Traveloka reportedly stops talks with Richard Li-backed SPAC for US listing
It has decided to drop merger talks with Bridgetown Holdings as interest in the SPAC market has declined; Instead, the travel company will look at doing things the traditional way for its US listing — an IPO.

‘League of Legends’ owner Virtuos nets US$150M
Investors are Baring Private Equity Asia and 3D Capital Partners; The company will use the funds to accelerate growth and finance its buy-and-build strategy across global markets with strategic partnerships and acquisitions.

Indonesia-only Intudo Ventures hits final close of Fund III at US$115M, to back 12-14 firms
Its notable LPs include Koh Boon Hwee’s family office Black Kite Capital, Gregory Wasson’s Wasson Enterprises; Intudo Ventures III seeks to invest US$1-10M each in companies across agriculture, B2B, education, finance & insurance, healthcare, logistics, new retail, and entertainment.

Agritech ecosystem in Thailand: 60%+ startups haven’t raised external funding, says a white paper
In terms of the amount of investment, Thailand is categorised at the same level as its neighbours Malaysia, Vietnam and Myanmar but much lower than those of Indonesia and Singapore; This is a reflection of the local agritech ecosystem still being in its initial phase, calling for the need for promotions and cooperation.

Digital assets platform Zipmex rakes in US$41M Series B, plans to launch in Thailand
Investors include Krungsri Finnovate, Plan B Media, Master Ad, MindWorks Capital and Jump Capital; Zipmex’s crypto exchange serves both new investors and high-net-worth individuals through two earning accounts, underpinned by its native ZMT token.

E-commerce brand aggregator Rainforest raises US$20M pre-Series A
Investors include Monk’s Hill Ventures (lead), January Capital, Crossbeam Venture Partners, Amasia, and Lo & Behold Group; Rainforest leverages tech to improve inventory management, cost optimisations, and expansions to new marketplaces and channels for these brands – mainly in home goods, mother & kids, personal care, and pet categories.

Ovo leads in Indonesia’s digital payments war, report says
The reports puts Ovo – which still counts Grab and Tokopedia as its stakeholders – ahead of several rival payment platforms such as Gojek’s GoPay, Sea Group’s ShopeePay, Ant Financial’s Dana, and LinkAja.

Go-Ventures leads US$16M Series A in grocery social commerce startup Segari
SIG, Alfamart, Gunung Sewu Group and Intrinity Capital also participated in the round; Segari streamlines Indonesia’s complex agri supply chain through tech and empowers local community leaders to offer grocery services to their social networks.

Ex-Uber, Facebook exec’s data security firm Borneo secures US$15.5M in Vulcan-led round
Investors are Vulcan Capital, Prosus Ventures, Lytical Ventures, and Wavemaker Partners; Borneo is already working at cloud scale with some technology companies and has seen higher demand for its solutions amid the current wave of public listings among such firms.

Indonesian agritech startup Crowde to close US$7M Series A led by Monk’s Hill
The funding follows a recent streamlining of Crowde’s lending business amid the impact of COVID-19 and the prolonged drought in 2019 that resulted in repayment difficulties for its customers.

Indonesian multi-brand e-grocer Pasarnow to expand to new cities with a US$3.3M funding
Investors include East Ventures (lead), SMDV, Skystar Capital, Amand Ventures, and Prasetia Dwidharma; This funding will be used to expand Pasarnow’s regional coverage and strengthen its capability in the groceries supply chain and last-mile solutions.

AI-powered logistics startup Portcast raises US$3.2M
Investors include Imperial Venture Fund, Wavemaker Partners, TMV, and Innoport; Portcast offers global freight forwarders and manufacturers an intuitive SaaS platform and APIs to accurately predict air and ocean cargo flows and forecast daily demand.

Singapore pre-employment screening firm Veremark nets US$2.8M in seed money
Investors include ACF Investors, Triple Point Ventures, and SOV Ventures; Veremark provides an automated solution that helps companies verify employee credentials such as employment history as well as academic, criminal, and credit records.

Indonesian podcast network NOICE nets ‘7-figure USD’ funding co-led by Alpha JWC, Go-Ventures
NOICE provides hyperlocal audio streaming content, including radio, music, audiobooks and podcasts, for Indonesian listeners; NOICE will use the new capital to add a new live audio feature, develop original content and hire talents across the region.

