Nium, a leading cross-border payments company with significant operations in Southeast Asia, announced today it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Wirecard Forex India, a foreign currency exchange, pre-paid card, and remittance services provider.

Wirecard Forex India is a unit of German fintech giant Wirecard Sales International Holding GmbH, which hit the headlines last year when it filed for insolvency in June 2020 due to one of the biggest accounting scandals in modern European history.

The acquisition includes Wirecard’s Authorised Category II Money Exchange Dealer (AD II) licence issued by India’s central bank, the RBI. With this license, Nium can directly engage in a variety of payment services activities across the subcontinent, including currency conversion, money transfer, and pre-paid card issuance.

The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

This deal, Nium’s second in just over a month after its acquisition of Ixaris, is expected to close in Q3 2021, subject to customary closing conditions, including approval by the local banking control authority.

Post-acquisition, all of the 190 employees of Wirecard Forex — which has 23 branch locations across India — will join Nium.

Also Read: Digital remittance startup InstaReM rebrands into Nium, offering global enterprise payments platform

“We’re seeing an accelerated move to digital payments as companies modernise their infrastructure to capitalise on the post-COVID economic recovery,” said Prajit Nanu,​​ Nium’s co-founder and CEO. “More companies are turning to our global payments stack to embed financial services quickly. This acquisition broadens our licensing portfolio, extends the suite of digital payments services we can offer in India, and provides us with a physical footprint to provide more support in metro areas.”

Founded in 2014, Nium (earlier known as InstaReM), is a global payments platform to enable businesses to send, spend, and receive money from around the world, in addition to empowering them to develop their own products that simplify cross-border payments.

The firm claims it issues approximately 30 million physical and virtual cards today and is licensed in 11 jurisdictions, including direct card issuing capabilities in 24 countries and in 40 currencies.

The company is regulated in the US, the European Union, Singapore, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Australia, and Malaysia.

Nium is backed by the likes of Vertex Growth Fund (Singapore), MDI Ventures (Indonesia), Beacon Venture Capital (Thailand), GSR Ventures, Rocket Internet, and SBI-FMO Fund.

This Wirecard India acquisition comes at a time when the country’s prepaid card market is expected to boom at CAGR of 40.5 per cent between 2021 and 2026. Driving this growth is an expected increase in adoption by businesses looking for fast and easy payment processing, payment flexibility, and elimination of delays related to reimbursements.

As consumer spending returns post-COVID-19, gift cards, meal cards, travel cards, and payday cards will become increasingly popular with businesses and consumers.

“Nium continues to expand its global operations through strategic acquisitions,” added Pratik Gandhi, Nium’s Chief Operating Officer. “Wirecard Forex has extensive reach throughout India and will enable us to deliver next-generation payment services across all major metropolitan cities.”

Founded in 1999, Wirecard offers electronic payment transaction services, risk management, and physical and virtual cards. The firm, which was once valued at US$42 billion, collapsed on June 25, 2020, owing creditors approximately US$4 billion after disclosing a gaping hole in its books. According to Wirecard’s then auditor EY, it was the result of a sophisticated global fraud. Reports said quoting German law agencies that fintech giant had been manipulating balance statements to boost sales earnings at least since the end of 2015.

Although Wirecard said the missing money had been sent to two banks in the Philippines, this claim was refuted by both the banks as well as the Philippines’s central bank. Its then CEO Markus Braun was arrested and is currently being investigated.

Over the past few months, Wirecard sold many of its subsidiaries, including in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam following its insolvency proceedings.

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Image Credit: Nium

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The top two of the UNDP’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals are to end poverty and hunger by 2030. These may seem like lofty goals, but the world has, in recent decades, made great strides toward achieving them. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has stalled progress with disruptions to global food supply chains exacerbating hunger and nutritional insecurity.

The current agriculture and food system, which is struggling to keep up with the demand for food from a growing global population and changing diets, has been criticised as part of the problem. Investors pouring billions into alternative protein sources are betting that foodtech can be part of the solution by building a more resilient agri-food system.

How alternative proteins contribute to food security?

Advances in foodtech have made it easier and cheaper to produce animal-free meat and many see cultured meat (also referred to as cultivated or cell-based meat) as an opportunity to diversify our food sources and enable food production closer to consumers. Cultured meat is grown from animal cells and uses fewer resources than traditional livestock farming.

The fast-growing field has attracted some of the world’s biggest companies and top investors. Companies such as Tyson Foods have partnered with cultured meat startup Future Meat, while Mosa Meats counts Google co-founder Sergey Brin among its investors.

