In the last decade, the world has witnessed a paradigm shift in grocery shopping, with a big push on digital engagement. In 2010, there was hardly an online grocery startup, and even, the customers won’t place their trust in buying groceries digitally.

With increasing mobile penetration, trust in e-commerce, and improved comfort needs, online grocery shopping picked up the speed steadily, and its market value gets doubled from 2016 to 2018.

Now, online grocery startups account for 40 per cent of total e-commerce funding in India that amounts to nearly US$665.70 million.

The research has projected that India’s online food and grocery retail is likely to touch US$10.5 billion by 2023.

The recent corona outbreak has made it come true with the tremendous growth in mobile grocery apps download such as Instacart, Walmart, Shipt, and others, and the sales.

There is a sad story behind e-grocery shopping

The people who are sitting at home and trying to buy the grocery online, they are constantly struggling to find a delivery slot even for the essential items. That’s why people resorted to the Kirana store (mom-and-pop shops) in the next lane to meet the grocery needs. This time the power of small stores is realised, and established players started making the mom and pop stores a part of the digital network.

However, the commercial biggie Reliance identified the opportunity in 2017 and piloted the Jiomart project. The new venture lies at the intersection of data and technology capabilities of telecom business Jio and B2B cash-and-carry infrastructure.

Harnessing the power of Reliance’s two consumer-facing businesses, the new grocery shopping e-commerce platform was launched in the suburbs of Mumbai in January 2019.

The POS machines with integrated billing applications are provided to the registered small stores that enable transactions, promotions, and supply chain management.

Also Read: E-commerce trends: What to expect in 2020

As Asia’s richest man and owner of Jio, Mukesh Ambani’s strategy is to build a new homegrown venture that helps small retailers to grow and increase sales while maintaining social distancing. After a couple of days, when Reliance allowed the Kirana stores to sign up and started taking orders on WhatsApp, Amazon plunges into the race with a plan of partnering with Kirana stores and allowed them to register and start selling the products through Amazon.

The attempt of grabbing a pie of Kirana shops has brought gala changes in the online grocery shopping space. With continuous changes, post-COVID-19 outbreak, a lot is expected to come with breaking news. Meanwhile, take a glance at how daily grocery shopping habits will get transformed.

Creating and managing the Kirana store’s chain

At RIL’s 42nd Annual General Meeting Ambani said that 30 million neighbourhood stores, which are nearly 90 per cent of India’s retail sector are unorganised, which will be connected through technology. It will empower and enrich the small retailers who have suffered a ton post-online purchase has become a norm. The Kirana store already has an army of loyal customers in the vicinity, which alleviates the need to build a network of courier services from scratch.

Connecting Kirana store’s to customers

The COVID-19 crisis has helped people testing the power of small stores when the commercial biggies are not able to deliver the essentials on-time even after investing billions of dollars to ramp up the e-grocery strategy.

This opportunity is spotted by reliance quite earlier, the Facebook deal has not only helped in creating a digital platform, and making the partnership with India’s largest retailers but getting access to a large user base of WhatsApp, that’s around 400 million users.

When the customers sign up with Jiomart, they need to add WhatsApp number on the Jiomart platform from where they can order through WhatsApp chat. Once, the order is placed, it’s redirected to local Kirana stores to complete the order as last-mile delivery.

Grocery shopping through WhatsApp

The orders which can be collected by the customers or delivered by the Kirana shops are not restricted to cash payment; instead POS machines are provided to encourage Kirana stores to manage the inventory and payment.

However, WhatsApp is also testing its payment service. WhatsApp Pay in India and waiting for the approval from the government to roll out the payment system, which will benefit Jiomart as ordering and payment system will be taken care of by WhatsApp.

Track customer’s behaviour

It’s expected that a mini-app concept will exist under the Jiomart platform where both Reliance and Facebook will have access to the customer’s data, which can be utilised to target the users accordingly. Facebook giant already had rich experience in monetising the data through advertising, which will help Jiomart in targeted advertising and grow the revenue by manifolds.

Furthermore, Credit Suisse said, the partnership between Reliance and Facebook that begins with grocery will later extend to medicine, fashion, food delivery, and lifestyle, which will further improve the chances of cross-targeting and selling.

On an ending note, the Jiomart initiative will bring local stores to the fore, reinvent the grocery shopping with WhatsApp, and targeted advertising will change the way people shop online and offline. The online to offline model is projected to gain momentum, but quality lapse and lower prices may pops-up the issues in the future, which Reliance should take care of proactively.

