Sequoia India is making key hires across its uppermost leaderships, including Ajay Gore, former CTO of Indonesian ride-hailing giant gojek, as its new operating partner.

Other than him, Gayatri Vasudeva Yadav will also be joining in as the CMO and Shweta Rajpal Kohli as the Head of Public Policy.

Gore began his professional career as a Staff Scientist at NCST Mumbai (now CDAC) after which he quit to join ThoughtWorks. He then took on the role of CTO at Hoppr and left the firm after a year to start SoLoMo Media. He also co-founded the non-profits CodeIgnition and Innovation and Technology Trust.

In Gore’s new role, he will mainly work closely with the CTOs and CPOs of Sequoia’s portfolio companies.

He will also bring his experience, passion, strategic insight and innovative mindset to help companies scale engineering, data science products and design functions.

Also Read: (Exclusive) Group CTO Ajey Gore leaves gojek

“To give a boost to our efforts across several important areas, we’re excited to welcome these three widely respected senior executives to the Sequoia Capital India team in roles that will help us expand the work we do to build startups alongside our founders,” shared Shailendra J Singh in a LinkedIn post.

He further added, “At a time when technology is transforming the world and capital is abundant, the one thing that stands out for the very best startups or VC firms is the ability to attract and nurture extraordinary talent. The most promising startups have choices of which VC to pick. We believe the very discerning and highest quality founders will increasingly select venture capital firms with the best operating team who can help them succeed.”

Sequoia India is a Venture Capital firm that operates in Southeast Asia and India. Some of its portfolio companies include BYJUs, Carousell, Druva, GO-JEK, OYO Rooms, Tokopedia, Truecaller, Zilingo, and Zomato.

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Image Credit: Ajay Gore

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Wahyoo, a startup that provides digital solutions to ‘warung makan’ (small eateries) in Indonesia, has announced the closing of its US$5 million Series A round of financing, led by Intudo Ventures.

Kinesys Group, Amatil X (Coca-Cola Amatil), Arkblu Capital, Indogen Capital, Selera Kapital, Gratyo Universal Indonesia, and Isenta Hioe also joined the round.

“With this round of financing, we plan to expand our operations into new cities outside of the Greater Jakarta Region and make new hires, especially for our tech and product units,” said Peter Shearer, Founder and CEO of Wahyoo.

“We will continue to add new features and services to better meet the needs of ‘warung makan’ owners, especially improving supply chain systems and financial products, which are designed to help eateries improve margins and gain access to financial service.

Founded in August 2017 by Shearer, Daniel Cahyadi (COO) and Michael Dihardja (CTO), Wahyoo is an ecosystem builder focussing on digitising and improving the business operations of warung makan (traditional small-scale local eateries and restaurants dedicated to serving Indonesia’s burgeoning working-class population).

Also Read: Indonesia’s digitised hawker startup Wahyoo acqui-hires online store directory platform Alamat

The startup works directly with these eateries, offering digital tools and services to attract customers, enhance marketing efforts, implement loyalty programmes, order and receive groceries, manage financial accounts, and provide educational training on best practices through its Wahyoo Academy.

Eateries are also able to earn additional income via advertising and brand partnerships with Wahyoo.

Wahyoo is currently active in the Greater Jakarta Region (Jadetabek), with over 13,500 warung makan registered with it.

Prior to this round, Wahyoo had raised an undisclosed seed financing from Agaeti Ventures, Chapter 1 Ventures, Kinesys Group, SMDV, East Ventures, and Rentracks.

In February 2020, Wahyoo reportedly acqui-hired Alamat.com, a local online directory that seeks to help consumers find service- and-lifestyle stores as a part of its strategic move.
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Picture Credit: Wahyoo

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Gero raises funding to develop new drugs for ageing

The story: Singapore-based biotech company Gero has secured US$2.2 million in Series A funding, bringing the total capital raised since Gero’s founding to over US$7.5 million.

Investors: Bulba Ventures (Belarus), previous investors and serial entrepreneurs in the fields of pharmaceuticals, IT, and AI.

Plans with the money: To further develop its AI-based platform for analysing clinical and genetic data to identify treatments for some of the most complicated diseases, such as chronic ageing-related diseases, mental disorders, and others.

What does Gero do?

Gero is a group of companies that develops new drugs to treat complicated disorders using AI and physics of complex dynamic systems to analyse big datasets of biomedical data.

It collaborates with researchers from the leading global institutions such as the Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Edinburgh, National University of Singapore, and Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center to develop new therapies.