New plant-based meats have also become popular with consumers, with startups whipping up new products using anything from soy and pea to jackfruit and algae.

Taken together, wider offerings of alternative proteins could go some way toward addressing concerns about overconsumption of meat in more prosperous nations such as America, where more than 70 per cent of adults are obese or overweight.

Also Read: How New Zealand-based Sustainable Foods is harnessing the power of hemp to produce meat products

Some experts argue that if these alternative proteins can be produced at a lower cost than traditional livestock and include most of the nutrients found in animal proteins, they could prove to be an attractive option for many developing nations looking to improve their food security.

While much of the meat consumed in Southeast Asia is produced within the region, the industrialised systems churning out this meat is highly dependent on imported animal feed.

Moreover, traditional agriculture is also a big contributor to climate change due to livestock emissions and resource use. “One-third of global grain production – enough to feed 4 billion people – is fed to livestock,” wrote Paul Laudicina, Chairman, A.T. Kearney Global Business Policy Council, in an article published on the World Economic Forum.

“This alone is enough to raise eyebrows. But livestock also contributes about 15 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions. And producing one kilogram of beef can require between 5,000 and 20,000 litres of water,” he added.

Singapore as a window to the future

In December last year, Singapore became the first country in the world to allow cultured meat to be sold to the public.

Singapore has set out to build up its capabilities as a hub for the fast-growing, US$10 billion alternative protein market as part of its “30×30” ambitions.

The approval of cultured meat sales follows a multitude of plant-based meat products hitting the market in Singapore, with consumers becoming increasingly aware of such products.

This also makes it a natural launchpad for related research. In May, Pinduoduo announced it would conduct a nutritional study with the Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation (SIFBI) to investigate the impact of plant-based meat protein consumption on human health.

Singapore also provides an interesting testbed as researchers will be able to study whether different ethnic groups respond differently to plant-based novel proteins.

“Human nutrition is a complex field, and we need more studies that look holistically at the nutritional impact of these food products over time, to inform the food industry of its potential benefits or the need for reformulation,” said Professor Christiani Jeyakumar Henry, Senior Advisor at SIFBI and Principal Investigator for the study.

“Health concerns are a major driver in Asian consumers’ decisions to choose plant-based proteins over conventional meats, especially in China,” said Mirte Gosker-Kneepkens, Acting Managing Director of The Good Food Institute APAC.  “The results of this study could further accelerate consumer interest and encourage plant-based meat producers to prioritise the nutritional value in their products when targeting Asian markets.”

Also Read: The spotlight on foodtech: Why we believe that what we put on our plate will determine the future

Indeed, for consumers to make the shift, questions about health and nutrition will have to be better addressed.  This applies to both plant-based and cultured meat.

For food systems to adapt to these new modes of meat production, the development of related infrastructure and supply chains will also require more intensive investment.

If the industry can continue to fire on all cylinders, alternative proteins could be a promising option for building more flexibility into our food systems.

Pinduoduo is hosting a Food Systems Forum on July 14-15 that includes speakers like Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute, as well as the founders of Mosa Meat and Future Meat. Register here.

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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.

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community or like the e27 Facebook page

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A fresh round of funding recently value cryptocurrency financial services firm Amber Group at US$1billion after raising US$100 million. In the second quarter of 2021 alone, venture capital investment into cryptocurrency and blockchain startups amounted to US$14 billion, according to PitchBook.

For the same period last year, only US$600 million was raised.  The crypto market has been put on a pedestal over the past few weeks given the high-frequency oscillations the market has been experiencing. 

Being one of the most thrown around word of the hour, blockchain, the peer-to-peer network that sits on top of the internet is an open distributed ledger that records transactions between two parties efficiently and can be validated by a selected or public audience.

It features “smart contracts” that are triggered automatically after conditions are met. The advancement of technology has spawned new variations of blockchain technology. Today we explore the latest manifestation of this vanguard, non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

nonfungible.com reported that more than US$2  billion was spent on NFTs in Q121, an increase of 2,100 per cent compared to Q4 2020. Coined as the art of blockchain, NFTs took the blockchain world by storm.

Marrying tech and art indefinitely, NFTs created a new wave of an asset class. They are built and supported by the Ethereum blockchain as the protocols designed by Ethereum positions themselves on smart contracts. 

These tokens that can be used to identify an item or product gives the minted digital asset a unique cryptographic serial number that affords prominence to that individual piece. It is essentially a one-of-a-kind tokenised deed.

Also Read: Are digital art NFTs horrible for Mother Earth? BoT gearing up for digital currency test

Non-fungible means that it is not replaceable by another of the exact same matter. Technically speaking, every NFT is a unique token on the blockchain where there is only one definitive actual version of it. The best example of a non-fungible product would be a one of one trading card with a unique code identifier. 

