Starting a business comes with its own set of difficulties but maintaining a business is the larger challenge. When it comes to small and medium businesses, money management is one of the main challenges they are faced with worldwide. Some of the most recognisable brands in the region have shut their doors due to financial losses and bankruptcy, including the 162-year old Singapore department store, Robinsons, and souvenir chain, Naiise Iconic. According to a survey with 1,000 SME founders from Asia, businesses are most likely to fail because of an inability to manage costs or anticipate rising costs.

As per a recent UNESCAP report, many respondents in diagnostic studies of SME development perennially cite the common complaint that access to finance is inadequate. The study also highlights that financing constraints play an even more critical role later on, when operating SMEs are seeking to expand and develop, but lack access to sufficient long-term funding sources in particular.

Capital is crucial not only for a business to run but for it to thrive. Limited access to the right financial services and tools is one of the main areas where SMEs struggle. They are more often than not struggling to cover daily operational costs to somehow manage their essential expenses such as payrolls, and are therefore unable to pursue a path of exponential growth.

According to a 2020 report by Oracle NetSuite, more than half of the top 10 challenges faced by small businesses involve finance. From limited or inconsistent cash flow to inadequate capital, funding can make or break small businesses in one way or another.

Also read: Startup Thailand Marketplace: a gateway to new markets

This is not only a challenge uniquely faced by SMEs during a precarious time. Corroborating this report is an earlier study by Synergix Technology conducted in 2019 which concluded that “finance-related problems are an ongoing issue for all businesses worldwide including SMEs in Singapore. Regardless of the operational sector, enterprises will more likely fail to succeed if they are not able to maintain a sustainable financial condition.

This is where the right fintech tools and services can help small and medium businesses tackle the issue of money management and thrive in the competitive market. One such company that is making strides in this direction is Finaxar.

Finaxar is a financial service provider focused on providing SMEs access to working capital so that they can supercharge their business towards accelerating growth. “We streamline the E2E process of providing short-term working capital, enabling digital payments, and facilitating expense management from one centralised platform using the power of technology,” shared Dr Tan Sian Wee, Group CEO of Finaxar.

Solving money management challenges faced by SMEs

Founded in 2016 and serving primarily the Singapore market with its focus on changing the way small business financing is done using technology, Finaxar is a Singapore-based fintech firm that is solving working capital challenges faced by SMEs

Finaxar finances directly from their balance sheet to provide innovative data-driven credit and payment solutions. In July 2019, with the support of Enterprise Singapore, the firm cemented its Lending-as-a-Service^TM in a new cross-border partnership with Cathay Financial Holdings and Indovina Bank to improve access to SME financing in Vietnam — setting a milestone of its first overseas market beyond Singapore. In the firm’s vision to digitising SME finance, Finaxar grew its capabilities in 2020 with a “Buy-Now-Pay-Later” solution for businesses in the B2B sector — on top of their existing Finaxar Credit Line, which enables business payments through a single, integrated platform that aligns seamlessly with businesses’ cash flows to provide rapid liquidity to SMEs.

Flex by Finaxar, powered by Visa: A unified spend management solution

Last year, when many small and medium businesses were struggling to survive and capital was one of the top concerns across the industry, Finaxar announced the launch of Flex: A unified spend management solution jointly developed in partnership with Visa. With the aim of providing businesses with a platform to unify spend, payables and receivables, the solution was launched in line with Finaxar’s focus to transform SME finance through digitisation. With Flex by Finaxar, businesses now have access of up to S$100,000 in interest-free credit within 48 hours.

“Our initial journey as an SME lending company gave us the opportunity to speak with our SME customers, which allowed us to validate some severe gaps in accessing working capital in Southeast Asia. With the digital ecosystem landscape dramatically changing, we had the chance to innovate our core capabilities to support SMEs in a more purposeful and meaningful way, at the scale and speed that is beneficial to everyone.” shared Dr Tan.