Gero’s AI platform is currently in use to develop new therapies, reposition existing drugs, forecast chronic toxicity and for clinical decision support.

People’s Inc. launches solution to aid Singapore’s SMEs

The story: People’s Inc. (PINC) has launched a marketing-as-a-service (MaaS) solution under the brand name of PINC 360 to aid and serve small businesses in Singapore in view of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

What is PINC 360?

PINC 360 has launched “Wix and Shopify for small businesses’ social presence” platform, a tool to grow a small business with social media content.

The platform helps small business owners understand what specific content to post for their specific business. So, when to post, how often, what copy, design, call to actions and hashtags to use on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest. Then the user needs to make final customisation and approve content for the whole month.

PINC 360 will post automatically at the right time and frequency, thus doing the heavy lifting for small business owners who really wouldn’t know where to begin in terms of creating and sharing content about their business.

The platform has access to 100,000-plus templates and images.

The pricing: PINC 360 starts at US$45 (platform-based) and DIFM at SG$ 388 per month.

Competitions: PINC 360 competes with visual design companies like Canva, Adobe Spark, and DIFM (‘do-it-for-me’) companies who do custom social content for small and medium businesses.

ECXX gets admission to MAS’s fintech sandbox

The story: ECXX Global, a company that operates digital asset exchange using blockchain technology, has secured admission from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to the Fintech Sandbox Express2 under a Recognised Market Operator (RMO) regime.

What does this mean?

With the approval, ECXX targets to launch a blockchain-based digital securities exchange platform, ecxx.co, that offers various asset-based digital securities — such as real estate, private equity, venture capital and investment funds — to institutional and accredited non-individual investors.

What does ECXX do?

With its own in-house proprietary system, ECXX has been operating a digital asset exchange that allows both professional traders and retail investors to buy, sell and store digital assets.

Its digital exchange platform is integrated with MyInfo, the one-stop Singapore government identity platform. This integration allows KYC checks on members of MyInfo who can log-in to ECXX’s digital asset exchange using their SingPass.

Recently in June 2020, Hatten Land invested US$6 million for a 20 per cent equity stake in ECXX.

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Image Credit: Gero

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Dian Kurniawati and Dinda Utami Ishlah had been researching on the recycling industry in Indonesia since 2014. The duo wanted to build a business that involved business and environment.

In 2014, the pair incorporated Tridi Oasis but the business didn’t kick off operations until 2017.

“Indeed, I was serious about the recycling industry for many long years before we started Tridi,” Dian Kurniawati, CEO and CFO of Tridi Oasis, told e27. “I had already set my eyes set on this industry since 2011 when I got serious about joining a business planning competition.”

Coming from an Engineering and Management educational background, Kurniawati developed social and environmental interest out of passion. She met her future co-founder Dinda Ishlah (COO) when they both were working in an oil and gas company.

“When we started out, there was next-to-no awareness about plastic waste management or how far it polluted the environment. It was harder and tech startups were the hotshots in getting funding. On top of that, we were often being questioned for being in the industry at such a young age and being females in a male-dominated industry,” Kurniawati recalled.

From waste to opportunity

The company is a classic case of passion proceeding knowledge and background that we all came to know and love, as the duo had no background in the environmental business whatsoever.

“We financed everything on our own at first. We tested and experimented with different plastics, we also tried to find the demand and to implement the right business model, up until we decided to focus on plastic bottle wastes,” Kurniawati recalled. “We also Googled everything back then.”

Now, the startup introduced recycling PET as its main product. PET is Polyethylene Terephthalate, a raw material made of plastic bottles in a form of flakes.

“These flakes can be made into a polyester textile fibre, which is then turned into yarn for clothing or shoes (like Nike which makes shoes made of plastic bottles),” Kurniawati explained. “Besides that, they can also be turned into a new packaging or a material to stuff dacrons.”

It’s a never-ending cycle for their products and that’s exactly what they aimed for — to produce something that has a circular life to it.

Also Read: (Exclusive) Myanmar’s waste-management startup RecyGlo raising US$900K to expand into Indonesia, Singapore

“We usually sourced our plastic bottles from the trash collectors and people who buy the plastic bottles from manual scavengers, sort it out to resell to bigger collectors with the machine to press all the plastic bottles to be ready to process. Sometimes, we also source directly from restaurants, schools, landfills and waste banks in housing complexes,” Kurniawati shared.

