Buko Ventures Q1 2023 Update
Named Top 50 Trailblazer in PH / AcadArena Series A / Backscoop Podcast Launch / Betterteem Korea Expansion & more from the Buko Ventures portfolio in the Philippines
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Hi Buko Ventures Community!
We wanted to share an update about Buko Ventures and our portfolio companies following the end of Q1 2023.
We were happy to see Buko Ventures recognized in Esquire magazine’s recent Esquire Trailblazers List featuring leaders in the tech and startup industry in the Philippines.
Today, we have a total of 20 investments in the portfolio. We are also actively investing so please forward any promising early stage ventures in the Philippines to us! We would love to meet them.
Here are some highlight notes about our portfolio companies so far in 2023.
AcadArena Series A
One of our earliest investments, AcadArena just announced a $10.2m Series A fundraise led by Blockchain Capital along with participation from 1kx, TNB Aura, and Mirana Capital. We’re very happy for the AcadArena team and excited about their long-term potential enabling esports culture and educational opportunities in the Philippines and ultimately around the world.
We had the opportunity to attend their recent company anniversary party at the Dessert Museum in Manila with over 500 attendees from campus esports organizations around the country. It was amazing to see the vibrant community they have enabled and we’re excited for their marquee event in June - CONQuest 2023, the leading gaming and culture convention in the Philippine, which will include the finals of AcadArena’s Alliance Games, the largest scholastic esports league in the country.
AcadArena co-founder Justin Banusing was quoted in a recent article in Spin.ph: “We are very excited to see where this growth will take AcadArena. More than the bigger and better ventures such as Alliance Games and CONQuest, we’re also seeing tremendous growth in membership signups, partner schools, and partner organizations. Now, AcadArena stands at 200,000 student members across 1,600 partner schools.” (article)
Backscoop Podcast Launch
Backscoop launched their own podcast called One More Scoop as a great addition to their newsletter which has become one of the most popular tech newsletters in Southeast Asia.
As Founder and CEO Amanda Cua describes it:
“[With the podcast], you'll get to listen to the unfiltered personal journeys of SEA's top founders, executives and VCs. It's fun, casual and totally not your usual "thought leader" kind of thing. Get to know their personal side, struggles and who they really are.
Personally, I'm super proud because launching this podcast (our second product) is another step taking BackScoop from "just a newsletter" to a leading media company in Southeast Asia. This is just the first of more launches to come! 🌏”
Amanda has already had a bunch of great guests like Kim Yao, co-founder and CEO of CloudEats, the largest cloud kitchen startup in the Philippines and Vietnam, and Hsu Ken Ooi, the Managing Partner of Iterative, the “YC” of Southeast Asia.
Amanda also made her first hire to join Backscoop: Wendy Qian joins the team after previously working in early stage investing for Picus Capital and Global Ventures. Wendy graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.
You can subscribe to BackScoop here:
https://www.backscoop.com/
Forent joined the Antler incubator program in Singapore and attracted a great growth advisor to join their team, who was previously a marketing leader for Airbnb. Forent has strategically focused their product from a general rental platform to specifically focus on car rentals in particular where they saw the most demand. Recently, they have seen the Forent app spiking in popularity reaching the Top 30 apps in the travel category of the Philippines Google Play Store.
Humble has seen 10x revenue growth in the last 9 months as they’ve signed major supply side clients in the Philippines. Humble is a tech-powered liquidation marketplace for the Philippines. Josef recently recruited a new head of sales who is bringing in a surge of new supply of excess, returned, and slightly damaged goods from some of the top brands in the country to help these clients capture substantial resale value. They also recently launched their B2C reselling platform thriftbyhumble.com where Humble can strategically list higher value items and enable cost-conscious and sustainably minded shoppers to get great deals (while also juicing up the liquidation value Humble can generate).
Humble is actually benefiting from the economic downturn as companies that are downsizing have excess office equipment in need of liquidation. Some of their largest recent deals have been from these downsizing clients.
Humble is currently finishing up an accelerator program with SeedStars and looking to raise a new investment round in the coming months. We think they have one of the biggest potential TAMs of any startup in the portfolio.
Betterteem was selected to join the Techstars Spring 2023 program in Tel Aviv. They are also hiring for their first Business Development Associate in Korea as part of their South Korea market expansion. After a year of solid work, their HR analytics dashboard is looking really polished with positive client feedback.
Betterteem now delivers an average employee retention improvement of 6% quarterly, which saves their clients a massive $1.5 million dollars per 1,000 employees in new hiring efforts and lost productivity annually.
A recent BPO industry report announced $32bn in annual revenues for the BPO sector in the Philippines, which is 9% of total Filipino GDP. The BPO sector (outsourced services for overseas corporations) is a massive part of the local economy and employee turnover is one of the biggest margin drivers for these BPO companies. Betterteem’s predictive analytics platform saves money by predicting and preventing unwanted resignations while improving employee experience, which is a core focus for the Philippine BPO sector today.
Betterteem is raising a new funding round with Techstars.
As always there is lots going on across the Buko Ventures portfolio and across the Philippines tech ecosystem in general. Our friends at Foxmont Ventures recently published their annual report on VC in the Philippines. We would encourage you to take a look here: Philippine Venture Capital Report 2023.
Feel free to reach out anytime if you have a venture you would like us to meet or if you would like to chat about the Philippines startup ecosystem.
Buko Ventures Team
Manila, Philippines
April 2023
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