Philippine pride: Salarium wins $500K equity investment from Seedstars World

Seedstars World (SSW), the global startup competition for emerging markets and fast-growing startup scenes, brought its 2014 round to a successful close today with one grand prize winner: Philippine payroll service Salarium. Salarium takes home the much-coveted guaranteed equity investment worth US$500,000.

The Philippine startup and nine other finalists pitched their business ideas at the SSW Final Event in Geneva, Switzerland in front of an international and prestigious jury, including Serendipity Investments’ founder Jose Marin, Bravofly Rumbo Group founder Marco Corradino, Kinnevik’s Jessica Thorell, Techstars managing director Jens Lapinski, Mountain Partners founder Dr. Cornelius Boersch, Edmond de Rothschild Private Equity CEO Johnny El Hachem, and SSW co-founder Pierre-Alain Masson.

The jury was presented with a diverse set of ideas: a self-updating phone book by Singapore’s 6Degrees, an automatized laundry service by Bangkok’s Washbox24, travel platform Busportal of Peru, and casual gaming studio The Other Guys of Argentina, to name a few.

But it was most impressed by Salarium’s brainchild: an end-to-end payroll system providing time and attendance keeping, payroll and expense processing, and salary disbursement that counts global logistics leader DHL as client.

“Not only did their product prove to be highly scalable and innovative, it already has a huge traction on the global market,” Masson says of Salarium.

Asked what the win means to him and his company, Judah Hirsch, CEO of Salarium, says: “This is a huge boost of credibility for us, and the connections we established during the SSW Final Event alone will be very helpful for our further success and expansion plans. The win is especially meaningful to us because all of the entrepreneurs here showcased great ideas and impressive business models.”

Around 2,000 startups joined the competition from all over the globe, and this was trimmed down to 36 semi-finalists, and later, 10 finalists.

The semi-finalists will be up for funding via the Seedstars World Crowd Fund, which allows European investors to invest with a minimum of £100 (US$152). The fund is running via Seedrs, the first crowdfunding platform for funds in Europe.

The semi-finalists took part in an intensive bootcamp at the leading engineering school EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. The bootcamp included a pitch training and mentoring session that reexamined each startup’s business model and financial sustainability. Among the mentors were top entrepreneurs Todd Embley of Chinaccelerator and Eventbrite co-founder Renaud Visage.

This was the second edition of SSW, whose mission is to discover the best startups beyond Silicon Valley and Western Europe, and help them succeed.

See: Salarium helps Philippine businesses to automate their payroll