This startup wants to solve the talent crunch in Asia

One of the greatest woes in startup ecosystems across the world is the shortage of technical talent. Top-notch coders are like the hot girls at parties – few in number, yet in huge demand.

Coders who have equally good management skills are an even rarer sight. Chok Leang Ooi, co-founder and CEO of UX design and software development firm Agility, has met too many early-stage startup founders who have stalled their plans simply because they were unable to find the right CTO. “Every technology-focused startup is always going to need a good CTO in order to take the company to the next step, especially once they figure out their product-market fit and need to grow rapidly,” he says.

Ooi, who was born in Malaysia, has previously spent some time in Silicon Valley and New York’s startup scenes. Over there, he found that while ideas and funding were in abundance, many startups were still being held back by – surprise, surprise – the lack of talent.

Not just any development shop

Instead of feeling stifled by the shortage, Ooi saw an opportunity, and he decided to found Agility to fill in the gap. He is quick to emphasize that it’s not just “a vanilla outsourced development shop, which just takes requirements and implement as is” – he describes Agility as a startup product development company that partners and works with their clients closely:

They come to us with their ideas and visions, and together, we help them build that into wireframes, a minimum viable product, and eventually into a real product and a real business. In other words, we help these startups make things happen. Because we have been in the trenches ourselves and have worked with so many other startups across industries, our clients trust our expertise and judgments.

Their name reflects the agile software development process that they have mastered working with around 50 startups over the past three years. Ooi claims that this is their other advantage over other development firms. “In an industry where new trends and changes happen so rapidly, our value is in helping our startup clients stay ahead, which means we have to operate nimbly and be able to go to market quickly,” he explains. “Hence, we thought the name ‘Agility’ best reflects this principle.”

He admits that while several of the startups that have enlisted their help have failed, it is part and parcel of being in this industry. He notes that when they move on to found or join another startup, many actually bring Agility along to their next venture, which is an affirmation of the team’s ability.

Some of the bigger names that have gone on to success include personal finance site NerdWallet, sustainable fashion site Modavanti, and Boston-based SparkCommerce. Ooi shares that they have also recently started work with certain heavily-funded startups, but would only reveal their names in the months to come.

See: Should non-technical founders learn how to code?

Filling Asia’s talent gap

After finding validation in the US, Ooi is looking to bring his brand of agile development to Asia. He and his partner Trung Ngo – both born in Southeast Asia – have been keeping a keen eye on developments in the region:

I signed up for a Geeks on a Plane trip that took us through Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, and Indonesia. On that trip, every startup that we visited gave us a presentation. Through their presentations, we started to identify that the number one challenge they face that keeps them up at night is talent.

That’s not to say that there isn’t talent in the region. Rather, Ooi believes that there is a shortage in talent when it comes to popular startup programming languages such as Ruby on Rails, Python/Django, and HTML5, and he is bullish about the growth of talent in the industry in the future. For now, though, he sees a gap in Asia that needs to be plugged, and he wants Agility to be the one to fill it in. With the three years of experience in hand, their development team in Vietnam should be well-equipped to take on the new challenge.

With that in mind, Agility opened an office in Singapore earlier in August with the aim of growing their business across Southeast Asia. Their portfolio already includes names from Singapore and Malaysia such as The Luxe Nomad, Picky, Popcorn, Travelshopa, and MindValley. Ooi says that they are already engaged in talks with startups in Thailand and Indonesia, and several accounts are currently in the pipeline. “We’ve also got inquiries from startups in Australia,” he adds.

Not replacing the role of the CTO

Ooi is clear that they are not looking to replace CTOs altogether. Instead, he advises startup founders not to get carried away with finding the right CTO at the start. “Focus on getting your minimum viable product out the door, either by learning how to code yourself, looking for freelancers to do the job, or partnering with a firm like ours,” he says. “Try to get a right product market fit as soon as possible. When you do, additional funding will come naturally, and with that, you will be in a position to attract a much higher caliber CTO.”

