The Vietnamese startup nabs the round called bridge round from CyberAgent, Y1 Venture, and others

Vietnam-based rental sharing startup Luxstay has raised US$3 million in a bridge round from Japan-based CyberAgent Ventures (CAV), Y1 Ventures and some other investors. This round made for CAV’s second investment after it added an undisclosed amount to the US$2.5 million pre-Series A round led by Genesia Ventures in early 2018.

CAV is said to be a key player in guiding Luxstay as a startup company to structure itself internally and raise investment in this round of funding.

Also Read: Pre-seed accelerator Founder Institute invites applications for Kuala Lumpur 2019 programme

Luxstay describes its service as an online platform that connects owners of accommodations such as apartments, vacation villas, homestay looking for short-term rentals with tourists or business travelers. Luxstay has specified its network serving the mid-end to high-end segment.

It was founded in 2016 by Nguyen Van Dung and claims to have a network of 10,000 homes in the country to date.

Taking sharing economy that will affect the tourism and real estate markets into account, the statement by CyberAgent Ventures’ investment director for Vietnam and Thailand Dzung Nguyen expresses its support to Luxstay’s business model.

“We believe that this business model, like Luxstay, is working as intended and can be a game-changer in its market in the near future. It brings a great source of income to homeowners, and also takes advantage of the available properties,” said the statement.

Also Read: Singapore’s e-scooter startup EuroSports secures US$1.5M from its parent ESG

The most recent collaboration Luxstay has embarked on was with Japan’s Rakuten LIFULL STAY. The partnership resulted in Rakuten LIFULL STAY providing its inventory of the Japanese vacation rental properties listed on its site under ‘Vacation STAY’ to Luxstay, and vice versa.
–

The post Home vacation rentals startup Luxstay secures US$3M bridge round funding appeared first on e27.

Besides the basic functionality, there’re also a lot of features that make it easy to form communities on Telegram

Telegram is amazing. More and more people use this instant messaging app every day, and there’s no stopping to its increasing adoption.

Besides the basic functionality, i.e. chatting, there’re also a lot of features that make it easy to form communities on Telegram. For example, you can pin important messages, and the maximum number of members you can have, at this time of writing, is 75,000!

Currently, there are all kinds of Telegram groups catering to different audiences, be it a small group project, interest groups, or even crypto communities. However, growing a group from scratch and ensuring that your group continues to thrive is a challenging affair.

Also Read: Empowering the community: A look back on what e27 has been up to in 2018

We get it, since we’ve grown our very own Telegram meme group to 13,000 members in the short span of four months. In this article, we share several tips to help your Telegram group thrive.

1- Understand why people join your group

For our group, the reason why members were in our group in the first place was a simple one — they simply wanted to enjoy memes.

In general, it’s important to understand why your members are in the group, as it will help you tailor your message. Not understanding this, your group will lead to slow growth at best, and people leave your group at worst.

Take some time to understand the needs of your members, and the types of content that they want to see in your group.

2- Set ground rules

When our group first started, there were no rules as members were already friends and had mutual understanding. However, as the group scaled, it was important to set ground rules. In the early days of the meme group, there were three main problems:

1. Unacceptable photos were shared — this included gore and material of adult nature
2. Long stretches of messages without any memes shared
3. Members receiving unsolicited messages from other members in the group

Members began leaving as these things did not align with what they wanted — to simply enjoy memes. To address this, the admin team set ground rules to curb these behaviour.

For example, admins regularly reminded members that they should be “more memes less talk”. Those who broke rule-3 were named and shamed, followed by expulsion from the group.

The ground rules reduced incidents of the three issues and subsequently reduced attrition rate. Publicising the admins’ decision was helpful as it sent a signal to members that we were serious about our rules. Other than keeping the channel as friendly as possible, it also served to deter future offenders.

3-Have an effective team

We were fortunate to assemble a team of passionate admins who were invested in growing the meme group. Our campaigns ran smoothly because the admins are aligned and ensured that things were executed.

Ensuring that admins were available at all times to monitor group activity is important as well, to avoid members breaking rules.

4- Communicate, communicate, communicate

Broadly speaking, communication is absolutely important in maintaining and growing a thriving community. Since your members are the biggest stakeholders in your community, their opinions do matter. As such, listening to your community can also prove to be valuable. One effective way is to take in relevant feedback and adapt their words into your strategies.

