Day: January 19, 2021

Tesla, the global tech giant known for its fast-paced and “innovations-first” work culture, is ramping up its team in Singapore with more new hires.

According to Tesla’s website, the electric car major has been looking to hire people to fill the following positions in Singapore: Logistics Analyst, Store Leader, Vehicle Service Technician, Vehicle Readiness Specialist, Vehicle Operations Specialist, Operations Manager, Sales Advisor, Parts Advisor, Customer Support Specialist and Country Manager.

This follows the US-based firm’s filling up of three positions across different verticals in the island nation in July last year.

Tesla, the world’s most valuable automaker, ranks among the top-10 biggest companies in the US. It also offers a variety of cutting-edge projects, such as Superchargers, Tesla Network, with a great salary for its employees.

The company is also unique in its approach to recruitment. While there are plenty of materials available online on how to bag an interview with the company, founder Elon Musk has shared in the past that candidates wishing to apply for a job in his billion-dollar empire need not graduate high school.

The way he identifies potential candidates is through “evidence of exceptional ability”. In his view, if there is a track record of exceptional achievement, then it is likely that that will continue into the future.

Tesla has been in the spotlight since its inception in 2003. With over 38,000 employees, the automobile firm is paving the way for electric cars and sustainable energy.

Also Read: Tesla approached Indonesia for potential investment, says report

Today, Tesla Motors is worth nearly US$304.6 billion, and Musk’s relentless innovation has disrupted not just the auto world but also the outer space with the mission to colonise Mars.

Most recently, Tesla incorporated a company in India. As per a report by Business Today, the company is currently scouting for land, possibly for manufacturing and R&D set-up in the country.

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Image Credit:  David von Diemar

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Bangalore-based telehealth startup MFine announced it has raised US$16 million in an oversubscribed funding round led by Heritas Capital, with participation from Singapore-based family office of Y’S Investment.

Existing investors, including SBI Investment (Japan), SBI Ven Capital and Beenext (both Singapore-based), and Alteria Capital (India), also participated.

The company said in a statement that it will deploy the fresh funds towards investing in its tech solutions, expanding its hospital network across India and scaling its recently launched services, which include medicine delivery, preventive health screenings and diagnostic tests.

MFine further said it it will also initiate its Series C fundraising in the “coming months”.

Founded in 2017, MFine is an AI-driven, on-demand healthcare platform that provides its users access to virtual consultations and connected care programmes from India’s hospitals.

Lockdown measures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the release of telemedicine guidelines by India have led to the widespread adoption of telemedicine within the country.

MFine claims it achieved 10x growth in 2020 and has more than a million users with over 4,000 doctors from 600 hospitals covering 35 specialities on its platform. The startup expanded its geographical coverage and remarked it now serves people from over 1,000 towns in India.

Also Read: AI becoming a viable way to bridge the gap in the doctor-patient ratio: mfine CEO Prasad Kompalli

The firm launched several new services in 2020, including an AI-based self-assessment of various health conditions, long-term care programmes for chronic conditions and membership to offer benefits on all the services for its direct consumers and also corporates.

“The year 2020 has been very significant for us. During the pandemic, with the introduction of strict lockdowns and social distancing measures, we found ourselves in a unique position to help millions of people with access to essential healthcare services,” said Prasad Kompalli, Co-founder and CEO of MFine.

“MFine has developed a compelling solution that has proven to be highly impactful during this pandemic to ensure continued and trusted access to quality and affordable healthcare services,” said Chik Wai Chiew, CEO and Executive Director of Heritas Capital.

“We believe MFine’s collaborative partnership model with hospitals and doctors powered by the application of AI will enable smart optimisation of limited healthcare resources to address unmet needs throughout India and beyond,” Wai Chiew opined.

Also Read: Indonesia’s healthtech sector anticipates its first unicorn. Meet the 8 contenders of the race

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased global funding activity in digital health in 2020. Telemedicine was the top-funded category and led VC funding activity with US$4.3 billion, a 139 per cent increase compared to US$1.8 billion in 2019.

According to Mercom Capital, global venture capital funding in digital health came to US$14.8 billion, a 66 per cent increase compared to US$8.9 billion in 2019.

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GoStream, a Vietnamese live streaming platform, announced that VinaCapital Ventures has invested a “seven-digit figure” into the company.

The fresh funds will be used to bankroll GoStream’s business expansion.

Founded in 2017, GoStream is a multi-platform live streaming broadcaster for social sellers, marketers and content creators. It claims it provides an “interactive experience” that encourages viewer participation in live videos, enabling users to reach a larger audience to increase visibility and get more views.

The startup shared in a press note that it facilitates over 100,000 live streaming sessions daily and serves multiple corporate clients.

