Evercare team: Sohail Khan (CEO), Gourav Goyal (CTO)
Earlier this year, global startup generator and early-stage venture capital (VC) firm Antler announced an investment of US$1.4 million into 14 companies from the third batch of its Singapore programme.
Selected out of 3,000 applicants, the programme brought together 100 qualified individuals from 30 nationalities, with an average of eight years working experience, to set up an “ideal” team. This arrangement leads to the founding of 14 companies.
In this exclusive interview, e27 sits down with four of those companies to find out what inspired them to go on this journey.
Checked out the edited excerpt of this two-part interview.
Evercare
Like many other young people, Evercare CEO Sohail Khan left home for university at 17 and would only return during the holidays. Since then, his mother has been living by herself, leading the CEO to feel worried about her welfare.
Also Read: Antler raises US$50M from investors including Facebook co-founder to expand into new locations
“Apart from the health concerns, loneliness and assistance requirements are needs which one is helping with at the moment. More and more senior citizens are ending up with undiagnosed depression because they are captives in their own homes with no one to talk to,” he explains.
Apart from that, there is also the problem of young people moving to a different city and struggling to find accommodation within their budget, with the safety and comfort of their own home.
“We have come up with a unique concept called the intergenerational home-sharing model, which solves both these problems together. What this model does, is it allows people looking for a home in to share a home with senior citizens who are feeling lonely. Senior citizens rent out an empty room in their flat to verified trustworthy companions of their choice at rates much cheaper than the market, in exchange for tasks they need assistance in,” Khan says.
Despite the initial struggle of finding the right solutions to solve the problem that they want to focus on, the company had run a six-week pilot in India and received a “tremendous” response with over 250 senior citizens and 100 youths showing interests in the programme. Evercare already has an annualised GTV of US$25,000.
“We used both the online and offline channels for user acquisition. We ran online marketing campaigns targeted to the children of senior citizens for getting their parents enrolled in the programme, and held events with elderly communities educating them about the concept. The response has been heartwarming and encouraging, to say the least,” Khan says.
For the year 2020, Evercare is all about expansion.
“We are looking to close our seed round before April so we can focus on our team and city expansion. By the end of this fiscal year, we are looking to close around US$1 million GTV with around 1,000 senior citizens as a part of our community,” Khan closes.
Also Read: New Antler-NUS initiative to nurture deeptech talents, to invest in 30 startups annually
Nectico team: Rani Yanarastri (CCO), Amry Fitra Amanah (CEO)
Nectico
Despite its popularity in rural Indonesia, and its potential in improving the livelihood of its members, cooperatives in Indonesia are being run in the same way for more than five decades.
This led Nectico to come out with a platform that can help cooperatives run its operations better. The products that the startup is offering ranges from a dashboard to report and aggregate data, accounting and member management platform, as well as apps for both the members and the management.
According to CEO Amry Fitra Amanah, the idea for the project came out when he was doing a project with the government to distribute home gas canisters to low-income society.
“We love the fact that cooperatives are a business entity that was created based on the democratise economy concept. It is owned by and served its member; it is also flexible enough to have multiple business units … It is also for-profit and fair in a way that everyone who contributes will get their own share of profit,” he elaborates.
“But when we start to look deeper into it, we found out that the current way of running cooperatives is very manual and inefficient,” he stresses.
Within the first five months since its launch, Nectico was able to sign deals with 12 cooperatives with 7,000 members and four monitoring entities.
When asked the greatest challenge faced by the company, Amanah says that securing their first funding was hard, but they were able to meet investors by participating in Antler.
“Business-wise, we learn to validate fast in an efficient way. It has been a challenge for us to train and change the players’ behaviour. But through proper communication, we manage to show them the promised land and make them excited to join the exciting journey of digital transformation,” Amanah explains.
For the year 2020, Nectico has many big plans.
“We want to close our seed funding, launch our e-commerce solution, acquire cooperatives with total member of 300,000 people, and achieve US$2 million in revenue,” Amanah closes.
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Image Credit: Antler
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