Endeavor selected 31 high-impact entrepreneurs leading 17 companies from 12 markets at the 88th International Selection Panel (ISP) in Tokyo, held July 1-3, 2019. Endeavor now supports 1,911 entrepreneurs leading 1,195 companies in 34 markets around the world.
The ISP is the culmination of a rigorous multi-step selection process to identify high-impact entrepreneurs who demonstrate the potential to leverage Endeavor’s resources and mentorship to create large-scale wealth and jobs, and are committed to reinvesting their time and money in their local entrepreneurship ecosystems to help others take off.
Over the course of the three-day event, panelists drawn from Endeavor’s extensive network of board members, mentors, supporters, and experienced Endeavor Entrepreneurs, interview entrepreneur candidates about their businesses, evaluating them on their potential for high-impact growth, and deliberating on which candidates should be selected to become Endeavor Entrepreneurs. Panelists must vote unanimously for a candidate to become an Endeavor Entrepreneur.
“The Tokyo selection panel truly demonstrated what we believe deeply at Endeavor: that entrepreneurs with enormous potential to scale up and pay it forward are found all around the world, often in markets overlooked by investors and the entrepreneurship community,” said Endeavor Co-founder and CEO Linda Rottenberg. “We’re excited to support and follow these high-impact founders as they take their companies to the next level!”
Once selected, Endeavor Entrepreneurs gain access to comprehensive customized services, including introductions to local and international business mentors and volunteers from Fortune 500 consulting firms who will help them address key needs.
Endeavor Entrepreneurs have had a significant track record of impact. Endeavor Entrepreneurs have created 3 million jobs, generated $20 billion in revenue in 2018, and help build sustainable growth models in their home countries.
In 2019, ISPs will be held in Quito (August 5-7), Atlanta (September 23-25), Istanbul (October 21-23), and Riviera Maya (December 11-13). For more information on these events, please contact [email protected].
Learn more about the companies and entrepreneurs selected in Tokyo below:
ATLANTA
Company: Chime Solutions
Entrepreneur: Mark Wilson
Description: Chime Solutions offers outsourced customer care to enterprises through call centers and other contact services. The company specializes in the high-end / high-touch customer care segment, with clients across a range of industries including financial services, insurance, healthcare & telecoms. Chime pairs this model with economic empowerment in struggling communities, which corporate clients have jumped on to fulfill their corporate responsibility initiatives. Mark opened his headquarters in the area of Atlanta with the highest unemployment rate, and invests heavily in employee training to empower his staff for success both professionally and personally, leading to attrition rates half of industry standards.
CHILE
Company: NotCo
Entrepreneurs: Matias Muchnick and Pablo Zamora
Description: NotCo is a booming Chilean scale-up that uses AI to create plant-based versions of dairy products. The company leverages its proprietary artificial intelligence platform, Giuseppe, to analyze food on a molecular level and recreate the flavors and textures of traditional foods. The company’s primary offering, Not Mayo, is made with potatoes, peas, basil, and canola oil, and is currently available in more than 1,000 stores in Chile.
DETROIT
Company: Wisely
Entrepreneurs: Arjun Iyer, Tyler Felous, Joshua Stern and Mike Vichich
Description: By running Wisely, it’s easier for restaurants to blow guests’ minds. Historically, there has been no sustainable way for a restaurant to remember each guest’s preferences, and to custom tailor every guest interaction at scale. Wisely solves that by offering an integrated platform of three products: Waitlist, Reservations, & Table Management, Marketing Automation, and Guest Sentiment. Driving 2-5% growth in Same Store Sales in the 12 months after implementation, Wisely has signed up many of America’s leading restaurant brands. Wisely has offices in Ann Arbor, Chicago, Austin, and Nashville and serves over 1,000 restaurants across the world.
