For being home to the fifth largest population in the world, Pakistan has a comparatively small startup community. That said, the country is hitting an inflection point, with internet and smartphone usage becoming more and more common. It’s not dissimilar to the technology adoption spikes seen in other countries across Southeast Asia, like Indonesia and Vietnam, that led to a wave of high-flying tech startups. Bykea, a Pakistani startup that offers everything from motorbike hailing to delivery of goods, is set to ride that wave in its home country to become the next local tech giant.

“One of the key differentiators we see for Bykea is a focus on being local,” says Founder Muneeb Maayr. “That is showcased in everything from our use of motorbikes for navigating the tight city streets, to having our app support voice interactions because many of our customers cannot spell or type in their own language on a smartphone.” This strategy has proved successful, as Bykea leads in a market where giants like Uber and Lyft have tried to make headway.

Looking back on the past decade, one of the most notable shifts has been the rapid spread of mobile technology, especially in Southeast Asia. But while consumers and startups were quick to make that shift, older companies found it difficult to quickly pivot to the new standard. Jirnexu was founded to bring those two parties together, specifically in the financial services sector.

“Having moved back home to Malaysia in 2010 after ~15 years living abroad, I had to go through the process of restarting my personal financial life,” says CEO Yuen Tuck Siew. “The process was extremely manual, often requiring me to physically go to a branch to get any service.” Jirnexu bridges that gap between existing providers and consumers, offering an easy way to find and buy financial services straight from your mobile device.

They say that with startups, timing is everything. Being early, or late, is the same as being wrong. This year has brought about more change than we can count, but with change comes opportunity for some. And for Johnny Boufarhat and the team at Hopin, the worldwide move to remote conferencing as a result of the pandemic accelerated a trend that they had seen coming for years.

“I initially built Hopin to scratch a personal itch,” says Boufarhat. “I was stuck at home with an autoimmune disease, but still wanted to connect with people, network, and attend events, not unlike the situation many around the world find themselves in today.” Listen to this episode to hear how Boufarhat tested his MVP, applied lessons from previous startups, and navigated the journey from launch to leading a team of now 150+ at Hopin.

The music industry has gone through massive changes in recent decades. Gone are the days of being able to track each week’s new releases. Now, over 40,000 tracks are uploaded on to music platforms each day. While new technologies have led to a creative explosion by lowering the barriers to record music, this new wave has somewhat overwhelmed companies in the industry, per Musiio co-founder and CEO Hazel Savage.

“When I was starting my career working in a record store, I was the person stocking the new singles on Monday morning. A busy week would see maybe five or six,” says Savage. “The recent mass increase in track creation means it’s impossible for a human to listen to each new release.” That’s where Mussio comes in. Leveraging the latest in artificial intelligence, the Singapore-based startup is able to analyze and categorize tracks at scale, making it easy to produce unique playlists based on customizable characteristics.

Fintech as a sector has been exploding for the better part of a decade now. Fueled by mass amounts of new data and powerful algorithms, startups around the world have sprung up to innovate within a once stagnant industry. Within fintech, peer-to-peer lending quickly emerged as one of the biggest opportunities—Lending Club saw marked success in North America, as did ANT Financial in China. Validus is on a mission to bring that same level of innovation to ASEAN.

“When looking at Southeast Asia, more than 90% of loans to SMEs are collateralized, which means you’re not getting financing from classic lenders unless your business has hard collateral,” says co-founder and CEO Nikhilesh Goel. “At Validus, we look at alternative data sources for our credit assessments, enabling us to offer funds to a wider variety of businesses and much faster than traditional options.” For companies, this means access to capital they need to grow, and having it in their bank account often within 48 hours.

The rise of e-commerce companies in recent years has made it easy to forget about in-store retail. But, in many parts of the world, physical stores still make up for the lion’s share of money spent. Fave, a startup based in Kuala Lumpur, is looking to connect the two industries by offering offline retailers new-age tools that historically have been only available to online businesses.

Pulling from his experience running Groupon in Asia Pacific, Fave founder and CEO Joel Neoh set out to build a company that would equip these offline retailers with what they need to thrive in the modern age. “We saw mobile payment adoption in our market growing quite quickly,” says Neoh. “Existing merchants, however, were getting the shorter end of the stick, as they couldn’t easily adapt to the digitization of commerce.” Operating in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore, Fave offers them a platform to manage everything from vouchers to loyalty programs, payments, and even financing.

When users head to Oway’s website to book travel in and out of Myanmar, they arrive at an easy-to-use portal where planning a trip end-to-end is within a few clicks. Much like U.S.-based Expedia, the 8-year-old startup offers up flight, hotel, car, and activity options for anyone wanting to get away. That said, the road to building and launching such a platform in Myanmar, a country of over 50 million where less than 1% of the population has a credit card, was far from easy, says CTO Tun Tun Linn.

