Since starting Buko Ventures in Q1 2021 we’ve made 17 investments in promising startups in the Philippines. We’re excited to see really strong progress from the founders we’ve backed. Below you can see some highlights and links to press articles featuring Buko companies.

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Pledge your support

We continue to focus on early-stage startups primarily at the angel or pre-seed stage before larger VCs are ready to invest. We like to get involved when founders have a clear problem they are trying to solve, a working product (even if it’s a prototype or ‘v1’ level) and at least a trace of evidence of early user traction. Our sweet spot and value-add is to help these early-stage startups get strong early traction and successfully reach the next stage of the startup journey (a solid seed-stage investment from a VC).

Since launching Buko Ventures, our investments have gone on to raise millions of USD in follow-on investments from leading funds around the world and have joined leading incubator programs like Y Combinator in San Francisco and Iterative in Singapore.

Recent Highlights from the Buko portfolio:

• Betterteem - HR Analytics and Employee Benefits - They now have active pilots with large corporates in the Philippines like Accenture and Ubiquity and are adding a fintech element to the business by enabling co-branded debit cards for employee benefits and perks for their clients, which is a multi-billion dollar category in the Philippines. The founder Bo has extensive experience operating in the HR Benefits space in the Philippines as an HR executive for JP Morgan’s extensive BPO team in the Philippines. Betterteem recently got invited to join TechStars’ incubator program and received an investment from a global fintech VC to accelerate the benefit cards product.
• Shipmates - Delivery Logistics SaaS - Buko Venture’s first investment has grown massively in the last year and now processes tens of thousands of delivery orders for businesses across the Philippines. They recently launched a full integration with Grab Express to extend their delivery coverage. They are part of the current Y Combinator YC S22 batch and recently announced a $2.2m seed round.
• Twala - Docusign for the Philippines - Twala recently received a strategic investment from the Philippines Department of Science and Technology to power document signing for various sectors of the Philippines government. They are also now an official partner of PLDT, one of the largest telcos in the Philippines, for document management services for PLDT’s thousands of SME clients. In the last year, Twala has helped securely process tens of thousands of signatures.
• BackScoop - Southeast Asia Tech News & Community Platform - Founder Amanda Cua is a writing machine - single-handedly churning out a daily stream of consistently insightful and entertaining newsletters about tech in the region. She now has over 5,000 email subscribers including many of the leading tech investors and operators around the region. She’s also received angel investments from some of the leaders of the Philippines media industry. We read her posts every day and you can subscribe here.
  

Buko Founders Meet-ups & Founder resources

We’re also trying to build a strong support community among the Buko startup founders. In addition to an active whatsapp group for all the founders to share updates and advice, we’ve done two in-person meet-ups this year in Manila and had a lot of fun getting to meet all the founders in person after previously only chatting over video calls during covid lockdowns. Our friends at Diageo Philippines also sponsored our second event with a cocktail bar and free drinks for the Buko community.

Support for founders

We’ve also been able to set up some solid benefits for Buko startups to help support their early growth. Buko founders now have access to:

• Free database credits from Amazon Web Services Southeast Asia team
• Free $100k in payment fees from leading SEA payment gateway Xendit
• Discounted banking services from Philippines neobank NextPay
• Discounted accounting services from SME accounting provider CloudCFO

Press coverage of portfolio companies:

Esquire: Meetbit Scheduling SaaS featured in Esquire Philippines
Esquire: Amanda (Backscoop) and Ariana (Acadarena) featured in 2022 Top 20 Women in PH
Rappler: Tech List Acadarena founders listed in Forbes 30 Under 30
Techcrunch: Shipmates raises $2.2m Seed Round for Logistics Aggregator
Tech in Asia: PlayDex raises $2m for NFT lending platform
Business World: ChatGenie featured as chat-based commerce partner of Meta
Manila Times: Podcast Network Asia ‘Podmetrics’ SaaS enables new Asian folklore podcast
Manila Times: Mayani enables over 100,000 Filipino farmers to sell into leading retailer WalterMart

- Buko Team 🥥🥥🥥

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