The N-House Community had the privilege of hosting the Pitch Night 2019 for our weekly Entrepreneurship event. We are fortunate enough to invite Dr Chee Yeow Meng, Sang Wuoh Wong, David Ding, Julian Low and Badai Tanmizi to be the judges for our 8 teams up for the pitch. Dr Chee is the Associate Vice-President of NUS Innovation & Enterprise; Wuoh Wong is the Associate Director of NUS Enterprise; David is the Head of FinTech (Regional) Ecosystem and Innovation of DBS Innovation Group and the President of NOC Alumni Association; Julian is the Executive Director of Vertex Ventures; and Badai is from the Investment Team of Qualgro Partners.
For Pitch Night 2019, we have invited 8 teams from NUS to pitch their ideas to NUS Enterprise. The winner of Pitch Night 2019 will get a chance to win themselves a $10,000 practicum grant as well as support from NUS Enterprise. Each team will have 5 minutes of pitching to present their questions and 3 minutes of Q&A to answer all the judges’ questions.
The 8 teams have all bought very interesting ideas, solving a range of ideas from travel to e-bikes technology and then to space technologies. Here is a short description of what each company are meant to do:
1. Good for Travel — To solve worldwide problem of luggage storage.
2. Andalus — To offer a better solution to e-bikes.
3. Bucketlist — To rethink exotic group travels.
4. Deskspace — To offer under-utilised spaces in cafes and restaurants as working spaces.
5. Terran Space Technologies — To provide a cheaper and better alternative for satellite manoeuvrability.
6. Active Kids — To provide a flexible and convenient commonplace for parents with kids to search and book classes easily.
7. Shareship — To provide free shipping on cross-border shopping by connecting users.
8. Augmentus — To solve the problem of inflexible and costly robotic automation.
Good for Travel
Many travellers, especially independent travellers and laptop-and-latte travellers have problems finding a place to stash their luggage during travel. Good for Travel, founded by Scott Koh and Chen Yi Zhao, is a company that aims to solve this worldwide problem of luggage storage. Through its app, you can easily find places, like hotels, co-working spaces and other co-living spaces, to store your luggage anywhere you are. All you need to do is to simply enter your location, choose from a wide variety of hyper-connected spaces, make a reservation and drop your luggage at the selected site. The model of the business is pay-as-you-go, collecting merely $6 per piece of luggage for 24 hours, and $4 for every subsequent 24 hours. What is special about their service is that baggage loss is assured, so you do not have to worry about it when you are out and about doing your business or having fun on the beach. In 2 years, Good for Travel aims to expand to 15 cities over APAC, with over 1000 partners for luggage storage. They also aim to partner with established travel-ware brands to offer attractive membership.

Andalus
Globally, there are a total of over 2 billion bikes and over 200 million e-bikes. That is $28.2 billion and $16.29 billion in terms of market size respectively. However, there some key concerns with the current e-bikes. They usually have long charging times and are relatively heavy. The lithium batteries used are also usually environmentally unsustainable with their limited product lifecycle. Andalus, founded by James Smith, Tal Crook and Nils Weng, have come up with a solution for all the above problems. Their solution is an adaption of the current wheels used by ordinary bikes. Using the flywheel technology, which is currently being used in industries like aerospace, automotive and energy grids, they are offering an environmentally sustainable, safer and lighter alternative, with its battery supporting faster charging and longer lifetimes. Their business model is to sign licensing deals to established e-bikes players and gain revenue from consistent royalties, which projects them to earn up to 12 million a year in 8 years.
Bucketlist
Personally, it is especially hard for me to plan for an exotic group travel, especially when everyone has their own opinion of fun. You have to first discover the places you want to go, do further research about them, collate them in an excel sheet and then gather feedbacks from the group. Bucketlist, founded by Renyi, Rachel, Sashankh and Yonghe, aims to consolidate all of the difficult, tedious and boring processes and allow people to rethink exotic group travels. Their app utilises a Tinder-like user interface, allowing users to swipe left and right to indicate their preference for a place to travel, with more information about the specific place easily accessible on the app as well. This also helps groups to make decisions about where to travel to by consolidating the group popularity votes. Their business model is a freemium model with paid features to the users, while offering boosted profiles, photography and analytics tools for businesses. They will be collaborating with content contributors, like photographers, bloggers and youtubers, and doing partnerships with brands and tour agencies.

