Lithuania: Just had it's first ever proper startup exit. Oberlo was sold for $20mil to Shopify. What is interesting - Oberlo was built without VC backing in 1.5 years. This is a good morale boost for local tech community, as Lithuania always tries to measure up to Baltic sister countries Estonia (Skype and many others) and Latvia.
Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
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Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#12For all tech news in Asia: https://www.techinasia.com
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#13Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#14Indonesia in ecommerce and fin-tech. There are plenty in the scene, but the two bigs ones to know are:
> GoJek - Fintech/Uber-like startup:
Raised over USD 550 million. They started out providing on-demand motorcycle taxis (called ojeks), but expanded to on-demand food delivery, cleaners, make-up, courier, massage, housecleaners, etc.
Their bigger play is GoPay. That's their e-wallet service that lets you pay for service you pay for via GoJek and also transfer money to other GoPay users
> Tokopedia - C2C ecommerce
They're a C2C ecommerce site with over 4.0 million product listings with 250 million USD raised.
Others to check out are Traveloka, Bhinneka, Bukalapak, Doku, Qerja, Talenta, Qraved, Fabelio...tons of energy and funding going around.
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#15Ukraine's IT industry is rather developed with still relatively cheap workforce. And there have been a few successful startups recently: http://www.uadn.net/2017/01/09/top-10-ukrainian-startups-in-...
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#16I was quite impressed with the Ciber City area in Mauritius, but not sure how well everyone there is doing.
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#17Vietnam has quite a strong startup ecosystem relative to its development stage. I think it has a lot to do with its government having laid out a plan since the 90s to develop its IT industry. Results are: 1) Lots of IT grads 2) Lots of funding 3) Okay-ish infrastructure If we add this to the interests in entrepreneurship among Vietnamese people, it results in a strong tech scene.
Vietnam has an amazing energy right now. Lots of enthusiasm and optimism among its people.
I know Malaysian companies that have back-offices in Vietnam because of the great talent there. The lack of English is a hurdle, but not impossible.
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#18As some have already mentioned, Indonesia!
Gojek on its own is an amazing story and product. Its also a major player in a larger plot: Payments, chat, e-comm and on-demand platforms are being mashed together in an attempt to build china-style mega portals.
Its pretty exciting stuff. On the product side Gojek & Kudo are relativly unique. On the market side check out the recent Grab / Tencent / Ant financial investments and down the rabbit hole from there..
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#19India | Telecom | 110M subscribers on-boarded in 100 days
To summarize: Jio, which is our cellular telephony play, now is the world's largest cellular data network (pumping 22,000 TB per day) and onboards a million customers a day! We now have 110 million subscribers (in ~100 days).
This became possible when the telco regulators here gave a go ahead to use the Govt of India's pet biometric auth project Aadhaar[1] to accept electronic KYCs(proof of identity+address). A typical SIM issue took us This infrastructure as the physical layer coupled with the fact that India has 40% YoY growth rate in Internet penetration[2] has opened up a fintech opportunity in a $50B market that BCG and Google estimate[3] to be in the tune of $500B+ by 2020.
Disclosure: I work with JioMoney's product team in Bangalore. We are building the payments infrastructure on top of Jio and other telcos. We're hiring![4]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aadhaar 2. http://www.kpcb.com/blog/2016-internet-trends-report 3. http://image-src.bcg.com/BCG_COM/BCG-Google%20Digital%20Paym... 4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14030014
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#20Malaysia: GrabCar