Empowering the enterprise: An examination of three B2B startups from Cohort 7
2023 is a turning point for businesses. With most still reeling from the pandemic, the present economic crisis will be a make-or-break moment for many. In times like these, there is a tendency to glorify hustle culture, which promotes the idea that only the hardest working business owners will survive.
This idea can be counter-productive. After all, it often doesn’t matter if an entrepreneur is working hard, if they are working hard on the wrong things. As the saying does, we should strive to work smarter, rather than simply harder. Helping business owners achieve this goal takes more than just dialogue - they need the right tools.
To this end, three startups from Accelerating Asia’s Cohort 7 are providing powerful enterprise solutions that help organizations in their respective industries. These tools help enterprise clients operate more efficiently, grow their business, and keep their customers happy.
SafeTruck (Malaysia, SDG 11)
SafeTruck is a fleet management platform with an incredible value proposition: Through the use of AI and IoT devices, fleet operators can reduce fuel consumption by 30%, improve driver safety by reducing accident rates, and even leverage data to enhance predictive maintenance and reporting. There is also an environmental component, given that SafeTruck helps fleets minimize their carbon emissions.
It’s no surprise that SafeTruck has had incredible traction. Operating in Malaysia and Indonesia since 2019, the organization’s revenue has grown by a factor of 20, reaching US$1 million in 2022. SafeTruck is on pace to reach US$3 million in revenue in 2023.
Just as remarkable as this revenue is the startup’s retention. "Our customer retention is 98%, and we have tracked over 18,000 of commercial vehicles across various industries,” said Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Yin Yin Low, who founded the company with Wilson Yew, a ten-year veteran of the trucking industry who was privy to its unique pain points.
One of the key advantages of SafeTruck is their strong localization and unique position in Southeast Asia. With major support from global players such as Samsara, who recently exited the market in the United States, SafeTruck has successfully catered to the specific needs of local fleet operators, making them a top investment opportunity in the region.
Through SafeTruck, local fleet operators can now enjoy high quality market intelligence and actionable data, and avail of discounted rates through aggregated pricing from their merchant partners in the group procurement marketplace.
Given the success of the platform, Low’s contention that “SafeTruck is beyond just another fleet management platform or dashboard” may very well be an understatement: The company is poised to be the very backbone of a key channel in the region’s supply chain.
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HealthPro (Indonesia, SDG 3 and 8)
Like many great startups, Indonesia’s HealthPro began from a problem the founder encountered first-hand.
"I worked as a nurse at a hospital and struggled to have my patients access home health care services,” said Vika Rachma Sari, the CEO and founder of HealthPro.
Many healthcare facilities in Indonesia, such as hospitals and clinics, struggle to provide home healthcare services due to the heavy operational burden and limited budgets. The demographic in need of these services exceeds 28 million and continues to grow 10% year on year.
HealthPro is a digital platform that enables Indonesians to avail themselves of top-quality healthcare workers. The organization’s value proposition is time and money: users can go through the onboarding process 3 times faster than traditional pen-and-paper agencies, and the cost is 30% cheaper. As some users may be wary of using this kind of platform for the first time, the company also offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee.
Of course, it’s not only patients who benefit from HealthPro’s platform.
"By providing faster, cheaper, and curated home healthcare services, we help healthcare facilities deliver better patient outcomes and increase profit by more than 20% per patient," said Sari.
Despite only launching in June 2022, HealthPro has already experienced 20 to 30% growth in that year and projects to grow by 100% in 2023. The company monetizes through a B2B2C model with a monthly subscription price of US$300. Sari invited interested investors to not only participate in the startup’s current round, but also join the team in giving “a million people a better life.”
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K-Link (Myanmar, Thailand, SDG 8 and 9)
When it comes to interfacing with businesses online, customers expect responses on a near-instantaneous basis. This is the on-demand economy, after all. The problem is that there are so many touchpoints - trying to be responsive to customer inquiries across all of them is an operational nightmare.
K-Link aims to address this problem. The organization’s flagship platform, K-Link Cloud, connects with local telecom operators and combines all social media chats into one place, enhancing customer experience with AI-powered features.
These partnerships with telco operators are the competitive advantage of K-Link: The market for cloud-based contact platforms is still relatively untapped in Southeast Asia. The company has thus been able to make inroads across Myanmar, Thailand, and Singapore, and plans to expand across the rest of Southeast Asia within the next five years.
K-Link is already helping some of the biggest brands in Asia transform their customer service operations.
“We found that Ninja Van was struggling with customer inquiries and needed a scalable solution. With our cloud-based platform, we were able to streamline their communication processes and improve their customer service, leading to a significant increase in revenue," said Zin Ko Oo, the founder and CEO of Klink, adding that Prudential and AIA are also flagship clients.
Because K-Link is so deeply integrated in client operations, Oo also projects strong yet stable growth from these enterprise clients. K-Link charges them a fee for services and generates additional revenue through sales and promotions. With this revenue model, Oo projects US$100 million within 5 years.
“Join us in revolutionizing business communication in Southeast Asia and be part of our success story," Oo offered to the demo day audience, who may soon be interfacing with their favorite brands via K-Link.