Andy Davis has been a startup founder for about as long as he can remember. From conducting market research for ideas while in university to launching multiple companies in industries including edtech and enterprise software, a passion for entr

The Key to TelloTalk’s Success: Localization

Jan 18th, 2021 31m 48s

Once thought to be a feature and not a business, messaging apps have seen a meteoric rise to popularity over the past decade. There’s WeChat in China, KakaoTalk in South Korea, and now TelloTalk in Pakistan. Founded in 2017, TelloTalk has seen

Building One of the Tech Giants of Tomorrow in Pakistan

Nov 11th, 2020 49m 10s

For being home to the fifth largest population in the world, Pakistan has a comparatively small startup community. That said, the country is hitting an inflection point, with internet and smartphone usage becoming more and more common. It’s not

Taking a Mobile-first Approach to Democratizing Financial Services in ASEAN

Nov 6th, 2020 34m 28s

Looking back on the past decade, one of the most notable shifts has been the rapid spread of mobile technology, especially in Southeast Asia. But while consumers and startups were quick to make that shift, older companies found it difficult to

The Journey to Launching a Virtual Events Platform Years Before the Pandemic Hit

Nov 3rd, 2020 38m 2s

They say that with startups, timing is everything. Being early, or late, is the same as being wrong. This year has brought about more change than we can count, but with change comes opportunity for some. And for Johnny Boufarhat and the team at

Applying AI to the Ever-Expanding Music Industry

Oct 22nd, 2020 53m 14s

The music industry has gone through massive changes in recent decades. Gone are the days of being able to track each week’s new releases. Now, over 40,000 tracks are uploaded on to music platforms each day. While new technologies have led to a

Using Data to Reinvent the P2P Lending Market in ASEAN

Oct 7th, 2020 27m 43s

Fintech as a sector has been exploding for the better part of a decade now. Fueled by mass amounts of new data and powerful algorithms, startups around the world have sprung up to innovate within a once stagnant industry. Within fintech, peer-t

Equipping Offline Retailers in ASEAN with the Tools to Thrive in the Modern Age

Oct 5th, 2020 32m 5s

The rise of e-commerce companies in recent years has made it easy to forget about in-store retail. But, in many parts of the world, physical stores still make up for the lion’s share of money spent. Fave, a startup based in Kuala Lumpur, is loo

Connecting the Dots to Launch a Travel Startup in Myanmar

Sep 7th, 2020 32m 47s

When users head to Oway’s website to book travel in and out of Myanmar, they arrive at an easy-to-use portal where planning a trip end-to-end is within a few clicks. Much like U.S.-based Expedia, the 8-year-old startup offers up flight, hotel,

Optimizing Waterflows Using Machine Learning and IoT

Sep 4th, 2020 26m 5s

From large metropolises like Singapore to smaller villages in places like Thailand, water is a constant need that flows through any community. And with climate change accelerating, the demand to properly manage this vital utility has never been

The Rules That Have Guided India’s Artists for Thousands of Years, Also Guide This Startup’s Growth

Sep 3rd, 2020 45m 55s

It began with a table that Zwende co-founder Innu Nevatia couldn’t find. She had this image of the perfect piece of furniture, but it didn’t exist anywhere outside of her head. No one was making quite what she wanted. In the process of scouring

Betting on a New Wave of Pakistani Entrepreneurs

Sep 3rd, 2020 29m 1s

For Kalsoom Lakhani, investing in the future of the Pakistani startup ecosystem was something of a homecoming. Having grown up in Pakistan before moving to the U.S. for university, Lakhani watched as her native country began to assemble the pie

Building at VC Scale in Southeast Asia

Aug 14th, 2020 26m 37s

Binh Tran, the founder of Klout and a partner at VC firm 500 Startups, looked out over time and geography and saw in Vietnam a place with a steadily growing engineering culture, and a population ready for an economic breakout. The question he n

Open Sourcing Investment Analysis

Aug 13th, 2020 34m 17s

The power of the open source software movement is how it harnesses the collective power of many developers to solve a shared problem. Raghav Kapoor, CEO and co-founder of startup Smartkarma, is looking to apply that same sense of collaboration

From Zero to Global in Five Years

Jul 28th, 2020 30m 27s

It was not by chance that Kamarul Muhamed combined his financial background and drone obsession into an AI-powered drone services startup. Aerodyne is Muhamed’s fourth startup, so he can spot a great opportunity. But even he didn’t fully appre

Ideas are Easy, Execution is Hard: Here’s How to Execute

Jul 24th, 2020 28m 34s

As every startup founder or would-be founder knows, there is an endless supply of ideas for the next great product, or the next great company. It is uncanny (but maybe not surprising in our information-at-warp-speed lives) that what may seem li

Seeing Yourself Through Machine Learning

Jul 17th, 2020 25m 53s

Michael Musandu grew up in Zimbabwe and South Africa before heading to the Netherlands to study computer science as an undergrad and then in graduate school. While shopping for clothes online Musandu had the experience, as many do, of never see

Inside Angel Investing: Teach Me Everything You Know About Virality. Lesson No. 1 -- There is No Such Thing as True Virality

Jul 16th, 2020 54m 30s

Rahul Vohra already knew there was a startup CEO + productivity love connection at his first startup, Rapportive. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have built the contact management email extension. What he didn’t know was how much that affinity would cre

Rewrite, Redevelop, and Rebuild: The Hard Choices That Led to the Success of Perx Technologies

Jul 14th, 2020 28m 42s

Anna Gong was brought into Perx Technologies in late 2014 as CEO to lead the Singapore-based lifestyle app company through its next stage of growth. But instead of scaling things to greater heights, Gong found herself shutting down the core bus

Inside Angel Investing: Chris Mairs’ Embarrassingly Long History of Getting it Right

Jul 2nd, 2020 45m 19s

Telecom software maker Metaswitch Networks was bootstrapped for the first 25 years of its profitable existence before the team decided to take outside investors including Sandhill Road standout Sequoia Capital. A few years after Sequoia investe

Inside Angel Investing: How Long Have You Been Working on This?

Jun 16th, 2020 42m 21s

The time and cost it takes to build things has come way down for all kinds of startups. So, unless you are deep in the R&D game, the answer to, “How long have you been working on this?” takes on deeper significance, says Seedcamp’s Reshma Sohon

What’s Behind the Startup Boom in Vietnam

Jun 11th, 2020 27m 44s

Southeast Asia is on the verge of an economic breakout, says VC Olivier Raussin. So how can founders building in these tough times be ready to hit the accelerator? Conserve cash, conserve cash, and take some time for yourself.

Farming’s Future is Already Present in Australia

May 31st, 2020 23m 44s

These are not the times to try and dance around the realities of what it takes (and costs) to run a startup, says Emma Weston, CEO and co-founder of Sydney, Australia-based AgriDigital. AgriDigital straddles the worlds of farming and fintech, o

Technology’s Role in Supporting the Very Human Need to Create

May 8th, 2020 11m 33s

Georg Petschnigg doesn’t think of himself as purely a designer, yet he has spent a career building products like Paper and Paste that helps us all create more beautiful things in the course of our work and fun. “It’s human potential,” says Pets

What Startup Founders Need at This Moment: It Starts with a Very Cool Head on Your Shoulders

Apr 30th, 2020 46m 3s

Fred Destin, founder of London-based Stride.VC, has been in the venture business for more than two decades, and what he sees now in the startup investment world is not surprisingly a substantially tightening economic picture. Startup valuations