10 promising Southeast Asian tech entrepreneurs under 30

“Age considers; youth ventures,” wrote Nobel Prize winning writer Rabindranath Tagore. This youthful derring-do drives many entrepreneurs to action.

This list is about them. In no order of merit, we present 10 promising startup founders who are under 30. These entrepreneurs are picked because of their track record and because they’re doing interesting things across Southeast Asia. While the thirties and beyond are often when entrepreneurs hit their stride, you’ll be surprised by what these up-and-comers have achieved.

Siu Rui Quek, 27, co-founder of Carousell

Siu Rui Quek, co-founder of Carousell (center)

When you ride on the subway in Singapore, notice how often Carousell pops up on smartphones. That’s thanks to the efforts of Quek and his equally youthful co-founders Marcus Tan and Lucas Ngoo. The Singapore-based startup’s premise is simple: giving consumers a really easy way to buy and sell on smartphones.

The marketplace has gotten serious traction since debuting in 2012: eight million items listed, two million goods sold. That’s eight transactions every minute. It attracted serious funding too, about US$6.8 million from Sequoia Capital, 500 Startups, Rakuten Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, 99.co’s Darius Cheung, and others. It has spawned several clones like Duriana and Singapore Press Holdings’ Trezo.

For building a popular consumer app in Singapore – which is tough to do – Quek and gang are the new golden boys of the Singaporean startup scene. As Carousell expands abroad, it has a chance to cement Singapore’s status as a startup hub on the world stage.

Achmad Zaky, 29, CEO of Bukalapak

Center three, L to R: Kuan Hsu (GREE), Achmad Zaky (Bukalapak), Takeshi Ebihara (Batavia),

Need more evidence about ecommerce’s ascendance in Southeast Asia? Look no further than Achmad Zaky’s Bukalapak. It’s essentially the Indonesian cousin of Carousell: both are consumer-to-consumer marketplaces spanning web and mobile. Its backers include Gree Ventures, 500 Startups, and Emtek Group, Indonesia’s second largest media company.

Bukalapak presided over US$80 million in transactions in 2014. While focusing on consumer-to-consumer sales early on, it has lately started wooing more small and medium-sized enterprises to sell to its users.

The startup is not Zaky’s first business. He started a noodle shop in his university days but failed. He then launched a software development firm which transformed into a consulting service for the tech industry. Bukalapak began as a side project, but its growth blossomed once Zaky saw the potential in ecommerce. Expect this rocket to continue its ascent.

Jason Lamuda, 29, CEO of Berrybenka

Lamuda is an experienced hand at ecommerce. In 2010, he jumped into the daily deals craze by launching Disdus in Indonesia, which was acquired by Groupon. At the end of 2012, he ventured into fashion ecommerce by starting Berrybenka, which also operates a sister site selling Muslim women’s fashion.

While Lamuda keeps Berrybenka’s numbers close to his chest, SimilarWeb estimates the site saw 590,000 visits in April 2015. The startup has raised over US$5 million in funding from Gree Ventures, Transcosmos, and East Ventures (East Ventures is a Tech in Asia investor. See our ethics page).

Lamuda is a buddy of Ferry Tenka, the founder of family needs online store Bilna. Both started Disdus together. Post-acquisition, they shared the same office and investor (East Ventures) as they launched their new ventures. Could they one day reunite? It’s possible.

Thuy Thanh Truong, 29, founder of Tappy

Truong best exemplifies the twisty road that entrepreneurs climb. She was the founder of Greengar – anointed one of the most promising mobile startups in Vietnam. 500 Startups was an investor.

But things didn’t work out. Its product, an online whiteboard, failed to get enough traction and it lacked a business model.

Truong moved on: her team created a new product called Tappy, which she describes as a “hyperlocal social app that transforms any location into a virtual online community where users can discover interesting people and relevant content.” The app was this month acquired by game-building platform Weeby.

We don’t know how much of the seven-digit deal was in cash, but it meant Truong became Weeby’s director of business development for Asia. We’ll be watching what she does next.

Lusarun “Trumph” Silpsrikul, 25, CEO of Thailand’s Page365

Back to ecommerce, we have Page365, a dashboard for online merchants on Facebook. The tool allows sellers to track inquiries, orders, and complaints, and manage them all in one interface. The startup began after Silpsrikul saw how social commerce was getting popular.

“Almost everyone knew a friend who operated their own online boutique store. One such friend approached us with her pain point and she became our first customer,” he said.