He added, “We were able to leverage our ability to underwrite SMEs efficiently, providing them with short-term working capital to fuel their business, and enabling them to gain more transparency and control over their finances. As a financial services provider, we introduced Flex to ease the process of applying for working capital and facilitate the convenience of managing business payments using digital capabilities in a secure, efficient, and low-cost manner.”

Also read: RE:SOLVE — the biggest summit for digital-first customer experience

With changing consumer behaviour and a landslide shift towards online payments amidst the pandemic, digital payments have become the most preferred method in Singapore, and SMEs need to be ready for that. They need holistic and agile solutions for better money management. In line with that, the Flex solution comes as both a virtual and physical corporate card — a key feature made available only to businesses in Singapore and is part of Flex’s all-in-one spend management solution. Flex enables easy reconciliation and integration into existing accounting tools to help SMEs keep track of the payments that require reimbursement. 

Employers can empower employees to make payments via corporate cards without prior approvals. This can be done by setting customisable parameters such as monthly amounts loaded to the cards, controlling specific expenses (e.g. transportation, entertainment, bulk purchases) and more. All expenses will be captured by the Flex platform for easy reconciliation and seamless reimbursements, thus improving the efficiency of SMEs.

Flex by Finaxar provides a three-fold money management solution

Flex’s proprietary solution that covers working capital provision, instant card issuance and spend control management is the first of its kind in Singapore. With an interest-free, fee-free credit line of up to 35 days with adjustable billing periods, it eliminates friction points and hidden costs typically associated with traditional lending. 

“We facilitate cross border payments with zero FX markup, and domestic payments on Flex are free for our clients. It is simple to apply, fast to get a credit line and very affordable for small businesses. We continue to innovate our platform with SME customers’ need for better control of their expenses in mind,” added Dr Tan.

Also read: Revolutionising the food industry with Malaysia’s StixFresh

Flex’s all-in-one financial management platform enables SMEs to:

• Regulate their spending: Businesses can determine exactly where and when the money was spent by setting up request-approval workflows and customising spend limits.
• Manage their spending: With the issuance of physical and virtual Flex Visa corporate cards, businesses can capture and monitor invoices, initiate payments and reconcile their payments using their accounting software via a single platform.
• Track their transactions: Using real-time spend insights, businesses can obtain an up-to-date, accurate, and comprehensive financial outlook — and easily integrate into any existing accounting software.

“We are not a technology company attempting to provide financial services. We are a true financial services company which leverages the depth of our team’s long backgrounds in finance. Today, we leverage the power of technology to better serve the SME community, aiding their ambitions to grow without limits,” concluded Dr Tan. 

Interested in improving your startup’s finance management and maximising business growth potential? Learn more about Flex by Finaxar at https://flexnow.co.

 

This article is produced by the e27 team, sponsored by Finaxar

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The world has been living with the pandemic for over a year now. Although vaccinations are already underway worldwide, many dramatic changes that businesses have adopted during COVID-19 are irreversible.

Both startups and corporates have increasingly turned to AI, cloud, and digital transformation to streamline operations and survive under the new normal, permanently altering the way we do business.

During the first half of 2021, the Taiwanese AI ecosystem reached a significant milestone with Appier’s public listing in Japan, becoming the first Taiwanese startup to officially achieve unicorn status.

Additionally, AI chip startup Kneron received funding and resources from major electronics manufacturers Hon Hai and Winbond at the beginning of the year, signalling a continuing demand for increasingly higher-efficiency computing capabilities from major technology companies. 

AppWorks Accelerator has updated Taiwan’s AI Ecosystem Map First Half 2021 with our learnings over the past six months. With the breakneck pace of digital adoption, some applications are no longer limited to a specific industry and have thus been reclassified as cross-industry solutions or technologies, which we believe is more reflective of the AI ecosystem in Taiwan.

In reviewing the changes in the overall ecosystem, we have observed several notable trends for the first half of 2021:

New perspectives and opportunities in AI

According to Hive Ventures’ AI report for Taiwanese enterprises released in the first quarter of 2021, 25 per cent of companies have deployed relatively mature AI applications in their organisations.

