A Singapore-based company is helping launch 13 international start-ups – whose businesses include swimwear design for plus-sized women and financing for tertiary education.
Antler, which calls itself a global startup generator, said it has completed its first cohort in Singapore, where 62 global founders have launched the 13.
These companies cover a wide range of industries including real estate, e-sports, hiring, future of work, robotics and automation, retail, and e-commerce.
“I feel like an opportunity to cater to the average women who aren’t being served by fashion industry right now,” Joanna Wong, founder of All Woman Co., told Fortune Times.
She said she is looking at the US as her main target market where two in three women are considered as plus-sized but only 17% of the women’s wear industry serves plus-sized fashion.
Besides Wong’s fashion business, the other start-up industries in the cohort include real-time game show platform, new solutions for a quicker reference check and matching amateur e-sports gamers.
Antler was started in 2017 in Singapore by McKinsey, Google, Spotify, Harvard, MIT and Stanford alumni.
They now recruit talented entrepreneurs from across the globe and provides funding from day one to help them focus full time on finding the right co-founders and the right idea. They also help the start-ups attack problems from a wide range of industries including tech-enabled solutions for better rental experience and a better recruitment marketplace.
Lawrence H. Summers, the former US Treasury Secretary who has recently joined Antler, said: “The opportunities for positive change through innovation are bigger than ever. I’m very happy to support Antler in building a global platform to enable this.”
According to the statistics provided by Experian, SMEs make up almost 99% of the total of more than 600,000 companies in Singapore. They contribute nearly half of Singapore’s GDP and employing 65% of the workforce in the island country.