Vietnam-focused fintech startup Jeff bags US$1.5M for SEA expansion
Investors include J12 Ventures, EstBAN, Startup Wise Guys, iSeed Ventures and Toy Ventures; The company plans to enter the Indonesian market by the end of 2021 and expects to start its operations in the Philippines in the third quarter of the year.

Vietnam’s audiobook app Fonos raises US$1.1M seed round to become ‘super app’
Investors are AngelCentral Syndicate, HustleFund and iSeed, and angels; Fonos produces short 10-15-minute book summaries, guided meditation, stories, news, and offline reading options; Its audiobooks are multi-genre, ranging from fiction, classics, economics to startups. Of these, non-fiction books are the most popular.

Startup IPOs in 2021 are encouraging interests of Asia’s founders, investors
According to VC firms in the region, the startup IPOs that have happened this year has created a positive impact on an otherwise challenging year; Spiral Ventures’s Partner Ryu Hirota says the recent groundbreaking IPO by Bukalapak has triggered greater interest from Japanese investors in the SEA market.

Underrated, untapped, and unknown: Malaysia’s startup ecosystem is coming of age
Malaysian startups have shown the highest investment to return ratio in the region – more than double that of Singapore, and nearly 10x more than its neighbours down south in Indonesia.

Why BNPL will change the payment landscape in Vietnam?
Traditional banks are believed to utilise BNPL channels to catch up on the race of acquiring young and new potential credit users and leverage their large customer base via card-linked instalments; Customers who own credit cards still claim to prefer BNPL.

Thai logistics unicorn Flash Express enters Laos via partnership with AIF Group
They will jointly launch Flash Laos, a land and air delivery service, in the country; Flash Laos will allow customers to courier parcels between Thailand and Vientiane, the capital of Laos, through an app on which they can pre-book a delivery service, track parcels, and check service fees on their own.

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Image Credit: Traveloka

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Indonesia-based cloud kitchen company Legit Group today announced that it has raised an IDR43 billion (US$3 million) seed funding led by East Ventures, with the participation of AC Ventures.

In a press statement, the company said that it will use the fresh capital to aggressively expand locations to reach a wider customer base and to create and market new delivery-centric brands.

Legit Group currently operates three F&B brands –Pastaria, Sei’Tan and Juju Chikin– and operates from 45 distribution points. It plans to launch two more brands and expand to 135 distribution points by the end of the year

“With my experience as Founder of Eatwell Group and strategic partnerships with Ismaya Group and Yummy Corp, we are in the position to be able to use our current infrastructure to quickly expand our operations without heavy up-front investment expenditure. This allows us to widen our coverage quickly and thus lowering the delivery charges and provide a better overall experience to the customers who wish to order our products,” said Sumarno Ngadiman, CEO and Co-Founder Legit Group.

Also Read: Ecosystem Roundup: GIC invested US$94M into Bukalapak before its IPO; All about the cloud kitchen industry in Indonesia

“We have been in the F&B business for more than twenty years and we will be able to draw on our experiences and create the products that customers want with the utmost standard of food safety and handling practice,” he stressed.

Founded in February through a strategic partnership with Indonesian F&B and lifestyle giant Ismaya Group, online catering and cloud kitchen company Yummy Corp, and SME incubator GK Hebat, Legit Group said that it has grown 9.5 times since its inception. It also claimed to have experienced a 61 per cent increase in revenue from June to July alone.

As food delivery services become more popular during the pandemic, Indonesia sees rapid growth of cloud kitchen companies operating in the country. As uncovered by e27 in a special coverage, tech-savvy Millennials in the country also play a key role in driving the growth of this segment.

According to data, Indonesia has the largest food delivery service market in Southeast Asia at a market size of US$3.7 billion, accounting for 31 per cent of the total food delivery value in the region and continues to grow at 35.2 per cent annually.

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Image Credit: Legit Group

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My name is Gabriel Sze, and I am currently a Year 4 student in NTU enrolled in the Renaissance Engineering Programme. I am also the founder of Dive Deals, a modern web-based deal discovery platform that strives to bridge the online-to-offline consumer journey.

Being a student entrepreneur is tough. The challenges of navigating the entrepreneurship space are already difficult. With limited experience in developing software products, industry experience, and networks, it can be a daunting task to start a company and build a software solution for tens of thousands of users.

However, being an entrepreneur has been the hallmark of my student life. It has been the most challenging but exciting, meaningful, and fulfilling journey as a student.

In this article, I want to share some insights about why I chose to run a startup as a student and how I exactly did it in the past two years of my time.

