Sunway City Kuala Lumpur, 15 April 2021 – Sunway Innovation Labs (Sunway iLabs) today launched the 2021 Super Accelerator programme.
The four-month programme is for start-ups seeking to deliver innovative solutions focusing on six key verticals – Smart Cities, Agrifoodtech, Edutech, Digital Health, eCommerce, and Fintech.
The 30 selected start-ups will go through a one-month pre-accelerator to assess their fit. After which, only the top five start-ups will be selected to join the three-month accelerator programme. The five selected start-ups up will be provided up to RM 100,000 of seed funding in two tranches upon their graduation and achievement of agreed milestones.
The start-ups will have access to resources across Sunway’s 13 business divisions and global ecosystem partners as well as Sunway City Kuala Lumpur’s thriving ecosystem as a testbed to conduct pilot projects and scale up their solutions. During the programme, the start-ups will also have direct access to student talents and experts from Sunway University as well as access to tech talent from 42KL, a revolutionary French tech coding school.
This is in line with Sunway’s vision to position Sunway City Kuala Lumpur as a living laboratory bringing in experts to generate sustainable, real-world solutions for the future urban spaces towards the betterment of the environment and humankind.
Led by Sunway Group chief innovation officer and Sunway iLabs director Matt Van Leeuwen, the Super Accelerator programme is unique as it opens real market opportunities that is both supportive of new ideas and ready for innovation collaboration.
“With Sunway iLabs team acting as catalysts, the Sunway ecosystem is a launchpad for start-ups to test, validate and scale their businesses with corporate and academia support,” Matt said.
“Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the world has deeply changed in the past year. We’re excited to have our second batch of Super Accelerator and we are looking forward to see what start-ups can bring to the table this year,” he added.
Gobi Partners Chairman and Founder, Thomas G. Tsao looks forward to supporting the 2021 batch of start-ups whom he believes are going to be more focused, innovative and resilient - having been tested in the crucible of Covid-19.
“There’s an old saying, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ so I can’t wait to meet this year’s batch of star-tups. Any entrepreneur that could survive the pandemic of 2020 is the toughest of the tough,” Thomas said.
Gobi Partners Malaysia Managing Director Jamaludin Bujang said, “With Gobi as a partner for this program, early-stage startups will be able to gain direct VC access for product feedback, regional networking, as well as the potential for follow-up funding, without having to stretch their resources.”
The top start-ups of the Super Accelerator programme’s first cohort in 2020 were CozyHomes, Ento, Fitscovery, JuzDrive, and Quadby.
Registration opens from 15 April 2021 to 15 June 2021. To register or for more information, visit http://sunway.my/superaccelerator2021
Leveraging Sunway’s ecosystem in building a scalable business together
Last year, Sunway iLabs connected the start-ups with more than 53 entities comprising Sunway business divisions, investors and business partners, and managed to run ten pilot projects between the start-ups and Sunway ecosystem. One of the pilot projects were with Fitscovery – a marketplace for online fitness, where vendors and consumers can discover each other, connect and transact.
The work-from-home culture had spurred the need for Sunway to adopt more digital well-being programmes for employees hence there was a clear market potential and opportunity for Sunway to perform a pilot project with Fitscovery’s online fitness and nutrition solution, which led to the creation of www.sunway.fitscovery.com
Through the pilot project, 16,000 Sunway employees had unlimited access to Fitscovery’s platform at a low monthly fee while Fitscovery’s team leveraged the pilot project to validate, customize and improve its product’s features through real user feedback.
“The accelerator opened opportunities for us to explore internationally while receiving valuable mentorship and feedback. This allowed our product and company to grow dramatically to where it is now,” said Fitscovery co-founder Francis Aguilar.
“Sunway iLabs has been tremendously helpful in linking us to the Sunway ecosystem through their retail tenants, diverse talent pool at their universities and also access to their world class facilities,” added founder and CEO of Ento Kevin Wu. Ento is a cricket-based protein company.
