With encouragement from peers and professors, Tan started Flying Cape.

The traditional education marketplace still faced many challenges up to this day and that’s what an edtech startup, Flying Cape, aims to address.

Founded in 2016 by its CEO, Jamie Tan, Flying Cape was born when Tan read a report back in 2014 that many learners, particularly children, do not learn effectively and efficiently and develop a disregard towards lifelong learning as adults. 

The article resonated with Tan as she also faced similar challenges in her younger years. She believed that what she learned when she addressed those challenges could essentially be helpful to others so she began her research in which she found out two pain points in the education system: One is that learners are not finding the "right" education options that can fit their personalised needs, and educators not finding the "right" students as they are plagued with labour intensive and manual processes whilst running their business.

Tan translated her research and submitted it as her EMBA thesis, later winning her cohort's Outstanding Thesis Award. Under the encouragement and support of her peers and professors in the dual degree EMBA course, she decided to start Flying Cape to transform the brainchild of the combined effort of academics and like-minded people into reality.

“Our first challenges were in bringing like-minded education partners to come on board, to join us in building an ecosystem for education. Many of them were accustomed to tried and tested manual processes and unfamiliar with digital tools. We guided them in embracing technology, helped them move them away from manual processes and put up their offerings online through easy-to-use features,” Tan explained in an exclusive interview with Singapore Business Review.

Flying Cape offers a marketplace aggregation platform for education products and services. On the platform, learners are offered diagnostic tools, backed by validated research, that help learners gain insights into their unique profiles and interests. It then helps learners match and find the “right fit” amongst the widest range of education options. Flying Cape’s engine tracks the efficacy of its recommendations which adapts and changes according to the learner's feedback. Using the same technology, it powers 10 marketplaces serving learners of different groups.

Flying Cape’s own platform, Flying Cape for Children, is a tuition and enrichment advisory platform where the startup takes a commission on transactions. In 2019, it introduced a B2B model, building on the technology used to develop its first platform to expand into other SMART marketplaces catering to different needs whose revenue model is based on an annual licensing fee and lower transaction fees.

In August, Flying Cape raised US$1.5m ($2.03m) from key investors Eduspaze and Start-up O and a few angel investors. They currently have combined funding of US$2.1m ($2.84m)

Currently, Flying Cape aims to expand its physical presence in China and has further plans to enter other South and East Asia markets.

“With the transition to online learning, Singapore Education providers are seeing the opportunity to expand virtually overseas and Flying Cape is well-positioned to facilitate this expansion. At the same time, we have also onboarded many new online enrichment entrants from overseas in the past year, thus enhancing education options for learners. With more innovative solutions coupled with the rise in technology, geographical boundaries are no longer a constraint to accessing the best education options, fuelling our ambition to build a global ecosystem for education,” Tan said.

And how media-focussed fintech Few¢ents saw this as a great business opportunity.

Surfing the web, you sometimes come across articles that pique your interest. Naturally, you click on it to start reading, but after reading a few words you are blocked by a paywall.

To read that one article, you are asked to pay X amount of money to subscribe for a month. You then wonder, why can’t I just pay for this one article? Why do I have to shell out for a whole month’s subscription?

In the early days of fintech-for-media startup Few¢ents, this was the very question chief executive officer and one of the founders Abhishek Dadoo, asked himself.

“The biggest pain point I identified was subscription fatigue during the Covid-19 circuit breaker phase in early 2020. I wanted to read and consume quality content across different digital publishing outlets, but subscribing everywhere was not feasible. I realised soon enough that a solution that can unbundle quality content at a global scale was much-needed and inevitable,” Dadoo said in an exclusive interview with Singapore Business Review.

In the early years, quality journalism had gone down, replaced by clickbait content for publishers to get revenue. But as advertising yields declined, digital publishers and creators are now looking to direct reader revenue based business models.

Dadoo explained that on average, publishers expect only 1%-5% of their users to subscribe. The rest of the non-subscribers are typically casual visitors referred by social media, international visitors, or local visitors who have already subscribed elsewhere. 

However, he, along with his co-founder Dushyant Khare, saw an opportunity to provide an incremental revenue model which allows publishers to monetise casual visitors while beating subscription fatigue and making pay-per-content seamless for global users. Meanwhile, Dadoo said they saw this as a solution for consumers to democratise access to quality content, as opposed to buying dozens of subscription plans.

Few¢ents, a Singapore based FinTech-for-Media startup provides solutions for digital publishers and creators to incrementally monetize their never-subscribers. Through the company’s solution, digital publishers unbundle and monetize premium content, including articles, video and podcasts, via a pay-per-content service covering 50+ currencies, that sits on the publishers’ sites.

But why focus their attention on the media industry?

“With the proliferation of the creator economy and creator tools, we see that quality content is no longer limited to large media houses. As a result of this fragmentation across all content formats, we see a large and growing need for unbundling and pay-per-content. We felt it was quite ironic that for the longest time digital media made revenue by disengaging their audiences from content but instead via ad-clicks. The content industry has been searching for complimentary engagement-led direct revenue models that can be scaled globally. And that’s where FinTech comes into play,” Dadoo said.

Today, every publisher and creator has global audiences and payments are personal for every user. Dadoo observed that users prefer local payment methods beyond just credit cards and want to do so seamlessly and efficiently. 

“For micropayments to work globally, a FinTech layer sits on top of our Media solutions layer allowing seamless micropayments in 50+ currencies from global audiences back to the publisher in their local currency,” he added.

Few¢ents helps publishers identify quality content better, and monetize content better. Dadoo said they are focusing efforts on identifying quality content which audiences will be willing to pay for and building analytics and algorithms to help identify these content. 

Recently, the startup raised US$1.6m ($2.13m) in a seed funding round with key investments from venture capital funds M Venture Partners and Hustle Fund as well as from angel investors such Koh Boon Hwee, former chairman of DBS Bank, Kenneth Bishop, former managing director of Southeast Asia at Facebook, amongst others.

Dadoo said they aim to have creators and digital publishers, with the help of Few¢ents, focus on giving quality content without having to worry about reader revenues at a global scale.