Startup News in Singapore for 2nd March 2020

In this series, I will begin writing my thoughts on startup news in Singapore/Asia. Here are the news today!

With fresh funding, Snapask expands tech-driven learning across Asia

This post seems like a sponsored post or a PR piece that declared that Snapask raised a bunch of money. Anyways, the tutoring industry is HUGE in east Asian countries. Even more significant than education itself.

Personally, I love the idea of an app to "video call" a doctor. And mostly, this is similar to that. Except that instead of reaching a doctor, you reach a tutor who will help you with your homework.

This startup has legs based on just the idea itself. But will it execute well? The question is, how fast can you recruit teachers and how well can you acquire parents who will pay for this service? Are they even willing to pay for such a service without dedicated face-to-face time? And wow, 35M is a large sum of money.

Commentary: Turning disaster into a driving force

I have been waiting for a recession since I graduated. With COVID19 and the "market corrections," I have got my brokerage accounts active, and am opening one for my son too. There is an opportunity in every disaster.

This piece feels very much like a "stay positive" kind of post, and that annoys me. Pragmatically, a recession can be a positive force to shake out the weak (business). With difficulties, one can identify which areas business is vulnerable in, and either fix it. Or start over.

As my engineer always says. We build things with a plan to rebuild it X-period from now. For businesses, either you get large enough to turn yourself into a rent-seeking monopoly (like Google/Facebook/Tinder), or you rebuild.

Fashion imaging startup FlixStock banks $2.5m from Wavemaker, others

In my experience with Wavemaker, I thought Wavemaker they stopped investing new monies. Glad to see that they are back. For one: "a programmatic fashion imaging startup" is a mouthful. But they look like a Trax but for fashion retail.

My first idea is that wow, they are going to have a hard time acquiring businesses. I will not comment much here because I know little about B2B, let alone fashion B2B. But good luck to them.

Deep Dive: Is Jay-Z's investment fund just another one in the sea of funds in Southeast Asia?

Let's start with some facts. There are not a lot of sophisticated funds in Southeast Asia. Let's get that out of the way first.

Secondly, the Jay-Z investment fund is branded, and well, branded might be useful, especially if they bring the bay area ethos to Asia.

I have no idea how this will work, but tell you what. I will send an email to them and see if they respond.

Facebook-backed Flickstree nets $3m from Samsung, others

Why does Flickstree not have HTTPS on their website? This company sounds like Videoplaza, the startup I interned at when I was 24. Videoplaza sold for 500M.

I do not know where the AI is here. And usually, when you see Indian, and you see AI, it means one thing -> cheap human labor pretending to be bots.

This sounds like another PR/fluff piece from TechInAsia.