SEA Open Innovation Challenge

About SEA OIC

The Southeast Asia Open Innovation Challenge (SEA OIC) brings together some of Southeast Asia’s largest conglomerates to collaborate with innovative startups, scaleups, and SMEs.

In its inaugural launch in 2020, the SEA OIC brought together five Southeast Asia conglomerates - Emtek Group, Hong Leong Holdings, Sunway Group, Central Group, and VNG Cloud. Each offered their most pressing challenge statements, looking to partner with innovative solution providers that could solve them. In an overwhelming response, the challenge received 325 applications from 38 countries, and our conglomerates matched with 5 exciting solution providers to begin 3-6 month pilots.

Enterprise Singapore, together with Ravel Innovation, were pleased to invite innovative local and foreign teams to take on the challenge to showcase their innovative solutions in addressing crucial opportunity and growth areas for regional, home-grown conglomerates.

Successful participants were able to attend an exclusive Ravel Innovation corporate-startup pilot Bootcamp, access $20,000 Startup SG grant funding per pilot*, additional grant funding from ESG, and more importantly, the chance to co-develop, testbed and deploy their solutions with our established corporate partners, in one country to start, and potentially, across the region at scale.

Sound interesting? The next challenge will be launched in November 2021!

*T&Cs apply

Market Entry: Thailand

The Challenge Statement

Context: Central Group is the leader in retail, property development, hospitality, and food & beverage industries in Thailand.

Digital media companies (e.g. Google & Facebook) have changed the way brands reach audiences online in more targeted and personalized ways. Yet when it comes to offline media (e.g. out of home, in-store), the ability to drive targeted ads remains very much at its infancy.

Pilot Requirements: In the SEA OIC, Central Group were looking for a digital media solution that helps reach audiences with more targeted (even personalised) ads and promotions throughout both their offline & online (O2O) journeys, utilising customer data analytics, in addition to location-based technologies, to provide advertising at the right time, place and channel.

The Match: Moving Walls

Moving Walls is an advertising technology company that automates outdoor advertising buying, selling, and measurement. They operate Moving Audiences, a location intelligence platform that brings transparency and automation to out-of-home media via Planning, Buying, and Measurement tools. Moving Walls is a global advertising technology provider that provides location-based audience measurement data to enable marketers to plan, buy, and measure outdoor advertising in an accountable and automated manner.

Market Entry: Indonesia

The Challenge Statement

Context: DANA is one of Indonesia's most popular digital wallets with over 45 million users. Its services are accessed either through the DANA app, or within partner ecosystems that have adopted DANA's solution. Users use DANA for money transfers, bill payments, e-commerce payments, entertainment, investments and insurance, amongst others.

Pilot Requirements: In this challenge, Dana sought solutions that had synergies with DANA's existing payment experience which could improve the interface for users, allowing easy access and retrieval of their financial data, enabling a more seamless, effortless and personalised way to perform follow-up actions.

The Match: Finantier

Finantier logo

Finantier is an Open Finance platform for Southeast Asia. Finantier offers an API and infrastructure that powers other fintech products, accelerating time to market and reducing costs for businesses while delivering tailored solutions for consumers so everyone can fully benefit from greater financial inclusion. By leveraging the digital footprint of consumers to improve their financial wellbeing, Finantier allows businesses to build and deliver financial services to consumers and other businesses in an efficient way.

Market Entry: Singapore

The Challenge Statement

Context: Hong Leong Holdings Limited (HLHL) has over 250 tenants, majority of which are commercial tenants. There is a lack of integration of a POS system that would have collected user data for leasing teams to stay informed on tenant performance, and in the case of Covid-19, make accurate decisions on the amount of rental waivers and rebates to be given to each tenant. In addition, the lack of digital processes within the company makes tenant management tedious and time-consuming. Many processes are still paper-first, both between tenant and landlord, or between internal departments.

Pilot Requirements: Hong Leong Holdings Limited used this challenge to seek a digital tenant management solution to allow the leasing team to deliver better customer experience, enable transparent landlord-tenant communication, and improve efficiencies between departments and with tenants.

The Match: AImazing

Aimazing is an end-to-end data-driven marketing and analytics solution backed by The FinLab (Powered by UOB & SGInnovate). Aimazing enables merchants of brick-and-mortar businesses to scale their revenue and gain better consumer insights, through a unique and customizable O2O Loyalty Program. By leveraging on the power of data, Aimazing aims to empower offline businesses to increase customer retention rates and accelerate growth.

Market Entry: Malaysia

The AgriTech Challenge Statement

Context: The world's population is expected to increase and global food supply is expected to decline. With recent challenges such as economical instabilities, extreme climate changes and the recent novel Covid-19 pandemic, there is an increasingly urgent need for improved food security. We are looking for an innovative partner to collaborate with on a technologically-enabled solution

Pilot Requirements: Sunway's Agrifood team aimed to find dynamic farm management and automation solutions for vegetable farming that improve farm operational efficiency, leveraging on image recognition, AI, IoT and analytics.

The Match: ProfilePrint

ProfilePrint’s combination of sensor technology and SaaS platform can be used across the whole supply chain. Their patented AI food fingerprinting technology synthesises complex interrelated parameters and sensory data into a single digital fingerprint, allowing users to build more intelligent and resilient supply chains.

Market Entry: Vietnam

The Challenge Statement

Context: VNG Corporation (VNG) is the first Vietnamese 'Unicorn'. VNG focuses on four main businesses: online games, platforms, digital payments and cloud services (VNG Cloud).

Electronic Know Your Customers (eKYC) has been widely deployed and adopted as the standard in the banking and finance industries in many countries. VNG has developed TrueID, an eKYC solution powered by artificial intelligence and facial and optical character recognition technologies. With a 60% rural population in Vietnam, there is huge market potential for eKYC digital banking services in the country

Pilot Requirements: VNG sought a proven scaleup looking to enter Vietnam as a key market that could provide complementary technology solutions that are synergistic with TrueID to create a comprehensive solution suite that enables banks and financial institutions to reach the 60% rural population in Vietnam. .

The Match: Source Sage

SourceSage is an ecommerce platform company founded in 2015, which aims to empower enterprises and individuals with their own platforms to start, grow and scale their businesses online successfully. By providing procurement and distribution services for both MNCs and SMEs, SourceSage is the intermediary that bridges merchantsʼ barriers to access, with the goal of accelerating the transaction process.

Benefits of participating in the SEA OIC 2020

Opportunity to pilot with a Conglomerate, to gain market validation and accelerated market entry.
Up to 5 companies will be awarded the S$20,000 Startup SG Grant - Each conglomerate will be able to award one grant to one team per conglomerate
Singapore-based companies are able to further apply for the Enterprise Development Grant to cover up to 70% of supported project costs
The opportunity to be part of ESG' Startup SG network and EDB’s startup network
Access to co-working and meeting space at Ravel Innovation’s Co-working Campus in Singapore
Access to other perks & benefits such as incorporation and legal support, accounting setup support, Google Cloud credits, etc.

As part of Ravel Innovation's community, successful applicants can enjoy credits and discounts from these partners and more.

About SEA OIC

We are proud to announce the inaugural SEA OIC matches

Market Entry: Thailand

Market Entry: Indonesia

Market Entry: Singapore

Market Entry: Malaysia

Market Entry: Vietnam

Benefits of participating in the SEA OIC 2020