Myanmar’s untapped market for mobile and digital development businesses is opening up and investors are eyeing a wide range of promising opportunities within the Southeast Asian nation’s fast growing IT sector.
One of the leading local mobile and digital startup NEX, founded in 2013, is now set to grow faster with the successful completion of new round of fundraising.
In the second seed round, Blibros Ltd, the privately-held investment arm of Sweden’s Böcker family, agreed to invest $150,000.
Singapore-based Blibros has a special worldwide interest on investing in IT companies.
“The investment landscape in Myanmar is very attractive for many investment firms with a wide range of opportunities from startups to medium-sized businesses to joint ventures with large local firms,” said Blibros CEO Jonas Lindstörm.
“The opportunities have never been better as the country’s IT sector is on the verge of great developments. NEX has some great ideas and implementation abilities. Its new product ‘Fyre’ is something we wanted to be a part of. We hope our investment will help speed Fyre’s development.”
Fyre is a web-based SaaS (Software as a service) that will help businesses build their own applications: it does not require any programming knowledge. With mobile penetration rate growing rapidly, NEX said it hopes Fyre will become a handy tool for all businesses.
NEX was founded by Ye Myat Min, an IT entrepreneur who has been involved with developing mobile applications, websites, UI and UX designs as well as project managing mobile and digital project for clients across the Asia-Pacific region.
“We are grateful to Blibros for showing confidence in NEX. We have many other exciting developments … We will keep up our momentum and further upgrade our resources,” Ye Myat Min said.
One of NEX’s first round angel investors, Ned Phillips, said: “I have been pleased with the growth of the company so far. The people are working hard and have come up innovative products such as Fyre and Hush.” The latter is location-based social network mobile app where users can post anonymous messages with just a mobile phone number.
Ravi Chabbra of local tech firm GMIT said: “It has been a joy to watch NEX develop. …With NEX we can see and feel the start of a new wave of innovation in the country.”
Myanmar’s IT start up scene is growing rapidly. Since 2013 a number of platforms have started to encourage and mentor firms like NEX. Ooredoo, one of Myanmar’s two foreign telecoms players, has supported startups through Ideabox, its incubation program. Every month players and would-be investors meet at Mobile Monday Yangon, a monthly IT focused social networking event.