On the topic of funding, Ooi is proud to say that Agility is an entirely bootstrapped operation thus far. “Our business has been growing quite profitably, and we also reinvest some of our profits to fund startups that we have worked with where in terms of culture we are a good fit with the founders,” he elaborates. However, he does not discount the possibility of raising funds in the near future.

(Image credit: Flickr user Ashley Baxter)

The post This startup wants to solve the talent crunch in Asia appeared first on Tech in Asia.

This startup wants to solve the talent crunch in Asia

Rovio exec quits to help a Japanese music startup go global

Hiroshi Asaeda, Beatrobo founder and CEO (left), pictured with new COO Antti Sonninen.

Finnish game developer Rovio, the creator of international smash hit Angry Birds, today sees a change in management at its Japan subsidiary. Effective today, country director Antti Sonninen will be replaced by Katsumi Oikawa, a marketing executive who has previously worked at Samsung, Sony, and Apple. Sonninen has revealed to Tech in Asia that he will be joining Tokyo-based startup Beatrobo as COO.

Beatrobo, which started as an online social music community in 2012, has since switched its focus from software to hardware. The company hopes that its PlugAir dongle, which instantly pulls music and other content from the cloud upon being connected to a mobile device’s headphone jack, will become the mixtape of the future.

“Beatrobo will now focus on global expansion and international hiring, unlike most domestic startups,” says founder and CEO Hiroshi Asaeda. “[Sonninen] is our first non-Japanese hire, and I think him joining us shows that if you have passion, if you have a big goal, even relatively small startups can attract cool people.”

Sonninen got his start at Rovio’s home office in 2011, working part-time as a market researcher. He transitioned into Rovio’s business development team before moving to Japan in 2012, serving as the country director since November of that year. In just three years, Sonninen says that Rovio Japan grew from approximately 80 people to more than 800 (Beatrobo, on the other hand, has just seven members).

After watching Rovio grow from a humble startup to a household name, Sonninen believes that he can help Beatrobo achieve the same:

If you look at the domestic startup scene, I think there’s a lot of potential. But something always puzzled me: why are there are so few big-name Japanese startups in the world? I observed the scene during my time at Rovio and realized that many companies are not big outside because they aren’t even trying. Beatrobo is more ambitious and more globally-minded than other startups here. PlugAir can definitely be a global player in the contents industry – even more than the product itself, I have faith in the team.

See: Music startup Beatrobo gets $1.1 million funding to reinvent the mixtape

As for Rovio Japan, it appears that the hiring of Oikawa may be further proof of the company’s push to become more of a global entertainment powerhouse than just a hit gaming company. What he lacks in gaming industry experience, Oikawa should make up with his skills in brand development and product marketing.

According to Japanese gaming industry insider Serkan Toto, the Japanese have yet to embrace Angry Birds – despite strong brand recognition in China and other parts of Asia. The franchise’s latest installment, Angry Birds Stella, is landing in Japan next month along with a special marketing campaign featuring the new (apparently female) title character.

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Rovio exec quits to help a Japanese music startup go global

Fashion brands in China work hard to get dedicated followers on WeChat

Julia Q. Zhu is the founder of Observer Solutions, a China-focused ecommerce consulting and research firm, and runs the China Ecommerce Pulse Newsletter. She formerly held management roles for Alibaba Group. She’s @juliaqzhu on Twitter.

In China, social media is more than just a way for people to stay ahead of the news and connect with friends. While Western companies tend to focus on advertising on social media, Chinese brands use social platforms for deeper customer engagement – and even for ecommerce.

WeChat, China’s most popular mobile messaging app with 438 million active users, has already become a handy tool for businesses in China – including foreign brands – to engage with Chinese customers. It’s used by more than two million bloggers, celebrities, media outlets, small companies, and major brands to reach out to people.

Italian online fashion store Yoox recently launched a shop inside WeChat (called the “Yoox online concept store”). The retailer not only uses WeChat for advertising, which is typically how businesses use social media in the US and Europe, but it also provides online shopping and customer service directly inside the messaging app.

