A leap in innovation

• 500-backed Hydroleap announced it has partnered with a construction firm that specializes in projects such as data centers, cleanrooms, and high-tech manufacturing.
• Hydroleap is a Singapore-based water purification startup that provides chemical-free, cost-effective, and environmentally-friendly solutions for treating water.

• Through this partnership, 2 silty water treatment systems have been commissioned to be piloted at Facebook’s data centers.
• Why do data centers need water? Servers generate heat from operational use, and the centers use water to cool them. In the US alone, data centers used 626 billion liters of water in 2014, and this number was projected to grow to 660 billion liters in 2020.
• Traditionally, the water treatment process employs chemicals such as coagulants which are expensive, harmful to the environment, and labor-intensive.
• The startup replaces the need for such chemicals with electricity.
• According to Dr. Mohammad Sherafatmand, CEO of Hydroleap, their fully automated solution helps companies cut costs of up to 50% by eliminating chemical usage and saving on human resources.
• It also takes up to 50% less space than traditional systems and is environmentally friendly.
• Watch the full video here.

When one door closes…

• The travel industry has been hit hard by the pandemic, with a UN report estimating 120 million tourism jobs are at risk, with the economic damage likely to exceed US$1 trillion in 2020 alone.
• Yet, there are travel companies that are still thriving despite the gloomy outlook, according to a series of interviews. One of them is 500-backed hospitality startup RedDoorz.
• In an interview, founder and CEO Amit Saberwal said the startup made a decision early into the pandemic to reduce its staff by 40%. “But we didn’t want to panic,” he added. “We didn’t cut down on core business, core leadership, because past experience shows travel is going to come back with a vengeance…It’s easy to cut, but it’s difficult to build again. We wanted to keep the soul of the company intact.”

• The startup also shifted its focus from growth to optimization. Amit shared the company renegotiated contracts with property owners and began to focus on boosting revenue per transaction.
• The result? “Dramatic,” according to Amit. “The path to profitability is very clear, very close. We are a much healthier company right now.”
• By July, the startup was able to reverse salary reductions that had been implemented early in the pandemic.
• Setting its sights on becoming the “largest new-age hospitality company in South-east Asia”, RedDoorz launched SANS, a new economy lifestyle hotel brand featuring trendy furnishings and amenities at low prices. The brand rolled out in Indonesia in October 2020.
• On 2020, Amit believes it is about survival and the opportunity growth will come post-pandemic. “We lost a lot of our competition, and I think the future end goal doesn’t change for us. We want to be in the pole position when full recovery happens,” he concluded.
• Read the full interview here.

Better data for better lives

• The Ministry of Health of Brazil, in collaboration with 500-backed Zenysis Technologies, has developed a dashboard to visualize deaths by natural causes at the national, regional, state, and state capital levels in the country.
• Zenysis is a big data and artificial intelligence startup that helps countries harness their entire data ecosystem to improve health programs.
• The startup’s software can integrate data from fragmented systems into a single unified view, giving decision-makers a nearly real-time view of their health programs to improve the decisions they make.

• A major milestone in the Ministry of Health’s efforts to improve the availability and transparency of public health data in Brazil, the dashboard is useful for estimating the number of deaths that have occurred in a given period.
• Such analyses are currently widely used to estimate the full impact of COVID-19 on mortality at the population level.
• Integrating data from the registry that issues death certificates and the system that records causes of death, the dashboard is updated weekly.
• Read the full article here.

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500 Startups is a venture capital firm on a mission to discover and back the world’s most talented entrepreneurs, help them create successful companies at scale, and build thriving global ecosystems. In Southeast Asia, 500 Startups invests through the pioneering 500 Southeast Asia family of funds. The 500 Southeast Asia funds have backed over 240 companies across multiple sectors from internet to consumer to deep technology. It continues to connect founders with capital, expertise and powerful regional and global networks to help them succeed.

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