In addition, 53 per cent of interviewed companies believed that there was a need to introduce AI to their organisations, with learning how to deploy and apply AI more effectively becoming a top priority for many leaders.

We noticed that companies have gone from directly seeking external solutions to building an internal team to sort integrated data, define application fields, develop and deploy AI models, and finally realise the assimilation of AI in their organisations.

Also Read: Taiwan is poised to power the AI economy in the region

It is precisely because of this trend that we see a number of AI enablers gaining significant momentum in the market.  ProfetAI, an automated machine learning engine aimed at assisting companies to introduce AI with the best efficiency, received pre-A funding from AU Optronics, Hive Ventures, and other investors in early 2021.

In addition, Infuse AI received a US$4.3 million Series A round of fundraising led by Wistron in the first quarter of 2021 to continue to develop their MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) platform.

Model development, management, and monitoring are optimised this year to assist more companies in deploying and managing AI models.

The next step in martech

As the penetration rate of e-commerce in Taiwan continues to rise, the concept of online-merge-offline (OMO) fusing virtual and physical sales and marketing is demonstrating powerful potential. The effect of Google’s announcement of phasing out third-party cookies continues to ferment, forcing companies to reassess how they manage their scattered online and offline data pockets.

Specifically, companies are now left to contend with the challenge of effectively accumulating, integrating, and drawing insights from fragmented customer data, and using that to make agile marketing decisions. Such issues have created new development opportunities for AI innovation within martech.

In the face of making increasingly complex marketing decisions, the data required is more difficult than ever to integrate by yourself. We noticed martech startups have begun to actively seek alliance opportunities with other companies, jointly form teams to share data, improve product content together, or even derive new service models.

Whether it’s teaming up between new ventures or seeking cooperation in different industries, you can find clues of these synergies happening throughout the first half of 2021. For example, two conversational AI startups, GoSky and Crescendo Labs, cooperated with iKala’s KOL Radar to collect the data they needed to launch social commerce solutions.

Another martech startup, Accuhit, collaborated with key media players in early 2021 to establish a joint venture in AI and big data called DaEX. Through cross-industry alliances, the media’s advertising data will be integrated with CDP (Customer Data Platform) to create a comprehensive marketing ecosystem.

In addition to its aforementioned fundraising news, Appier also acquired BotBonnie, an omni-channel social commerce platform to enrich their services and data analysis. With this wave of martech teams building strong networks, more AI applications will be born through such synergies.

Roles for large companies in Taiwan’s AI ecosystem

In the development of the overall AI ecosystem, whether in Taiwan or internationally, the participation rate of integrating AI in organisations and processes is increasing. In terms of startup accelerators, AppWorks Accelerator, established in 2010 and focusing on founders working in AI and Blockchain since August 2018, has graduated over 100 AI teams so far and continues to build up Taiwan’s AI ecosystem.

In April 2021, AppWorks also announced a partnership with Wistron, an active player in the AI ecosystem, to launch the first batch of the new Wistron Accelerator powered by AppWorks to focus on startups in the fields of AI, IoT, cloud computing, and information security.

Various business units of Wistron Group will collaborate with these startups to propose solutions for their departments and seek more growth opportunities within the overall AI/IoT ecosystem.

Also read: Why Taiwan’s AI ecosystem is a fast-emerging opportunity during the pandemic

Leading AI chip maker NVIDIA also announced that it will establish Asia’s first NVIDIA Inception AI startup base in Linkou’s innovation park, supplemented by the NVIDIA Inception AI accelerator program to inject talent and innovative technology into Taiwan.

In addition, startup accelerators that support AI startup teams, including SparkLabs Taipei, Taiwan AI x Robotics Accelerator, and the CIAT Accelerator, are all recruiting AI startups to join them.

Taiwan AI Academy Foundation and Taiwan AI Labs are Taiwan’s representative institutions in AI education and research, respectively. The former, a consortium, combines industry and academia to promote the implementation of AI in various industries.