Firstly, there is communication to get a community’s opinion. This involves interacting with the community as a whole. It ranges from a simple message in the group to more sophisticated ways like using a bot to conduct polls.

Secondly, there is communication to get feedback. In contrast with communicating with the entire community, there’s also engaging individual members for feedback. We reach out to group leavers regularly to understand why they left. This allowed the admin to tweak our rules and messaging in the group.

Also Read: A quick look at the state of Southeast Asia’s tech ecosystem in 2018

In addition, reaching out to leavers has an unexpected effect — there are those who come back after being individually engaged. Is it scalable? Not immediately, but it’s nonetheless important as reconverted members are stronger supporters than before.

It is also important to communicate your decisions to the entire group, be it in the event when community rules are flouted or thought-processes behind the admins’ actions.

5- Use analytics

Telegram is an amazing messaging app not just because it supports large groups, but the team also built a suite of application programme interface (APIs) that allow us to draw data to perform analytics. We developed in-house analytics capabilities to monitor our group growth.

Utilising analytics also helped us in identifying our key target audience and keeping content relevant to this age group. It was also easier to set goals for upcoming campaigns.

Over time, community managers or admins can intuit who are strong supporters in the group. They are individuals who consistently and frequently active, and are usually the first to engage the admins over issues.

In our case, we identified key members who were consistently contributing to the group using analytics. Engaging them helped maintain consistent levels of user-generated content in the group while encouraging new members to contribute.

6- Incentivise key members

From time to time, our group also organised contests to engage the community. These contests ranged from spurring members to create their own memes, to encouraging them to invite as many friends as possible to join the group.

Top contributors will then be rewarded for their efforts in helping to strengthen community bonds. Incentivising our members will help to foster a sense of loyalty in the community and engaging with the community as a whole. This is also a way to show gratitude to members for reaching and exceeding goals – be it membership, or simply strengthening community bonds.

In our case, recognition given by admins to members is also key in spurring more user-generated content from our members. Admins would then choose their favourite original meme in a bid to commend our members for their effort.

Recognition as an incentive helps us to retain our members by making them feel cared for. Productivity also increases, i.e improving the quality and quantity of memes posted.

A game of patience, love and strategy

Growing a Telegram community is a long-term effort, involving a lot of investment in time and communication. While growing a group into a thriving one might be daunting to begin with, the rewards are amazing when your efforts strengthen the community and members are aligned and have the same levels of passion for the subject.

Your community needs to grow at a manageable pace and in an organic way. As community members interact around shared values, community cultures will begin to form and that is when a group starts to thrive.

—

To Si Ling is Co-founder of MnD Analytics.

e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

The post 6 ways to grow a thriving Telegram group appeared first on e27.

The company plans to use the funding for the development of the machine learning in its chat bot

Singapore-based GrabJobs, entry to mid-level focussed job platform, has announced a total of US$930k seed funding just in 2018, bringing total funding to over SGD$2.5 million (US$1.8 million).

The company said that it will focus on product development and platform improvements, including the integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning technologies into their signature interview chat bot. The latter is a project run in partnership with Mr. Erik Cambria, Associate Professor in Artificial Intelligence at NTU.

Also Read: Home vacation rentals startup Luxstay secures US$3M bridge round funding

Some new features that the company has introduced:

• An omni-channel web-based interview chat bot, in addition to an in-app chat bot

• Automated multi-channel job posting

• Automated Interview Scheduling and Interview Reminders to improve applicant show-up rates

• In-store interview kiosks

• A web-based version of the job portal

In addition to these features, GrabJobs plans to launch a product feature that will support job seekers for high-volume recruitment jobs, such as retail and F&B services with no-CV application feature. GrabJobs believe that it allows users to apply for jobs quickly, without the need to create and craft a CV, supported by chat bot that will expedite the interview and screening process.

About the plan, CEO and Co-Founder Mr. Emmanuel Crouy said, “In 2019, we will be expanding outside of our current markets in Southeast Asia by partnering with regional job sites to provide our services to recruiters in the region.”

Also Read: Grab ordered to pay US$208K to Vietnamese taxi firm Vinasun in lawsuit

GrabJobs claimed to be the cost-effective recruitment solution that automates the traditional toll of sourcing, screening and interviewing candidates.
–

The post Mobile-focussed recruitment platform GrabJobs raises US$930K appeared first on e27.

