Last Saturday, ThumbsUp, the leading tech blog in Thailand, organized a annual event with the theme “Thai Startup Year in review 2013″. Here are some main points briefed from the event.
Highlights
- Sharing from Thai startup in Sillicon Valley: Apisit Toompakdee, co-founder of Jupiter, a photo-sharing app. And Brad Phaisan Co-founder of AdsOptimal (Startup in YCombinator)
- Stamp, a loyalty app won “Most Promising Startup” award at Thailand Satelite. Since October 2012, Stamp has had a total of 75,000 downloads with 55 merchants on board. Partners include global franchise Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Citibank.
- Builk got in to 500 startups Batch 7. Builk is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that allows construction companies to manage their projects.
- Thailand’s top e-book store OokBee has secured partnerships with AIS (a leading telco in Thailand), SPH (a leading media group in Singapore, including The Straits Times), another telco in Malaysia, and Scoop – an ebook store in Indonesia. OokBee is now valued at $8M after raising $2M from InTouch (Shin Corp)
Funded startups
- Computerlogy, backs SocialEnable – a social media management platform, closed it Series A funding round with US$932,000 from InVent, a venture capital arm of Intouch Group.
- ShopSpot, a social commerce app, received $620k from Jungle Venture and SingTel
- Noonswoon, has just finished its seed round of US$400,000, with Golden Gate Ventures as its lead investor and several high profile angel investors.
- Wongnai, a Thailand’s Yelp already got its Series A funding from Recruit Strategic Partners.
Note: for a full list of funded/exited startups in Thailand please check here
Building ecosystem
- Co-working spaces in Thailand now have a new member in Chiang Mai Pun Space, also a partner of Hubba.
- Founder Institute, the global startup accelerator with over 1000 companies is coming soon to Bangkok the end of this year. Startups interested in can apply here: http://fi.co/apply/Bangkok
- TrueIncube, an incubator from True Corp (the secon largest telco in Thailand), partners with Gobi Partners and 500 startups to leverage their global partners strengths and helps Thai’s startups increase their exposure to regional and global level.
- Ardent Capital announced its first round of external funding from US-based Siemer Ventures and Japan’s Recruit Strategic Partners and GMO Venture Partners. This is good news not only for Thailand startups but also for Thailand’s eCommerce space as ArdentCap is focusing only in eCommerce startups. ArdentCap founding team were very sucessful with selling Ensogo, a group-buying group in SEA (Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia) to LivingSocial.
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Note: we can see eCommerce-related companies counted for almost half of each area Highlights, Funded Startups, Ecosystem with
- Stamp (customer loyalty), Ookbee (online book store app)
- ShopSpot (social eCommercial app), Wongnai (going to online reservation space too)
- ArdentCap: eCommerce-oriented VC.
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Last but not least, this event was also another milestone of ThumbsUp, a leading tech site as a startup its self since 2010. The conference room was full of attendees. ThumsUp planned to move its next event to a university, which is friendly with startup and tech.
The first time I knew about Thumbsup was when I first met Mimee, co-founder of Thumbsup via an intro of founder of ShopSpot, in Bangkok. It was around Nov last year, so almost one year passed. Time flies!
Minh Bui
PS: What do you think about Thailand’s startup space?
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