5 Asian startups You Should Know

1. PINDUODUO

Giving consumer insights to help revamp the traditional supply chains to benefit both consumers and producers.

Like Alibaba’s Taobao and rival JD.com, Pinduoduo is an e-commerce platform that offers a wide range of products from daily groceries to home appliances. Pinduoduo’s twist lies in its integration of social components into the traditional online shopping process, which the company describes as the “team purchase” model. By sharing Pinduoduo’s product information on social networks such as WeChat and QQ, users can invite their contacts to form a shopping team to get a lower price for their purchase. The mechanism keeps the users motivated and better hooked for a more interactive and dynamic shopping experience. When looking at a product, users are presented with two price options, a standard price to buy directly and a discounted price. Discounted prices are unlocked when users form ‘teams’ of at least two buyers.

2. ZILINGO

For connecting merchants to fashion’s supply chain—and winning the right to sell Disney-branded goods.

Zilingo operates a business-to-business marketplace for the fashion industry, connecting 60,000 businesses and 6,000 factories worldwide—the merchants with the manufacturers with the raw-material suppliers. The company, which claims to generate more than $100 million in sales every month from Zilingo Shopping, its consumer-facing e-commerce site, which has dedicated versions for Indonesia, Singapore (Zilingo’s home base), Philippines, and Thailand, is focused on assisting the small- and medium-size players in the fashion ecosystem. Beyond the opportunity to find the vendors who can turn ideas into reality, it offers them data and analytics as well as financing options and cross-border selling solutions. This agglomeration of services enables the companies on Zilingo to do everything from demand forecasting to product development. Last year, the company also scored the license to Disney-branded goods, giving even the most micro-entrepreneur on its platform the opportunity to make character merchandise and sell it via Zilingo.

3. LUMITICS

For assessing waste in restaurant kitchens

This Singaporean food-tech startup launched last year to help tackle the country’s stated goals toward zero waste. It’s developed a smart tracker called Insight, which uses sensors, image-recognition technology, and a scale to measure food waste in commercial kitchens. Insight works with any garbage can: Workers merely need to empty the unused food into Insight. Once it determines what’s being discarded and how much, it sends its data to the cloud so it can be analyzed. Chefs and kitchen managers can then discern how they can improve operations to reduce how much food is thrown away.

4. YUANFUDAO

For AI-enabled virtual classes, live tutoring, and apps for homework support.

A start-up founded in 2012, Yuanfudao has raised US$1 billion in a new round of funding in April as a response to the coronavirus outbreak led by Hillhouse Capital and its previous investor Tencent Holdings. This puts its valuation at around US$7.5 billion, making it one of the most valuable ed-tech start-ups in China. More than 13 million Chinese junior high and high school students utilize the app, where hundreds and thousands of apps are aggregated to prepare students for the college entrance exam. With such a huge database like this, it's no surprise that two-thirds of Yuantiku’s staff is dedicated to research and development. Leading engineers and researchers are also hired for the application’s “little ape” search and “ape teaching” assistance to further develop its artificial intelligence methods in more effective learning methods.

5. IHANDAL ENERGY SOLUTIONS

For recycling wasted heat from buildings

iHandal captures lost heat from a commercial building, compresses it using its Heatfuse technology, then redirects it to help regulate the temperature of the building as appropriate. The Malaysian company has implemented its solution in a number of hotels and hospitals in Kuala Lumpur, as well as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, such as Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.