By Alithea De Jesus
With the growing interests in innovation among Filipinos, the country’s largest corporate incubator 917Ventures is in search of viable ideas in the fields of eCommerce, Healthtech, Fintech, and Adtech which may be transformed into business ventures that it can fund, build, and market.
Speaking before over 5,000 participants at the recent Philippine Startup Week online conference, 917Ventures Managing Director Vince Yamat said the company is constantly looking for venture builders in Southeast Asia who are willing to be part of its massive ecosystem that extends to its parent company and the Philippines’ leading telecommunications provider Globe and Globe’s major stockholders Ayala Corporation and Singtel.
917Ventures, he pointed out, has already built several initiatives such as GCash, the country’s largest provider of mobile money services; digital marketing firm AdSpark; and telehealth companies KonsultaMD and HealthNow, the latter in partnership with AC Health. Thus, it has the expertise and resources to turn new ideas into reality.
“We support our venture builders with the funding, the right processes, and the right infrastructure. Typically, setting up a company from scratch is difficult due to the time and effort needed to raise funds, recruit a team, pitch to potential partners, and attend to administrative staff, among other things. In 917Ventures, we promise to support venture builders by providing all the resources that they need so they can concentrate on the product and the customers,” said Vince Yamat.
Yamat said that while they are willing to entertain different kinds of business ideas, the top priority is still those that already fall within the scope of what 917Ventures is already doing in eCommerce, Fintech, Healthtech and Adtech. “We believe that there are lots of opportunities in these sectors and there are several unmet needs that we still need to find out and solve,” he said.
Anyone with viable ideas related to the 917Ventures focus areas may join Velocity, the company’s newly-launched venture builders program which will initially run for three months. The program seeks to gather and fund the best innovators in Southeast Asia. Talents who manage to build a meaningful product with proven traction will continue in the venture development journey through a seed round, with the ultimate goal of spinning off as an independent entity. Up to 10 finalists will be selected to partake in this exclusive program.
Applications for the first batch will be accepted until January 11, 2021. Details may be found at https://velocity.917ventures.com/