Shanghai-based SOSV Chinaccelerator has announced the 10 startups pitching on its 19th demo day.

Out of these, three hail from Southeast Asia.

Selected startups have received support from the accelerator in modules involving business strategy, growth hacking, business development, building traction, as well as fundraising.

Chinaccelerator aims to bridge China and the rest of the world, especially Southeast Asia, through sharing entrepreneurship and innovation lessons learned from the China market.

The accelerator claims to have invested in and accelerated over 170 startups and is the only active accelerator in Asia to have a unicorn go through its programme, i.e Bitmex from Batch 8 (Fall 2015).

A snapshot of the three SEA startups

Bizbaz (Singapore)

Offers a full suite of financial intelligence solutions, including but not limited to, comprehensive risk assessment, alternative credit scoring, fraud detection, e-KYC, financial product aggregation, and recommendation systems.

GetCraft (Indonesia)

A platform where brands can easily scout for and work with creators. According to its website, it has 10,000 creators signed up from Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia.

PouchNation (Singapore)

A hotel and event management and mobile payment solution, empowering hotels and event organizers with wearable technology.

Other startups:

AMMA Pregnancy Tracker (Russia, Hong Kong)

An AI-powered mobile app that guides parents from pregnancy through early childhood.

ARO (US, China)

A platform that helps global celebrities sell their branded products directly to consumers in China.

Also Read: Chinaccelerator announces 9 startups in the 16th Demo Day, to bridge China to the world

Data Forge (US, China)

An image annotation platform for training AI data models with high accuracy and low cost.

HuviAir (India)

Mining and construction site productivity tracking and enhancement in the cloud using drones, laser scanners, 360 cameras, and smartphones.

Lattis.io (US, EU)

End-to-end micro-mobility management platform for bike, scooter, and vehicle fleet operators to create a cost-effective and secure shared vehicle service.

Lucidefi (Korea)

DeFi trading terminal with AI-based prediction models helping traders make intelligent trading decisions in real-time.

SuperWorld (US)

A virtual world where users can buy, sell, create, and monetize tokenized assets (NFTs) from virtual land to digital art.

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COVID-19 has become the force that shapes our present economy and creates new customer demands and needs, thereby challenging businesses to improve their performance.

However, history shows that disasters are not new; what has changed is the advancement of technology that enables organisations to shift toward decentralised and networked structures.

This in turn allows for offshore tech operations to become a favourable business practice during the pandemic, for its non-disruptive nature and significant cost saving. But here’s the catch, organisations must overcome these key challenges in order to manage their offshore developers.

Communication

Did you know that 70 per cent of workplace communication is non-verbal? Through body language and facial expressions, we learn how serious an issue actually is; or the trust and confidence toward their company.

Unfortunately, offshoring your tech operations to another country means most interactions occur virtually via email, chats, calls, and video conference. There is a pretty good chance that communication will suffer as there are more layers and friction that hinder the flow of information.

According to a study conducted by Harvard Business Review, remote workers who don’t get to interact well tend to get incomplete stories, never the full picture and are more disconnected or alienated compared to onsite workers. Meaning it is one of the biggest disadvantages of offshoring tech operations that businesses have to overcome.

Also Read: Mio raises US$1M to help rural Vietnamese women become micro-entrepreneurs

Micro-management

It is a daunting challenge to get remote workers motivated to accomplish their tasks on time. The lack of physical presence can sometimes make you feel like you’re shouting into the wind in hopes that they will listen. And for those who claim to be working, you’ll have little choice but to take their words for it.

As a result, about 40 per cent of managers expressed low confidence in their ability to manage workers remotely. This often pushes them into panic mode where extreme methods are taken to offset their doubt.

Managers can start to develop an unreasonable expectation that those team members must be available at all times, ultimately disrupting their work-home balance and causing more stress on the job.

This, in turn, could create a negative spiral, where a manager’s  mistrust leads to micromanagement, causing  drops in employee motivation, further impairing productivity.

Time zone differences

An interesting advantage of building up your tech team in other parts of the word is that project teams can “work round the clock” to optimise schedule and capacity.

However, it might be a real hassle to find a common meeting time that works well for all parties due to the time zone differences. Someone will always have to compromise by meeting outside their normal business hours.