Helmad offers an innovative way for brands to advertise products on helmets, while rewarding two-wheeler riders for every kilometre they cover

Michael Hendriks was touring to Jakarta in 2015 when he decided to lock himself one night in the brainstorm room of a co-working space, with nothing more than a whiteboard and some music. He was working on a concept that could possibly change the lives of millions of people of Indonesia, a country he was deeply in love with.

He invited a friend to share his feedback on the product, or rather the prototype. After hours of discussions and iteration, he ended up wiping clean the whiteboard and drawing a helmet and an advertisement next to each other.

And an innovative product, Helmad, took shape.

“Hailing from Holland, I arrived in Jakarta early 2015 after many visits as a tourist. I saw the possibilities offered by this country, a land of nearly 300 million people and a fast-growing economy,” Hendriks tells me. “On a personal level, Jakarta has always felt like home to me; the culture, the busy city, the people, the vibes, and even the traffic.”

After years of painstaking research, Hendriks started Helmad in 2018. His product offers an innovative way for brands to advertise products on helmets, while rewarding two-wheeler riders for every kilometre they cover.

In other words, Helmad turns a safety tool people are obliged to wear in traffic into a moving billboard.

“I couldn’t imagine that almost four years after I arrived here, I would turn the traffic jams into a new marketing machine, but it feels only right to contribute to a better, safer and more booming environment,” he shares.

Also Read: One startup in Indonesia seeks to transform the way people deal with food excess

According to him, Helmad is partly a new marketing channel and partly a social impact generator. “Along with providing a platform for brands to spread their message around town, Helmad allows students to earn some cash and receive other incentives along with it.”

“As for the quirky brand name, we simply smashed the words ‘helmet’ and ‘ads’ together. It’s so simple that it’s effective, and is weird enough. A weird name works; some people like it, some people don’t. It makes people start talking about it,” he laughs.

How does it work?

Drivers can sign up and get assigned to a certain client ad campaign, after which they will receive a helmet with a built-in GPS tracker (to persuade students to sign up as drivers, Helmad offers free helmets with 12-month basic insurance, in addition to rewards).

The helmets are designed in partnership with the clients in order to ensure the marketing message remains on the headgear throughout the campaign.

Throughout the campaign, Helmad provides live updates on its progress and offers continuous support to its client, who may want to change their game plans along the way. At the end of each campaign, the helmet will be renewed or exchanged and the drivers will get brand new ones.

The drivers (students) will keep track of their covered distance as well as their earnings through Helmad’s app. Moving forward, Helmad will actively turn the app into a financial platform, where drivers will be guided on how to save and manage money.

“Whether the driver gets assigned to a campaign of one month or three months, he or she receives the insurance for 12 months upfront, allowing everybody to get acquainted with insurance coverage. For the insurance, we are working together with a partner, who offers a very affordable life insurance with lots of features and benefits, and most of all, an easy-to-use app, allowing users to upgrade or downgrade certain policies,” he reveals.

With the current structure, Helmad focuses on bigger brands, for their marketing budget fits with its business model. “We have been pitching Helmad to some of the key players active in Indonesia, and especially in Jakarta. We can offer them tailor-made campaigns varying in length, number of drivers and of course budget. More than half of the prospected clients are interested to start a campaign in 2019.”

However, Helmad doesn’t restrict itself to big brands. “The beauty of this system, however, is that we can easily scale it down, and it will be interesting and affordable for smaller businesses also,” Hendriks adds. “Think about an artist who releases a new album, or movies that will be in the cinemas soon, or even events. We also see huge opportunities in the country’s politics. The project I am most proud of has to be the upcoming presidential elections in Indonesia. I am expecting to make a huge social impact with that, although I cannot disclose too much information about that at the moment.”

Also Read: 6 ways to grow a thriving Telegram group

As per market research portal Statista findings, the total advertising spending in Indonesia came to US$2.36 billion in 2015 and is projected to grow to US$3.23 billion in 2019. This includes online advertising streams such as desktop/laptop, mobile and other internet-connected devices as well as offline advertising mediums such as directories, magazines, newspapers, out-of-home, radio and TV).