The most fascinating aspect of an NFT is that it can be anything digital one can think of including immutable ownerships where collectors own instead of lease any item or artwork.

Of prominence now being art, music, gaming, sports, collectibles, metaverses, and even utilities. The majority of NFTs are used in gaming (33 per cent) and collectibles (47 per cent). This is indicative of the option of tokenising real-world assets onto the blockchain. 

The very first ideation of NFTs dates to 2012 – 2013 where it was first introduced as Colored Coins, which was made in the smallest denomination of bitcoin, a single Satoshi.

Due to the nature of bitcoin being fungible, the “colouring” in essence made every coloured coin unique to its own and this term made it non-fungible. It was created with the purpose of representing a property, coupons, or even issues of shares, but at its time it was limited by the coding behind bitcoin’s framework. 

Fast forward to October 2017, a market-ready version of the token called CryptoKitty quickly found its way into vogue. It was a blockchain-based virtual game that allowed players to adopt, raise, and trade virtual cats. Players could buy, breed, and trade the cats. To date, with already 50,000 generations of kitties bred, more than $30,000 in transactions still occur on the platform every single day. 

Outside of artwork and collectibles, the main driver of the NFT market is blockchain-based gaming. Valued at US$180 billion, the gaming industry showed promising growth with the usage of NFTs and blockchain integration.

This decentralisation of the gaming engine gives real-world value to digital in-game assets as players now own instead of leasing gaming assets with it being pegged onto the blockchain. The significance of this integration was expedited by an announcement from Atari on the creation of the Atari blockchain division, bringing modern NFTs into retro gaming. 

Sony is looking to release The Six Dragons in which the game’s item trading and crafting are pegged to the Ethereum blockchain, making it one of the first releases by a mainstream gaming platform to incorporate NFTs.

Also Read: HashMix raises US$3M funding to roll out its mining power NFT in June

On June 11, Mythical Games, an LA-based NFT games startup secured a US$75 million round of funding led by WestCap to support its first NFT-based title. 

Notably, major NFT marketplaces such as Opensea and Rarible have experienced exponential growth of between 50 to 100 times in Q121 sales. Opensea saw US$5 million in cumulative sales in the first week of January 2021 and since then has racked up sales of more than US$100 million. The group has also been successful in raising funds of up to US$23 million led by A16Z. 

Even giants such as Nike look to implement their own NFTs for the purpose of authentication. It patented CryptoKicks,  a platform that allows for the attachment of cryptographic IDs to physical products like shoes. 

With basic economics of supply and demand disparity driving prices, there were 73,000 NFT buyers and 33,000 NFT sellers in 1Q21, exhibiting bullish signals of interest from newcomers. 

In a time where taking a screenshot creates a replicate digital file, a non-fungible token proves that only one digital file is the original or authentic. The uniqueness that comes with each NFT is supported by proven authenticity, traceability via the blockchain, and ultimately its value. Minted on the blockchain itself, NFTs are indestructible and cannot be removed. 

In recent years, we have seen the rise and fall and another subsequent rise of blockchain as a technology. Each step sees advancements and progression in this technology and now virtual currencies have started inhabiting our everyday lives as it becomes more pervasive.

All-time high prices have soared to a place where the top line is a constant moving target that inches higher every time. More so after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sold a screenshot of his first tweet in 2006 at a price upwards of US$2.5 million.

Understanding the crypto art hype may be a bit of a brain teaser. In truth, it has helped provide artists from emerging economies and underrepresented groups entry to the global art market that was padlocked before.

Also Read: Blockchain and Bitcoin for business 101 with Justin Renken

Tokenising real-world assets and creation of ownership of digital assets are nascent concepts. As we move along, infrastructure for NFTs will improve and chances are it will only get better with higher adoption.

Until then, the mainstream market’s acceptance will be a hurdle interwoven in the path of NFT. 

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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.

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community or like the e27 Facebook page

Image credit: Arno Senoner on Unsplash

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GREDU, an Indonesia-based edutech company, has raised US$4 million in a Series A round of financing led by Intudo Ventures, with participation from existing investor Vertex Ventures.

With the new funding, GREDU intends to expand into Java and major cities throughout Indonesia, accelerate product development, and recruit new talents.

Founded in September 2016, GREDU aims to increase the level of engagement in a school environment to improve the overall schooling experience for teachers, parents, and students.

