When intelligent, driven, and dedicated startups co-work together, you begin to see amazing synergies
Earlier this year, Singapore-based Fintech VC Life.SREDA officially opened its new fintech space at Block 79.
Amidst the celebrations, which saw over 300 people from all across the finance, tech and startup sectors attend, the event also saw the startups from the first batch of Life.SREDA’s InspirAsia accelerator put on a demo day.
As someone involved with Life.SREDA from day one, an accelerator is something we have always envisioned running, and with InspirAsia, we got a behind-the-scenes look at the business of it.
Also Read: Why fintech is the hottest place to be right now
Several months and lots of miles later, I must admit that one lesson in particular has made the biggest impact. When you take a bunch of intelligent, driven, and dedicated startups, and bring them under one roof with the sole purpose of exploring their growth, you begin to see amazing synergies.
For example, SoftPay and Posseple, two POS focused startups, joined forces to achieve economies of scale by merging both platforms and leveraging each other’s strengths. When both teams had the chance to work together under the accelerator program, they integrated their products, and now the Posseple team moved to Vietnam and will launch their solution based on SoftPay’s infrastructure and distribution network.
Even for startups, that may not seem a good fit for one another, a slight pivoting of the core business proved to be very successful.
For example, Philippine-based remittance startup Ayannah discovered that by adding the big data AI technology of another Filipino startup, Adatos, they could offer not just a means of transferring money but also a way to help people gain a deeper understanding of their financials and therefore be able to make better monetary decisions. This can also enable teams to gain totally new capabilities, such as in Ayannah’s case, wherein the use of Adatos’ tech has allowed it to start offering loans.
Also Read: Digital payments startup Ayannah diving deep into Big Data
Beyond just sharing technology, startups in the accelerator became aware of the partners and distribution networks that each other possessed. For the startups, this sort of insider knowledge became invaluable when it came to mapping out their next steps.
For example, Mobikon, a Singapore-based CRM/marketing platform with a strong presence in India and Singapore found that by tapping on SoftPay’s presence and popularity in the Vietnamese market, they were able to enter a very difficult market with a lot less trouble than if they had done it by themselves.
It is for these reasons and more than when we opened our fintech space, we asked all our startups to have a presence there.
We are firmly convinced that it is the synergistic capabilities of cccelerator programs that make them so popular amongst startup communities all over the world. In fintech, this means that instead of startups spending resources on dealing with competition, they are able to better invest in stronger business solutions while at the same time enjoying the benefits of strong partnerships.
Moving forward with the next batch of InspirAsia and even in future investments, we will look even harder at synergies between startups and seeing how we can use our position as a VC at the nexus of Asian fintech to create the next big fintech success story.
—-
Igor Pesin is Partner and Investment Director at Singapore-based Life.SREDA, a Singapore-based fintech VC. He is responsible for investments throughout their entire life cycle: from deal search, analysis, due diligence, structuring to the portfolio companies’ exit. As a recognized fintech expert, Igor regularly takes the floor of the major professional conferences.
The views expressed here are of the author’s, and e27 may not necessarily subscribe to them. e27 invites members from Asia’s tech industry and startup community to share their honest opinions and expert knowledge with our readers. If you are interested in sharing your point of view, submit your post here.
Image Credit: Pixabay/Public Domain
The post Accelerators: Here’s why you should bring all your startups under one roof appeared first on e27.