This inhibits productivity and can cause tensions in the team. Additionally, monitoring your offshore team is difficult. Are they working during office hours or are they slacking off? Are your offshore developers able to fix a P1 bug in a timely manner?

Cultural barriers

It is obvious that cultural differences hinder effective communication, right across the project, from within the project team to external stakeholders. This can be particularly challenging for tech talent from deferential cultures such as Vietnam who may feel less comfortable speaking up or sharing ideas directly, especially if they are new to the team or in a more junior role.

Also Read: How looking into Vietnam can help startups save development costs

Moreover, the difference in cultural value will also drastically impact the expectation and performance result.

For example, the Japanese prefer a long detailed report and being on time as a way to show dedication. On the other hand, Vietnamese offshore developers are more laid-back and open-minded. So if you are offshoring your tech operation into Vietnam, having a flexible timeline will encourage them to perform better instead of a strict schedule like the Japanese.

Remote HR Management

Most startups and SMEs struggle on managing their offshore developers, which are often be-prioritised from their core activities. This complexity is multiplied when it comes to remote workers in another country, where the culture and regulatory compliance can be drastically different from yours.

Not only do these gaps create risk that can prove to be costly for companies, they also mean the companies need a dedicated HR department to effectively manage their teams across the globe. In fact, more than 80 per cent of small business owners have to handle HR on their own – and more than 30 per cent weren’t sure they were doing everything correctly.

Offshoring part of the IT operation to other countries has become one of the common strategies for startups and small businesses to scale up their tech capabilities in an efficient and scalable fashion. But to make the most out of it and maximise the benefits, it is crucial for companies to identify any potential offshore challenges and eliminate them.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. This season we are seeking op-eds, analysis and articles on food tech and sustainability. Share your opinion and earn a byline by submitting a post.

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When I quit RedDoorz in September 2019, little did I know I would end up in the food industry a little more than a year later. But as I was working on another hospitality company in the US back then, COVID-19 hit New York and all plans for that venture were dashed.

After some soul-searching amidst the lockdown, I came up with the beginnings of what would become Dishserve, and came back to Indonesia in October of 2020 to turn the idea into reality.

Simply, Dishserve is a network for ghost kitchens helping F&B brands reach customers faster and more efficiently. You might say — isn’t that just another cloud kitchen business?

The pandemic has brought on a wave of these with the increased demand for home deliveries, and certainly, that’s part of what led me to close in on this idea. But with Dishserve, there’s more than what meets the eye, and I didn’t want to settle for what other players were already doing

Why stick to a two-sided platform when you can be a three-sided marketplace creating livelihood opportunities for homeowners. While we use home kitchens for operations, the catch is that we do not actually own or operate any of these kitchens. These kitchens are fully operated by the homeowners.

Whereas other players own their kitchens and become a two-sided platform between F&B brands and customers, we also thought about the kind of value we could give to micro-entrepreneurs who cannot afford to go out to work, like stay-at-home moms or recently unemployed individuals.

Also Read: Co-founders of Grab Philippines, Zalora join cloud kitchen startup Kraver’s Canteen’s US$1.5M seed round

By working as a home kitchen in the Dishserve network, they are able to make up on average up to US$600 in additional income per month which is 2.5 times the minimum wage in Jakarta. Apart from enabling livelihood opportunities for homeowners, Dishserve also benefits as a business from reduced costs of operation.

The typical cloud kitchen business would aggregate both the mid-mile (food processing, cooking, production) and last-mile (heating, packaging, delivery) segments within the same location, and this can be costly as renting space to cover all these is not cheap.

By decoupling the mid-mile operations and last-mile distribution, letting the brands take care of the mid-mile objectives and the homeowners and platforms such as Grab, Gojek take care of the last-mile distribution, we act as a network for F&B brands to expand their customer base without interfering with or potentially compromising their food quality and consistency.

This means that the homeowners we work with only have to heat, assemble, and package the food before delivering them to the customer. So our app helps the homeowners manage this entire operation–from inventory, orders, invoices, and audits– in one place.

The kitchen audit feature on this app also allows us to maintain the quality and performance of this process. The homeowner/kitchen operator has to periodically send photos and videos of their kitchen and these submissions are moderated by our team. We also collect reviews and customer feedback, so that even if we are mostly hands-off on how the homeowners run their kitchens we are still able to maintain a level of consistent quality.