Pre-COVID-19, the company also regularly did a beach cleanup, not only for environmental awareness but to get plastic bottles that they needed. “We set up a beach cleanup organisation based in Jakarta to do it regularly alongside four other organisations,” she recalled.

After collecting all these bottles, Tridi Oasis then uses a certain machine in its facility that turns these plastic bottles into flakes, ready to be sold again to their customers (less than five currently as they’re selling in bulk).

Creating demand to solve waste problems

Plastic pollution is a huge cause for concern for Indonesia: it is the second-largest contributor of ocean plastics in the world. Its current waste management systems are not adequate to handle the large amount of waste generated, especially with plastic consumption expected to continue to increase amid the population and economic growth.

Indonesia is “monumentally” a laggard when it comes to waste management — at least that’s what Kurniawati thought when e27 asked on what the country needs to do more to catch up with the rest of the world.

Kurniawati further emphasises on the importance of having government-imposed waste management. “We think it would make a difference if the government is involved in the imposing of mandatory recycling, like making sure that every product with packaging that contains plastic must have a recycling content of x and x per cent; this in effect can create demand,” said Kurniawati.

The demand that Kurniawati meant will benefit all parties involved, like the recycling companies of Tridi Oasis’ league. “With the government’s regulation on this matter, companies that still use plastics will need to partner with recycling companies so that they can adhere to the regulation to recycle their production waste. The sense of responsibility needs to be built and maintained,” said Kurniawati.

Beyond plastic

For the bigger picture, Kurniawati added, the country needs to start by carefully mapping and getting to the roots of the waste problem. “It can also be done by really thinking about where the problems lie with plastic use, not simply eliminating it,” she said.

What Kurniawati meant is how the country needs to think about why the plastic is needed, how plastic can be valuable, and what kind of plastic management required from the production down to how it can be reused again to ensure there’s next to zero waste.

Also Read: Can the new waste disposal app bail out Bali from its waste problem?

“The problem lies in the inability to think beyond the plastic. The lack of understanding and awareness to simply put trash in the trash can as a start, so every waste can be managed accordingly instead of scattered around. Look at Japan, they still use plastic on daily basis and is recorded to be country with the highest use of plastic, but the people are aware enough that they need to do their bid in collecting their plastic waste and drop it in the recycling centre for the plastic to be available,” said Kurniawati.

Indonesia definitely can learn from the way Japan handles plastic waste instead of blindly banning plastic use.

Tridi Oasis’s next move

The company recently raised US$6 million investment from investors such as Singapore-based Circulate Capital via its Circulate Capital Ocean Fund (CCOF), which is dedicated to the ocean plastic crisis in South and Southeast Asia. A company from India also co-invested in the round.

Speaking of the investment, Kurniawati said that the funding will be used for relocation to a better facility for production and to increase their capacity.

“Circulate Capital is not only providing funding but also network and market access. They also take the role of becoming an operational advisor to help our operation be more efficient,” she added.

The next move is to diversify to other types of plastics. “In December 2019, we received a grant from the Korean Government Agency which we used for research in recycling multilayered plastic sachet waste. Why we chose sachet waste because it’s really hard to recycle and it’s everywhere,” Kurniawati shared.

“We have found a way to turn the sachet waste into something more valuable,” she added.

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Image Credit: Tridi Oasis

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According to an annual national graduate careers survey conducted in 2019 by GTI Media Singapore, interest among local youths to create or join a startup has never been higher. Therefore, it is of no surprise to find the youth startup ecosystem in Singapore thriving.

Today, we will explore the reasons behind this growth by examining various aspects of the ecosystem, starting with current educational programmes in universities to nurture budding entrepreneurs.

University support

What do Carousell, Shopback, and 99.co have in common? They were founded by graduates fresh out of university, which turned out to be their very first career job too. Along with other startups such as e27 and Xfers, the sheer number of young entrepreneurs being produced in universities is no mere coincidence.

In fact, it is a by-product of initiatives in place by schools to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit of millennials today. Since the founding of the now esteemed NUS Overseas College (NOC) in 2002, there has been a shift in emphasis by universities today to focus on entrepreneurship, as opposed to STEM in the decade before the millennium.

Student clubs such as the NUS Entrepreneurship Society (NES) has grown to become one of the largest in the local university scene, thus solidifying the fact that youths of today are increasingly interested in joining the startup ecosystem.

Also Read: 3 lessons I learned as a student entrepreneur

It is not only the entrepreneurship side of the house that gets increased attention. Venture capital (VC), an important piece of the ecosystem, is getting eyeballs too. Originally started out as a pilot project by SMU in 2017, Protégé Ventures has grown to be the first student-run venture fund in Southeast Asia.

