Kirirom Institute of Technology (KIT), run by a Cambodia-based social entrepreneurial startup called vKirirom, held an online event for virtual companies by current students on the 8th. Virtual company is a unique system of KIT that verifies the effectiveness of a business while maintaining accounting and independent profitability and recruits angel investors. It is incorporated when there is a certain number of angel investors.
About 50 people from Japan and other countries involved in vKirirom investment and community participated in this pitch event. After the pitch, meeting opportunities were set up in Google Meet for individual interviews, and it is expected that more than half of the startups on the pitch will be provided with support such as angel investment.
Fixh.me
Fixh.me has developed a platform that connects people who want to repair home appliances, water services, electrical equipment, etc. with service providers in Cambodia. It started in 2018 with more than 100 service providers. 20% of the fee is collected from the service provider as a referral fee, and in the last four months, the referral fee was US $ 2,330.
By expanding this business from B2C to B2B in the future, it plans to sell US $ 35,000 over the remaining five months by the end of the year. The amount raised is US $ 60,000.
JOBIFY
JOBIFY is a matching site for job seekers and companies specializing in engineer recruitment. There is no engineer-specific recruitment site in Cambodia yet, but JOBIFY differentiates itself by having IT engineers interview job seekers and offer free online exams and online training courses. Our target is 5% (2,500) majoring in IT out of the 50,000 Cambodian university graduates every year.
When a matching contract is concluded, the company will charge 10% of the person’s starting salary for one month as a commission (10% VAT is not included). If a job seeker quits within three months of employment, the company will be introduced to a replacement for free. For the time being, it will concentrate on the Cambodian domestic market, and in the future it is also considering market development in the ASEAN region.
Zeal
Zeal is a startup that provides real estate tech and construction tech. For Cambodian real estate companies, we will digitally generate real estate data and create virtual tours using VR so that prospective customers will be interested in real estate online. The created virtual tour can be viewed on Zeal’s website as well as embedded on the real estate agent’s website.
Meanwhile, Construction Tech will develop offshore content such as interactive maps, 360-degree images, and video walk-throughs based on drones and point data. It is envisioning contracts from overseas construction industries that utilize the low-cost Cambodian labor force. Competitors are AroundMe360 (Thailand), Tubear.co (Singapore) and VJ Virtual Tour (USA).
KGF Online
KGF Online is a startup that provides online seminar services. In collaboration with the Tokyo-based recruitment web media “LISTEN“, we plan and hold weekly online seminars + networking events under the brand “LISTEN x KGF Online” using Zoom, Remo, Google Meet, etc. One of the themes is to share knowledge through cross-border and cross-generation. So far, Japanese speakers who are active in the field from England, Israel, China, etc. have been invited to the seminar as a speaker, and 9 events have been held so far.
The current core value is to provide seminars with high-quality speakers, and we will collect 100,000 yen from members as an annual membership fee. In addition we sell recorded contents of seminars to members who are too busy to attend the event, and we will be monetizing through business matching and business outsourcing which starts from KGF online. Currently, it specializes in the Japanese market, but in the future, we plan to expand this business to the English-speaking and Cambodian markets.
Casstack
Casstack has developed a chatbot specializing in the Cambodian food and beverage industry. While the spread of covid, many restaurants are unable to make large-scale IT investments and there is no need to provide high-end services. Casstack helps the food service industry accept online orders by offering a chatbot that does not require initial costs and can be introduced with a subscription model.
Cambodia has a population of 16 million, with 10.17 million Facebook users and 14.6 million smartphone users, and it is a unique market for efficient mobile social media engagement. Casstack aims to make the best use of this point and aim for a platform that can promote sales from a mechanism that accepts online orders. The number of contracts will be increased from 80 to 90 per month, aiming for sales of US $ 400,000 in the first year.
Len Of Reality
Len of Reality is developing services to use VR to learn languages, especially to increase vocabulary in foreign languages. With the influence of covid, children, students, and working people have fewer opportunities to learn languages through face-to-face lectures, but with the introduction of VR, we can get more chance to learn with gamification aspects without spending a lot of time. Furthermore, due to the utility of VR, users can learn vocabulary by making full use of their eyes, ears, and mouth, so it is easy to connect with experiences and to retain memory.
Currently, we are brushing up the service quality by repeating tests using about 200 VRs in KIT. We are currently optimizing for Oculus Go because of the availability of the product, but we plan to shift to Oculus Quest in the future. Currently, we are focusing on markets such as Japan and China that have a relatively high potential to pay for English learning, but in the future, we will expand to vocabulary learning services in Japanese and Chinese in addition to English in Cambodia and other countries.
Dexpertize
Cambodia is expected to promote DX in many areas of the industry by 2023, but only 22% of companies have a specific DX strategy. The reasons are lack of tools, lack of data, lack of technical support, and so on. Dexpertize offers solutions that support digital transformation (DX), targeting SMEs with inadequate DX strategies.
The elements required for DX can be broken down into data collection and digitization, data visualization and monitoring, process optimization, and process automation. Among these, Dexpetize is currently focusing on developing KPI dashboards (data monitoring and monitoring). Considering the market characteristics, we would like to provide a comprehensive DX solution with KPI dashboard and RPA (process automation) for Cambodia, and process mining tool (process optimization) and RPA (process automation) for Japan and the world. The process mining tool utilizes Celonis.
Keen
Keen specializes in software coding testing. It can be said that it is a Cambodian version inspired by SHIFT (TSE: 3697), a major Japanese software quality assurance and testing company. In response to the growing demand for coding tests in Cambodia and around the world, we intend to become a testing company that takes advantage of Cambodia’s social characteristics.
One of the merits is that it is certified by the International Software Testing Qualification Committee (ISTQB), it secures human resources by utilizing the network of KIT and JOBIFY, and costs can be half as much as neighboring Vietnam, which is famous for offshore companies. Summing up the past experience of team members, it has reported more than 8,000 test cases and more than 2,000 bugs so far.
vKirirom is a social entrepreneurial startup founded in February 2014 by serial entrepreneur Takeshi Izuka. Mr. Izuka moved to Cambodia with his family in January 2014 after living in Singapore for four years. He sold Digital Forest, the operator of the web access analysis platform “Visionalist” he founded, to NTT Communications in 2009. He rents Kirirom National Park partially from Cambodian government to develop a city that combines highland resort and a boarding university KIT.
vKirirom raised US $ 2.9 million in July 2016 from 15 angel investors in Japan and Singapore. The company has won the “Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific“, announced annually by Deloitte Touché Tohmatsu, for the third consecutive year from 2017 to 2019.