When COVID-19 struck in early 2020, the startup world went to a standstill. Most startups were scrabbling around to stay afloat. Many had to wind up their businesses but some emerged stronger by pivoting products/business models, forging partnerships, and securing investments.
Here, we bring you a list of the three e27 Luminaries startups that managed to secure partnerships right in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis.
Ayannah’s partnership with ECAP
In June 2020, Ayannah, a Filipino company providing affordable and accessible digital financial services, signed a merger agreement with Indian payments firm Electronic Cash and Payment Solutions (ECAP) to form a pan-Asian company.
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Christened Ayannah Global, the merged entity aims to provide accessible digital financial services to the region’s middle class. Headquartered in Singapore, it also aims to draw from the city-state’s talent pool and forge new partnerships with companies there.
Established in 2010, Ayannah is an AI-enabled technology platform that provides financial services to the emerging middle class, with a significant presence across geographies with customers in India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam. The company claimed that its AI tech is designed to launch a comprehensive range of financial and lifestyle products and services ranging from payments, remittance, insurance, and telemedicine.
Ayannah’s products include PanaloCare, a hospital income insurance plan in partnership with AXA, which supports the insured with a daily supplementary income whenever hospitalised.
Also Read: Digital payments startup Ayannah diving deep into Big Data
Since 2013, Bengaluru-based ECAPS has catered to the needs of domestic migrants and the unbanked populations in India. The company provides services such as domestic money transfers, utility bill payments, recharges and travel ticketing for emerging middle-class consumers in India.
Biofourmis’s partnership with Brigham
In March 2020, Singapore-based digital therapeutics company Biofourmis launched a Biovitals Hospital Home in partnership with Boston-based Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Biovitals Hospital Home is an AI-based, turnkey technology platform that enables hospitals and health systems to quickly deploy a ‘hospital at home’ programme.
Over the past few years, the two organisations have worked together to refine and scale the platform for use by healthcare organisations to fuel programmes in which patients are ‘admitted’ to their homes for hospital-level care.
The programme provides 1:1 parity with inpatient payment rates to treat patients in their homes for conditions that include more than 60 diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) such as infections, asthma, heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Started in 2015, Biofourmis discovers, develops and delivers clinically-validated software-based therapeutics to provide better outcomes for patients, advanced tools for clinicians to deliver personalised care, technology to demonstrate the value of and complement pharmacotherapy, and cost-effective solutions for payers.
It has built Biovitals, a highly sophisticated personalised AI-powered health analytics platform that predicts clinical exacerbation in advance of a critical event, which is the backbone of their digital therapeutics product pipeline across multiple therapeutic areas—including heart failure, oncology, infectious disease, chronic pain, acute coronary syndrome and COPD.
DiMuto’s partnership with OPAL
In May 2021, global agri-fintech trade solutions company DiMuto announced a partnership with OPAL, a major payment institution (MPI) licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).
The partneship aims to provide payment services on the blockchain-powered DiMuto Platform.
The duo will develop a new payment module that will allow DiMuto’s agrifood customers to make payments directly tagged to the movement of goods on the DiMuto Platform. This will create visibility of both the movement of goods and money for physical agrifood products tracked with DiMuto’s existing trade digitalisation technology.
Also Read: SG Innovate invests in agri-food tech startup DiMuto, raising awareness to food sustainability issue
The two companies intend to combine their strengths and transform payments and financing in the agri-food trade space. They will leverage OPAL’s expertise in international payment, multi-currency wallets, FX management, and financing solutions alongside DiMuto’s strong network of agrifood clientele, trade digitalisation technology, and capability to collect asset-based data.
DiMuto provides end-to-end supply chain visibility for global businesses. DiMuto uses blockchain, IoT, and AI in its trade solutions digitises the agri-food supply chain for data visibility and trade transparency to solve the industry’s challenges such as food safety breaches, that reportedly experienced a US$110 billion loss, as discovered by a 2018 World Bank study.
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Photo by Claudio Schwarz | @purzlbaum on Unsplash
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