The projected market share for Out Of Home (OOH) advertising is around 29 to 30 per cent of the total ad spending market, which translates to US$93.3 million. “The growth of OOH advertising is showing the same amount of annual growth, and we at Helmad believe that we can trigger certain markets to opt for OOH even more and less for online,” he shares.

While Indonesia has always been Hendriks’s target market, he is not averse to exploring neighbouring markets. “We have already sat down with a party from Vietnam to discover the opportunities there, since it has a booming economy. Soon after, more countries like the Philippines can and should follow. It will be another dream come true, but for now, we need to deliver in Indonesia first.”

In the starting stage, Helmad faced many challenges. One mistake he made, Hendriks says, was coming up with client pricing and drivers’ wage calculations before comparing them with the country’s minimum wages.

Long before starting Helmad, Hendriks ran a business in Holland, and most recently in Indonesia.

“However, there was no social drive and it was solely focused on profit. It took me over 15 years to finally find a way to and make people happy and make a living out of it,” he signs off.

The post Indonesian startup Helmad turns your two-wheeler helmet into a moving billboard appeared first on e27.

Quikspaces currently has more than 1,200 listings on its platform

Philippines-based flexible office spaces online marketplace FlySpaces has today announced that it has acquired its competitor Hong Kong-based Quikspaces.

Following the acquisition, the company’s founders and team will join FlySpaces
and its Hong Kong operations.

Through this deal, FlySpaces will gain 1,200 additional office listings to its marketplace. The platform allows customers to search, book and pay for over 3,000 office listings in Southeast Asia online.

“We are excited to join Southeast Asia’s largest platform for flexible office space and join its team while bringing to the table our local expertise and extensive network in Hong Kong,” said Eunice, CEO of Quikspaces, in an official press release.

“This was a natural fit since Quikspaces will benefit from the large-scale operations and technology that FlySpaces provides, helping accelerate our growth within Hong Kong.”

Mario Berta, CEO of FlySpaces, observed that the ecosystem has been witnessing a consolidation of co-working spaces since a year ago. This trend, in turn, has “inevitably” impacted flexible office spaces aggregators as well, he said.

Also Read: This co-working space tackles the number one problem working moms face: Guilt

“Customers looking for flexible workspaces across Southeast Asia can benefit from the increased scale that one platform can provide,” said Berta.

FlySpaces is currently developing a suite of tools for office space operators to manage all aspects of their co-working business, from space management to end-to-end booking software.

Quikspaces is FlySpaces second acquisition since its founding three years ago. It previously acquired Malaysia’s 8Spaces in 2016.

FlySpaces offers flexible office spaces in Singapore, Manila, Cebu, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Jakarta, and Macau. Among its notable users are Uber, Google, Heineken, AstraZeneca, and Nestle.

In 2017, the company raised a US$2.1 million a pre-Series A round from a group of investors, led by The Net Group Co-president Raymond Rufino.

—

Image Credit: FlySpaces

The post FlySpaces acquires HK-based office space marketplace Quikspaces appeared first on e27.

Instagram should be the go-to place for your social media marketing, and you should consider drawing traffic to your profile

Instagram, considered to be a disruptive social networking platform, has given more power to influencers and celebrities. The interesting part is that these categories of people are minting money from the photo-sharing app in the name of being promoters of brand awareness.

You, too, can be part of the new marketing wave

The beauty of all this is that you, too, can be part of the money minting business by considering Instagram for your social media management. This article is to show you just how you can do that by giving you helpful social media advice on how you can seriously, yes, I mean seriously make money on Instagram.

Did I mention that the advice goes for both your business and personal Instagram accounts? Well, now you know.

How to monetise your Instagram account

I may not be a member of the Kardashian clan or any other celebrity you can think of (speaking of their immense following), but what I can say is that with the growth in the number of followers in my Instagram accounts and the amount of money I have been able to make, I can comfortably cite there are certain tips I can swear on that have proven to work for me in my journey.

Also Read: How I used data analytics to weed cancer out of my Telegram group

As such, in the quest to turn your Instagram account into a money-making machine, the following social media advices are imperative:

1- Make the most from images

We all know that Instagram is all about photo and video sharing, and it is this fact that keeps Instagrammers glued to the site on any given day or month, and Statista can confirm this for us. If you take your photos, consider the prowess that comes with using a smartphone, especially when looking at the extent of immaculateness that is enshrined in image capturing and processing. If you have someone else taking your photos, then hire the best photographers to capture mouth-watering natural and authentic images that will keep followers wanting to see more from your  account.

