The ‘PolyU Micro Fund 2014’ awards ceremony last week honored teams of students for their startup projects.
Operating under the ‘Do Well, Do Good’ theme, the fund is meant to encourage students towards social entrepreneurship or to build projects with sustainable community impact. The fund is open to teams with at least one member that is a current PolyU student or graduate. This year, 20 winners within the ‘Entrepreneurship Stream’ were gifted a seed investment of HK $100,000.
Since the program’s inception in 2011, the fund has already invested HK $4 million into the program and 50% of student teams have gone onto secure further funding and incubation support of HK $20 million.
We had a chat with Raymond Chu (pictured below), the assistant director for PolyU’s Institute for Entrepreneurship, to learn more about the program, and he said that the viability of startup projects have improved over the past few years. “In 2011, we had a few student teams sending in applications with primitive and pre-mature startup ideas to test their luck, whereas in 2014, we saw students with very concrete ideas and they even have built prototypes to test the market,” he said.
Besides the Micro Fund, there’s also the STEFG-PolyU China Entrepreneurship Fund which offers PolyU students and alumni’s startups in Shenzhen and Shanghai seed funding of RMB $200,000. MailTime was one past startup that has benefited from this fund, and so has recent successful Kickstarter campaigners Umbrella Here.
“Up until now, we have already funded 20 startups and we expect to fund another 8 to 10 in 2014 and 2015,” said Chu. “Some awardees are doing great, like MailTime, who has just launched their product at TechCrunch Disrupt.”
Besides supporting MailTime, PolyU has also backed logistics startup Aftership, who has raised US $1 million in Series A funding back in May and has over 150,000 active users. Chu said that future plans include the launch of 2-3 new funding programs with a focus on tech startups and social innovations.
According to Chu, PolyU Micro Fund awardees often continue their startup journey as Cyberport incubates so these could be the freshest startup ideas to hit Hong Kong. Here are a list of all the tech-related teams in the ‘Entrepreneurship Stream.’
- BLE-iCare: intelligent caring system to enhance the safety of the elderly
- ComicStick: self-service, crowdsourcing-based design platform that lets messaging app users design their own stickers
- Gangpiaoquan: one-stop online social platform for Mainlanders to find practical information on living in Hong Kong
- Greeting Plus: mobile app that makes physical greeting cards with augmented reality tech
- Qiangu: a platform that provides user-friendly content to higher education and research students using a powerful data integration and content delivery system
- Homey: interior decorating app that draws from a database of floor plans and 3D graphic rendering technology
- JohnShout Brothers: eCommerce platform for users and service providers in the building maintenance and home renovation industries to communicate
- Schoolmat.es: career-building social network for students to share content anonymously
- MOSU: developers of ‘the straw system,’ a unique cloud-based canteen ordering system that recommends the healthiest meal options
- Talk-now: a wearable device that helps those with hearing and speech disabilities
- Umbrella Here: smart device with an internal lighting system to be attached on an umbrella that signals that the umbrella is available for sharing
our corporate, would be interested to get involved in this programme and here about new ideas prior to kickstater or crowd funding and if the ideas and proposal makes sense, we would invest in seed funding.
Please contact me.
Regards
Sachin Pradhan