Hong Kong accelerator Betatron injects funds into fifth cohort of 8 startups

Betatron, a Hong Kong-based startup accelerator, said it has invested up to US$150,000 in each of the eight startups in the program’s latest run.

Photo credit: Betatron

The company said it will also guide each startup through the three-month program, which will end in December 2019.

The focus of the program is to accelerate business growth and fast-track each startup to its next funding round, according to a statement. Each startup gets a lead mentor from Betatron’s network of venture capitalists and industry experts. They are also provided support for marketing, sales, tech development, UI/UX, legal, and accounting.

“The current batch of eight international startups have gone through a rigorous, in-depth, and careful selection process over the last couple of months,” Betatron marketing director Sam Ameen said. The startups are a mix of business-to-business companies from Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, the US, and Egypt.

Here are the eight startups:

• Bookairfreight is an online booking platform that connects small and medium-sized businesses with air freight forwarders.
• ExpandCart is a comprehensive, cloud-based ecommerce platform, which is essentially a Shopify designed specifically for the Arabic language and the Middle East and North Africa region.
• Next Billion deploys its free POS platform in rural stores to digitize offline retail data from independent stores in emerging markets.
• Positive Energy helps investors connect with vetted small and medium-sized renewable energy developers or projects, streamlining the full investment process with a secure digital platform.
• Sakay is a transportation and mapping software that is regarded as Waze for informal public transit.
• Shipnext is an automated shipping marketplace that seeks to make cargo-to-ship matching, freight trading, contracting, and documentation flow efficient, secure, and reliable.
• Toku is a cloud communication provider that enables smart customer engagement via voice and messaging APIs.
• ZhenHub is a cloud-based inventory and order management system for ecommerce retailers to automate logistics.

Betatron said the latest batch saw 1,301 applications and an overall acceptance rate of 0.61%. It claims to have invested in 37 startups since launching in 2016.