Meet the 8 startups that pitched at the MOX demo day in Taipei and Singapore

Photo credit: MOX.

If you’re a mobile app maker, chances are user acquisition is one of your biggest concerns. Sure, you’re probably also worried about funding, resources, technical challenges, and what have you. But all of it is for naught if you can’t get eyes and fingers on those touchscreens.

Well, there’s an accelerator for that. The Mobile-Only Accelerator, MOX to its friends, is especially interested in helping startups get over this particular hurdle.

MOX is a program by SOSV, a US-headquartered venture capital firm that invests in seed- and growth-stage tech startups. The difference is, it’s doing so through its own accelerators. The firm also operates IndieBio for biotech, Urban-X for smart cities, Food-X for restaurants, HAX for hardware, and Chinaccelerator for internet software.

“In the US and Europe, you have one billion people who started using the internet on PCs,” MOX managing director and SOSV partner William Bao Bean tells Tech in Asia. “In China, one billion people will soon be online, first on mobile – the largest mobile-only population in the world. That’s the next billion.”

MOX operates out of Taiwan and is about what William calls “the last four billion” – specifically Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America. MOX partners with one of William’s local investee companies, GMobi, which offers smartphone advertising services and a payment platform.

See: Team behind Chinaccelerator launches mobile-only accelerator in Taiwan aimed at ‘next four billion’

MOX managing director and SOSV partner William Bao Bean. Photo credit: MOX.

Unfair advantage

GMobi has raised a disclosed total of US$5 million and is currently raising a new round of funding, William says. But the important thing here is its user base. William says GMobi’s platform has attracted more than 100 million users so far.

“Every single company that comes onto the MOX platform has access to over 100 million users for free,” he explains. “Startups have two problems: customer acquisition and retention. We just solved customer acquisition. We’re about unfair advantage, and we have a significant one over just about everyone.”

MOX wants to solve customer acquisition for startups by leveraging on GMobi’s 100,000-strong user base.

Through GMobi’s business practice of getting apps onto smartphones through advertising deals, MOX can offer its startups a considerable audience for A/B testing, distribution, and monetization options through revenue sharing, William says. The accelerator also helps its startups with launching and localization in new markets.

MOX looks for companies that already have a product and some initial traction in terms of users and funding, and are interested in going into the markets the accelerator is targeting. All the startups in the batch that pitched in its demo day in Taipei and in Singapore are in the process or raising new rounds of funding, from pre-series A to series B.

The pitches