JFDI’s Demo Day: Over 100 Investors, One Dave McClure, and 7 Startup Pitches

JFDI, the Singapore based startup incubator, had its Demo Day yesterday and it attracted more than 200 attendees. Many of those present were investors with big international names like 500 Startups’ Dave McClure, MIH Group (Naspers), Global Brain, plus regional investors such as Golden Gates Ventures, Red Dot Ventures, Crystal Horse Investments, and more. It was a great event with well rehearsed pitches and a valuable chance for folks to build their network.

I liked this part of the opening message from JFDI’s co-founder Hugh Mason to the investor-centric crowd:

Please don’t come into this space (Southeast Asia) for just one, two, or three years. Come here for ten, twenty years. That’s how investors should look at investing in this region. There was a saying that it takes a mom and dad to bring up a child, but it takes an ecosystem to bring up a startup. So everyone of you here are important in helping startups here grow.

Below are the seven startups that graduated from JFDI this semester:

Our Health Mate

Problem: There are more than 20 million Indians working overseas and they usually send money back home. Part of this money is intended for healthcare services but most families at home may not have access to these services or they wish to scrimp on it.

Solution: Our Health Mate aims build a website that is linked up to thousands of clinics in five major cities in India. Indians working overseas can make payments and fixed appointments on behalf of their family members on this website. To monetize, It charges both the clinic for referral fees and the user for booking fees.

Collabspot

Problem: Salespeople usually communicate with clients via email. Current CRM tools are not built to work with emails. As a result, salespeople have the pain of doing data entry work to transfer information in emails to CRM tools. This reduces productivity.

Solution: Collabspot works as a plugin into Gmail that pulls data from Gmail to your CRM apps. This reduces the mundane data entry work and makes salespeople more productive. Collabspot monetizes on a per user monthly subscription model.