Meet the 4 Southeast Asian startups participating in latest Google Launchpad cohort

Google today announced the startups that will be participating in the fifth cohort of its prestigious Launchpad accelerator programme.

Of the 24 teams, 4 of them represented Southeast Asia (an additional six companies came from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan).

The accelerator is six-month programme that includes an “intensive two week bootcamp in San Francisco”.The accelerator does not take equity and continues to mentor the companies back in their home countries after the bootcamp.

This latest batch will begin on January 29th, 2018.

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Let’s meet the companies!

Kulina — Indonesia

Kulina is a meal subscription service with an interesting twist, it leverages social media to connect people with caterers or private home chefs. It also is working to cook food that is hyper-specific to individual tastes and preferences.

It also wants to use technology to optimise inefficiencies in the Indonesian supply chain and logistics infrastructure.

Ayannah — the Philippines

Ayannah is a digital payments company that targets the unbanked. In Southeast Asia, there is a large population of unbanked people and it has become one of the core target markets of the fintech industry.

The company has three SaaS services, one for e-commerce, one for payments and another for remittances. One of the targets for Ayannah is the large population of migrant workers across the world who come from Southeast Asia.

Priceza — Thailand

Priceza is a company that aggregates prices from 10 million products to make price comparison simple and easy. Instead of navigating multiple sites to find the best deal, Priceza brings them all into one app.

Monkey Junior — Vietnam

Monkey Junior is a learning app to help teach children the basics of math, letters and even foreign languages. It is available in Chinese, English, French, Spanish and two regional Vietnamese languages. It also plans to introduce Russian soon.

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To get an idea of what to expect, Monkey Junior has about 1,000 lessons in English covering 30 topics and a visual approach to help kids see what the words mean.

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