How I met my investors: Yash Kotak, the winner of Techsauce 2017’s Pitching Contest, shares his success story | Techsauce

How I met my investors: Yash Kotak, the winner of Techsauce 2017’s Pitching Contest, shares his success story

Meet Yash, the founder and CEO of Jumper.ai, a Singapore-based commerce-enabler startup. Founded in 2017, Jumper.ai is Yash’s another shot in running a startup after failing 12 times and succeeding 4 times with the startup scene. Here, Yash is going to share about his latest startup’s journey. Jumper.ai, the winner of Techsauce Pitching Contest 2017

How does your product work? "Very simple. You upload your product on your social media channel like Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. Jumper will have information on its integrated dashboard through the hashtags you use. From there, we’ll take care of the rest using our robust in-house built tools”, said Yash.

Through automation, Jumper helps businesses run online, from sales to payment, without the need to build their own website. Simply put, it helps merchants sell their products, and it does so by converting business owner’s social media post into a direct Point of Sale by leveraging the power of hashtags cross platform. Not only does Jumper help business auto-respond to common queries, but it also manages the cross-channel inventory and embeds the purchase behavior within the hashtags.

Meeting the investors at the summit Yash, who attended Techsauce Global Summit 2017 and went on to win first place for the pitching contest, met two angel investors, who then later on went on to fund Jumper’s seed funding stage with over US$1 million. Without having known them beforehand, Yash’s business partner first met the angels when they passed by her demo booth at the summit and was magnetized by Jumper’s idea and potential. With the funding provided for the seed round, Jumper planned to use this capital to launch the business in other parts of South East Asia, including Thailand.

The summit not only granted Jumper the perks every winner would get, but it also opened up the gateway to global level recognition from many Thai and foreign investors, supportive mentors and business partners – being one of the reasons why it is seamless for Jumper to expand its branch in Thailand.

Expanding the business With its headquarter in Singapore, Jumper currently has 16 full-time staffs across Singapore, India, the UK and the USA, and aims to reach 50 employees by the end of this year.

“We need more developers and software engineers. Our product has a lot of potential, but it is not that powerful yet; we need a lot more data in order to train the AI to be smarter and more advanced”, said Yash. For now, the “ai” of the company name is used to signify A=automated and I=instant. But that will change in the near future.

The promising dream of South East Asia Up to this point, Jumper already acquired over 500 merchants in Thailand without the help of marketing and advertisement.  With word of mouth introduction to Thai startup ecosystem and mentorship from one of Techsauce 2017’s panel judges, Jumper is all set to launch its product in Thailand starting next month.

For the next stage of business expansion, Jumper plans to take advantage of marketing strategy. “South East Asia is booming overall, with a clear-cut winner in Thailand”, said Yash.  Thailand has the biggest social commerce market in South East Asia, and Jumper wants to play a part in that. The commerce-enabler also revealed that it has partnered up with Line and a few payment transaction organizations in Thailand to fully leverage the market potential as local consumers and shoppers are now shifting towards cashless payment, and these are also supplemented by banks and a few rising payment processor startups.

Advice to Techsauce 2018’s pitchers  “Be confident and give it everything. Believe in your dream, because this 5 minutes can change your life”, said Yash. According to him, there is no need to fake or try to be something you are not. With strong ambition, strong team and solid business model, you can effortlessly capture the attention of the judges and investor – the money will follow.

Catch Yash at 2018’s Techsauce Global Summit - grab your ticket while you still can!

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