Through this three-sided marketplace approach we are hitting multiple birds with one stone: enable hundreds of individuals to turn their home kitchens into ghost kitchens, expand the last mile distribution and customer base of F&B brands, bring faster and lower cost deliveries to customers, and also develop a less costly and more profitable approach to the typical cloud kitchen model for Dishserve.

Why keep it fixed when you can make it flexible for F&B brands to grow

But apart from homeowners fully owning and operating their kitchens, there’s another catch. When it comes to working with F&B brands, we do not charge any fixed monthly operational costs. Our monetisation is all through revenue sharing.

We decided to go this route because we wanted to make it easier for F&B brands to expand without a fixed operating expense, especially with the economic difficulties of operating in the pandemic.

When brands expand they typically incur fixed costs like rent, manpower, electricity, renovation, and by working with Dishserve, they don’t have to pay a single dime for all this, primarily because they are working with our home kitchen network

It also brings benefits to Dishserve as well. By enabling F&B brands to expand and work with more home kitchens in our network, we are also able to reach more customers with them and the amount we share with them also increases.

Also Read: Understanding the economics of food delivery platforms

One can think of it as a flexible model that allows us to work with the ups and downs that come with operating in the F&B industry while also rewarding our business as we grow the network of F&B brands and home kitchens rather than depending on fixed revenue streams

It’s all about enabling growth

And these decisions where we deviated from the typical cloud kitchen model have paid off for Dishserve. We’re able to maintain positive unit economics and make money on every transaction.

The best part is that we work with some of the most prominent restaurant and catering brands as well as two leading cloud kitchens companies, strengthening their last-mile distribution with the 100+ kitchens in our network across Jakarta and the National Capital Region.

So with our approach to cloud kitchens — these catches I’ve mentioned — we’re not just making deliveries more efficient for customers, but also supporting the growth of F&B brands and the livelihood of homeowners across Indonesia

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. This season we are seeking op-eds, analysis and articles on food tech and sustainability. Share your opinion and earn a byline by submitting a post.

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Engine Biosciences, a Singapore- and US-based drug discovery company, has raised close to US$42 million (S$57 million) in Series A financing from a slew of investors.

Led by Polaris Partner, the round was also joined by Invus, 6 Dimensions Capital, WuXi AppTec, DHVC, EDBI, Baidu Ventures, Vectr Ventures, Goodman Capital, WI Harper, and Nest.Bio.

This comes after over three years after its raised US$10 million seed funding from leading US, Singapore and China-based VCs and multi-stage investors.

Engine will use the newly raised capital to expand its portfolio of precision oncology therapeutics, prepare for its first clinical programmes, and scale its tech platform.

Founded in 2018, Engine’s technology combines biological experimentation with AI to discover and develop better therapies for human diseases

By understanding and testing genetic interactions, it can decipher biological networks to enable more rational drug discovery for both single and combination therapies.

Compared with conventional drug discovery approaches, which are too slow and costly to test and map the huge number of genetic interactions that underlie diseases, Engine’s platform drives orders-of-magnitude gains in speed and scale.

Also Read: Singapore biotech firm Austrianova secures US$100M investment

Two scientific innovations lie at the heart of Engine Biosciences are NetMAPPR and CombiGEM.

NetMAPPR is Engine’s searchable biology platform, revealing gene combinations and drug targets integral to diseases. Whereas, CombiGEM is a patented technology that tests hundreds of thousands of gene interactions experimentally in diseased cells.

The company has performed several large-scale computational and experimental cycles with respect to genetic interactions and their relevance to multiple cancers, claiming to yield new and subsequently validated discoveries.

“Many breakthrough tools to edit, programme, and modulate biology have emerged and matured in recent years. The fundamental question continues to be whether we know the disease-driving errors in the genetic code of biology to direct these tools, including therapeutics,” said Engine Biosciences’s co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Lu.

“We believe Engine’s AI-enabled technology platform has the potential to discover new biology targets and disease-causing links amongst known targets,” said Leon Chen, CEO and Founding Partner of 6 Dimensions Capital.

