The who’s who

• According to the BusinessFinancing.co.uk, a media site aggregating insights and data for entrepreneurs and startups, these are the top female founders in every country around the world.

• Analyzing data from Crunchbase, the website pinpoints the women making an entrepreneurial dent in their countries.
• Listed as well, are two 500-backed female founders. Tan Hooi Ling of Grab and Maliha Quadir of Shohoz.
• Hooi Ling co-founded Grab (then MyTeksi) with Anthony Tan in 2012. From a taxi-booking platform, it became Southeast Asia’s first decacorn, expanding to food delivery, fintech, and e-commerce.
• After years abroad, Maliha moved back to Bangladesh during 2014 and started Shohoz with a simple vision of solving the logistical challenge her country was facing.
• Under Maliha’s leadership, Shohoz has now become the largest online service platform in the country.
• View the complete list here.

The evolution of GrabAds

• GrabAds launched in 2018, focusing on car wraps and in-car tablets as advertising solutions.
• Four years later, the service evolved into a full-fledged digital advertising product.
• Ken Mandel, Regional Head of GrabAds and Brand Insights, speaks with DealStreetAsia, on how GrabAds has gone from “ads on cars” to an online-to-offline business model.
• Aside from the car-wrapping ads many are used to seeing, GrabAds is also integrating its services to the Grab app.
• On the Grab app, mobile ads are put on display in front of their active users in 351 cities across Southeast Asia, with over 187 million downloads, allowing merchants to have their products seen by a large digital audience.

• Most recently, Grab launched the GrabAds Masthead, which sits along the top of the home screen when launching the Grab app.
• There’s also GrabMerchant, an analytics platform providing actionable insights and data for businesses to track their campaigns in real-time.
• Ken speaks more on the current initiatives and future plans for GrabAds here.

The come-up

• Grief in the family led Val Yap to found PolicyPal, the insurtech company providing consumers with end-to-end service for their insurance needs.
• Val and her sisters had to scramble to get their late father’s insurance documents sorted, a draining process for her.
• An idea was birthed, which became PolicyPal. But the process of building the startup came with struggles and hardship.
• She attended entrepreneurship courses and signed for an accelerator program. But Val struggled to hire talent.

• “…when I first started out, I felt quite helpless because I come from a non-tech environment. I had zero friends in the startup ecosystem,” Val told The Vulcan Post.
• While rejections and heartaches were aplenty, Val stayed true to her mission.
• She founded a small team of engineers, one of whom was KC, the current co-founder of PolicyPal.
• Four years later, AMTD Digital, the digital arm of AMTD Group, acquired PolicyPal for an undisclosed sum.
• “To those who are looking to build a company, it’s going to be a long but fulfilling journey. So find the right purpose, and stick with it,” Val says.
• You can read Val’s story 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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