From the Yoox store inside WeChat we can see a good model for how a brand can use the versatile social app. This is what the Italian brand does:

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  Shares the brand story – As shown in the case study picture below, the first tab on the bottom of Yoox’s WeChat official account is called ‘explore’. It allows WeChat followers to learn about the brand story, receive the latest news and updates from the retailer, and play a social game called Shake the Style. This mini game allows the brand’s WeChat followers to shake his/her phone to make various fashion matches that the user can then share directly on WeChat or other social media. That in turn helps spread the Yoox brand in China.

  
  


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  Online selling – The ‘shop’ tab is the second component. In this, Yoox’s WeChat followers can browse and shop in sections dubbed “New arrivals” or “Look book”. The store has “exclusive deals” for WeChat followers. WeChat’s own epayment system means that shoppers can complete payment directly within the app.

  
  


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  Providing instant services – The last tab is called ‘service’. It includes live-chat customer service, chat-based fashion consulting every Friday, special discount codes, and a general guide to Yoox’s WeChat store. The fact that WeChat is a messaging app makes it well suited to conversing with a brand representative in this way. All replies from the brand trigger notifications in the same way as a chat message from a friend.

  
  

See: LV or not LV? WeChat has a big problem with fake brand accounts

Chasing a $29 billion luxury market

A number of other brands are also making full use of WeChat. Another good example comes from US luxury brand Coach. Consumers in China will account for about 20 percent of global luxury sales in 2015, according to a report from McKinsey – that’s worth RMB 180 billion, or US$29.1 billion. It makes China a crucial luxury market.

Similarly to Yoox, Coach also uses WeChat to push out its latest products and news. It also sends out fashion guides and special offers to its followers. Coach has gone even further in trying out several brand awareness strategies on WeChat that are worth noting.

One such initiative ran in China in the run-up to Chinese New Year. Coach released a phone wallpaper (shown below) that spread virally between WeChat users in the country. The wallpaper captures much of the symbolism associated with Spring Festival, as it’s dubbed in Chinese. For example, the Chinese character 福 (fu) which means ‘luck and prosperity’, sits at the center of the wallpaper. Meanwhile, the color red is consistent with the Chinese New Year theme. Coach subtly incorporates its well-known logo as a pattern in the wallpaper’s background. The classy design and timing of its release allowed for a simple and effective viral campaign, spreading the branded wallpaper across new and existing WeChat followers.

In another ploy, Coach sometimes runs a lucky draw within its WeChat account that encourages consumers to return to its WeChat page on a regular basis. It’s easy for a WeChat user to quickly go to the Coach account and see if they’ve won anything in the lucky draw by tapping a single button.

Neither of these two approaches are particularly novel, but they demonstrate how Chinese consumers are willing to interact with brands on WeChat in a variety of ways – not all of which need to be highly complex. A simple piece of wallpaper that people want to share with friends or a giveaway set on a regular cadence are simple ways for Coach to increase the ‘stickiness’ of its WeChat presence and encourage Chinese consumers to interact with the brand.

See: China now has a luxury electric car brand after $149 million bid for Fisker

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Fashion brands in China work hard to get dedicated followers on WeChat

How America’s shale gas boom brought Rajasthan farmers a fortune and why it is being taken away

When shale gas companies in the United States hiked their production six-fold in the last six years, it brought untold prosperity to farmers living 21,000 km away in Rajasthan, the Indian desert state with poor economic and social indicators.

The source of that new prosperity was a processed powder called guar gum, which is used in fracking, a method of extracting shale gas that involves pumping pressurised gas into the ground. Guar gum is derived from a crop called guar. India is the world’s largest producer of guar.

India is, thus, also the world leader in guar gum. Derivatives of guar gum are used in several industries, including textiles, pharmaceuticals, food processing and oil extraction. But it was because of shale gas that India’s exports of guar gum shot up from Rs 121 crore ($20.2 million) in 2003-04 to Rs 21,287 crore ($3.5 billion at exchange rate of Rs60 to a dollar) in 2012-13, even occupying the top spot in India’s agri-export basket in fiscal 2013.

