Four Bangladeshi startups among Accelerating Asia’s 11 high-potential startups

Accelerating Asia, an international VC firm, has announced its largest accelerator cohort of 11 high-growth startups from Southeast Asia and the South Asia region. The cohort is the fourth of the firm's flagship 100-day program for pre-Series A startups. The 11 startups have raised over USD 4 million coming into the program and hail from Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The four Bangladeshi startups are; Amar Lab, DoctorKoi, HandyMama and SWAP.

Amar Lab is a healthcare startup that provides on-demand diagnostic services, partnering with top local and international diagnostic labs to provide end to end diagnostics test services from sample collection to testing to report delivery directly from customers premises, saving time, money and hassle for patients.

DoctorKoi is a health-tech company that offers prescription writing software allowing a doctor to write a prescription from a database of 27,000 medications within just a few clicks. Currently, DoctorKoi is working with over 1300 doctors and has partnered with top pharmaceutical companies and processed over 2.6M digital prescriptions. "We have been following Accelerating Asia for a while because the cohorts they have been working with in the country have been doing statistically well. It's a great opportunity for us to be getting this global exposure, in terms of fundraising, networking or even global expansion. As a team,  we're really excited about this," said Sadman Soeb, co-founder and CEO of DoctorKoi. " We have been getting really good product traction and customer feedbacks on the products and services that we're offering. Now the plan is to bring more doctors and healthcare stakeholders into this platform and create a network that can be facilitated for the stakeholders. We also want to digitise more chambers and prescriptions, and that is the way forward for us," he added.

HandyMama is the first and leading professional cleaning and handyman services platform in Bangladesh. HandyMama has provided its services to over 100,000 households so far and aims to serve a million households by 2025. "The pandemic was more of a test for our survival, and we have already recovered 70 per cent of our previous businesses. The team showed resilience, we recovered and started getting momentum. We also attracted investments from angel investors, which contributed to the success of the Accelerating Asia programme. Now the team is ready to level up and expand our operations with increased efficiency. We are also going to introduce new sets of products and services," said Rezaur Robin, CSO, HandyMama.

SWAP is the first cross-category exchange platform for users to sell or swap their old phone, laptop, car, motorcycle, furniture in just 24 hours. With over 25,000 clients served in 12 months, SWAP has helped to save 36 metric tons of e-waste and 694 metric tons of carbon emissions. "We are on the verge of securing funds from investors and VCs in Singapore as well as Bangladesh. We want to use it to ensure more growth in the future. We want to reduce waste and increase the affordability of the people simultaneously," shared Md. Parvez Hossain, CEO & MD, SWAP. "We also want to help all other e-commerces in Bangladesh in reducing carbon emissions. We plan to have a lot of collaborations. We are already collaborating with companies like Peekaboo and Daraz. Hopefully, with Accelerating Asia's assistance and guidance, we will be able to build an ecosystem for the e-commerces and the people," he added.