FWD Start-Up Studio, a subsidiary of Hong Kong-headquartered insurer FWD Insurance, has partnered Malaysia-based early-stage venture capital firm 1337 Ventures to form a pre-accelerator scheme dubbed Alpha Startups.
The four-week programme is set to take place twice a year, with the first cohort scheduled for May 2021. It is accepting applications from artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing, blockchain and data-powered financial and insurance technology developers based in Malaysia.
The initiative will provide 10 selected startups with industry mentoring and entrepreneurial modules in a bid to help them develop their business ideas towards a demo day.
FWD and 1337 Ventures will invest about $36,500 in each of the top two teams and provide roughly $29,500 in credits for cloud infrastructure, recruitment, marketing and payments. The funded participants may be eligible for further investment as part of their seed and pre-series A rounds.
1337 Ventures also runs accelerators for organisations including telecommunications firms Digi and Telekom Malaysia, financial services firms CIMB, Bank Negara Malaysia and Maybank, and the government-backed Multimedia Development Corporation and Khazanah Nasional.