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According to PK Hissaria, president of Indian Guar Gum Manufacturers Association, in the last three years, nearly 80% of Indian guar-gum exports were directed to shale-gas producers in the US. Guar-gum powder has unique binding, thickening and emulsifying qualities, which make it suitable for fracking.

The demand spike caused a 10-fold increase in price. From about Rs3,000 (around $50 at today’s exchange rate) per 100 kg five years ago, the price of guar gum crossed Rs 30,000 (or $500) in 2012—a ten fold rise in five years. “There were visible signs of prosperity among farmers,” adds Hissaria. “Farmers were able to clear their debts.”

This is confirmed by Ashok Gulati, former chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), an Indian government entity that recommends the minimum price at which government can buy foodgrains from farmers. “I have heard stories of farmers with hordes of cash buying SUVs (sports utility vehicles) and luxury cars,” he says. Manufacturers and traders of guar gum also reaped a windfall.

But in the last year or so, the situation has reversed. “When prices went up, shale-gas producers started looking for alternatives, and have found synthetic alternatives supplied from China,” says Hissaria, who also owns a guar-gum production unit. In addition, oil producers have built inventory anticipating a further increase in prices in 2012, and this resulted in a drop in demand.

As a result, the price of guar gum has dropped sharply, and is presently at Rs5,500-Rs6,000 per 100 kg (around $90-100). Even at this price, it’s competitive for Indian constituencies interested in guar gum, feels Gulati, but only just. “It will be competitive if prices ranges between Rs 5,000 and Rs 10,000,” he adds.

For now, a rebalancing is under way. In the years that demand was rising, existing companies increased processing capacity and new entrepreneurs set up plants in the hope that demand from the shale gas industry would endure. According to data from Hissaria, industry capacity increased from around 600,000 MT (metric tonnes) in 2008-09 to around 1.3 million MT in 2013-14.

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Guar-gum powder has unique binding, thickening and emulsifying qualities, which make it useful for fracking.

But in 2013-14, he says, India exported only 602,000 MT. “Many companies are operating at 30% of production capacity, resulting in wafer-thin profit margins,” says Hissaria. They would like to increase capacity utilization—and increase profits and margins.

Exports did pick up in 2013-14. In value terms, between 2012-13 and 2013-14, India’s guar-gum exports shrank 45% to Rs11,734 crore. But this decline was entirely on account of price. Data from the ministry of agricultural shows that export volumes increased 48% during this period, indicating renewed demand from oil-drilling industries.

Meanwhile, farmers growing guar—mainly in the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Haryana—are still better off. They produce a total of 13 MT of guar crop a year, and the doubling of the price bar of guar gum in five years has pulled them out of a debt trap and lifted their lifestyle. All because of the shale gas boom in the US.

How America’s shale gas boom brought Rajasthan farmers a fortune and why it is being taken away

The next time you sit down for coffee or pancakes, you might actually be in a PayrollHero Lab

When a patron walks into The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Burgos Circle, Fort Bonifacio, he enters into a testing environment.

Business ideas are put up to the light, so to speak, in the warm, glossy interior of this coffeeshop. In one example, the sponsoring company wanted to see how employees would act if they have a “like” to give to a coworker at the end of each business day.

This is PayrollHero Labs. PayrollHero uses this lab to try out its new products and new features that are related to business intelligence. As of this moment, PayrollHero provides solutions relating to time, attendance, scheduling, payroll, and human resources information systems, but this could evolve as products are put to the gauntlet in its eponymous lab. Their clients include BreadTalk, Candy Corner, Krispy Kreme Donuts, Zendesk, and Faburrito.

Just looking around

PayrollHero Labs is only about three months old. It was formed because PayrollHero CEO Michael Stephenson wanted to test out ideas live at client establishments after testing them internally within the team. Unlike many corporate labs, PayrollHero Labs has multiple locations. In addition to the one at The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, PayrollHero also has labs at Krispy Kreme and iHop. PayrollHero pitched the idea of having a lab at one of their locations, and all three companies readily agreed.

