Michael Joseph Bautista

Mastercard Foundation 2019 - 2020

Alumni

Legatum Fellow

From:

Philippines

Sector:

IT/Telecom

Location:

Philippines

Degree:

MBA, Sloan School of Management

Miko Bautista’s venture, TOCA, is a two-sided marketplace that connects machine learning companies with digital workers in the Philippines. TOCA is a mobile application specifically designed for budget smartphones with limited data connectivity, empowering gig workers in the Philippines to perform simple tasks, such as image annotation, in exchange for money. TOCA can also be used as a tool for talent identification and skills-building. Users who have historically done well can be offered progressively complex, higher-value work, enabling them to develop practical skills that can translate into real-world career opportunities with the venture’s partnering companies.

Miko has always dreamed of taking his learnings from the USA back to the Philippines, building a start-up that will help provide technology-driven solutions to many of the problems back home. With TOCA he is tackling the issues of the high underemployment and unemployment rates in underdeveloped nations, and the need for cheaper labeled data to train machine learning algorithms.

Miko studied Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and worked at Apple as a Siri Software Engineer in Silicon Valley. At the moment, he is pursuing an MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is also co-president of the South East Asian Society.