2- Other apps come in handy, too

Having captured just the right images, the next step is to go further and make a statement, and there is no better way to do this than to use the right caption. It is here that other mobile apps come in handy, with the example of SwiftKey (a predictive app). This app will allow you to insert captions quickly and with ease, which will save you a good amount of time to do other stuff. Such an app is essential for account users, who post a lot in a 24-hour period and for those who have multiple Instagram accounts.  

3- Originality when it concerns content

Aside from the above, be keen to ensure you maintain originality. This goes for the content and images that are posted as well as natural gifts and individual stories. People love authenticity and so it’s to keep this in mind at all times.

4- Instagram should be the centre of your marketing focus especially for social media marketing

Notably, Instagram should be the go-to place for your social media marketing, and you should consider drawing traffic to your profile. To be successful at this, you must be good at engaging, enlightening and encouraging your audience. Before you know it, you will have created an Instagram community, attracted to the authenticity that you or your brand represents.

5- Be professional

This should come naturally for anyone concerned with marketing pursuits. Professionalism and discipline come in handy when building a reliable and reputable brand. This is especially true when you are called upon to engage in partnerships.

6- A PayPal account is key

Finally, with your pay day only being a few posts away, it’s essential to have a PayPal account ready to get the money coming.

Also Read: Indonesian startup Helmad turns your two-wheeler helmet into a moving billboard

Let me conclude this article by saying choosing to take Instagram seriously for your social media management quests is worth it, especially when looking at Instagram marketing which is the way to go for both personal and business brands. You can monetise your account today. The question is: are you ready to join the Instagram money making club? If yes, welcome aboard — we can’t wait to hear from you.

Cheers!

—

The author Amelia Dean is a digital marketer based in Melbourne, Australia.

e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

Photo by lalo Hernandez on Unsplash

The post How to turn your Instagram into a money-making machine quickly appeared first on e27.

AI and ML should be commoditised for the financial industry, but implementation suffers from technology weaknesses, data inadequacies and human inertia

Big Data and Machine Learning have already changed the way we receive information. Advertisers no longer rely on billboards or television to reach us. The recent events surrounding Facebook, Twitter and Google have shed a very public light on the way those mammoths have been using the data of their users to serve the commercial and political purposes of paying third parties. By simply reading the user profile and applying Machine Learning tools, they can, more easily than ever, identify the user’s needs and wants, with an almost scary accuracy.

The pervasiveness with which Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come into our daily lives is indeed impressive. What if we could also apply this to trading and investing?

Actually, this is already possible. Some hedge funds and quantitative funds have already developed AI-driven trading bots. But how do we make it easily available for everyone?

In general, we would like to automate the following investing process:

1. Idea generation
2. Idea validation
3. Trade execution
4. Evaluate steps 1 to 3 to iteratively improve them. This is a very logical place for AI to help us improve our own trading biases.

Most of these processes could be automated with AI bots. We could implement bots that are able to identify changes in prices, volumes or even related news from reputable media outlets. Automation with bots will allow investors to be able to expand their trading universe without spending more time in front of a computer to find and analyse the information that an AI bot would be able to process more accurately and tirelessly. Sometimes we also need automation to ensure that we are not driven by our emotions especially when we have been monitoring a position closely for long periods of time.

Also Read: These 3 blockchain startups are building on AI to change our everyday lives

I believe that AI bots would be able to play a large role here to help our investors to be more reliant on automation and scalability of these bots to become better at their trade. It is almost like creating a trading team without hiring a team.

Next steps

For it to happen, there are still many challenges that AI will have to face before becoming commoditised and easily utilised by everyone.

The first challenge lies in ensuring the perfect understanding by the AI of the user’s request. To be used for trading, the AI bots would need to understand with 100 per cent certainty the demands of the trader. This 100 per cent capable AI bot is still far from being achieved. Even Siri is still struggling when you request the weather or the nearest gas station. Imagine letting Siri give trading orders to your broker…. I would still be afraid today.

