Reflection on 2021 — Story of Aespada
As 2021 is fast approaching its end, we have decided to dedicate this blog post to looking at the history of Aespada from 2018 to 2021 and share with our readers certain milestones that we are proud of.
The initial idea of Aespada came about when co-founders met during their masters program at the Nanyang Technological University. Since both of them had a career in the construction industry prior to their masters program, they both shared a passion for improving the long standing inefficiencies in the industry and thus the idea of Aespada was born.
Fast track to August 2018, Aespada was formally incorporated in Singapore and the co-founders formally became the first two employees of the company. They set their sights on taking part in local competitions to secure money for the grants to build their company with institutional partners. In Mid 2019, Aespada was awarded winners of BEAMP Cycle I ASD Phase and in Mid 2020, Aespada was awarded winners of BEAMP Cycle I MD Phase.
These two awards and the grant money which accompanied the awards meant that the product could now be developed by professional developers. After months of development and onboarding a small team of employees, the product was finally launched in November 2020 and began to see early traction as the platform offered lorries and cargo vans for On-demand deliveries. In early 2021, the platform also added on lorry cranes and in late 2021, the platform onboarded a fleet of 200 minibuses to cater for workers’ transportation.
Aespada was featured on the Straits Times and Channel News Asia for our work in making workers’ transportation safer and more secure and this press coverage has helped get many more companies interested in our solution. We hope that in future minibuses will be the default mode of transport for foreign migrant labour and lorries will no longer be used.
In spite of Covid-19 having a detrimental effect on most construction related companies, we were able to stay strong and push ahead to get the results we wanted for ourselves. We are seeing strong month on month growth in new customers being added and more of our vehicles being used by the industry.
In 2022, we are looking to push our growth even further as we start raising our seed round of investments and we channel the funds towards market expansion