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Wiz.ai, a Singapore-based Artificial Intelligence startup, announced today the closing of its pre-Series A funding worth US$6 million, led by GGV Capital.

Wavemaker Partners, ZWC partner, Insignia Ventures, and Orion Fund (managed by K3 Ventures) also joined the round.

The money will be used to expand Wiz.ai’s product offerings and grow its team in Southeast Asia. It also plans to expand its geographical coverage globally.

Also Read: Payment network Thunes closes US$10M Series A led by GGV Capital

Established in 2019, Wiz.ai is focussed on facilitating conversational AI for ASEAN languages. The firm has deployed its in-house, proprietary, conversational AI technologies into large corporations throughout Southeast Asia.

According to Wiz.ai CEO and Co-founder Jennifer Zhang, through improved AI chatbot technologies, conversational AI will revolutionise call centre functions and improve customer engagements cost-effectively.

“Deploying these technologies in businesses across Southeast Asia requires a deep understanding of the local culture and business landscape, so we continue to bring in talents from the region to our diverse team of experts in conversational AI,” said Zhang.

Besides Singapore, the startup also has offices in China and Jakarta with a team of scientists, researchers, linguists, and dialogue designers.

How Wiz.ai overcomes the challenges of enterprise digitisation in customer engagement

According to Wiz.ai, the key challenge of enterprise digitisation is effectively capturing and processing insights from tele-conversation interactions with customers. Wiz seeks to help its customers cut costs while improving service levels with personalised inbound and outbound calls.

The human-like front-end of Wiz.ai’s proprietary talkbot encourages customers to convey more in conversations.

At the same time, the back-end sifts through the data in real-time and stores insights from the conversations into the enterprises’ existing CRM to enable analysis at both the granular and aggregated level.

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Picture Credit: GGV Capital

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Singapore’s heartland shops launch new initiatives to go digital

Government agency Enterprise Singapore has joined hands with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IDMA) and the Heartland Enterprise Centre, Singapore (HECS), to launch an initiative to ‘digitise’ mom-and-pop stores in the city-state.

Ten precincts in the country will be a testbed for the initiative, which was rolled out this week.

The initiative will partner local “mom and pop” stores with tech firms ConntectUpz, Dei, and Fave to help them get online as soon as possible.

Starting with Ang Mo Kio, Bedok, and Clementi in Singapore, the initiative aims to reach around 400 merchants, as reported by The Straits Times.

The initiative will implement a range of ready-to-use solutions, including loyalty programmes and payment methods, as well as online sales channels, depending on their stage of digitisation.

Element AI launched two AI collaborations in Asia Pacific

Element AI has launched new Artificial Intelligence collaborations with a South Korean investment advisory company and a Veritas consortium based in Singapore.

Element will integrate its AI tech with the investment advisory firm Shinhan AI’s platform Neo. It is aimed at simplifying and accelerating application and forecasting decisions for its index tracker with a new market prediction model.

Also Read: Canadian startup Element AI to support AI Singapore in its Smart Nation initiatives

According to a report by Beta Kit, Shinhan Financial Group was one of Element AI’s first partners and that the two had signed a memorandum of understanding in May 2019.

Element AI’s second collaboration is with the Veritas Consortium led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), which will look at Element AI assisting in developing a framework for driving the responsible adoption of AI in the financial services industry.

Element AI will take part in research and development activities aimed to support the consortium’s mandate for AI adoption.

Two traditional kiosks empowerment initiatives join forces to help guard Indonesia’s micro-economy

Mitra Bukalapak and GrabKios, two of the largest digital platforms that empower traditional kiosks/stalls in Indonesia, have announced a strategic partnership for provisioning and distribution of digital products in more than 5 million kiosks and agents located throughout Indonesia.

Through this collaboration, GrabKios will provide digital products on the Mitra Bukalapak platform, which can be sold by kiosk owners and agents to their customers to continue earning income amidst the pandemic.

By helping them sustain their incomes as demand for other products drops, both companies hope to safeguard economic stability at grassroots level, especially for warung kiosk owners whose income is affected during the implementation of Large Scale Social Restrictions (PSBB) in several regions.

