Each startup will receive up to US$14,500 cash funding and various opportunities to refine its business models and scale up while pursuing social causes
Singaporean telco company Singtel today announced the seven winners of its Singtel Future Makers programme at an award ceremony held at *SCAPE The Tree Top.
Those winning startups are:
Bompipi
An online marketplace for popular fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and groceries. It offers a reward system which gives incentives to customers for volunteering with community partners, allowing them to convert volunteer points to rebates or discounts.
It expects 70 per cent of customers to volunteer through the reward system, and will contribute 15 per cent of profits to voluntary welfare organisations and non-profit organisations.
CaptionCube
Using a cloud-based platform and speech recognition technology, CaptionCube provides high-quality, fast captioning, transcription, and subtitling services for e-learning and media content providers who are inclusive to hearing impaired audience. They employ persons with disabilities who work remotely on the transcription, giving them flexibility and convenience.
It claimed to have improved communication engagements by over 30 per cent among its clientele.
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Enabled
Through the Empathy Training Simulation App, Enabled provides empathy training and experiential workshops to empower school students to be advocates for persons with disability.
It also hopes to embed empathy training into the core curriculum in schools.
GIVE.asia
A free-to-use platform that empowers people and organisations to create crowdfunding and donation campaigns for charities in a matter of minutes, without a designer or developer.
It claimed that 200,000 people have joined the social movement and raised S$10.8 million (US$7.8 million) to support 15,000 social causes.
Irisada
A specialised marketplace for the special needs community to find hard-to-reach products all in one place. Through intuitive search functions, curation and other special features, it hopes to connect buyers to solutions that would help them enjoy a higher quality of life while connecting sellers to their target markets.
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Jaga-Me
A health tech company which aims to make healthcare more responsive, more affordable and more personal. It has developed a mobile app to help patients and their families engage home care services from qualified professionals within the community. These healthcare professionals are matched according to patients’ requests based on skillset and availability.
It claimed to have served over 2,500 hours of safe nursing care across Singapore. Nurses are carefully screened and have at least three years of experience working in a hospital with valid clinical skills.
Medarwin
Medarwin is looking to change the way the elderly and people with physical limitations dry their laundry, with its product Raincheck. Through a smartphone app, Raincheck automatically deploys wet laundry outdoor and retracts them during inclement weather.
It is expecting to test bed Raincheck across various households and smart city initiatives for further product feedback before manufacturing.
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The seven winners were selected through a pitch battle involving 12 outstanding finalists, chosen from over 70 applicants.
The winners will get cash funding of up to S$20,000 (US$14,500), and work for six months in a coworking space provided by iMDA Labs. They will also be able to receive business workshops, mentoring and coaching support from Singtel and its partner network the Community Chest, SPD, iMDA Labs, raiSE and UNFRAMED.
There will also be networking and potential commercialisation opportunities with the Singtel Group and its regional mobile associates.
Particularly for GIVE.asia, the startup also received additional S$10,000 (US$7,200) prize money granted by the Community Chest Sustainable Giving Award.
“The partnership with Community Chest for this special award underscores the commitment of the Singtel Group to explore different ways to build inclusive communities through social and technological innovation. Together, we can reach out to a pool of established social entrepreneurs and enterprises to drive meaningful changes in the social service sector,” said Andrew Buay, Singtel Vice President of Group Corporate Social Responsibility, in a press statement.
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