Why did I choose to run a startup as a student?

Well, I am convinced that being a student is one of the best times to start anything. Apart from the limitations aforementioned above, being a student is absolutely great. We have more time, flexibility, and energy to invest in an exciting idea. We have more opportunities to create solutions, innovate existing ones, and explore the needs around us. We have maximum room to try, iterate and fail.

There’s so much more to being a student thinker. Still, I realised that I enjoyed spending some leisure time reclining on my chair, thinking about crazy ideas that solve various needs in the world and society.

However, running a startup wasn’t my first intention. Solving a problem was.

Also Read: Tecent, SCB 10X, Vertex back insurtech startup Sunday’s US$45M Series B

Although I silently wished I could, I didn’t start out wanting to build a successful startup. That’s too far ahead for me. Several years back, I identified a personal problem statement and wanted to build a better product to serve my needs and people around me, mainly family and friends who shared the same pain points.

And so the exciting journey began, a rapidly fast process but a game of patience.

How did I build a startup?

I hope to share some structure to how I approached it and developed what I have today, although I humbly acknowledge that every path is different. Well, here’s how I went about it with the startup I built today while being a full-time university student.

Identifying a pain point

First, do not start with building the product.

One of the best starting points is usually to identify a pain point that you currently face today. There should be many, but it often takes some awareness and reflection before stumbling across the more important ones.

One of the pain points I had in my daily life as a Singaporean was saving money through finding deals and promotions.

I didn’t particularly appreciate installing many applications on my phone, and there were too many aggregator websites and social media channels to follow to hunt down the most relevant deals.

As I enjoyed googling for promotions, most of the websites I found had a poor user interface and experience, with long wordy posts that often occlude essential information.

This problem was further amplified to me because I was a student trying to find cost savings via student deals and promotions.

As I am enrolled in a computer science major, it seems reasonable for me to develop a better website. As students, I feel we should find a reasonable problem statement to tackle or possibly get some friends involved that can help us build towards it.

Validating a pain point

It’s usually not sufficient to build a product that only helps yourself or several people. Ideally, you want to be able to build something that benefits a sizeable amount of people.

I approached family, relatives, and friends with this problem statement and wanted to hear their thoughts regarding this. Ask honest and objective questions. 

After asking about their experiences with hunting down deals in Singapore, I heard similar frustrations in scrolling through many sites, poor user experience, and disinterest in downloading more applications. Data representation and lack of reliable data were also key points raised. 

Also Read: Lessons from a student entrepreneur on building a successful startup

Hidden criteria, terms and conditions, and finding applicable outlets were some issues raised.

Be humble to accept and acknowledge that your pain point may not be shared across others, and be comfortable with iterating back to the problem statement once again.

Building and iterating the product

Taking into consideration the feedback, I started designing, then developing the product.

Be prepared to spend many hours learning and iterating. I had almost no prior knowledge of web development, so I had to start from ground zero.

I spent about three to six months learning the fundamentals of building a scalable and custom website, investing almost 10-12 hours a day learning new languages, frameworks and finding resources online. 

I did this during my summer break in my second year, so sacrifices have to be made. I took a break from internships after having done two in the past year.

The building then became easier along the way. Many months later, I developed a mobile-optimised deal discovery website that solved the pain points of my own and those validated around me. 

I focused on user experience, created simple data pages to surface essential data, and highlighted important locations in a customized map view on the web.

Be prepared for many iterations.

As I launched the product and iterated along the way, our user base slowly but surely grew, and we received great feedback about the product.

It is also important to have passion and meaning in what you build. In this pandemic, we had the opportunity to link up with many businesses to help them increase their awareness and reach. We frequently liaised with local and neighbourhood brands to offer attractive promotions on our site.

I still hope to grow this platform, but it’s fun and exciting to develop a product that people use to help people during these challenging times. 

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Motorist, a Singapore-based automotive platform, has raised SGD1.2 million (US$900,000) in seed funding from an AngelCentral syndicate led by Lim Der Shing, co-founder of JobsCentral.

Existing investors, including Royston Tay, co-founder of Zopim, and Huang Shao-Ning, co-founder of JobsCentral, also participated. 

The fresh funding will allow Motorist to “supercharge its growth” in Singapore and Malaysia and venture into Thailand by the end-2021. 

The company also plans to add 100 more employees to its operations in various markets, including a tech team in Vietnam.

