
Nath is a second-time entrepreneur and cofounder of Airboxr. He took his last company—Overcart—to 2M visitors/month and $8.5m in sales. He was also a management consultant specialising in data studies, and served customers from Fortune 100 companies. Prior to building Airboxr, Kaushal is a full-stack engineer who has helped many startups scale their technology. He was the first engineer at a Y-Combinator funded company, Chaldal, and one of the early engineers at the Israeli company, CallApp.
Airboxr helps non-technical business users make data-driven decisions without leaning on developers and BI analysts. Airboxr enables non-technical business users import, filter, and summarize information from any data source through an interactive, no-code UI within their spreadsheet. This makes downloading of Microsoft Excel files and requiring technical assistance unnecessary.
Users do not need to learn any new software or even shortcuts or formulas. At the back-end, Airboxr will convert the UI instructions into queries and return the results from SaaS systems, databases, and external data sources. It's like having a BI analyst within every spreadsheet.
In the last few months,
Airboxr.com (Make your Google Sheet analysis 10x faster) is ranked #3 on Product Hunt.
They have launched a public beta version of their product
Have acquired users from over 60 countries.
Fundraising Status
Airboxr has raised money from Entrepreneur First and received a SG Founders grant. They are currently raising their pre-seed round of $850,000, of which $150k-200k ideally from angels.
How the largest consumer startups in South-East Asia acquired their first 1000 users
(By Cheng Zishuang)
Inspired by Lennysan's post on ‘How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users - Issue 25’, Zishuang decided to do the same, but for Greater South East Asia. Given that there’s a lot of material out there that covers startups in a PR friendly manner, he thought a list that’s actionable for startup founders would come in useful.
There are many differences between launching your startup from the Bay Area as opposed to say, Jakarta. For one, the valuations and amounts you can raise is a lot more modest, internet penetration is a lot lower, and customer needs are inherently very different, which makes a lot of the best practises that are applicable to the US very different in Vietnam or Taiwan. The methods applied in SEA is a lot more grinding hard work as opposed to the legendary hacks that Silicon Valley companies like Airbnb’s Craig’s list hack...
Click here to read the rest of the article
Recent Startup funding news (Source: DealStreetAsia)
Investment: Indonesian online stock brokerage platform Ajaib Group raised an additional investment of $65 million in its Series A round led by Silicon Valley fintech investor Ribbit Capital. The funding comes after Ajaib raised $25 million in January for the same round.
Fintech: In Singapore, neo-banking startup StashFin completed raising $40 million to expand its operations across South Asia. The company, which is already present in India, is looking to tap newer markets such as Nepal and Sri Lanka in South Asia, its founder & CEO Tushar Aggarwal told us.
Fintech: Singapore-based wealth management platform Endowus raised S$23 million ($17 million) in a Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from SoftBank Ventures Asia.
Corporate Training: China’s corporate training service Yunxuetang entered the unicorn club after raising $190 million. The investment, which flowed into the company in two tranches, marked the Series E round for the company.
Supply Chain: In yet another transaction in China, supply chain financing platform Jiangsu Yincheng Network Technologyraised 500 million yuan ($76.3 million) in a Series C round led by GL Ventures and DCM.
By Elise Tan (founder), Hui Hong Seow (Curator) and Charlene Yip (Editor)