“Considering the field’s tremendous needs for the right drug targets for the right patients and Engine’s unique capabilities in finding those, we continue to be excited by Engine’s potential to power new medicines,” Chen added.

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Getting into the coveted club of Unicorns is every entrepreneur’s dream. However, it is no mean task to build a billion-dollar company; it takes many years of investments, efforts and hard work to reach the magic number.

In Southeast Asia, there are more than 10 unicorns and decacorns like Grab, Gojek, Sea Group, Lazada, Traveloka, Bukalapak, OVO and Tokopedia. Many more are on track to become billion-dollar companies. For example, Ninja Van, Carousell, and Zilingo.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been boon for some of these tech giants whose business skyrocketed, but for some others, it was proved disastrous. While it boosted the valuation of some of these unicorns, the pandemic slowed down the growth of some others.

Below is the list of the four Unicorns that have made it to ‘e27 Luminaries‘.

Grab

Grab doesn’t need an introduction. It is the quintessential poster boy of the region’s startup ecosystem.

Founded in 2012 by Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling, Grab was started as ride-hailing company in Malaysia. In order to grow and scale faster, the company later moved its headquarters to Singapore. There was no looking back since., and it scaled many summits and became the market leader in many verticals.

Also Read: Meet the 4 Luminaries startups that made a pivot to tide over COVID-19 crisis

Today, Grab is a super-app platform in Southeast Asia, providing everyday services that matter to consumers. The app provides users access to millions of drivers, merchants, and agents.

Grab offers a wide range of on-demand services in the region, including mobility, food, package and grocery delivery services, mobile payments, and financial services across 398 cities in eight countries.

In April, Grab announced its plans to go public through a SPAC merger with Altimeter Growth Corp., in a deal that values the company at US$39.6 billion, the largest blank-check merger to date.

Over its nine year of existence, Grab has raised US$12.1 billion in funding from 53 investors across 34 rounds. It has also snapped up three companies, namely Bento, iKaaZ and Kudo.

The tech behemoth is currently valued over US$40 billion.

Gojek

Gojek recently hit the headlines when it made official its US$18-billion merger with Tokopedia to form GoTo Group. One of the most valuable startups and a darling of foreign and domestic VCs, Gojek was started as two-wheeler hailing platform in its home country Indonesia.

The company’s rise to a billion-dollar company has been steady. On its journey to the top, it conquered many heights and ventured into new verticals and introduced innovative features.

Gojek aims to be a super-app, along the lines of Grab, by offering multiple service across verticals, such as ride-hailing, finance, e-commerce, and health, among many others.

Founded in 2010 by Kevin Aluwi, Michaelangelo Moran, and Nadiem Makarim (who later quit to become a Minister in Indonesia), Gojek has thus far raised US$53 billion from 32 investors across 13 rounds, and has made 13 acquisitions.

The tech behemoth is currently valued US$10 billion.

Tokopedia

Established in 2009, Tokopedia is an online marketplace that intends to help individuals and business owners to open and manage their own online stores.

Its platform helps users build and manage online stores and a single e-commerce destination for customers. The firm offers a wide range of items — from fashion accessories, beauty and health aids, electronic equipment, food, beverages, to toys, enabling individuals and businesses to open and maintain their stores for free.

Founded by Herman Widjaja, Leontinus Alpha Edison, Melissa Siska Juminto, William Tanuwijaya, Tokopedia has raked in nearly US$2.8 billion from 11 investors across multiple rounds since its inception.

Also Read: Meet the e27 Luminaries startups that are making life easier through tech in these emerging markets

Alibaba, EV Growth, Sequoia India, SoftBank and CyberAgent are among its backers. As per multiple reports, the tech giant is valued between US$8 billion and US$10 billion.

OVO

One of Indonesia’s largest payments and financial technology company, OVO is a mobile app payment system. It provides online payments, rewards and financial services, which are available on 115 million smart devices in more than 300 cities across the archipelago.

It has thousands of merchants all across Indonesia in various categories, including F&B, fashion, beauty, entertainment, transportation, and travel.

The company became Indonesia’s fifth unicorn in 2019.

The company is backed by SoftBank, Lippo and Grab, and last valued at about US$2.9 billion. It has also made two acquisitions.

Last year, there was a report that OVO was in talks for a merger with rival Dana.

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