INDONESIA
Company: Printerous
Entrepreneur: Kevin Osmond
Description: For Indonesians, printing is big business, but it’s also tediously inefficient. Within a $14.5B market, customers spend an average of four hours waiting at a print shop for a single print job – not counting the time spent in traffic to get to and from the shop. Printerous offers Indonesians – individuals and businesses alike – a centralized, online printing platform through which they can submit any and all printing requests for commercial, merchandise, packaging, and photo printing needs. The platform distributes jobs to an existing network of 200+ Printing Service Providers (PSPs) based on their availability, specialty, etc., offering them an easy-to-use back-end dashboard to accept and track all inbound requests. The Printerous platform offers customers transparent pricing, expected turnaround times, and at-home delivery while it allows local print shops to put historically underutilized machines into use.
ITALY
Company: Credimi
Entrepreneurs: Sabino Costanza and Ignazio Rocco di Torrepadula
Description: Short on euros? Credimi’s your hero! Italian businesses, especially SMEs, struggle to fund their trade receivables as the typical application process with banks and traditional factoring companies is time-consuming and cumbersome. Credimi is an Italy-based digital factoring platform that streamlines every aspect of the trade-receivable funding process, making it easier, faster, and more transparent.
JAPAN
Company: Omise
Entrepreneurs: Ezra Don Harinsut, Jun Hasegawa and Vansa Chatikavanij
Description: Cash, Mastercard, Crypto? No problem. For merchants in SE Asia, accepting non-traditional forms of payments is typically a nightmare. Enter Omise, a leading payments gateway platform that provides merchants with friction-free solutions and infrastructure to process payments from any fiat (government-declared) or virtual wallet. It handles every step of the payment process, so customers benefit from feature parity across devices, faster processing speeds, greater reliability, and transparent pricing.
Company: UniFa
Entrepreneur: Yasuyuki Toki
Description: Japan-based Unifa hopes to tackle the problem of expensive childcare by bringing smart technology – both hardware and software – to nurseries across Japan. On one end, the company digitizes nurseries through its software products like the HR platform and digital correspondence diaries and on the other, it integrates high-tech devices such as the infrared thermometer and smart sleep tracker to make childcare more automated within these nurseries. Operating in the $160M childcare tech market in Japan, the company works with 500,000 children across 7,000 nurseries today.
MALAYSIA
Company: Carsome
Entrepreneur: Eric Cheng
Description: Carsome is transforming the used-car industry by offering Southeast Asia a fast, fair and free car selling service with full transparency. Carsome makes it easy for car sellers and dealers with its onestop online auction platform. Its simple 4-step process – car valuation, inspection, online bidding, and ownership transfer – allows owners to sell their vehicles at the highest price to a network of dealers across Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia.
Company: TheLorry
Entrepreneurs: Nadhir Ashafiq Zainal Abidin and Chee Hau Goh
Description: TheLorry is a booking and reservation platform for online retailers that enables online-to-offline logistics through price-fixed quotations, on-demand service, and vast capacity. The company partners with reputable and experienced drivers and small trucking companies to ensure that its user’s goods are transported safely and securely to their final destination. It also offers home relocation, office relocation, and bulky items transport to private citizens. Additional services such as packing, wrapping, assembly, disassembly, and boxes are available on request. With over 7,000 vehicles available on the platform, TheLorry is redefining what it means to be a lorry driver in South East Asia through a focus on professionalism and customer service.
PUERTO RICO
Company: HYP3R
Entrepreneurs: Leandro Armas and Carlos Garcia
Description: Hyp3r is an enterprise software and data company that transforms the way some of the world’s leading hospitality companies use location marketing. With its patented geosocial technology, Hyp3r has created a unique dataset of over 450 million profiles of the highest value travelers and consumers in the world. These profiles combine public social media posts, online reviews, and smartphone location IDs to create a dynamic portrait of the customer – helping marketers not only understand who is visiting their business, but where that customer has been before, and what they want and expect from their interactions with the company. Using their platform, Hyp3r’s clients are able to surprise and delight customers with personal interactions in ways that were never before possible.
