Meet Iterative's Summer 2023 Batch
+ Introducing The Iterative Growth Methodology, How We Help Seed Stage Founders
Hi there,
We're already in the second half of 2023! At Iterative, that means kicking off our second batch of the year. We're super excited for you to meet the 19 companies below, as well as the Visiting Partners who will be working closely with the founders in the program.
In this newsletter, you'll also find the Iterative Growth Methodology - the framework we use to help companies grow 5-7% - and why it's important to optimise for learning the highest value things first.
We introduced this methodology during our in-person kickoff for the Summer 2023 batch in Bali, and the founders found it valuable as there's now a common language for them to use and grow their companies. We think it'll be helpful for you too.
Let's get into it.
Introducing Iterative's Summer 2023 Batch
We're stoked to announce the Summer 2023 batch! For this batch alone, we've received 800+ applications and spent over 200 hours interviewing companies. To our Venture and Visiting Partners, thank you for helping to review applications!
With their help, we've narrowed it down to these 19 amazing companies:
Blackbox AI (Singapore) - AI employees: The future of intelligent work.
bukaPO (Indonesia) - Pre-order community web-based marketplace.
CL1CK (Hong Kong) - AI to optimise B2B sales teams' email outreach.
Chodeli (Vietnam) - F&B supply chain and B2B marketplace.
Decube (Singapore) - Unified platform for your data stack.
Fluid (Singapore) - A one-click payment checkout for B2B marketplaces & commerce.
Flywheel (Singapore) - Help robotics companies deploy faster.
Fuzzy Sequence (Singapore) - Streamline and automate AI deployment on hardware devices.
GORO (Indonesia) - Indonesian fractional property investment platform.
Homefectionery (Bangladesh) - Bangladesh's largest home-cooked food subscription network.
Kentara (Indonesia) - Digital financing agent platform in Indonesia's logistics & transportation industry.
Matida (Vietnam) - Connecting Southeast Asian young mothers in an AI-Powered community.
MedPiper (India) - Middleware platform for health insurance.
Needle (Singapore) - AI copilot to help e-commerce businesses grow.
Nuflow (Singapore) - Provides no-code tools for B2B companies to manage money movement.
Pasima (Indonesia) - All-in-one app for easy access to automotive-related services.
Roomable AI (Singapore) - Generative AI to revolutionise the interior design process.
Setoko (Indonesia) - Platform to create a free online shop in 12 seconds.
Wavtool (Singapore) - AI-accelerated music production.
To the founders, thank you for joining us and having Iterative as part of your journey. Stay tuned for Demo Day featuring these 19 companies in September.
Read more about the companies here.
Meet the Summer 2023 Visiting Partners
To help us with our current batch, we got seven amazing Visiting Partners to help us. Visiting Partners are all founders — no exceptions.
Being a founder is a unique experience, and we think founders will only be able to receive the nuanced advice they need to be successful from people who know firsthand what it's like building a startup. We're excited to have…
Aaron Yip - Co-founder and CEO of Issa, a software infrastructure platform for immigration and hiring. Previously, he built and shaped the innovation strategy at Houzz as the Lead Inventor, where co-authored the majority of the company's patents and technological breakthroughs that helped reach $400 million funding at a $4 billion valuation.
Chinmay Chauhan - Co-founder and President of BukuWarung, which builds bookkeeping, digital payments, and e-commerce solutions for the 60 million MSMEs in Indonesia. There, he led product and technology functions and helped raise $80M in funding (the largest Series A raised for startups focused on mSMEs).
Dayana Yermolayeva - Was the founder of JiPay, a fintech startup for migrant workers in SEA. She raised funding from leading investors such as East Ventures and SHL Capital and grew the user base by 20x in 12 months. Dayana currently drives Strategy & Ops for Inflow, a Series A healthtech building a science-based app for managing ADHD.
Jessica Chao - Partner at Iterative, leading healthcare investments. She was previously the Director of the Clinical Innovation Center at UCSF, where she developed the infrastructure and capacity to accelerate innovations that solved the most critical delivery system problems.
Karine Hsu - Co-founder and Managing Partner at Slope, a hybrid creative agency and venture fund focused on working with startups. Since 2019, Slope has partnered with over 200+ startups to help design, launch, and grow brands like Superhuman, Daily Harvest, and more.
Rob Liu - Founder of ContactOut, a recruitment intelligence tool designed to help recruiters find deep insights into their talent pool. He bootstrapped the company to an 8-figure revenue, 7-figure profit business. The company is used by more than 350,000 users, including recruiters at more than 78% of the Fortune 500.
Zach Cheng - Co-founder of ReferralCandy, a referral platform that helps small and medium businesses grow. Referral Candy raised their Series A from Amnasia, Innosight, and BAF Spectrum.
Read more about them here.
Apply for Winter 2024 Batch
The next batch is scheduled to start in February 2024, and while that may feel like a long way to go, we encourage founders to apply early:
Invest upon admission - We invest the full amount upfront (up to $500K) - we don't wait for the program to begin to transfer the full investment.
Higher investment rate - We review applications on a rolling basis, and we've found that early applications have a much higher investment rate.
When the batch starts, we'll kick off with an in-person orientation and then work with founders closely for three months. If you're a founder and working on something, you should apply here.
Ideas from Iterative
Learn the Iterative Growth Methodology
Learning is a huge part of the startup journey. But how can you structure your learning process to fuel growth? In this video, Hsu Ken (Managing Partner of Iterative) reveals Iterative's tried-and-tested formula that propels founders towards a 5-7% weekly growth rate.
Watch the video to learn…
Learnings Not Created Equally: Not all learnings are equally important. Learn how to optimise for learning the highest value things first.
Problem vs Solution: Why you should be talking to users about their problems, not what you’re building.
Common Mistakes: What do most people get wrong and how you can avoid them.
Watch the video here.
How We Help Seed Stage Companies
A common misconception about accelerators is that they are often associated with helping only early stage companies*. But at Iterative, seed stage companies have found our program valuable. We help companies in many ways, one of them being growth - here's how:
To become seed stage companies, they likely had strong growth early on. To keep that going, a seed stage company needs to be able to do 2 things and in the right proportion.
Build on Existing Growth – It's often difficult to know whether you've barely scratched the surface or exhausted the channel. We help seed stage founders figure out which it is and if it's the former, what to do.
Identify New Growth – At some point, you'll need to find a new growth channel because you've either exhausted your existing channel or you're going after a new group of people. In our experience, a company will try a dozen different ideas to find the one channel that really works and throw away the best. We help seed stage founders get there faster by helping them generate and prioritise those ideas based on our experience.
We also help seed stage companies with fundraising and organisation - read more here.
*Early stage companies = companies with no funding, maybe has an MVP, etc. Seed stage companies = companies with over 100K in annual revenue, over 20 employees, etc.
Spotlight on Founders
We'd like to congratulate two of our portfolio founders on their recent fundraise.
NodeFlair (S22) Raised $2M in Series A
We're thrilled to be leading NodeFlair's Series A round (yes, we do follow-ons!). Congratulations Ethan Ang, Adrian Goh Jun Wei and the NodeFlair team!
Read more here.
Needle (S23) Raised $1.2M in Pre-Seed
The company is helping young D2C brands cut through the noise and market effectively to reach more customers using AI. We're thrilled to be a part of Needle’s journey, alongside co-founders Kiyan Foroughi, Jeannie (Ngoc) Nguyen, Serene Gan, and Rachelle Yee.
Read more here.