Don’t discount the size of social commerce; Silpsrikul estimates it’s worth at least US$510 million a year in Thailand. While we don’t know how many active sellers it’s serving, it has attracted US$400,000 in seed funding from Inspire Ventures and Galaxy Ventures.

Farouk Meralli, 29, CEO of mClinica

Front row, second from left: Farouk Meralli, CEO of mClinica.

Meralli was working with major pharmaceutical firms like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson when he realized drug companies have no data on where their products are going in emerging markets. In addition, consumers in these countries find medicine too expensive.

MClinica from the Philippines hopes to address this by using mobile technology to bridge pharma firms with distributors and consumers. Patients who visit pharmacies partnering with the startup can claim discounts if they provide their phone numbers. The pharmacy sends transaction details to mClinica to get reimbursements from drug companies. The end result is more transparency and efficiency in the market, which supposedly benefits everyone.

MClinica says it has a network of 1,400 pharmacies in three countries, and it has the backing of investors like 500 Startups, IMJ Investment Partners, and Kickstart Ventures.

Ai Ching Goh, 28, CEO of Piktochart

Goh left a career as a marketing manager at P&G to start Piktochart, a startup that’s made an infographics creation tool aimed at non-designers.

“The main reason why I left P&G was because the bureaucracy was always making things move slower. Once you spot a trend, it is so difficult to go through with it with the large amount of meetings and red tape that comes with it. On the other hand, a startup has much greater flexibility,” the Malaysian told us in an earlier interview.

While quiet on the fundraising front, the startup claims to have doubled user growth and tripled its revenue in 2014. It had 800,000 registered users in February 2014. SimilarWeb saw consistent growth in Piktochart’s site visits from November last year to March.

Chang Wen Lai, 27, CEO of Ninja Van

For guys who have done mandatory military service in Singapore, “ninja vans” are a welcome sight. These are peddlers of drinks and snacks who make their way to training sites, making life bearable for the poor conscripts.

Ninja Van the startup hopes to do the same for ecommerce merchants. Its specialty is next-day delivery for ecommerce companies, and it claims to be working with over 300 merchants in Singapore, including Lazada, Guardian, and Love Bonito. It recently raised US$2.5 million in series A funding from Monk’s Hill Ventures.

Lai started a number of companies in the past. He was the “ironing boy” at Marcella, a custom men’s clothing retailer. He then started Get Fitted, a tool for people to figure out if shirts sold online fit them. Ninja Van is his fourth venture in as many years, and it could be his most successful one yet.

Cameron Priest, 28, CEO of Tradegecko

Priest runs, in his own words, a startup that’s tackling the unsexy problem of inventory management. It gives small online retailers one web interface to manage their inventory, rather than resorting to Excel spreadsheets, paper purchase orders, faxes, or costly software.

Tradegecko claims to have “tens of thousands” of paying customers, though it didn’t provide an exact number. Venture capital firms are impressed: it recently scored a US$6.5 million series A round from NSI Ventures and Jungle Ventures. Priest has come a long way from being a tadpole in startup accelerator JFDI’s pond.

Ferry Unardi, 27, CEO of Traveloka

Traveloka co-founder and CEO Ferry Unardi

Traveloka is a flight and hotel booking site that has become a household name in Indonesia. In the flight category, comScore ranks it number one in the country.

The site is said to get between 4 million to 7.5 million monthly visits, far more than its rival Tiket, which garnered an estimated 1.95 million. It’s riding on a travel boom in the country, and it stands a chance of converting the remaining 90 percent of these passengers to online ticket sales. Its backers include East Ventures and Global Founders Capital, a fund run by the Samwer brothers of Rocket Internet fame.

Unardi is an archetype of the reluctant entrepreneur. He started out as an engineer but found a need in the travel industry that he could fix by building his own solution. Even then, he did not jump in right away, opting for an MBA at Harvard. His plans changed once again when e-ticketing was booming in Indonesia and he realized this was his chance to seize the bull by its horns. He dropped out.

Traveloka began life as a flight search engine and aggregator, and it could have stayed that way. But the company discovered customers were unhappy about using different services to complete their purchase. That led his team to build a complete product for consumers, moving past their comfort zone. For that dedication, Unardi deserves a spot on this list.

Special thanks to Warren Leow and Hazel Samah of MaGIC, Christian Besler of Kickstart Ventures, Kuo-Yi Lim of Monk’s Hill Ventures, Dewi Yuliani of East Ventures, Joash Wee of Between, and the Tech in Asia team for contributing to this report.

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