SAUDI ARABIA
Company: Noon Academy
Entrepreneurs: Mohammed Aldhalaan and Abdulaziz Alsaeed
Description: Noon Academy is a social learning platform that aims to make studying and test preparation fun and interactive for students by connecting students with quality tutors on-demand and creating engaging online classrooms to supplement the regular curricula. Currently, Noon Academy operates in Saudi Arabia and Egypt with plans to expand to India, and has 2M registered users, 35% of whom are high school students. The company provides ~1,500 teachers and tutors across their markets with an additional income source and employs 80 full time staff members in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and India.
SPAIN
Company: Spotahome
Entrepreneur: Alejandro Artacho
Description: Spotahome is a mid-to-long term rental booking platform that connects landlords with tenants. The company has over 10K registered landlords and more than 50K properties listed in 10 cities in seven countries. Spotahome leverages “homecheckers” (local freelancers) to take pictures and videos of properties and perform quality checks according to company standards before listing a property. Once the listing is live, “homecheckers” answer calls and emails from potential tenants and schedule property visits. This saves the landlord time while maintaining the autonomy to choose tenants by reviewing profiles and either accepting or declining offers online.
UAE
Company: Bayzat
Entrepreneurs: Tarek Bayaa and Talal Bayaa
Description: Bayzat offers a free, one-stop shop HR platform that lowers HR management costs and reduces tedious and manual processes for SME employers. This platform ultimately serves as a customer acquisition and data collection tool, through which the company offers and cross-sells health insurance, car insurance, and other financial products based off of data points they call “life changing moments,” collected from employers and employees who use the platform. The platform offers employers the ability to compare and buy insurance while employees can easily access their insurance plans, search benefits, and claim reimbursements.
Company: eyewa
Entrepreneurs: Mehdi Oudghiri and Anass Boumediene
Description: eyewa is an eyewear ecommerce platform that sells color contacts, clear contacts, sunglasses, and eyeglasses from local and international brands like Acuvue, RayBan, Nike, and more. Unlike traditional eyewear companies that present themselves with a medical angle, the eyewa brand is anchored on beauty and fashion. The company sells 100% online in UAE and KSA to mostly fashion-forward female millennial consumers. eyewa recently raised a $7.1M Series A to fuel its international expansion in the GCC and to manufacture its own line of products.
Company: Lunch:ON
Entrepreneurs: Dana Baki and Mohammad Al Zaben
Description: Lunch:ON uses customer satisfaction data and maps to curate a limited daily menu for office workers from local restaurants that maximizes delivery efficiency. Whether it’s employees ordering for themselves from the daily hand-picked menu or companies ordering food for a meeting, training event, or larger corporate event, the platform takes the usual hassle and cost out of food at the office. Customers love the low prices, convenience and variety of their daily lunches, and restaurants enjoy the opportunity to optimize their kitchens and reach new audiences.
VIETNAM
Company: Topica Edtech Group
Entrepreneur: Tuan Minh Pham
Description: Topica Edtech Group is a leading online education provider in South East Asia. Topica Uni cooperates with 16 universities including top-tier institutions in the USA, Philippines and Vietnam to provide high-quality online degree programs, and several accredited US universities recognize credits from Topica-powered programs. Topica Native provides online English speech tutoring courses in Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam, and was the first in the world to launch an Augmented Reality app for speech tutoring. Topica Edumall is the largest platform of short-skill courses in Thailand and Vietnam, offering video learning content on popular topics from Excel to guitar and raising kids. Topica Founder Institute is an accelerator program whose grads have raised nearly 15 million US dollars in 3 years. An early Topica initiative was personally launched by then-Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. Topica employs 1,400 full-time staff, 2,000 instructors and operates offices in Bangkok, Danang, Hanoi, HCMC, Jakarta, Manila and Singapore.
Company: Scommerce (GHN)
Entrepreneurs: Tran Thi Nguyen and Duy Hoai Luong
Description: Scommerce is Vietnam’s fastest growing e-commerce logistics ecosystem, bringing six distinct services from on-demand delivery to warehousing onto one platform. Processing a quarter million orders per day for individuals as well as Vietnam’s largest online retailers, S-Commerce is positioned at the vanguard of Vietnam’s rapidly expanding (14% CAGR ’19-’23) e-commerce market.
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