21 startups in Asia that caught our eye

Emily Goh

9 February 2014 at 5:30 am

Here’s our newest round-up of the featured startups on our site this week. If you have startup tips or story suggestions, feel free to email us or tell us about your startup on this form. Any juicy tech news tips go here. Enjoy this week’s list!

1. planBCD | Japan

Launched in August 2013, planBCD is an A/B testing software developed by Japanese startup Kaizen, which allows businesses to harness the power of crowdsourcing to improve any type of online conversion including sales, user registrations, and email sign ups.

Within the month of it’s official launch, the startup also concluded its seed round from CyberAgent Ventures, GMO Venture Partners, and GREE Ventures.

2. Female Daily | Indonesia

This week, Indonesia’s Female Daily Network have relaunched Female Daily this week and have closed down two of their subsidiary sites, Fashionese Daily and Travelers Daily. The new Female Daily is no longer a stand alone forum. Instead, it is now filled with beauty-related articles and product reviews. The site now aims to become the number one beauty destination for women in Indonesia.

3. PayrollHero | Philippines

Philippines-based Payroll Hero offers a unique service that helps companies keep track of employees using biometric facial recognition to ensure workers are at work when they should be. This week, the startup launched an app for clock-ins, and added a few improvements to its platform in order to attract more clients not only in the Philippines, but across Southeast Asia.

4. PhilMotors | Philippines

Started by online vehicle platform AfricaUA, Philmotors is a platform for Filipino consumers to find dealers that sell brand-new or second-hand vehicles nationwide. Vehicle dealers and agents can post advertisements on the site for a fee, and according to the company, has a model that ensures users that only cars from reputable dealers will be found in the platform.

5. Shopious | Indonesia

Shopious was initially a C2C e-commerce marketplace that has a strong fashion focus, along with a couple of social features. The startup has since pivoted, aggregating fashion shops on Instagram onto the Shopious platform and no longer handles any transactions.

6. Origin | Cambodia

Developed by Cambodian game development studio Sompom, Origin is a puzzle game all about squares and peg where the user have a limited number of moves to shift the blocks, one space at a time, so that they line up to connect the color pegs via squares of the same hue.

7. Fliplingo | Thailand

Thailand-based Fliplingo is a Twitter translation service that it uses real people to translate the context, instead of using the crowdsourcing model of other translation apps like Linqapp and Gengo.

8. MoneyMax | Philippines

MoneyMax is a financial comparison site launched by CompareAsia Group, a venture of technology investment firm Nova Founders. It offers comparison services for credit cards, insurance, loans and broadband plans. It also allows personalized search filters for its users that aim to show results that suit consumers’ specifications.

9. Guvera | Australia and Indonesia

Guvera is an Australia-based music streaming service recently launched in Indonesia, which aims to help fight music piracy in Indonesia. In contrast to Guvera’s freemium business model in Australia, Indonesia is a full-on subscription service.

10. Pilih Dokter | Indonesia

Launched in December last year, and currently still in beta, Pilih Dokter wants to offer solutions to mainly two problems in the medical world: lack of local doctor exposure and lack of medical information in Indonesia.

11. Smart Air | China

Smart Air is a startup from Beijing that has been making waves across polluted Chinese cities with an incredibly simple fact: by strapping a HEPA filter to a household fan, you can clean the air in your home for just RMB 200 ($33).

12. The Artling | Singapore

Singapore-based The Artling is an online art gallery which has just secured seed funding from an art collector. The e-commerce site caters primarily to American and European customers who want to buy art from Asia.

13. EatOye | Pakistan

EatOye is a brand new food delivery site that also provides users a restaurant reservation option for those who don’t want a home delivery. Currently, EatOye is free for users – both for deliveries and reservations. The new site makes money by taking a transaction fee from the food establishments for each order.

14. SmartNews | Japan

SmartNews is a news reader app from Japan that was launched back in December 2012. The Japanese-only app not only focuses on its home nation but it’s also distinctive in being tied closely to Twitter, mining millions of Twitter stream data and picks up thousands of hot topics. The startup received funding in August 2013 to help it grow.

15. VIP Plaza | Indonesia

VIP Plaza is a daily flash sales site focused on mid-range brands such as Levi’s, Guess, and Nike, that was launched just this week. The startup has funding from Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures, though the investment sum hasn’t been revealed.

16. Myntra | India

Myntra is an online retailer of lifestyle and fashion products from India. The fashion e-commerce startup announced it raised a funding round led by Premji Invest. The money will be used to “strengthen its technology, infrastructure and customer experience; and fund future growth initiatives.”

17. NaShangBan | China

Nashangban is a jobs site dedicated to tech startups jobs from China. The site features open positions at top web giants like Baidu, Sina Weibo, Alibaba, and UC Web. Though not yet profitable, the founder revealed that the company has had seed funding from three key angel investors.

18. Bright | US and Philippines

Bright is a Philippines- and US-based job search company that was recently acquired by professional social network LinkedIn. The three-year-old startup takes a big data approach to job hunting, matching job seekers to employers with a calculated “Bright Score” so employers don’t have to look over every resume separately. The aim is to increase efficiency and find better matches for both parties.

19. Jomblo | Indonesia

Launched this week in Indonesia, Jomblo is a web-based social dating site for singles, and also an online platform where single people can meet new friends based on interests. The startup team plans to release Android and iOS apps in the future.

20. Circle Watch | Malaysia

Circle Watch is a child-monitoring app from Malaysia that can automatically notifies the user whenever their loved one enters or leaves specific safe zones, such as a school or office building. On top of that, users can opt to be watched over anytime they don’t feel safe. In case a bad thing happens, they only need to shake their phone to trigger an alert to the appointed emergency contacts.

21. Codemi | Indonesia

Codemi, or Collaboration Academy Indonesia, is a website that aims to bring online education to Indonesians through video, audio and presentations. Currently, the site offers just a few business related courses and hopes to keep its focus narrow for the time being, stating that it will venture into other subject categories in the second quarter of 2014.