11 Startups in Asia That Caught Our Eye

Emily Goh

Here’s our newest weekly startup list, this time featuring eleven young companies from across the region. For tips and stories suggestions, feel free to email us. Alternatively, you can send tips here and/or tell us about your startup here. Enjoy this week’s list. 1. Trip Tern | IndiaTrip Tern automates the travel-planning process, giving you a daily itinerary that’s designed to fit your interests and maximize your traveling efficiency. It is currently only accessible via web browsers, but a mobile application is in the making and will be aiming for launch sometime this year. 2. Karir Rakyat | IndonesiaKarir Rakyat (meaning “people’s career”) is an Indonesian job portal launched last month. It offers yet another alternative for Indonesians who are looking for jobs online and focuses on being a lot more visual and pleasant to browse. It even has localized job maps. 3. JinJin | ChinaJinJin is an app developed by the Sino-US startup Appconomy, and appeals to both shoppers and retailers. It can serve as a mobile wallet that holds loyalty cards, discount coupons, allows mobile payments in-store, and even lets you gift a product to a friend. For retail partners, it offers tools for understanding customers and how they shop, and permits the targeting and automation of shopping promotions. 4. Tokyo Otaku Mode | JapanTokyo Otaku Mode focuses on the otaku community surrounding Japanese anime, manga, and cosplay, with its venture starting out as a Facebook page before launching as a standalone site. Then came its funy photo app. Just this week, it announced that it has attracted funding from YJ Capital (an investment subsidiary of Yahoo Japan) and more investors. 5. e27 | Singapore Singapore’s technology-focused media company e27 has announced this week that it has concluded a S$760,000 ($614,000) financing round from B Dash Ventures, Pinehurst Advisors, Ardent Capital, Dan Neary, and some other undisclosed angel investors. 6. PairBuddy | IndiaPairBuddy was built by Nirav Shah and a small team in under 48 hours. Appropriately for a dating app, it launched on Valentine’s Day. PairBuddy focuses more on outing a secret crush on Facebook than getting people hooked up immediately - in contrast to the notorious Bang With Friends. 7. WearYouWant | Thailand Founded in October 2011, Thailand’s WearYouWant is a B2B2C fashion e-commerce site which helps other retailers to feature and sell their products to consumers online. The Bangkok-based startup is backed by Digital Media Partners (DMP) and also other undisclosed investors. 8. Surround App | Hong Kong Hong Kong-based startup Surround App is an upcoming English mobile client for Sina Weibo, with its first release planned for April 2013. It stands out by offering a mix of machine and human translation to help you make sense of the content on Weibo, China’s vast, real-time social network. Surround App received some seed funding this week. 9. Nuffnang | Singapore Singapore’s Nuffnang, is arguably the largest blog ad network in Southeast Asia which delivers a whopping 13 million page-views per day. Here’s the inspiring founder’s story. 10. Startup Jobs Asia | Singapore Singapore-based StartupJobs Asia is an online jobs portal which helps overcome the hiring barriers existing within the startup ecosystem and aims to form the bridge between potential employees and startup founders. 11. Tujia | ChinaTujia is an online Chinese vacation home rental startup which now has over 400,000 holiday rental homes in 65 Chinese cities and 45 overseas locations. After attracting its first major financing in May of last year, it has wrapped up series B funding yesterday, and finally revealed the first two rounds’ investment amount.

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