We have a few Asian tech startups on our radar but just specifically China and Hong Kong for this week.
For folks who are interested in investing or partnering with these startups, drop us an email — hello[at]penn-olson[dot]com – anytime. No promises, but we’ll try our best to be a bridge. And if you’re a tech startup founder in Asia hoping to be featured, kindly send us your pitch here.
1. MadeInChina.com | China
MadeInChina.com is a B2B e-commerce site that focuses on helping foreigners to source supplies that are made in China. It works like Alibaba.com (HKG:1688) but this space is certainly big enough for more players to enter and fight for. MadeInChina charges a commission whenever a deal is successfully transacted on the site. Business is good with sales growth rate from Q3 to Q4 in 2011 seeing a 700 percent increase. Its rapid growth has caught ePRO’s attention, who announced on December 31 that it acquired the site back in November. ePRO is…
2. Chaoren360 | China
Whenever we’ve looked at specialist Chinese e-commerce sites that focus on fashion, they’ve pretty much all been aimed exclusively at women. And so the startup Chaoren360 – which is a pun on the word ‘superman’ in Chinese – is bucking that trend by selling only men’s apparel, shoes, and accessories. Chaoren360.com is based in Guangdong in southern China – now home to over 10 percent of all Chinese startups – and is actually more of a magazine than an online mall because it just links to products on others sites such …
3. JiaThis | China
The Chinese startup behind the social sharing platform JiaThis has revealed that it has acquired the very young social commenting service Uyan in a bid to consolidate its lead as the biggest indie service of this kind. Websites that use JiaThis – which range from Yahoo China to state news agency Xinhua, among over half a million other mostly Chinese websites – can put an array of social buttons or ‘share counters’ on their sites (or just the signature JiaThis green-and-white cross) to allow readers to quickly share an article on …
4. 8Securities | Hong Kong
Hong Kong-based startup 8 Securities has recently closed a round of funding worth US$8 million, according to co-founder and CEO Mikaal Abdulla, in conversation with PO. The company’s service is a a socially-engaged “trading portal” that makes it easy for anyone to invest in financial markets using its app-ified dashboard – as we saw when Mikaal and his team made it through to the TC Disrupt Beijing Startup Battlefield which we live-blogged back in November. Since then, 8 Securities has been in private beta. But now it’s ready for primetime having …
Other startup related stories in Asia
- How Indonesia’s Tech Scene Grew in 2011
- Top 3 Startup Provinces in China: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong [CHART]
- 10 Sites to Help You Learn Python for FREE
- The Douche Bag