5 in 5 minutes - June 09th

Snapask raises $5M to expand its business 

Hong Kong-based education technology startup Snapask has raised $5 million in a pre-Series A round from Kejora Ventures, Cai Wensheng and Welight Capital. Snapask plans to expand its mobile education business into other regions, such as Southeast Asia, Australia and the United Kingdom with the funds.

The startup uses artificial intelligence and cloud services to provide online tutoring services. Over 17,000 qualified tutors and around 300,000 students have been using this service across Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.

Heartisans eyes on preventing heart attack with the smartwatch 

Hong Kong-based technology startup, Heartisans, has built a smartwatch that predicts the onset of sudden cardiac attack. The smartwatch is now being tested at Queen Mary Hospital on patients who have already had heart attacks. Also, their next goal is to develop a long-term care plan for the users with this device. 

The Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation has nominated the co-founder of Heartisans, Tim Lui,  for the South China Morning Post’s Spirit of Hong Kong Awards in the Innovating for Good Category.

Spout raises US$2.1M funding to expand into emerging markets 

Singapore-based startup Spout Entertainment Group has recently closed a seed round with US$2.1 million of funding from business builder REAPRA Group. 

Spout plans to use this capital as expansion into emerging markets like Myanmar. It will also commit to providing free education resources to the local community up to US$600,000. The capital will be used to finance Spout’s expansion into emerging markets like Myanmar. 

The Founder of Spout, Daryl Teo, mentioned,“Southeast Asia is one of the world’s fast-growing regions, with a burgeoning young-middle class and a strong appetite for real-time on-demand content, particularly in the sphere of competitive gaming. Spout is committed to meeting that need.”

Singapore FinTech hub connects to Asia and Nordic FinTech ecosystems

Singapore-based FinTech hub LATTICE80 has recently entered into a partnership with the Nordic Finance Innovation (NFI), which is an independent Nordic executive network for the finance industry.

LATTICE80 hopes to gather more FinTech startups from the Nordics to Singapore and their other hubs in Asia, and vice versa. Fintech startups in Asia will have more opportunities to experience the Nordic culture, business and regulatory environment, and connections. 

MIT-CHIEF launches Co-founder’s Journey for students 

The student-run MIT-China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum (MIT-CHIEF) collaborated with the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node to launch a new program, Co-founder’s Journey. 

This new program aims at providing early-stage MIT startups with unique opportunities to dive into the innovation ecosystems, Hong Kong and access manufacturing resources from the neighboring Pearl River Delta. 

The second milestone of the journey will be in July while 10 selected startup teams are invited to Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China for the on-site visit, and learn from production lines, domains of the teams, and hardware incubators for rapid prototyping.