Malaysia’s 1337 Ventures brings its Alpha Startups bootcamp to Indonesia

At the Alpha Startups bootcamp in Malaysia.

Alpha Startups is coming to Indonesia – that’s an intensive mentoring program for startups initiated by Malaysia’s 1337 Ventures.

To help run the program in Indonesia, the Malaysian venture teamed up with local venture capital firm Convergence, Chinese venture capital firm Gobi Partners, and Baidu Indonesia. A unique Chinese-Malaysian-Indonesian startup alliance is forming here.

The Alpha Startups program works like this: early stage startups are invited to a five-day bootcamp, where they validate their ideas and turn them into minimum viable products ready for launch. The best companies to come out of that will continue to receive mentorship and access to facilities after that for three months, and a small investment. Besides Malaysia, Alpha Startups has tested this concept in the Philippines and Singapore.

The first Indonesian Alpha Startups bootcamp will begin in Jakarta on March 28, Gobi Partners said in a statement. Applications are accepted starting today. A second batch will run in August. Up to three teams will be selected to move on to the three-month mentoring phase, and will get a micro-investment of US$5,000 in cash along with other benefits, such as some free access to Amazon Web Services.

Alpha Startups says it has already successfully coached 196 startups in this way – 23 of which have received follow-on financing from angel investors, accelerators, venture capital firms, and government funds.

The announcement of Alpha Startups’ plans for Indonesia comes just one day after US-based Fenox VC in collaboration with Japanese IT giant Infocom introduced their own accelerator program in the archipelago.