[ANNOUNCEMENT] Accelerating Asia Ventures Cohort 13: 5 Startups, 5 Countries, Under 1% Acceptance Rate
We're thrilled to announce the five startups selected for Cohort 13 at Accelerating Asia.
For eight years and across 13 cohorts, we have backed more than 100 early-stage companies building across 16 markets, with a simple focus that has not changed: revenue-generating founders solving real problems, often in the sectors and geographies that larger funds overlook. That is the lens every application runs through, and Cohort 13 ran through the most competitive process we have ever held.
This cohort drew a record 724 applications, the largest pool we have ever reviewed for a single intake, from founders across 20 countries and through five rounds of evaluation. From all of that, we selected five. That is an acceptance rate of under one percent. Every one of the five is already in market today, with paying customers and real revenue or usage, several already at six-figure annual revenue run rates, and a number of them led by founders who have built and scaled companies before.
"Every cohort is competitive, but Cohort 13 was the hardest selection we have made. What set the five apart was not a pitch, it was real operators, already in market, solving problems they understand from the inside. They are still early-stage companies, building in emerging markets where the right capital is hard to find, and backing that kind of potential before it is obvious to everyone else is exactly what Accelerating Asia exists to do."
- Amra Naidoo, General Partner, Accelerating Asia Ventures
Here are the five companies joining the Accelerating Asia Ventures family as part of Cohort 13:
Driftly AI
An AI-powered operating suite for consumer goods distribution.
Across emerging markets, consumer goods distribution is still run on fragmented systems stitched together across WhatsApp groups, spreadsheets and mismatched ERPs. Decisions such as how much inventory to order, how much to deliver to each retailer, and how to recover credit from the market are made on intuition, and that guesswork costs distributors up to 20% of net profit. Driftly puts an LLM-managed decision layer over the entire chain, telling distributors exactly how much inventory to deliver, which retailers to work with, and how to improve their cash conversion cycle. Founder Sheheryar Iqbal saw the problem from the inside as Head of Supply Chain at Airlift ($120M+ raised), where he launched over 80 warehouses and worked with 450+ manufacturers, and the Airlift founders, Usman Gul and Ahmed Ayub, are now angels and mentors in Driftly. The team spent more than eight months embedded inside its flagship customer, Gourmet, where it doubled the sales footprint and saved over 20% in margin. Driftly is now rolling out nationally to new customers, with a warm enterprise pipeline that includes Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Nestle.
DIGIBOX
A last-mile, IoT delivery-locker network that keeps eCommerce and enterprise deliveries running 24/7.
Most last-mile companies in Bangladesh compete on riders, vans and warehouses. DIGIBOX is building the layer underneath all of them: the country's first and only shared logistics infrastructure, a network of IoT-enabled lockers that any platform, bank or retailer can plug into, cutting delivery costs by up to 40% and failed deliveries by up to 80%. Founder and CEO Rezwanul Haque Jami has done this before, having built and exited two ventures already (BDTickets.com, one of Bangladesh's first online ticketing platforms, and OLX.com.bd). His 31-person team, with seven engineers in house, designs and manufactures its own lockers and owns the full hardware and software stack, with patents pending on its scalable, off-grid design. DIGIBOX already runs 55 locker sites, close to a million deliveries and 123,000 end users, and roughly one percent of every Daraz order in Bangladesh now flows through its network, alongside clients like BRAC Bank, Rokomari and Carlcare.
Meza AI
Cursor for Customer Success. An AI-native platform that helps SaaS companies reduce churn and unlock cross-sell and upsell from their existing customers.
Most customer-success teams still run on dashboards and spreadsheets while SaaS companies lose 20 to 30% of revenue to churn they saw too late. Meza connects product usage, CRM, support, calls and emails into one layer that does not just show a health score, it tells the team which accounts are at risk, why, and what to do next. The founders call it a system of decision rather than a system of record. Co-founders Abhishek Yadav and Priya Yadav have known each other for more than twenty years and built their last company, NbliK, to more than two million users, where the data was everywhere but the decisions came too late. Meza onboards a customer in under 90 minutes, has converted every pilot it has run into a paying customer, and is already at around $230K ARR, monitoring more than 1,500 accounts.
Govaly
The largest fashion and beauty e-commerce marketplace in Bangladesh.
Counterfeits and unverified sellers cost Bangladesh's e-commerce market hundreds of millions a year, so Govaly works only with authentic brands and sellers it has verified through a three-step process, focused entirely on fashion and beauty rather than trying to sell everything to everyone. That focus shows up in numbers the horizontal giants cannot match: an average order value of $22, roughly three times the local norm, an order cancellation rate of 11% against an industry average near 30%, and the fastest fashion delivery in the country, roughly 80% faster than the market because a non-warehouse model ships straight from verified sellers rather than holding stock. In its first year, founder and CEO Himel Faraz and co-founder Jeion Ahmed have grown it past 100,000 users, 70,000 orders and more than 1,000 verified sellers, building the trusted destination in a category most marketplaces handle badly.
meed
Consumer-first retail loyalty. One QR scan, native to Apple and Google Wallet, no app and no login.
More than half of loyalty memberships sit dormant because every brand wants its own app, so meed strips that away with a single wallet-native scan that goes live in Apple and Google Wallet in minutes, no app and no login. It is the first consumer-first unified loyalty layer, one card that works across every merchant rather than one more app per brand. Founder and CEO Phil Ingram, a 28-year product veteran across Web2 and Web3, has built it into something merchants come to on their own: more than 700 organic sign-ups from 85 countries with no paid acquisition at all, an organic LTV to CAC ratio of roughly 140 to 1, and zero churn among paying merchants. The strongest paying signal sits in beauty and tanning salons in the UK, where merchants who join keep paying and refer the ones who join next.
One cohort, one pattern
On the surface these five don't look alike: distribution software, delivery hardware, a customer-success platform, a marketplace and a loyalty layer, spread across the UAE, Bangladesh, Singapore, the US and Hong Kong. But they have more in common than that mix suggests. We are unpacking what connects them, and why we find it interesting, in a companion piece later this week.
What comes next
Over the next 100 days these five work toward Demo Day. Cohort 14 applications are opening soon. If you're a founder, or you know one who should apply, the details are at acceleratingasia.com/getfunded.
"Our edge is structural, not market timing. We are usually the first institutional cheque, in early and at the entry valuation, in markets where serious capital is still thin at seed. Then we go to work. The accelerator is built to help these founders scale and raise their next round, and that next round, with the later-stage investors and strategic acquirers who follow, is where our seed position becomes a return. That is what has built the track record across both funds. We are genuinely excited to welcome these five to the Accelerating Asia family and get to work over the next 100 days."
Craig Bristol Dixon, General Partner
Fund 2 is in final close.
Start with the fund deck. Choose your path at acceleratingasia.com/investors and we'll send access.
Ask a question first. Email team@acceleratingasia.com and we'll get back to you.
Ready to invest? Book a call here with a partner.
- Craig & Amra General Partners | Accelerating Asia Ventures
See the portfolio. Check out acceleratingasia.com/portfolio. Filter by country, sector, or fundraising status. Request an introduction directly to any CEO.
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* Carta Q4 2025 VC Fund Performance. US benchmarks used as Asian fund comparables remain limited.
About Accelerating Asia Ventures
Accelerating Asia Ventures is an independent accelerator and venture capital fund investing in early-stage startups across Southeast and South Asia. Founded by operators, the organisation is committed to supporting founders with capital, credibility, and a long-term community.
For interviews, data requests, or portfolio introductions, contact: team@acceleratingasia.com