“One of the many unique issues we ran into while getting Oway off the ground was accepting payments online when a large majority of our customer base did not even have a bank account,” says Linn. “We had to get creative, leaning on partnerships with new mobile wallet companies that had become very popular to make it easy for our target market to transact with us.” And that’s just one example of the ingenuity employed by the Oway team to build what they hope will be an all-in-one travel platform, encompassing everything from flights to fleet management and ride hailing.

From large metropolises like Singapore to smaller villages in places like Thailand, water is a constant need that flows through any community. And with climate change accelerating, the demand to properly manage this vital utility has never been higher. SpaceAge Labs, and CEO Deepak Pitta, are on a mission to help solve this growing problem by applying that latest in machine learning and IoT sensors, bringing an antiquated industry into the modern age.

“At the beginning of the company, our team looked at the consumer market and saw how advanced technologies were being integrated into everything,” says Pitta. “This for some reason hadn’t been applied to the utilities industries, which is exactly what we’re doing.” Using a combination of sensors, low-power wireless connectivity, and machine learning to crunch the data, SpaceAge Labs is able to offer up new insights on how to monitor and manage not only water, but a variety of other utilities that are necessary for any community.

It began with a table that Zwende co-founder Innu Nevatia couldn’t find. She had this image of the perfect piece of furniture, but it didn’t exist anywhere outside of her head. No one was making quite what she wanted. In the process of scouring the flea markets and pop-up design shows in and around her home base in Bengaluru, India the idea for her startup was born.

“I was meeting all these incredible artists in this quest to find someone to make me a table,” Nevatia says. “And I began to realize there was an opportunity to match the craft of what these artists do with the more modern tastes of today.” So, with her husband, Sujay Suresh, Zwende was launched.

You can think of Zwende as a marketplace that makes it so artists can just make art, rather than, say, wrap packages or find new ways to market their work. And, of course, on the other side of marketplace are people looking to buy that artwork.

For example, Zwende features designers and artists who are taking an ancient art form originally used to create characters for shadow puppet performances, and applying the same techniques to lamp shades, screens, and other decorative art pieces for the home. The twist is that Zwende allows its lamp-shade hunting customers to customize their particular pieces in tens of thousands of different ways. “But we do it within the rules of the art forms that have been practiced for a very, very long time,” Suresh says. “We like to say we are using algorithms developed thousands of years ago.”

The artists only make the items when they get ordered, so there is no excess inventory for them to carry. The data gathered from Zwende retail customer also helps the artists anticipate when there will be a rush for a certain item, or a certain style, and even experiment with entirely new products created purely digitally to see if they resonate before committing time and materials to making them.

Nevatia eventually did find her perfect table, customized by a favorite artist. It sits in the Zwende showroom displaying some of the latest designs, it’s a reminder of what sparked the idea for the startup, and how much more there is yet to do.

For even more on Zwende’s co-founders and the artists they work with check out this episode of Now Go Build with Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=2n7bm0mteG0&feature=emb_title

For Kalsoom Lakhani, investing in the future of the Pakistani startup ecosystem was something of a homecoming. Having grown up in Pakistan before moving to the U.S. for university, Lakhani watched as her native country began to assemble the pieces necessary to support would-be startup founders in the fifth largest market in the world. Leaning on the lessons learned in other regions that have recently seen success in building strong startup ecosystems, such as Egypt and Vietnam, Lakhani launched i2i Ventures with her co-founder Misbah Naqvi to invest in and support this new group of budding Pakistani entrepreneurs.

“When looking across Southeast Asia and other new technology hubs, you can really see themes in the early days of growth,” says Lakhani. “Marketplaces and e-commerce, for example, seem to take off quickly, with startups also popping up to support various parts of that value chain.” This theme can be seen in i2i Ventures’ maiden investment, EZMakaan, a platform for domestic services. That said, Lakhani is quick to point out that while she can glean insights from other countries, building a business in Pakistan is anything but drag and drop. Local knowledge is essential, she says, and clearly i2i Ventures has that more than covered.

It was not by chance that Kamarul Muhamed combined his financial background and drone obsession into an AI-powered drone services startup. Aerodyne is Muhamed’s fourth startup, so he can spot a great opportunity. But even he didn’t fully appreciate that if developing technology is your only focus as CEO -- you will fail. Today, Muhamed pilots his own startup with one key focus: people. “I know it’s cliché, but our people are everything,” Muhamed says. “In the past, I used to be focusing more on our technology, on developing our systems and our solutions. I would say the first year of operations put us into a little bit of stress. We managed to coming up with pretty cool tech, but I could see that the team was suffering.” By addressing the struggle he saw within his team, Muhamed also saw Aerodyne’s technology and business soar.