The hope is that the findings across the different outlets will not conform with one another, but that they will differ. “We’re looking to see why they are different,” says PayrollHero co-founder and head of business development Stephen Jagger. “So that we can see the uniqueness across the different stores – iHop being a full service restaurant, Krispy Kreme being a factory store, and The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf being a traditional coffeehouse.”

Though PayrollHero Labs is ostensibly designed to test out new products, it’s also supposed to serve the broader goal of helping the team better empathize with its end users. This process can go really in depth.

Jagger used iHop as an example. The PayrollHero crew toured the restaurant, and they were abuzz with questions. “How does their kitchen work? What are the notices on the boards in the back? How do they disseminate information across multiple locations?” he says. “We’re not looking for something – we’re just looking.”

The goal is that the team finds inspiration to develop a product that solves their customers’ pain points. “The more time we spend with our end user and learn about their role, the better it is for them,” says Jagger.

See: How one startup creates ‘adventure engineers’ to live on the edge in Southeast Asia

Making the team

Developing great products may not even be as important as weeding out the bad ones, which may be promising enough to test in PayrollHero Labs but not great enough to make it out. Jagger emphasized that the goal of this testing is not to bloat their offerings with more products and more features, but to find the ones that are genuinely valuable to their users. PayrollHero prides itself in being what it calls “ridiculously customer focused.”

To find those, PayrollHero has to go through lots of chaff. For example, the PayrollHero team tried out securing “manager tools” with a pin system. “Problem was it was just one more thing for managers to remember,” Jagger says. “In theory, it made sense, but in application, it did not work.”

The feature was quickly nixed. In assessing new products and new features, the PayrollHero team employs an evaluation process that is equal parts quantitative (data driven) and qualitative (feedback driven).

In listening to their clients, PayrollHero pays attention to everyone. While the manager tool is an example of a feature for management, PayrollHero wants to provide value from the CEO all the way down to the cleaner.

In providing their clients with business intelligence, one of the major goals is to help them retain their best employees, and to do so for longer. Churn, after all, is a serious problem in the Philippines – workers tend to have very short stays at companies. Part of PayrollHero’s value proposition is that their data can reverse this trend.

According to Jagger, even PayrollHero’s most basic features serve this purpose. For example, their time and attendance analytics will allow the CEO of a company to see which of their employees has never been late.

Though these types of employees are anomalies, they provide a valuable case study, one unique to their company: Why has this person never been late? How we can make other employees as punctual as this one? How can we reward or recognize this employee for their excellence, so that they don’t leave for a competitor?

According to Jagger, PayrollHero’s higher level tools – such as the Daily Pulse feature through which employees can “like” a coworker – only serve this purpose even more. If a worker or manager at an establishment is consistently liked, the manager gets a good lead on who to promote and fight to keep. Conversely, if an employee is almost never liked, the absence of feedback can be an indicator of who to let go.

When asked how people generally tend to give feedback for Daily Pulse – do they vote for friends? do they vote exclusively based on merit? do they vote for their peers more than they do their higher-ups? – Jagger deferred to PayrollHero’s evaluation process with a smile. “We haven’t pulled the reports,” he says. “So we can’t draw conclusions just yet.”

Top image via The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Philippines Facebook page. Editing by Jeff Quigley. 

The post The next time you sit down for coffee or pancakes, you might actually be in a PayrollHero Lab appeared first on Tech in Asia.

The next time you sit down for coffee or pancakes, you might actually be in a PayrollHero Lab

A billionaire’s son designs an app to keep nosy parents at bay

Whatsapp founder Jan Koum migrated from Ukraine to the US when he was 16 and his family got an apartment on a social support scheme. Co-founder Brian Acton was turned down for a job by Facebook.

The hardships Kavin Bharti Mittal has had to face in life are decidedly of a different nature. His father, Sunil Bharti Mittal founded India’s largest telco, Bharti Airtel, and is among the country’s richest men.

While Sunil Bharti Mittal has been on the forefront of India’s telecom revolution, with his backing, Mittal Jr. is aiming to ride the next communication wave, through an instant messaging app his company built—Hike.