Also Read: 37 VCs to invest US$800M+ in Vietnam’s startups over the next 3-5 years

“GoStream’s innovative streaming technology is helping more businesses reach more viewers and customers, and we look forward to working with them as they further expand their capabilities and play an even greater role in Vietnam’s growing digitalisation,” said Trung D. Hoang, Partner at VinaCapital Ventures.

According to a Statista report, revenue in the video-streaming segment in Vietnam is poised to reach US$162 million in 2021.

VinaCapital Ventures was launched in 2018 as part of VinaCapital, a Vietnamese asset management firm with over US$3 billion in assets under management. It seeks to invest in Vietnamese and Southeast Asian tech startups.

Earlier in December 2020, VinaCapital Ventures was among the investors of a 7-figure pre-Series A round into proptech startup Homebase.

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Amidst the report of the reports that its merger discussions with immediate rival gojek reportedly have fallen through, Singapore-based super-app company Grab is said it be considering launching an IPO in the US this year

The public offering could see Grab raising at least US$2 billion, said an exclusive report by Reuters quoting three unnamed sources. This would likely make Grab the largest overseas share offering by a Southeast Asian company after Sea Group’s US$1 billion IPO in 2017.

Good market condition coupled with Grab’s better performance will augur well for the company to go for a listing, said a source. However, there is no clarity on the size of the issue and the timing of the IPO launch. They are still still being finalised.

Also Read: Grab-gojek or Tokopedia-gojek: which merger will make better business sense?

Grab is the poster boy of the Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem with US$10.1 billion funds raised till date and is valued at US$15 billion. The company counts among its backers well-known investors such as SoftBank.

In August 2020, Grab reportedly raised US$200 million from South Korean private equity firm Stic Investments. This followed a US$1 billion fundraise from SoftBank Vision fund in 2019.

In a virtual conference organised by DealStreetAsia, Grab President Ming Maa had said that the COVID-19 pandemic had not affected the company’s thinking around an IPO or the timelines.

In recent months, multiple reports suggested that Grab was close to merging its operations with gojek. However, the deal fell through after Grab CEO Anthony Tan insisted on possessing control of the new entity. These developments come even as gojek was engaged in parallel conversations with Tokopedia for a potential merger. As per some reports, the gojek-Tokopedia deal is already signed and a formal announcement could follow soon.

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Image Credit: Grab

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Volopay, a Singaporean startup providing expense tracking solutions to enterprises, announced today it has closed a seed funding round of US$2.1 million from Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen.

The round also saw participation from Soma Capital, CP Ventures, Y Combinator, VentureSouq, and founders of Razorpay Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur, besides a few unnamed prominent angel investors.

Volopay intends to use the new funding for hiring, product development, international expansion, as well as to build strategic partnerships.

Launched in January 2019 by Rajith Shaji (CEO) and Rajesh Raikwar (CTO), Volopay was born when the co-founders experienced the hurdles of tracking different company spendings such as subscriptions, vendor payments and employee reimbursements.

“The whole process was broken. I would spend hours noting down each individual spend and then have to reconcile it with receipts. Once submitted through the company’s expense platform, I would wait a whole month before being reimbursed the funds,” Shaji said.

Also Read: Six Singapore fintechs are among the KPMG’s Fintech100

“I soon realised employee expenses and shared bank cards was a huge problem for businesses of all sizes, especially startups; they were losing countless hours each month going through bank statements and reconciliation. The lack of visibility meant they were losing money due to unaccounted expenses. Volopay sets out to re-imagine business banking for startups and tech companies while providing significant cash-back and saving,” he added.

Volopay is an all-in-one platform that combines expense approvals, corporate cards, bill payments, expense reimbursements, credit, cashback and accounting automation.

The app is free to use and the firm earns money through interchange fees that credit cards charge merchants. This also allows Volopay to offer users perks such as cashback deals.

Its “corporate card for startups” offering provides companies with a two per cent cashback on all software subscriptions, hosting and international travel, which Volopay terms as “the three main categories of expense in every single tech company”.

The company calms it has over 100 Singaporean companies on its platform, which include Smart Karma, Dathena, Medline, Sensorflow and Beam.

In addition to this development, Volopay said it will also be launching its services in Australia in late January and claims to have had built a sizeable waitlist of customers ahead of the launch. It has already partnered with an Australian cross-border financial startup and integrated its API on its platform.

Also Read: Singapore fintech Silot raises US$8 million Series A for intelligent banking

“To fast track our customer offering, we have chosen to integrate with fintech giant Airwallex’s API suite. We were impressed with how easy Airwallex’s API technology integrated with the Volopay platform, providing us with robust payment and issuing capabilities,” Shaji noted.

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Image Credit: Volopay

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