It promotes services for AI project evaluation and transformation strategies. Taiwan’s smart driving test lab and Taoyuan’s innovation park connect government and corporate resources to provide an R&D environment for self-driving cars to test.

With organisations now banding together to push the AI agenda forward, we will continue to see the demand for integrating AI rise.

Taiwan’s AI Ecosystem Map First Half 2021 is jointly produced by AppWorks and Taiwan’s Artificial Intelligence Foundation (AIF), and is updated every six months. Download the map here: Taiwan’s AI Ecosystem Map First Half 2021

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Over the next ten years, media and entertainment will become one of the most attractive sectors for investments in Southeast Asia, as per a recent report by Golden Gate Ventures. It is already evident from the number of startup exits in the region. Of the total 80 exits so far, media and entertainment registered the fourth most exits, as per Crunchbase.

In entertainment, gaming is the largest and most expansive industry globally. As of 2021, it has a staggering three billion game players, which is equivalent to nearly 40 per cent of the world population. Newzoo forecasts that the global gaming market is expected to generate US$175.8 billion in revenue this year. When it comes to Southeast Asia, the market is set to grow by 8.5 per cent per year on average, according to a Research And Markets study.

Where is the gaming industry headed and what are the key trends in this booming industry?

e27 spoke to a few market players, including the region’s fastest-growing media publisher SHAREit, Singapore’s social media unicorn Bigo, and Vietnamese blockchain game developer Sky Mavis, which owns the popular NFT-based game Axie Infinity.

Pandemic-fuelled behaviour shift: mobile, e-sport, and live streaming

Ranked first in the 2019 global growth rate, mobile gaming in the region made its mark, thanks to high smartphone penetration. This hype has been accelerated further in recent years due to the extended lockdown induced by COVID-19. Mobile games have led the charge as the most viable form of entertainment for the homebound.

According to mobile consultancy App Annie, users worldwide downloaded 30 per cent more games in Q1 2021 compared to Q4 2019. The spending on mobile games also reached a record US$1.7 billion per week in Q1 2021, up 40 per cent from pre-pandemic levels. 

Plus, emerging markets such as Vietnam and the Philippines have seen over 50 per cent growth in consumer spending on mobile games.

“While, at one point, gaming used to be considered as socially isolating, people all over the world under lockdowns turned to gaming as a way to seek out a community connection on the other side of the screen,” said Karam Malhotra, partner and global vice president at the SHAREit Group.

Social gaming, therefore, has emerged as a notable trend that drives the explosive growth of e-sports.

“Southeast Asian gamers’ strong inclination towards community play — coupled with a lucrative environment and government policies — has aided in the rise of e-sports in the region,” Malhotra added.

Since people cannot go and watch real-life sports in stadia, e-sports viewership in Asia has grown to 618.4 million in 2020, a 21 per cent increase compared to 2019, according to research published on Research And Markets.

Also read: ESPL raises pre-Series A to grow its e-sports platform for grassroot gamers

E-sports turned mainstream when Singapore-based live streaming platform Bigo signed an agreement with Pakistan’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and Garena to launch an initiative to support and facilitate young gamers to enter the industry.

Gamers use global live streaming platforms such as Bigo Live to observe, showcase, connect and create content for real-time game streaming. Some of the most viral games on Bigo Live are Bang Bang (MLBB), PlayerUnknown’s Battleground (PUBG), Free Fire, Fortnite, Call of Duty and Valorant.

“Livestreaming has not only emerged as a popular format for gamers to view and participate in e-sports but also an important platform for gamers to build and connect with the community,” said Mike Ong, Vice President at Bigo.

Ong added that the lockdown blues drove more people to turn to digital platforms and watch live game streams. The number of users enjoying live streaming games saw an uptick of more than 11.7 per cent globally between 2019 and 2020.

“Users are shifting to video-first social experiences such as live streaming that favours content creators,” Ong noted. “We have noticed a shift towards authentic experiences as users are starting to move towards a model of directly recognising content creators instead of traditional content produced by production houses.”

Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand have emerged as the top countries in terms of game live streaming, according to Bigo.

Blockchain-based games attract venture capital

These changing user behaviour also increased the need for technology-powered gaming experiences. In particular, the growing blockchain technology advancements in recent years have fostered blockchain-based games’ positive momentum in Southeast Asia.

Axie Infinity, a blockchain game developed by Vietnamese startup Sky Mavis released in 2018, became the first-of-its-kind NFT-based game developed in Southeast Asia. In August, the startup announced that the game drew a record 800,000 daily active users in July and will soon hit the one million mark.

Ever since, the combination of gaming and blockchain technology, wherein gamers utilise the true in-game item ownership, has become more popular and attracted investments.

Earlier this year, My DeFi Pet, a game developed by Vietnamese studio Topebox, also received a US$1 million investment from Axia8 Ventures, OKEx Blockdream Ventures, and OKEx. Having decentralised finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) features, the game allows players to earn tokens while playing, get rewards by joining events and make profits from trading in-game characters.

Just last month, Virtually Human Studio, which owns virtual horse racing platform Zed Run, raised US$20 million in a Series A round led by media and technology-focused investment firm TCG Capital Management, besides Andreessen Horowitz and Red Beard Ventures.

These deals mark investors’ appetite for companies that stand at the crossroads of entertainment, gaming and NFT.

The capital, however, is not restricted only to conventional VCs or corporate VCs. Even retail cryptocurrency investors are also betting on the governance token of the game to fuel its development. Axie Infinity’s token is now worth around US$70 per token, which was just US$3-4 a month ago.

Also read: VCs, IEOs, and crowdfunding: How the likes of Sky Mavis manage good relationship with each investor

Game design and Economic design 

“Blockchain is changing the monetisation and mechanics of mobile games,” stated SHAREit’s Malhotra. “It allows players to monetise their own gaming experiences with NFTs unlike traditional gaming, which forms an opportunity area.”

As a prominent success case, Sky Mavis CEO Trung Nguyen said that Axie Infinity combined both game design and economical design. With the “play-to-earn” model, gamers can have verified ownership for digital assets, create digital value in tokens for virtual items, and then trade or convert them to local currencies.

“Nevertheless, there are still several conflicts between designing blockchain games and other conventional games,” Nguyen said. “While conventional games aim to maximise the unilateral revenue towards the developer, a decentralised platform of blockchain games works as a true economy, where the ecosystem is broadened by maximising total in-app transaction and creation value of users.”

In his view, balancing these conflicts by designing enticing gameplay and ensuring a healthy in-game economy will help secure and scale its user base.

Blockchain games have also become an alternative, easy-access approach for financial benefits or savings. The games act as an “abstractor” to popularise technologies and “increase financial inclusion”.

This, combined with the rise of mobile as a platform to offer publishers a direct line to reach a broader audience than before, has empowered developers to be creative in genres, formats and monetisation models.

For example, immersive in-game ads have become more sophisticated, which require a deep understanding of gaming technology and the audience. Ads must reside within a digital world seamlessly and not be intrusive in any way.

In the past two years, developers across regions also increasingly shifted their focus from an ad-only monetisation strategy to include in-app purchases. “The publishers that creatively integrate ads will see higher lifetime value and retention with lower churn,” said Malhotra.

In the case of game streaming activities, creators can also be recognised for their work through ‘gifts’ or in-app currencies given by the audience.

“Our users can give various forms of virtual gifts to their favourite broadcasters, which can then be converted into cash,” said Ong of Bigo. “This is part of our ongoing efforts to foster a sense of giving back to our broadcasters and being at the forefront of the creator economy.”

In a broader sense, the democratisation of the gaming experience for people has become the most important trend that can leverage the growth of this sector in years to come.

“We are democratising the mobile gaming experience for millennials, be it a casual, social, mid-core, hardcore, or professional gamer,” said Malhotra.

