917Ventures: Empowering Filipinos and Filipino Businesses

917Ventures is a venture builder and wholly-owned subsidiary of the Globe Group, one of the Philippines' largest telecommunications companies. 917Ventures focuses on developing, launching, and operating businesses in various industries, with a particular emphasis on digital technology and innovation. They work to create and support startups and new ventures that can drive growth and innovation within the Philippines and beyond. Some of their initiatives include fintech, e-commerce, digital health, adtech, and more. 917Ventures is pivotal in advancing digital transformation and entrepreneurship in the Philippines. With that, join me in learning more about 917Ventures with its Head of Growth Marketing and Corporate Relations Group, Natasha Dawn Bautista.

Can you provide an overview of 917Ventures and its primary mission within the startup and corporate landscape?

917Ventures is Globe's Corporate Venture Builder and the largest Venture Builder in the Philippines. What we do is we ideate, launch, accelerate, and scale businesses that uplift Filipino lives. That really is our mission: to uplift Filipino lives and we do that by seeking to solve the pain points of both consumers and businesses. That’s both Filipinos and Filipino businesses through digital solutions in the Philippines and also hopefully, beyond.

What differentiates 917Ventures from other corporate incubators or startup accelerators?

We're not the typical incubator or accelerator – we’re a venture builder. The main difference between them is that incubators and accelerators typically look for startups externally and then invest in them and provide them with resources, mentorship, and networking.  For us, we build our own ventures. We have a whole team that ideates. From the idea, we create a whole business plan internally and then validate that idea. We test, learn, and incubate internally. We also fund it ourselves. And then hopefully, we spin it off into the next generation of companies, hopefully the likes of GCash and KonsultaMD. That's the main difference. The second main thing that I do want to discuss is that we have what we so call Globe's Unfair Advantage. Being the corporate venture builder of Globe, we have some advantages like access to data and the customer base of Globe. We also have distribution points which are a network of enterprise partners that are already established because of the ecosystem. And of course, marketing execution capabilities and capital. Lastly, I feel like we really demonstrate the true meaning of corporate innovation because we have the most diversified portfolio. We have a total portfolio count of 13 now and counting. It spans across eight different verticals.

How does 917Ventures identify and select the startups it decides to support and invest in?

We usually ask these three questions when we assess the ideas. First, is there a need? Second is can we deliver? And then third, is it worth it? The first one really tries to identify if a problem is being addressed or not. Additionally, this question identifies if the problem being addressed is aligned with our mission of uplifting the lives of Filipinos and Filipino businesses. The second one mainly identifies if we have the right to play or if we are the right organization to build this company. For the last question, this tries to see if there is a huge market opportunity that we ask about scalability, revenue, and profit story.

Could you share some success stories or notable achievements of startups that have been nurtured by 917Ventures? How do these startups align with your overall mission and vision?

I do want to emphasize the two champion companies we have which are GCash and KonsultaMD. Both these companies started out as startups. They started out as innovations that we thought of internally in Globe. But because of Globe’s Unfair Advantage and the team that did a really good job accelerating these companies, we can say that these two are our success stories and we do hope to see more companies with the likes of GCash and KonsultaMD not just in 917Ventures, but also in the Philippines as a whole. GCash is the Philippines’ number one finance app. This is the only double unicorn valued at over $2 billion. We already have over 80 million users and that's still growing. GCash does not just empower Filipino individuals, but also Filipino businesses. For instance, you see now that sari-sari stores have GCash and some even only accept GCash. It really is a good story, especially during the pandemic when everything had to digitalize. Then we also have KonsultaMD. KonsultaMD is now the super app of the healthcare industry. We also announced that we consolidated KonsultaMD, HealthNow, and Aide, the three largest players in the industry to uplift the healthcare journey and make sure that we provide easy, reliable, and affordable end-to-end patient care. We're already seeing more than 1,000 professionals on the platform across over 40 specializations already. Those are the two main success stories we have. But I also want to emphasize that much more than nurturing our companies, we also create solutions with Filipino businesses in mind.

We're currently incubating some ventures that have not spun off yet, but we're validating and testing them. We always come up with solutions that will help out SMEs. For example, we have FundSpace that helps SMEs with funding if they need loans. We have a few other ventures that we’re incubating that will help digitize SMEs. We have Rush, one of our portfolio companies that also target SMEs.

Can you discuss the industries or sectors that 917Ventures is currently focusing on or exploring for potential investment and growth??

As I mentioned earlier, we're in eight verticals or eight industries. First is fintech because of GCash. We’re also in digital health because of KonsultaMD. On top of that, we also have edutech, media and entertainment, B2B SaaS, e-commerce and loyalty, adech, and data, and climate tech. I would say that we're quite bullish on two of these industries – B2B SaaS or MSME enablement because we do believe in empowering and enabling not just startups, but also traditional SMEs; and also climate tech. We've started that with our partnership with Gogoro to bring two-wheel EV Smartscooters® and battery-swapping stations to the Philippines. We announced a partnership beginning of this year and we’re currently under beta testing for the Smartscooters® going around Metro Manila as we speak, and we hope to have this commercially available to Filipinos by the end of the year. On top of this, we're also looking at how we can use and leverage AI to enable our solutions. Although AI is not part of our industries, we do see that AI will cut across all eight industries. We’re already looking at how we'll use AI and incorporate it into our solutions.

What are your thoughts and feelings with IGNITE 2023 coming up? How was your experience overall experience with IGNITE throughout the years (if applicable)

I’ve been attending IGNITE for maybe half a decade now, even before the pandemic. IGNITE is something close to my heart not just because of the organizers, but also because it's a good way to get everyone in the startup industry to get together. Definitely very excited about the upcoming IGNITE just because it's finally going to be fully face-to-face. Conferences like IGNITE are a really good platform for people to network, create deals, and meet each other when you normally wouldn't be able to. More importantly, it's a good way to showcase Filipino innovation. There’s definitely a lot more showcasing that we can do in the Philippines. Just celebrating small wins, celebrating successes of each other, not just of startups but also of corporations. I think it's definitely something that I always look forward to every year.

Natasha Dawn Bautista is the Head of the Growth Marketing and Corporate Relations Group of 917Ventures. Natasha is responsible for the growth marketing of its ventures, marketing communications, program management, and external and public relations, among many others. With inspiring passion, Natasha is dedicated to truly empowering both Filipinos and Filipino businesses, giving them the help they need to improve and succeed. Using her experiences and learnings, she believes that the future will be filled with bright, happy Filipinos and their businesses.

Visit www.techshake.asia if you would like to know and connect more with 917Ventures.