The 13 young founders onstage at the graduation ceremony.
At the Pacific Place in Jakarta yesterday, Jakarta Founder Institute graduated its fall batch of startups. This selected crew started four months ago, in October last year, and was initially 132 registrants. That eventually got cut down to 43 participants, and yesterday only 13 students – representing eight startup ventures – survived all the assignments and hardcore mentoring.
Jakarta Founder Institute, which is backed by Andy Zain, Sanny Gaddafi, and with Novistiar Rustandi as the director, has great mentors and sessions week in, week out. Some notable mentors include Peter Vesterbacka (the Mighty Eagle of Rovio), Gabe Zichermann (Gamification), Izak Jenie (Nexian), Kartini Muljadi (Indonesia’s 23rd-richest businessperson), and more.
And so the eight startups, with their 13 founders, were officially graduated from the Jakarta Founder Institute at this Graduation Day event. The proud alumni are:
- Aibilities - Combining healthcare and technology to provide a solution and communication platform for patients with movement disabilities by using an eye-tracking Android app. (Sidenote: won Best Rising Startup award at SparxUp last year)
- Eductory - An online resource that help parents find the right education (school, courses, private learning) for their children with an automated targeting machine.
- Fokado - Provides an alternative/solution to the whole gift problem we face by giving experience rather than physical goods.
- Ifetcha - A dating service where it helps users connect and interact with new people around them using its LBS app.
- Mitramicro - A PaaS (Platform as a Service) startup which aimes to make insurance available and accessible to informal workers with low incomes and low coverage.
- Socentix - A cloud-based solution business intelligence for alternative asset managers.
- Stilomo - Mobile app that allows users to get promotions/deals by sharing it to their social media accounts. (If that sounds familiar, check out Gspot).
- Wujudkan - A crowdfunding platform which focuses on helping artists and creators to get funding for their projects through fans and a creative network.
I believe that these eight startups and 13 founders have really experienced a tough yet fun four months – I could sense it through their presentations. Props to the directors for bringing the Founder Institute to Jakarta.
I mean, we need founders, right? With East Ventures Alpha graduating its first batch not too long ago, we’ve had 14 quality start-ups launched in the country in the space of two months. Exciting times indeed for Indonesia, don’t you think so?