Deskspace
There are many problems to finding a good space to work productively, like no guaranteed space in cafes and libraries, no/bad Wi-Fi connections, the lack of power plugs and possibly getting chased out of a café. This is especially a problem for freelancers, remote workers and people in early startups, who do not have a fixed place to work in. Deskspace, founded by Ye Sheng and Zhi jia, aims to solve this problem of using under-utilised space for productive purposes. There are restaurants and cafes that sit empty during the day, but are perfect for people to work productively in. Their market validation has also proven that up to 67% of their target audience is willing to pay to get a more reliable working space, and that restaurants and cafes are willing to rent out the unutilised space during off-peak hours. As the user, all you need to do is to use their app to find a space to work in and reserve a slot. This offers flexible and affordable spaces for people to work in. Deskspace offers different subscription plans, from $29 to $109 a month, for people with different purposes.

Terran Space Technologies
There are currently around 5,000 satellites around the Earth’s orbit. A huge proportion of them (around 1000) are CubeSats, which are very small in nature and do not have manoeuvrability capabilities. NASA has mentioned before that “the need for compact, low-power micropropulsion systems to increase the manoeuvrability of CubeSats has increased significantly as nanosat missions have become more ubiquitous and complex. Terran Space Technologies have come up with a solution for satellite manoeuvrability. Using Vaporising Liquid Microthrusters technology, they have managed to develop a 3D-printed microthruster that uses water as propellant, which is small enough to fit into the small existing satellites. Their satellites are the most power efficient compared to other competitive technologies at a better price, costing around $20,000 per thruster. Their business model is to get revenue streams via sales of thruster packages to bulk buyers, as well as licensing of thrusters to partners and distributors. They project a profit of USD$240 million over 5 years upon completion of their first commercial product.
Active Kids
Many parents want to send their children for various enrichment classes, like dance and piano, but face problems when their children lose interest in the classes. It is difficult and inconvenient to find and book different types of activities for their children. Active Kids aims to solve these problems by providing a flexible and convenient commonplace for parents with kids to search and book classes easily. Their app allows users to easily search for classes to book for their children, and parents can switch their children’s classes easily. Their business model is to take a 10% commission fee on each transaction. With parents paying around $20 per class and a market size in Singapore of around 236 000, their annual projected market revenue is over $2.4 million. While they face competition from BYKidO and LessonsGoWhere, they provide a more flexible and convenient platform for the kids.
Shareship
Overseas distributors often offer free shipping, but only when you spend over a certain amount of money. In 2017, there is a total spending of S$2.4 billion on cross-border shopping. ShareShip, led by Pinxi, Yue Tong, Wei Keong, Thaddeus and Laminn, aims to solve this issue by connecting users to get free shipping on online purchases. As a user, you can either be a Captain, who consolidates orders from people, or a Shippie, who gets free shipping by submitting their orders to their Captains. To date, they have been consolidating group orders via Carousell, and have been very successful, completing 47 batches of orders and saving over S$2 500 in shipping fees. While there are competitors like Carousell and HardwareZone, they are both non-dedicated platforms for group orders and are inconvenient. On top of its services, ShareShip also offers security as well, ensuring that their Shippies get their items securely and their Captains get their commission fairly paid out. They will charge users a fixed service charge of $2.50 per order, in which $1.50 will go to the Captain consolidating the order and keeping the remainder of $1. Other than that, they also aim to get additional revenue streams via advertising and partnerships with ecommerce retailers.

Augmentus
The current robotic automation is both inflexible and costly. They can cost over $130k a year and a long lead time to develop a working robotic automation, making companies very concerned over their return on investment. Augmentus, founded by Yong Shin, Daryl and Voon Foo, aims to solve this problem of inflexible and costly robotic automation. They have developed an Augmented Reality app that programs robot by drawing robot movements on a mobile device. One very sweet deal to this app is that it has a very intuitive interface and no coding is required at all. This allows for engineers and non-engineers alike to develop their own robotic automation, with up to 60 times the speed a normal coder may take. This offer cost reduction on companies on employee training and hiring and a faster and cheaper deployment. Their app also works for different types of robots. Their business model is to earn licensing fees of $15 000 per operator, which is 20% below competing solutions. With a market size of over 2.6 million robots worldwide, they have a projected revenue of $10 million in 5 years, with 800 licenses sold, which is 2% of their addressable market.

After the teams’ great pitches and demos, the judges were amazed, and it was a very difficult decision for them. However, unlike the other Pitch Nights, the judges have decided to give the winning awards to 2 teams. We would like to congratulate both Terran Space Technologies and ShareShip for winning Pitch Night 2019! Other than the winning award, we would also like to congratulate Bucketlist for Audience Favourite Award!