The second main impediment for a good investing bot lies in the quality of the data and the data collection method. On the former, the current data available to the general public is limited and with minimal checks to ensure validity. If the source of data is not good or the data sets are corrupted, there is no chance for the AI bot to operate a successful investment strategy. In short: ‘garbage in, garbage out’.

On the latter, we replicate the data collection processes over and over again between the different data vendors, hedge funds, individual traders and big institutions. Wouldn’t it be to the benefit of all to have a single data collection and validation facility to be shared open source with all the market participants? I am appealing to all market participants to be “green” about how we collect and store our financial information. Currently, we are all doing it in a highly non-sustainable, non-environmentally friendly manner.

One of the main reasons invoked by market participants to run the data collection individually is the capability to differentiate themselves from the competition, by obtaining a “better” set of data. Well understood, but I think focusing on the raw information is the wrong battle. The focal point should be growing the capability to harvest the knowledge from the data. This would be akin to the commoditisation of computer power with cloud computing, so why not the data too? After all, data is merely oil within the engine of race car. A good driver is still necessary to ensure that you can reach the finish line.

New interfaces

The third obstacle resides in the user interfaces that currently exist. We see chatbots being used successfully in customer relationship management or as virtual assistants, but not yet in the area of finance. Why? First and foremost, we need a way to transform our financial industry’s reliance on outdated user interfaces such as spreadsheets, watch-lists and chart reading skills to identify signals.

Also Read: 7 fintech industry trends you should keep a close eye on

The next generation of traders grew up as smartphone users with apps and games that leverage touch screen interfaces and notifications. A simpler user interface that encourages idea generation, validation and sharing would be essential in the social media age. In general, most online brokers have perfected the user interfaces for execution but have neglected the investors’ discovery journey.

Once those challenges are solved, the next step would be to increase the complexity of the bots that one creates, by using Machine Learning tools to develop predictive capabilities and enhance simple regression analysis with neural networks

For now, what would make most sense is for everyone to get involved collectively and build community-based investing platforms so that all can benefit. Automation and machine learning is within the reach of many investors today because of the birth of cloud computing, open source code and pre-trained AI models. Let’s make it happen for all.

—

The author T Kiang Tan is CIO of Grasshopper and Tilde Trading, and Founder of ChatQ

e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

The post The future of social investing — and it is not about blockchain appeared first on e27.

The country’s National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC) has developed blockchain technology for e-voting

Thailand is on a track to introduce blockchain-based e-voting through its NECTEC arm. The technology reportedly can be deployed in tandem with traditional voting as Thais become more technologically literate with 5G implementation, as told by The Bangkok Post.

“The plan is to have blockchain technology for e-voting that can be applied to national, provincial or community elections, as well as business votes such as the board of directors. The goal is to reduce fraud and maintain data integrity,” said Chalee Vorakulpipat, the head of the cybersecurity laboratory at NECTEC.

Also Read: FlySpaces acquires HK-based office space marketplace Quikspaces

In making sure the system functions, it requires a controller, voters, and candidates. The controller is needed to verify voter identity and candidate qualification before the election, while the voters will be able to vote by email and must be verified using mobile camera.

The downside of this approach would be making sure each and every voter has access to a mobile internet connection and identity verification, something that would require quite a long time.

According to Vorakulpipat, blockchain voting could be useful for Thais living abroad to vote and verify their identities by going to an embassy or consulate.

NECTEC is a statutory government organization that operates under the purview of Thailand’s National Science and Technology Development Agency and the Ministry of Science and Technology. The organization promotes the development of computing, electronics, IT and telecommunications.

Also Read: Vietnam’s FastGo commences operation in Myanmar

Other countries that have tested the blockchain voting in 2018 are United States during the federal mid-term elections for West Virginians in the armed services stationed overseas, as well as Switzerland in the city of Zug and Japan in Tsukuba.
–

The post Thailand’s official tech center to include blockchain-based voting appeared first on e27.

The Malaysia-grown startup also got support from Commerce.Asia to close the round in late 2018

Claimed itself to be the largest homegrown dropshipping platform, Malaysia-based Kumoten has raised pre-Series A funding led by Cradle Fund and joined by Commerce.Asia Ventures. To date, the company shared that it has more than 100,000 stock keeping units (SKUs) in its catalogue.

