Cyberview Living Lab Accelerator hosts first virtual Demo Day
By Kiran Kaur Sidhu May 18, 2020
- Five startups ERTH, VITA, Red Angpow, Moovby & Engage pitched to investors
- Since 2013, the CLLA has supported 75 startups develop their business models
Startup founders have long pushed the boundaries of technology to solve problems. And while the current movement control order (MCO) has hampered business in many aspects, the startup ecosystem is unrelenting in finding workarounds for long term business growth. Featuring five startups in its 13th cohort, the Cyberview Living Lab Accelerator (CLLA) programme hosted its first ever virtual Demo Day on April 29.
“At Cyberview, we aim to champion Cyberjaya as a vibrant Global Tech Hub and the centre of Malaysia’s tech innovations. Towards this end, we strive to continuously build Cyberjaya as a robust, well-developed and ever-expanding ecosystem that supports businesses of any size and at any stage. Alumni of the CLLA programme over the years have certainly made significant contributions towards this vision for Cyberjaya,” said Najib Rahim, the managing director of Cyberview.
During the virtual event, the online audience witnessed founders in action presenting solutions and offerings of their startups after over five intensive months in the CLLA programme. These startups are ERTH, VITA, Red Angpow, Engage and Moovby – which, respectively, showcased an AI-powered electronic waste recycling platform, an AI powered health app which provides early warning to future risk of chronic disease, an online map-based solution that conducts real estate due diligence and feasibility studies within minutes, an AI-driven customer retention solution and a peer-to-peer car sharing platform.
About the CLLA 2020 startups
The first startup to present its solution was electronic waste recycling platform ERTH which operates via a digital platform to manage e-waste pickup requests from consumers. In his pitch, the founder of ERTH, Mohamed Tarek El-Fatatry shared that 75% of discarded electronics end up in landfills and it is the world’s fastest growing waste stream. “It’s a quite a disaster because as we go towards 5G and IoT etcetera, electronics are going to proliferate our life even more. This means toxic pollution for centuries. We are literally handing this problem over to the next generation.”
The platform name, ERTH, is an acronym for E-waste Recycling Through Heroes. Dubbing their pickup riders as Heroes, those looking to recycle their old electronics can submit a pickup request on the website and, in turn, ERTH pays customers for their items at a specified rate.
As for the health app VITA, the chief executive officer Dr Ian Ng is an occupational health doctor looking to help corporates to track employees’ health and stress levels. Admittedly, there is no clear cut way of measuring stress levels in people. Explaining the app, Ng said: “We consolidate all your information into your phone so you can hold your health record with you and get actual calculations of all your risk factors.”
For now, Vita is focusing on gaining corporate clients instead of individuals due to capital constraints. “35,000 corporates in Malaysia have 50 or more employees and they are looking at some sort of wellness benefit for their staff,” he claimed, adding that it will help employers better target health policies.
Meanwhile, Red Angpow is looking to optimise the real estate and infrastructure environment by reducing development risk for developers. The product, Lokasi.io, is aimed at being a smart town planning platform. “The main data source that we have is from the government with data published daily. But the data is fragmented and unstructured,” admits Erhanfadli Azrai, the cofounder of Red Angpow.
“We collect all this and make it usable for data analytics to work on, meaning we crawl, clean and harmonise the data,” he said, explaining that it will help developers and town councils save time and money.
Fourth in line to pitch was Engage with its customer retention management solution for micro and small retail industry. The chief executive officer and founder, Yap Zhen Yang believes it is a must-have strategy for retail businesses. He highlights some issues business owners face: customers lack loyalty and are easily distracted by competing brands and the tools used by large businesses are unreachable to smaller players.
“Businesses using Engage can use all ten of our customer engagement features to mix and match up to 288 combinations for personalised engagement campaigns. We then slice and dice all customer data collected from your campaign to create an independent data model for each customer,” he describes. Engage also has a new store credit solution to help companies during this uncertain Covid-19 period.
Finally, peer-to-peer car lending platform Moovby also shared its solution to rising car ownership in the country. The founder and chief executive officer, Nik Muhammad Amin has the goal of changing the way people think about car ownership.
Although he is confident that Moovby is set for greater heights in the ASEAN market, the current Covid-19 situation has undoubtedly affected business. “The first week of MCO, our revenue dropped by 20%. And right now, it is almost 100% down. Of course, we have some bookings in urgent cases but I would say revenue is 95% down.”
To weather this painful situation, Moovby has introduced a supplementary business model for the time being. “We introduced disinfection services for vehicles and buildings. We are now looking to collaborate with a company which has over 400,000 cars. As of now, we have already disinfected 200 vehicles around Malaysia. It is a little far from our business model but this is how we are going to navigate through Covid-19.”
[Correction: An earlier version gave the wrong number of cars already disinfected.]
Since its inception in 2013, CLLA has successfully nurtured 75 startups, providing them with resources, facilities, mentorship, networking and market access opportunities that are worth US$23,000 (RM100,000) each. To date, the CLLA has helped startups to raise over US$20 million (RM87 million) in total investments and generate more than US$50 million (RM218 million) in total revenue.
According to Siti Shafinaz Mohd Salim, Head of Technology Hub Development Division of Cyberview, “Now, more than ever, it is imperative for companies to embrace change and find opportunities that can meet the needs of consumers. This cohort’s participants have showcased immense ingenuity, leadership, and resilience when it comes to building a successful business and we have enjoyed the opportunity to support them in this journey.”
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