Through its centralised management system, its platform helps administrators handle documentation, compile syllabuses, manage teaching schedules, improve big data management, and increase transparency. It also facilitates communication between administrators, teachers, students, and parents to improve the overall education experience.

Working with school districts and administrators, GREDU’s subscription-based services allow schools and teachers to track the performance and progress of students in line with the national curriculum to improve oversight and effectiveness of instruction.

Also Read: It takes a village to raise a child, so GREDU builds a platform for schools and parents to collaborate

GREDU targets Indonesia’s K-12 National Curriculum, which includes both public and private schools — while also offering solutions for the country’s large Islamic Curriculum programmes.

The startup claims to be working with over 400,000 users in 400 schools. It is also developing products for new verticals, including preschool and university programmes, facilitating digitisation across the entire education value chain.

In the future, GREDU plans to enhance user engagement through interactive features, such as extra content and gamification.

“The current pandemic has accelerated the need for digitalisation and transformation in the education industry. We believe that GREDU, with its holistic approach to serving all the school’s stakeholders and value chain, is in a great position to capitalize on this change as well as help improve the education quality in Indonesia,” added Joo Hock Chua, Managing Partner at Vertex Ventures.

Prior to this round of financing, GREDU has raised a pre-Series A round led by Vertex Ventures.

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Image Credit: GREDU

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With a boom in the edutech industry, many companies are coming up with innovative solutions for the sector. But more players also mean more competition.

Also Read: Edutech in SEA is ripe for acceleration. This is why they can help build a more inclusive society

GREDU is one such company that operates in the edutech space.

Founded in September 2016, GREDU aims to increase the level of engagement in a school environment to improve the overall schooling experience for teachers, parents, and students.

While its co-founder Rizky Anies agrees that the edutech market is a booming industry, he believes that GREDU’s model is unique. This is because its model aims to complement other platforms rather than compete with them.

In this interview with e27, Anies discusses the startup’s growth plans, the future of edutech, and more.

Below are edited excerpts of the interview.

What first got you into entrepreneurship and why did you decide to start your own company, GREDU?

Entrepreneurship has always been my passion, regardless of my background — entrepreneurship runs deep throughout my whole family, so it’s always been an interest for me.

And as for the reason for GREDU, it comes from a personal pain point that I (and the other co-founders) have, with the schooling environment, as a student and as a guardian (for my youngest sister). I always felt that there is a lack of engagement that creates all sorts of issues, and that’s how we came up with GREDU.

Since its launch in 2016, how have the objectives and goals for your company evolved?

The objective and goals always remained the same what differs is our approach. 2016 marks the moment where the founders decided that we wanted to do something in education, but we also realised at the time that the market was not yet ready, so we bided our time and focused on research until we felt the market was ready and we officially launched our product in 2020.

Since ideation in 2016, the iteration has certainly changed, especially towards the needs and implication of technology in the day to day activities, that was only made possible by the advancement of our technology and intimate collection of user feedback to better meet the needs of administrators and educators in their daily work.

What are your short-term goals for 2021 considering the current exponential rise of COVID-19 cases in Indonesia?

The short-term goal for use right now is to expand to targeted cities and be able to help schools as much as we can in their efforts to transition towards online learning, which we know has been a big issue here in Indonesia and other parts of the world.

Our team’s focus is to measure how learning can still be done effectively in online environments and refine our offerings to help teachers and students excel in this new learning environment.

The edutech sector is currently booming and digital learning solutions have risen due to the pandemic. What differentiates GREDU from other online learning platforms?

What differentiates us the most is our service, our aim at this point is not to disrupt but to be a solution to the changing landscape of education that has been forcefully altered due to covid.

Also Read: GREDU raises US$4M to allow Indonesia’s schools, teachers to track K-12 students; performance

Hence, instead of an online learning platform as an alternative to educational materials, GREDU offers tools that enable learning and teaching to still be conducted by schools, effectively and with ease through online requirements.

How do you see the future of edutech?

Firstly, due to COVID-19, now we can no longer separate education from technology, and we see edutech will be a hot commodity going forward. With many players jumping into the scene due to this pandemic and with the competition heating up, there is bound to be a big evolution and breakthrough in the market.

Our solutions do not necessarily compete with other edutech players but complement their offerings. In the future, even after the pandemic, many of the digitisation adopted during this period will continue to be used, resulting in more efficient school administration and targeted solutions for students that create better educational outcomes.

What’s the one piece of advice you would like to give to founders struggling due to the current pandemic situation?

Efficiency and innovation will be the key. If the situation creates a big hindrance towards your business, the first thing to do is to make room to breathe, and then go back to the drawing board for alternative approaches given the changing landscape.

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