Besides training students in the field of VC investing, they support student entrepreneurs in building their young companies too. With the presence of Protégé complemented by student entrepreneurs coming from NES and NOC, startups in universities find themselves in a micro-ecosystem after all.

Therefore, it is not shocking that Singapore is home to a multitude of startups founded by youth entrepreneurs.

Accelerating growth

Upon exiting the university ecosystem, it is paramount startups get the right support and funding, especially for those at the scaling stage where cash burn would be at its highest. Fortunately, there is generous aid in this aspect.

From accelerator programmes by corporate giants such as Singapore Airlines (SIA) and DBS Bank to incubator programmes by global early-stage VCs such as Antler, resources are aplenty for startups to thrive in the local ecosystem. These programmes are key to fuel the next stage of growth for these budding startups due to the extensive access to market resources and mentorship that they provide.

Furthermore, acceptance into incubator and accelerator programmes serve as validation of startups’ initial business model and instils confidence in young entrepreneurs for further expansion.

Also Read: Entrepreneurship in a pandemic: Seeking success through economic turmoil

Mentors are paramount for startups to succeed given the uncertain environment they operate in and the ecosystem here has been able to utilise past successes to its advantage by bringing in experienced mentors, both from the field of startups and other key players such as venture capitalists and large corporations, to aid youth entrepreneurs. That has certainly been the case for the Startup SG Founder scheme by Enterprise Singapore.

As of May 2020, their mentor network totalled 57 different established partners, ranging from VC firms such as Cocoon Capital to infrastructure support services such as Silicon Solution Partners. The wide variety of mentorship available in a government-led initiative is rarely seen in other parts of the region, where ecosystems are still maturing and thus have a scarcity of mentors.

Therefore, local youth entrepreneurs should fully utilise these opportunities available to their advantage and tap on the vast network these mentors bring about to take their businesses to the next level.

Funding

Given that research has shown that one of the top reasons why startups fail is due to a lack of cash, sufficient funding is a key driver for startups to succeed. This is especially so for early-stage startups given the high cash burn associated at the beginning due to the inability to achieve economies of scale.

Often, founders bootstrap their businesses by devoting personal savings into them and not taking a salary for months at a time. However, there is only so much one can pour into their firm from their savings. Ultimately, external funding must occur to fuel the next phase of growth. Out of the plethora of government agencies providing cash grants and equity financing schemes to assist startups, the Startup SG Founder grant is perhaps the most relevant for youth entrepreneurs to tap onto.

It provides first-time entrepreneurs with a capital grant of up to S$30,000 on a 3:1 co-matching arrangement. Therefore, to receive the maximum value of the grant, entrepreneurs themselves need to raise and commit S$10,000 to the business.

Private equity support for local startups is increasing too with the influx of angel investors and VC firms. Angel investors are high net worth individuals who invest in startups at their seed stage. They invest in companies despite there being no proven success of the company’s business model.

Also Read: Angel investing is full of risks –but that is why it is so rewarding

Therefore, they are advantageous to startups, particularly in the deep tech sector, that requires significant capital for a proof-of-concept to validate their business model. Notable angel investor groups include Business Angel Network South East Asia (BANSEA), Asia’s oldest angel investment network and Business Angel Scheme (BAS), which is supported by SPRING Singapore.

For late-stage startups that require large capital for scaling, founders turn to VCs to pitch their businesses in hope of securing funding. The vibrant VC scene in Singapore has resulted in a diverse range of VCs investing in local startups. From global VCs such as 500 Startups and Sequoia Capital to local players such as KK Fund and Jungle Ventures, the wide variety of venture investors here is a testament to the strength of the local startup ecosystem, driven by the potential of youth entrepreneurs.

The future

Youth entrepreneurs in Singapore are indeed fortunate to find a thriving and supportive ecosystem in place to launch their businesses. The abundance of public resources devoted is also a validation of the fact that the government views startups as the next driver of growth for the local economy, given that the nation has already previously exploited its competitive advantages in manufacturing and engineering.

The highly skilled local workforce would also be able to supplement the rise in startups, particularly in the deep tech sector with increased emphasis on data learning and artificial intelligence in universities today. Therefore, the future does indeed look bright for youth entrepreneurs in the little red dot.

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Register now: What is corporate venture building and why this is the right time to look at capturing venture opportunities across South-east Asia.

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