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Image credit: 123rf, SHAREit, Bigo, Sky Mavis

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This article is run in collaboration with Makan For Hope, a non-profit initiative by Asia Startup Network. The Makan For Hope Festival brings notable mentors and aspiring entrepreneurs in 30 meaningful virtual conversations over food from Social Enterprises to raise S$125,000 for Fei-Yue to support the children and seniors from low-income families. 

At this Makan For Hope session hosted by exited entrepreneur and investor Qing Ru Lim, she led the discussion with 10 seasoned startup founders, angel investors, and venture capitalists.

The roundtable took a deep dive into the headwinds women faced and discussed the steps we can take today to empower female founders and encourage more to thrive in the Southeast Asia startup scene.

Setting the context

Globally, venture funding allocation to female-founded companies is an astonishingly low percentage –two per cent in 2020, according to Crunchbase News. 

The number is nine per cent in female co-founded companies. In Southeast Asia, the numbers are higher, though still on the low side: companies with female founders or co-founders raised 16.4 per cent of total funding.

Yet, according to a BCG study, women-led startups provide better financial returns for investors — for every dollar of funding, they generated a return of 78 cents. In contrast, male-founded startups generated less than half that. 

On the investment side, only 2.4 per cent of all VC partners globally are women. Yet, having more women in funds provided higher fund returns and more profitable exits, according to a research report by Harvard Kennedy School –VC firms that increased the number of female partners by 10 per cent experienced a 1.5 per cent increase in fund returns each year, plus 9.7 per cent more profitable exits.

Also Read: Levelling the playing field: How to build a home for women in tech

Data from both sides of the table suggest that females could outperform their male counterparts. 

Now more than ever, we need to support more females in startups

Besides the strong hypothesis that women make great entrepreneurs, the other reason for this urgency is the COVID-19 pandemic.

More women than ever are leaving the workforce, as shared in McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace study. Without deliberate intervention, as the report suggests, it will be “unwinding years of painstaking progress toward gender diversity.”

It would also hold our economy back. Furthermore, there has been increasing investment into ESG funds to support the empowerment of women and minorities. 

The timing is favourable, and there is no matter time to act than right now. But how can we increase the number from 16.4 per cent to 50 per cent?

What needs to be done, what needs to be changed? At the roundtable conversation, most believe that change needs to happen at all levels, and women also need to lead the change themselves.

More can be done to sustain the growing trend of females in tech:

At the Government level

One of the initiatives led by the Ministry of Social and Family Development is the “Conversations on Singapore Women’s Development” which aims to shift societal mindsets for a more inclusive society for men and women. While progress in recent years has been encouraging, we can do much more. 

• Qing Ru Lim: suggested increasing access to funding by creating a Perpetual fund to back women-led startups (similar to SheEO, which pools money to loan to female founders at zero per cent interest) and a tax incentive scheme for female-led VC funds, which is already implemented overseas.
• Shao-Ning Huang: seconded the tax incentive scheme because tax is only relevant for profitable companies, which aligns with investors’ interests.
• Yiping Goh: shared that back in 2017, the government raised the paternity leave to two weeks from one week for working fathers. She opined that supporting men in the ecosystem is also important and believes they can create more incentives for husbands to support their wives in caregiving tasks.

At the Investor level

Investors could pave the way to empower more female founders. Women in startups often face headwinds of blinds spots and cognitive bias, making fundraising even harder than it already is.

A recent study conducted by TechCrunch found that women are asked more risk questions than men, which ultimately results in far less money being raised.

Even more surprising is that female investors typically exhibit the same gender bias demonstrated by their male counterparts towards female founders. And for most of them, they may not even be aware of it.

Also Read: How women in tech can navigate the 2021 business landscape

Here are three possible measures to lead change:

• Shao-Ning Huang: VC firms must look at ways to hire more women decision-makers, at all levels, especially at the top. This is important as female investors would have a better capacity to empathise, understand and communicate more effectively with female founders.
• Carmen Yuen: Investors or stakeholders could consider having a team of organisational development specialists offering guidance to their portfolios to overcome gender bias and implement female-friendly policies.
• Qing Ru Lim: Limited partners could promote gender diversity by requesting it to be a mandatory ESG component in Annual Reports of the funds they invest in. The same goes for investors — it will be game-changing for them to seek their portfolio companies to include how they have embraced gender diversity in their investor reporting.