Teddy Oetomo, Chief Strategy Officer Bukalapak, explained, “Strengthening economy at kiosk level has a fairly extensive ripple effect. Warung’s presence in the society is deemed essential to help fulfill the needs of the local residence, while the revenue generated would be used to meet their own family’s basic necessities. At the same time, stabilising the economy at micro-level also means contributing to the country’s economic resilience. So, increasing their productivity and well- being can go a long way.”

Also Read: Kudo becomes GrabKios, marking new offers aimed at larger kiosk’s digitisation

The strategic collaboration is expected to increase the capability of nearly 5 million traditional kiosks and Bukalapak agents as well as bringing impacts to the society.

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Voiz FM, an audiobook and podcast startup, announced today that it raised an undisclosed seed funding from 500 Startups Vietnam.

The Vietnamese startup will spend the money on product development and market expansion.

“Our product roadmap includes the launch of a recommendation algorithm in early July and an AI Voice functionality, which will allow users to choose their preferred voices for all titles, in October this year,” said Thai Tran, Co-founder and CEO of Voiz FM.

Voiz FM was launched in late 2019 by three entrepreneurs with the goal of capitalising on opportunities in the emerging audio media space.

Starting off with an audiobook, Voiz FM ensures that it has attained legitimate copyrights for the published contents and filter the noise in the country’s online piracy industry.

In recent months globally, the platform has seen twice the growth in its user base, as there’s a surge in demand due to coronavirus quarantine.

Taking a long-term approach has resulted in exclusive publishing rights for more than 1,000 best-selling titles on the platform in the 6-month span.

It also partners with top tier publishers in Vietnam, including First News, Kim Dong, and Tre Publishers.

According to Deloitte, the global audiobook and podcasting markets are set to grow to US$3.5 and US$1.1 billion in 2020, which reflects an annual growth of 25 per cent and 30 per cent, respectively, compared to that of the broader global media and entertainment sector at 4 per cent.

Also Read: Glee Trees raises funding from 500 Startups to take its robotic process automation tech to Indonesia, Vietnam

Binh Tran, General Partner of 500 Startups Vietnam, said: “In Vietnam, the on-demand audiobook and podcast market is young but we believe it will grow tremendously over the next few years as more quality content is made available to listeners. The Voiz FM team quickly shipped a polished product that allowed listeners to discover and consume high quality exclusively licensed audiobook content. This combined with their dedication to customers and broader vision to tackle the growing podcasting market gave us confidence that this team will lead this market.”
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Picture Credit: Voiz FM

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Xeraya Capital invests in US-based biotech firm Greenlight

American biotech company Greenlight Biosciences, which focuses on the sustainable production of chemicals and fuels, has raised US$17 million from Malaysia’s PE firm Xeraya Capital, Baird Capital and Flu Lab, according to DealstreetAsia.

Also Read: Going big? Then Go e27 Pro.

The startup will use the new capital to enable the production of COVID-19 vaccine using bioprocessing technology.

“It’s an investment towards the world having access to an affordable Covid-19 vaccine. A bet that mRNA will play an important part in human vaccines,” said Fares Zahir CEO of Xeraya Capital.

FairPrice, WhyQ launch food delivery platform at zero commission to support smaller F&B biz

FairPrice Group and food delivery startup WhyQ have partnered to launch a commission-free food delivery platform for vendors, according to ChannelNewsAsia.

Members who sign up on the platform will not be required to pay any commission or set up fee. However, there will be a “6 per cent markup on food price will be used to offset payment gateway and server costs for the platform”, the company said.

“While larger and more tech-savvy food businesses transited to delivery platforms, smaller food establishments struggled to keep up,” FairPrice and WhyQ said in a joint statement.

“These smaller food establishments faced more difficulties in accessing digital platforms due to high commission fees, manpower considerations, and a perception that it is difficult to incorporate technology into their business,” read the statement.

MDEC predicts online business trend will continue post-COVID-19

The Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) has predicted that changes in the behaviour of consumers and local traders from traditional to digital mediums will continue after COVID-19, according to MalayMail.

“The main players in the e-commerce sector would leverage on the digital capability to increase their presence offline, and thereby further expanding their e-commerce ecosystem,” said MDEC CEO Surina Shukri.

“Digital transformation will move fast. Businesses, meanwhile, have taken proactive steps to participate in e-commerce to survive,” she added.

MDEC has also started the eUsahawan programme, which trains SMEs to grow and improve their digital skills. The agency claims that it has trained more than 330,000 micro-entrepreneurs till 2019.

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