Whatsapp currently dominates India’s instant messaging scene—it has 60 million active users in the country. The $19 billion price tag Whatsapp got earlier this year was a reminder of the value in getting young people in the developing world depend on you for their communication.

From its launch in 2012, Hike has grown rapidly. In July, it was the most downloaded app in India on both the India Apple app store and the Google Play store for Android devices. The company claims 35 million users, of which about half are active. Some 80% of the users are under 25 years of age, according to the company.

Whatsapp is still way ahead in India, having been popular even before Hike was born. But the two-year old Hike is confident that it can carve a niche for itself in the Indian market.

“We believe there will be two messaging apps in this country,” said 26-year-old Kavin, who met us in his chic glass-walled office in Gurgaon. “One is simple messaging, WhatsApp would be that company, the second is much more rich form of messaging. We believe Hike is going to be the other one.”

In order to woo Indian users, Hike has added many features that WhatsApp lacks. It allows users to password-protect certain chats. You can also set privacy levels for individuals. For instance, you can decide whether a person can see that you have seen their message or not.

“Lots of Indian kids live with their parents till they are 24 or 25 and they don’t have privacy and sometimes they share a phone with the family,” explained Kavin. “Kids chat all night and they don’t want their parents to know.”

They also “reward” users for being on Hike. You can earn Rs20 (in mobile talk time) for each friend you invite to Hike, a price that Kavin believes is not much for customer acquisition. The app also rewards its users with coupons that can be redeemed at fast food outlets or shopping websites.

Hike also has stickers with local context and content, something that Whatsapp’s universal emojis can’t match.

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Hike has relied on word-of-mouth publicity and launched its first ad campaign in July. But according to a recent survey by mobile advertising firm InMobi, TV ads have limited influence in driving adoption of mobile messaging apps. Browsing app stores and word-of-mouth publicity have the strongest impact.

Whatsapp is not the only competition. Other global apps such as Line and WeChat are also trying to capitalize on the growing number of mobile internet users in India. Vishal Tripathi, a technology analyst at research firm Gartner, believes that Hike is doing better job at localizing features than others.

“WeChat and Line don’t give reasons to customers to move from WhatsApp to their platform,” said Tripathi. “I don’t see them aggressively reaching out to the consumer. But there are certain features that WhatsApp doesn’t have… which work in favor of Hike.”

Wants to clock 100 million users

Mittal studied engineering at Imperial College in the United Kingdom and has interned with McLaren, Google and Goldman Sachs. He is into car racing and flies planes when he can find the time. He wants to make Hike “Internet’s playground in India”.

The company is funded by Bharti Softbank (BSB), a joint venture between Bharti and Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank. BSB has invested some $47 million in Hike—$7 million in 2013 and $14 million in March 2014. In the latest round of funding, announced a day after our meeting, Hike raised $65 million from Tiger Global and BSB.

Mittal doesn’t have a revenue stream in mind just yet. He is in fact not going to think about making money before Hike crosses 100 million users, which he wants to do in the next 18 months.

From a three-member team, Hike has quickly grown to 100 people. It recently hired 30 fresh graduates from top engineering colleges. New employees get MacBooks and a smartphone of their choice.

A billionaire’s son designs an app to keep nosy parents at bay

17 startup funding rounds in Asia last week

We ended August with a big bang as we saw 17 startups get funded in the last week of the month. The biggest winner has got to be India’s messaging app Hike, with US$65 million funding raised in its latest round.

1. Xingyun | China

Xingyun, a Chinese niche social network for people interested in the arts and entertainment industry, has just raised an RMB 40 million (US$6.5 million) series A round of funding led by Shenzhen Capital Group.

2. Wecash | China

China’s first big data credit assessment startup, Wecash, has raised RMB 40 million yuan (US$6.5 million) from IDG Ventures.

3. Itugo | China

Itugo, a site that recommends fashion and lifestyle brands to women, bagged an undisclosed amount of funding from Matrix Partners China, InCapital, and a fund managed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

4. WeYap | Indonesia

Online city directory WeYap has received an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Mountain SEA Ventures. The site was beta launched on August 18, one day after Indonesia’s independence day.