Back in 2017, Kumoten has garnered Commerce DotAsia Ventures Sdn Bhd (Commerce.Asia)’s attention in a seed stage, and received mentorship from the venture’s founder and executive chairman Kumar Bangah under Commerce.Asia’s GrowthX Market Acceleration Program. Now, the venture came back for Kumoten’s aid in this round led by Cradle Fund.

Also Read: Vietnam’s FastGo commences operation in Myanmar

Kumoten has said that the fund from this recent equity round will be used to expand its product research and development team, as well as talent acquisition. It also plans to launch local dropshipping sites in Indonesia, Philippines, and Thailand.

Kumoten’s CEO Isaac Leong has expressed that Kumoten will continue to be the seller-centered solution that helps sellers take care of their stock information and cash flow info.

“We want online sellers to enjoy selling online and to focus on sales and marketing activities instead of worrying about the cost of investing in stocks, taking product photos and writing product descriptions,” said Leong.

Kumoten is said to be the first in adopting the Automated Dropship system, where users do not have to download or copy and paste product data. Their approach is called “pay-as-you-sell” instead of the conventional business model of “buy-first, sell-later”, helping to remove the risks of keeping stocks.

Also Read: Thailand’s official tech center to include blockchain-based voting

So far, the company that was founded in 2014 by Leong and his brother, Leong Yew Meng, has worked alongside online marketplaces in Malaysia such as Lazada, Shopee, Lelong.my and 11Street.my.
–

Image Credit: Kumoten

The post Malaysia’s dropshipping platform Kumoten secures pre-Series A funding from Cradle Fund appeared first on e27.

We also have a funding news for the life sciences unit of Google’s Alphabet, Apple’s stock price, and a moon landing

Google Maps blamed for congested Jakarta alleyways – The Jakarta Post

Yoga Adiwinarto, country director for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in Indonesia, has urged Google to stop recommending Jakarta alleyways in its special motorbike route feature on Google Maps.

“The function of these kampong roads is different from that of main roads. The former are meant to accommodate pedestrians and provide residents with public space,” he said.

According to a report by The Jakarta Post, residents of several neighbourhoods in the city have complained about the increasing number of motorcyclists passing through their alleyways, which often only have the width of an adult’s outstretched arms.

Some neighbourhoods even ban motorcyclists from entering their alleyways; some would stop passing motorcyclists to warn them against endangering children.

Motorcyclists have been following the route as recommended by Google Maps in order to avoid congestion on main roads.

Alphabet’s life-science unit Verily raises US$1B – Dealstreet Asia

Alphabet Inc’s life sciences division Verily has announced a US$1 billion investment round led by private equity firm Silver Lake, Dealstreet Asia reported.

The funding round also included the participation of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

The company plans to use the new funding to support acquisitions and partnerships as well as to advance business strategies.

Starting off as a research and development unit in Google, Verily received a US$800 million investment from Temasek in 2017.

The company is working on several projects with pharmaceutical companies to research on surgical robots and develop retina scan technology for eye diseases detection.

Also Read: Google wraps up the year with Singapore’s trending list for the past year

China’s lunar probe successfully landed on the far side of the moon – Xinhua, SCMP

The China National Space Administration announced that the country’s lunar probe Change’e-4 has touched down on the far side of the moon on Thursday, becoming the first spacecraft soft-landing on the moon’s uncharted side, which was never visible from Earth.

According to a report by Xinhua, the probe consists of a lander and a rover.

An earlier report by South China Morning Post said that the lunar probe will be used for “astronomical observation using low-frequency radio, surveying the terrain and landforms, detecting the mineral composition and shallow lunar surface structure, and measuring neutron radiation and neutral atoms.”

Apple’s stock drops 38 per cent in 90 days – TechCrunch

Apple’s stock was down more than nine per cent overnight and continued its downward trend in trading in the morning, TechCrunch reported.

The company has been dropping a total of 38 per cent since October, leading it to halt trading on Thursday to provide lower guidance for upcoming trading.

The downward trend is attributed to the slowdown of iPhone sales, which D. A. Davidson senior analyst Tom Forte dubbed as “surprising” though “not unexpected.”

“We knew that iPhone unit sales were weak, but just not how weak,” he said.

—

Image Credit: Yulia Agnis on Unsplash

The post Today’s top tech news, Jan 4: Google Maps blamed for congested alleyways in Jakarta appeared first on e27.