JFDI Asia reveals the 8 startups selected for its second 100-day ‘Bootcamp’ accelerator program

The Joyful Frog Digital Incubator, or JFDI Asia as it is more commonly known, made a big splash in Southeast Asia last year when it ran its inaugural ‘Bootcamp’ accelerator program. Today it is back after it announced its next class of eight startups.

The 100-day program will begin on February 21 and each of the young companies on the list has secured an initial investment of SG$25,000 (approximately USD$20,000). They will also get the chance to develop their businesses through mentoring and numerous other programs and activities arranged by the folks at JFDI Asia — not to mention its extended partnership with Golden Gate Ventures.

The climax of the program will be the demo day. Each startup will get six minutes to convey its business to the room of watching investors, media and other tech observers. More than half of last year’s class got funding of at least SG$600,000 (around US$450,000) as a result of demo day, and these new arrivals will hope to follow that lead, or indeed better it.

In fact, graduates of the 2012 Bootcamp have raised a total of SG$3.3 million (US$2.67 million) in investment to date, which matches the average of other international TechStar-affiliated programs, the company says.

Here are the new recruits, in alphabetical order. Interestingly, UK-born Mason says that there may be another one or two new additions before the program begins.

AskAbt (India) – platform to manage real-time crowdsourced queries
Collabspot (France/Philippines) – customer relationship management platform
DayTripR (Singapore/New Zealand) – online data collection utility
DocTree (Singapore/India) – software for medical practice management
Duable Chinese (讀able) (US) Chinese language learning service
Fashfix (Singapore/Malaysia) eTailer/blog-shop platform
My Fitness Wallet (Singapore) health and wellness sartup
Referoll (Singapore and Vietnam) platform to recruits research studies participants

I sat down with Mason when he visited Bangkok last December and, even though the call for applications had only just been made, he was already seeing an impressive rate of responses from Southeast Asia’s startup community, and beyond. JFDI Asia revealed today that, in total, the program received applications from 262 teams, which were boiled down to the selected eight.

JFDI Asia is a young company itself and it’s aiming to foster startups and entrepreneurial communities across Southeast Asia. That was clear last year, when it ran ‘Startup Weekend’ events at major cities across Southeast Asia to promote the first-ever Bootcamp and recruit promising startups to enter.

This year, the company and its program is better known, and it opted against event-based submissions, instead all applications came in via its website. Weekend events across Southeast Asia are time consuming and tough to manage while JFDI Asia is not an events company, but those meetups did inspire many entrepreneurs in the region. With that in mind, it’s great to see that this year’s unsuccessful applicants have been given “detailed feedback and an offer of support to fix the issues that seemed to hold back their chances”.

I’ve said before that Southeast Asia is the world’s most exciting tech region right now, and JFDI Asia is one company that is helping to translate the potential of technology into young, startup businesses across the region.

Headline image via Peter Reijners / Shutterstock