Established in 2015 as a contemporary car-dealing platform, Motorist has shifted its focus to support the entire vehicle ownership cycle. It aims to create an ecosystem of smart tools and services such as vehicle purchases, vehicle loans and motor insurance for car owners. 

“As we prepare for the opening of the economy, our team will accelerate our execution across markets to support more motorists in their ownership cycle,” said founder and CEO Damian Sia. 

Also read: Is Singapore ready for the EV revolution?

The startup claims to have served close to 500,000 motorists and facilitated over US$600 million worth of vehicle transactions. Leveraging a team of data scientists with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, Motorist can personalise user experience over time, primarily through its newly launched features such as incident reporting, workshop recommendation, and online payment. 

Motorist boasts its app assists approximately 10 per cent of the vehicle population with vehicle management matters in Singapore. It aspires to take up as much as 40 per cent of the market share by 2023.

“They have demonstrated their ability to be capital efficient and have built a profitable multimillion-dollar business by mostly bootstrapping,” said Der Shing.

Der Shing added that with the GMV (gross merchandise value) of S$650 million (US$483.34 million), Motorist has become one of the leading car transaction platforms in Singapore, alongside other well-funded competitors.

The two most prominent players in this sector include Carro, which turned unicorn this June with its US$360 million Series C funding, and Carsome, a Malaysia-based used car platform that is eyeing a US IPO in 2022. 

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Image credit: Motorists

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Ficus Asia raises US$10M from Alibaba’s eWTP Technology and Innovation Fund

The story: Dealstreet Asia reported that Vietnam-based retail firm Ficus Asia has raised US$10 million from Alibaba’s eWTP Technology and Innovation Fund after it has invested US$50 million into the company last year. Both investments were made via ReDefine Capital Fund; it has made Alibaba the second-largest shareholder in the firm.

The company: Founded by Mobile World veteran Dinh Anh Huan, Ficus Asia has businesses in the retail, logistics, and tech sectors. It is the parent company of Seedcom, which is, in turn, the parent company of various lifestyle and F&B companies in the country.

Singapore-based ProfilePrint shortlisted into FoodBytes! Pitch 2021

The story: FoodBytes! Pitch 2021, an annual agritech and foodtech startup programme held annually by Rabobank, has named the 45 finalists of their programme. The list included 12 startups based in Asia Pacific with ProfilePrint being the only Southeast Asian startup in it.

The company: Based in Singapore, ProfilePrint is an Artificial Intelligence-powered food ingredient analysis software.

The programme: According to a press statement, the top 45 startups globally will now participate in a two weeks virtual mentoring programme and one-on-one meetings with corporate leaders and investors. They will also be pitching their solutions to Rabobank and other corporate and investor members who will choose 15 finalists to participate in a live-streamed public pitch competition on November 8-10, where the ultimate winner in each of the three sectors –Consumer Food Beverage (CPG), foodtech, and agritech– will be decided.

Also Read: Legit Group raises US$3M seed funding to further expand cloud kitchen business

Report: Singapore tops the list of countries with great interest in NFTs

The story: Blockchain Centre announced that based on Google Trends platform data analysis, global interest in NFTs jumped by 426 per cent in August. The interest in Google queries for the phrase “how to buy NFT” on August 1 was 19 but jumped to 100 by the end of the month.

The research also revealed that Singapore is the country most interested in digital assets, with a score of 100 in August 2021. It is followed by Australia (score of 86) and Nigeria (score of 70).

The implication: According to Blockchain Centre CEO Tadas Maurukas in a press statement, “Even though we see huge growth in popularity, NFTs are still unknown to the majority of the population. Investors see this as a massive opportunity for early adopters, as profits could be exceedingly high when these digital assets go mainstream.”

The non-fungible tokens (NFTs) market is exploding in popularity. Prior to 2021, only a small group of investors saw the potential for significant earnings in NFTs. Yet, the course of the market took a massive turn at the start of the year, and it does not seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

Flash Express, AIF Group Laos team up to launch Flash Laos

The story: Thai unicorn Flash Express and AIF Group Laos announced a partnership to launch the full-service logistics platform Flash Laos. According to a press statement, customers will be able to deliver parcels between Thailand and Vientiane Capital to support the growth of e-commerce industry and the economy of the two countries.

The details: The cooperation between will have two main parts: the first part is the launch of Flash Laos which will provide logistic service from Thailand to Vientiane, and the second part is a key cooperation of both companies, expanding the service to cover all areas of Laos. The second part of the partnership will be launched in November.

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Image Credit: krailathyothayath

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