5. Tripvisto | Indonesia

Indonesian travel startup Tripvisto, has secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding from East Ventures. The team will use the money to hire more employees and to improve their products. (Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in TechinAsia. See our ethics page for more information.)

6. Hike | India

Hike, the Indian answer to WhatsApp, Line, and WeChat, has just raised its largest round of funding: US$65 million led by Tiger Global Management. Bharti SoftBank (BSB), a joint venture of Bharti Enterprises and Japan’s Softbank Corporation, also participated in the latest round. Earlier, Hike had raised US$7 million in 2013, and another US$14 million in April this year from BSB.

7. Theatro | India

Theatro, the developer of voice controlled wearable communications devices for hourly workers in the retail, hospitality and manufacturing sectors, announced it raised US$5 million in series A funding from Khosla Ventures.

8. Attero Recycling | India

Roorkee-based Attero Recycling offers end-to-end electronic waste (ewaste) recycling solutions. It just announced an INR 100 crore (US$16.5 million) series C funding.

9. PriceBag | India

Product discovery and price comparison engine PriceBag netted US$2 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors.

10. Ybrain | South Korea

South Korean startup Ybrain revealed it secured US$3.5 million in series A funding to build up its healthcare platform and launch medical wearables.

The startup is applying its know-how to an upcoming headband that claims to slow the effects of Alzheimer’s, a degenerative brain disease that initially leaves sufferers forgetful and confused, before it later shuts down bodily functions and leads to death. The headband entered clinical trials in South Korea last month and is slated for release early in 2015.

11. Vivit | Japan

Tokyo-based excursion buddy and destination discovery startup Vivit nabbed JPY 30 million (US$300,000) from Venture United and Incubate Fund.

12. Zuu | Japan

Tokyo-based financial advisor matching platform Zuu Advisors announced it raised JPY 105 million (US$1 million) from four angel investors.

13. Korbit | South Korea

Korbit, South Korea’s leading Bitcoin exchange, wallet and merchant processor, has closed a US$3 million series A funding round led by SoftBank Ventures Korea. Pantera Capital led the round from the US, with participation from BAM Ventures and previous investors Bitcoin Opportunity Corp, Tim Draper, Pietro Dova, and initial investor Strong Ventures.

14. PatSnap | Singapore

Singapore startup PatSnap has raised a S$4.5 million (US$3.6 million) series A round led by Vertex Venture Partners, the venture capital arm of Singapore-government-owned investment firm Temasek Holdings. It has raised a total of S$6.7 million (US$5.4 million) to date.

PatSnap wants to simplify the process of searching for patents. It has a search engine that makes finding patents easier, visualizing search results as 3D topographical maps. Patents are grouped into ‘islands’ according to technology area, and colors represent different companies. The startup has already gotten over 500 clients worldwide, including NASA, IBM, Pepsi, Xiaomi, and Vodafone.

15. MyDoc | Singapore

Singapore startup MyDoc recently announced that it has attracted investors. It completed an early-stage funding round of an undisclosed amount led by August Capital Partners. Spring SEEDS Capital, a Singapore government-related fund, also joined the round.

MyDoc offers a web and mobile service where patients can consult doctors online and seamlessly share their personal health data. It hopes that will result in lower healthcare costs.

16. HipVan | Singapore

HipVan, a Singapore-based ecommerce startup that sells “great designs” in home and furnishings, fashion, art, and other categories, has completed its $1.4 million series A financing round led by LionRock Capital and Skype co-founder Toivo Annus. This round marks the second time Annus has backed the startup, suggesting HipVan is looking promising and hitting its targets.

17. Spavista | Indonesia

Spavista, an Indonesian platform that lets consumers search for and book beauty and wellness services, announced it has received an angel investment amounting to S$200,000 (US$160,000) from the founding team of Singapore’s automotive marketplace SGCarMart. The Bali-based team will use the cash to hire a few people in Jakarta as it focuses on acquiring more partners in the capital city area.

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17 startup funding rounds in Asia last week