A Filipino Startup That Provides Potentially Lifesaving Data About Natural Disasters Scores $1 Million in Seed Round Funding
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A Filipino startup that offers an “environment intelligence” platform for clients has announced that it has raised $1 million (about P51 million) in a seed funding round. Komunidad’s platform “is designed to help environment-critical industries to make informed decisions when it comes to safety, operational efficiency, business continuity, and natural disaster preparedness,” according to the company’s website. “It allows relevant weather and environmental data to be quickly organized into visualizations, reports, and alerts to build the most suitable decision-making tools to support their operations.”
The seed round funding was led by Wavemaker Partners along with ADB Ventures (the venture arm of the Asian Development Bank). A report on TechCrunch said the startup, which has offices in Singapore and Manila, intends to use the fresh capital primarily to expand in Asia and introduce new features to the platform, “including a self-serve version that is slated for release in January 2022.”
Founder and CEO Felix Ayque started Komunidad as an independent weather and typhoon alerts service sent to various communities through email. Using government and private sources such as The Weather Company and other environment data providers, Ayque eventually expanded the service by providing useful and customizable analytics for government as well as corporate clients. Today Komunidad can even allow its clients to build their own alert systems.
“We act as a system integrator that only brings the relevant data and tells customers that this is the most important data,” Ayque tells TechCrunch.
On its website, Komunidad provides updates about its activities and long list of clients. For example, in July, the company said it won a contract for a weather and natural disaster early warning system for Assam State in India; last September, it was awarded a contract to provide weather data services to Nickel Asia, the Philippines’ largest producer of nickel ore; and in August 2020, it also won a contract to supply, deliver and install a weather and natural disaster early warning system for Mandaluyong City.
The startup’s list of clients includes the Taguig City, Capital One, Meralco, SN Aboitiz Power Group Rizal Technological University, and others.
According to TechCrunch, a portion of Komunidad’s new funding “will be used to launch self-service customizable dashboards next year that will allow clients to drag-and-drop widgets, similar to creating a website in Wix or WordPress. The seed round will also help Komunidad take on new business opportunities in India, Thailand, Cambodia and other markets, grow its sales teams and pay for more data sources.”
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