At the personal level

To see sustained change, females also need to start with changing their own mindset and behaviour.

Also Read: How the tech industry can become friendlier for women

The group’s ideas boiled down to five priority areas for action: 

• Senior Minister of State Sim Ann: Women need to revisit their own experiences and highlight the obstacles they have faced or what held them back. She encourages females to champion the change they wish to see.
• Doris Yee, Executive Director of Singapore Venture Capital & Private Equity Association: Education will be instrumental, such as leadership training for women leaders to change the tendency of holding themselves back.
• Edwina Yeo, co-founder, and CEO of Supermomos: She testified to the reality of gender-related subconscious bias, but also the reality that women may voluntarily decide to take a back seat after they have kids. She believes it is about paving the way to ensure these women could still score in their career while juggling other priorities, possible through more flexible work arrangements.
• Yen-Lu Chow, Co-founder and Executive Chairman, WholeTree Foundation and Over-The-Rainbow: He saw how many women, through his experience, have made a significant difference to the lives of people when allowed to lead. He urges more women to say yes to leadership opportunities — stand up, speak up, and be counted.
• Shao-Ning Huang: There is a need for female founders to be self-aware of the hero’s mindset and victim’s mindset that they tend to adopt. Both mindsets are unproductive and obstacles to building good startups. Women also need to be open to enlist help from others, use them and unitedly create a vicious cycle of female empowerment. A single chopstick may be easy to break, but a bunch of them creates a robust and unbreakable infrastructure.

Banding Together is how we can realise the vision of seeing female founders as the new normal.  Here’s how you can play a part— support these ground-up initiatives listed here.

This article is co-written by Jessica Bong.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

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

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Momos, a startup providing an online platform for marketing, reviews, and analytics to F&B businesses in Singapore, has received US$6.5 million in a seed funding round co-led by Sequoia India and Alpha Wave Incubation, a US$300-million early-stage fund.

Other investors include K3 Ventures, Captii Ventures, HOF Capital, JIA Group, Hong Kong-based Integrated Capital, and angel investors from global food delivery and software companies.

With the new investment, the SaaS startup plans to bankroll its expansion plans as part of an international strategy, enhance its value proposition for restaurant partners, and further build its platform.

Momos was launched in 2020 by Sai Alluri and Andrew Liu, former executives at Grab, Uber, Microsoft, and Intuit. The platform offers restaurants a unified interface to operate across meal delivery systems, social media, and other online channels, and launch virtual delivery-only brands.

“We started Momos during the pandemic to help restaurants embrace the massive change happening in the F&B industry,” said CEO Alluri. “We think of ourselves as building Shopify for F&B, but in reverse.”

Andrew Liu, Momos co-founder and CBO, added that they realised restaurants faced the same challenges everywhere and consider the region a hotbed for talent and global SaaS companies. 

Also read: F&B’s growing appetite for technology solutions and how it leads to success

According to Aakash Kapoor, VP, Sequoia India, F&B is a vast and growing market, with numerous multibillion-dollar corporations catering to restaurant operations’ cost side, including delivery and POS payments. 

“Momos has built a unique and compelling SaaS platform to instead help restaurants grow their business,” said Kapoor.

The company is working with large and small food and beverage firms in Southeast Asia, including The Lo & Behold Group, Flash Coffee, Guzman y Gomez, and Wolf Burgers. 

Besides, it counts virtual brands such as Tree Side Nasi Lemak, COOP by Neon Pigeon, and Curry Fried Chicken among the partners.

A report by Consumer Foodservice by Location in Singapore says that cafés/bars, limited-service restaurants, and street stalls/kiosks are leading the US$8.3-billion F&B foodservice industry in Singapore, which is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 2.1 per cent by 2023.

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Image credit: Momos

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