Recent Posts

Momolay: Myanmar’s Rising Entertainment App

9gag meets Buzzfeed with a goal to replace Facebook, Momolay (available for now on Google Play) is Myanmar’s mobile-first entertainment app on the rise. Launched a year ago in February by a talented man: Lin Myat, this app has grown rapidly since then gathering a wide audience in Myanmar.
Back in November 2015, Momolay received a seed funding from Singapore based investors of US$200,000. The news spread around the web, allowing them to gather more interest. And since then they have escalated in the number of active users from 98K to 140K and it doesn’t seem as though it will stop there.

We had a quick chat with Lin Myat (founder) on how Momolay has changed after receiving the seeding:

In terms of our operation and scope, there is not much difference before and after the investment. Our plans and goals have always been the same. Our operations have been more or less the same. The main difference might be that we now have more attention from local media and IT community.

As you might have already known, we are still yet to have a sustainable revenue. So the investment will allow us the runway until the end of 2016. Our target before this runway runs out is to amass 1,000,000 monthly active users (currently we only have 130,000 MAU) in Momolay app and to have a sustainable revenue to at least cover our operation cost.

We then asked what may seem like an obvious question but one that’s been of interest to potential investors: should they invest in Myanmar tech startups?

In general, I believe it is a good time for investors to start looking around to invest in local tech startups. There are currently very few real competitions and the market is relatively untouched.

We had a go using the app and could see the interest for it. There were so many articles on the platform for light reading materials, and if ever you got bored, there were brain teasers games and other activities to prevent the users from wanting to leave it and to keep coming back for more.

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A Walking Guide to Pitches in Global Entrepreneurship Week & Beyond in November

Monsoon’s just ended. The storm’s gone. With the clearing up of the sky everybody in anticipation of the election seem to have just come out of their hiding place in order to pour in their investments to Myanmar in good measure. This can be seen by the events featuring pitches by startups at various stages.

This would be a guide for you to know where you might hear the pitches.

All happening in November, Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW), the first of international events to happen right after the historic elections of 2015, features four of the mentioned events.

Phandeeyar’s Startup Challenge

A weeklong challenge open to any stage of startup, but more useful for people with an idea stage. They will go through with a Business Model Workshop and make you work on developing your idea into a workable business model in the end. The beauty of this is, you can show up with an idea and get paired up with someone else to form a team even if you don’t have anything in place.

This is a good program to go through if you are passionate about entrepreneurship but clueless about what it entails. More details on their Facebook Page. Starts on 13th Nov and ends with pitches to the jury on 22nd.

Participants are free to work at Phandeeyar offices during weekdays. Contact [email protected] for registration.

Meet the Yangon Angel Investors

An invite only event with pre-qualified angels and startups. Yangon Angels is a group of angel investors who have interest in Yangon based startups. The event aims to let the angels meet the startups in more private one-to-one meetings. Startups can expect a more serious look into their ventures without the prying eyes of the public.

17th Nov. 5pm — 6.30pm. Location: Mingalar Hall, UMFCCI.
Register with [email protected] to attend.

CoStruct Seedstars Yangon

A global pitching event co-organized by CoStruct (a maker space) and Seedstars (a pitch platform) the winner will fly to Switzerland for a global competition. The competing startups should have a minimum viable product but are less than 2 years old and have not raised more than $500,000 in funding.

Pitches are on 19th Nov, 6:30–9PM, at Building Market’s Training Room.
Apply here.

The Project Hub’s Startup Stage

The startups’ open mic event. No restrictions are placed but registration is required (closed on 19th Oct), the event will allow startups to get connected, get noticed and collect feedback. The event is open to all.

November 21st, 2pm — 4pm, New Treasure Art Gallery, 84A Than Lwin Road, Golden Valley.

Channel News Asia Start-UP

CNA’s docu-reality TV series will tour to Yangon along with three investor judges. Last year during the airing of season 2 of the show, Myanmar’s code2lab went to Singapore to compete with the other regional startups. They were the only ones to be offered an investment by the investors of the TV show. This year should be equally exciting for Myanmar startups.

The only catch is that the pitching event is not happening during GEW. The organizers have yet to confirm the Yangon date. It is believed to be happening towards the end of November.

Co-working Space: Phandeeyar

TLDR: The most affordable co-working option for you in Yangon but it’s not perfect.

Phandeeyar is located right next to Sule pagoda with the amazing view of Yangon, which you will take a photo of and post on your social media like everybody else who has been there even for a brief period. Rain or shine, you can’t beat the convenience of the place located right at the public transport hub and the heritage zone of Yangon.

Internet: workable speed which isn’t protected from nation wide outages but the events run in the community space next door might have some impact.

Access: access is less restrictive than other co-working spaces, which is a plus. Opening hours are 9–6 but you can usually stay longer if the staff is not in a rush to go back home. Luckily Phandeeyar’s got pretty hard working staff who won’t go home till late for most of the days. The lift going up to the co-working space needs an access card, yet to be issued to the tenants; a work-around solution is the security guard downstairs who will tap the card for you with a standby card at the top floor for you to use when you want to go down.

Facilities: coffee, tea and water is available for all the tenants. Desk and chairs does their job but you shouldn’t expect Herman Miller. Enough sofa and beanbag for a comfortable creative working space.

Downside: currently there isn’t a backup generator. Not a big problem in the cool seasons, but Yangon summer without aircon would put a dent in your productivity. Lack of lockers could be an issue especially if you are a hardware hacker, but I am sure you can talk to the staff if you have serious enough reason and they may be able to work something out.

Rates: $30/month per seat.

Reference: The Yangon Foreigner’s Post, Phandeeyar.org

About Us

With the recent opening up of Myanmar’s economy, especially it’s Telecommunication sector, Myanmar’s tech startups have started to mushroom in the scene.

Within one year of Myanmar’s first international teleco operator launch, SIM card subscription in the country has reached over 25 million, over 40% of the 52 million population. Growth of user base is a great opportunity for the startups developing internet based products. Now, almost every month, there are startup or a product launching in Myanmar. And we are on that for you to keep track.

Startup95 provides on the ground coverage of Myanmar’s tech scene. Meeting with it’s key players every day, we are the industry’s pulse.

New Mobile Financial Service Comes to Myanmar Through MySquar

MySquar recently announced reaching 1.5m registered users and on their service agreement with MyPay. MySquar is an AIM listed company whose early and major investor, Rising Dragon, also lead the series B investment round for Fastcash, the technology provider of MyPay. Fastacash.com recently announced their investment in MyPay although details of the deal are not published.

MySquar mentioned in their previous filing of 31st May 2015 that there were 392,400 monthly active users (MAU) out of the total 774,636 registered users. They have managed to double their total registered users to 1.5 million in these past 5 months. We believe the users may not be of Yangon but of other region. Startup95 is based in Yangon and after surveying around, we couldn’t find a single active user. There is a possibility that their Burmese users are in other cities and towns of Myanmar.

MySquar will be receiving 0.5m USD for integration fees and will be receiving 50% of the revenue through its’ user base. This puts it at $0.33/user for access. With their previous MAU statistic of 50% of registered users, this puts the cost of access closer $0.66/active user.

While both companies involved have yet to give details on what would be the nature of the financial services they would be providing, their technology provider Fastcash’s products appears to be peer to peer (P2P) and persons to merchant payments via mobile.

Other Players

The industry insiders mentioned there are already over a dozen mobile financial service companies in the market below are the list of some of them.

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