Singapore-headquartered Aspire, which intends to provide an all-in-one finance operating system (OS) for small and medium businesses (SMEs) in Southeast Asia, has announced an oversubscribed US$158 million Series B fundraise led by an undisclosed global growth equity firm.

DST Global, CE Innovation Fund, B Capital and Fasanara Capital, alongside existing backers Hummingbird Ventures, Mass Mutual Ventures, Picus Capital, and AFG, also participated.

Besides, Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of Wise), Alexandre Prot and Steve Anavi (co-founders of Qonto), Pierpaolo Barbieri (founder of Uala), Moses Lo (co-founder of Xendit), Hendra Kwik (co-founder of Payfazz), and Gerry Colyer (co-founder of Clara) have also joined the round.

Aspire is looking to double down on existing markets with the new investment while building the foundations to serve growing business clients across Southeast Asia.

Incorporated in January 2018 by Andrea Baronchelli, former EVP and CMO at Lazada, Aspire aims to “reinvent SME banking in Southeast Asia” by serving a new generation of internet businesses with a mobile-first digital account across Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam.

Also Read: Thailand’s Beacon VC invests in Singapore’s neo banking platform Aspire

The startup’s flagship product AspireAccount caters to digital merchants across the region and can be opened online in just a few clicks. It is free and comes with an instant credit limit for daily business expenses, a virtual B2B payment acceptance and other tools to help SMEs manage their cash flow.

As per a press note, Aspire has served over 10,000 businesses across Southeast Asia.

Aspire is a graduate of Y Combinator Winter 2018.

“We see a world dominated by integrated platforms across various business functions such as Salesforce for Sales or Slack for Communication. We believe the same is happening for finance, and we are here to build the operating system for the SouthEast Asia digital economy,” said CEO Baronchelli. “We build value for our customers by saving time, saving money, and boosting their growth.”

In August 2019, Aspire secured US$32.5 million in a Series A round of financing, led by Mass-Mutual Ventures (MMV) Southeast Asia, with participation from Arc Labs and Y Combinator, Hummingbird Ventures, and Picus Capital. This was preceded by a US$9 million seed investment from Insignia Ventures Partners, Mark 2 Capital, and Hummingbird.

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Image Credit: Aspire

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Singapore-based women-focused healthcare services startup, Ease Healthcare, has attracted a US$1.3M seed financing round led by Insignia Ventures Partners.

Several high-profile members from the XA Network also joined.

Additionally, Ease Healthcare launched a mobile app that enables users to book doctor appointments and preventive tests on the go, make purchases, and run comprehensive contraception tracking. In addition, it allows users to manage critical sexual and reproductive health indicators through personalised guides and content and engage with the larger community of Ease users through a community forum.

Also Read: Breaking the taboo: Meet the Singapore-based startups that are working to provide access to sexual healthcare

Ease Healthcare will use the funds to introduce new features, expand its team, and continue scaling the reach of its services. A portion of the capital will go into launching its own line of products focused on preventing or improving women’s health conditions, including vaginal infections, premenstrual syndrome (PMS), and urinary tract issues.

Ease Healthcare was founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur and sexual and reproductive health rights advocate Guadalupe Lazaro and lawyer-turned-entrepreneur Rio Hoe.

Their own experiences inspired the duo as a couple accessing sexual and reproductive healthcare in Singapore. Through market research, the founder-couple identified four main barriers to access sexual and reproductive health services. They were the cost of these services, the inconvenient experience of making appointments, booking tests, and getting prescriptions; the lack of education around this aspect of personal health; and the prevalent stigma of availing these services.

These issues are more prominent in Asia, where health education is not as prevalent. They point towards underserved sexual healthcare and women care market in APAC that is worth US$10 billion this year.

They launched Ease’s initial platform in 2020 to cater to these needs and the pain points they identified in the market. This platform enables consumers to consult with medical professionals, obtain and renew prescriptions conveniently and affordably, get medication discreetly delivered to their doorstep within four hours, and learn more about managing their reproductive health.

Ease Healthcare’s platform works hand-in-hand with its network of clinics, pharmacies, doctors, and laboratories across Singapore. The app now includes and expands beyond these existing features with new services such as contraception and symptom tracking, personalised insights, and a broad range of relevant products available for purchase.

Ease Healthcare claims its community grew 6x over the past year to 20,000 members.

The company regularly shares educational content with its community, ranging from using various contraceptives to early warning signals for infections.

Also Read: How ZaZaZu aims to empower women by starting conversation about sexual wellness

“Our new app brings us a step closer to becoming the go-to platform for all women’s health care needs. It will enable every Ease user to control their health and wellness by significantly reducing the impact of stigma, lack of education, inconvenience, and costs that burden traditional channels. The long-term goal is not just to tackle access to sexual and reproductive healthcare, but address the larger picture of women’s health through a truly comprehensive ecosystem of products and services,” said co-founder Lazaro.

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Image Credit: Ease Healthcare

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We are racing towards the last quarter of this year, and six months have already passed since I last shared an update from our Facebook State of Small Business report.

Since the early months of the pandemic, Facebook has been surveying small businesses worldwide at regular intervals to find out what they’re going through and what help they need.

Last week, we published the results of our latest survey of more than 35,000 small business leaders across 30 countries and territories, carried out this July and August.

It finds that closure rates are falling worldwide in most surveyed countries, a sign that slight business recovery is underway. But there is still a long way to go and many challenges to tackle.

In the Asia Pacific, we surveyed small businesses in Australia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. There is both good and bad news from the survey.

First, the good news: Most SMBs on Facebook in the Asia Pacific countries we surveyed reported that they were operational or engaging in revenue-generating activities. The bad news is that their sales have dropped significantly.

More than half of SMBs surveyed said that their sales continue to be significantly lower, leading to cuts in employment. Businesses in Vietnam, Indonesia and Taiwan are struggling the most from the impact of COVID-19, as more than 75 per cent say that their sales performance decreased during this time.

There are some silver linings. One is that many small businesses have found success by shifting online. For some, moving online has been the difference between staying afloat or going under. For others, it’s given them a whole new lease on life.

Also Read: Leveraging digital-first CX for customer delight and business growth

Globally, the use of digital tools has increased during the pandemic, and it’s up again in this latest edition of the survey: 88 per cent of all businesses said they use digital tools compared to 81 per cent when I last wrote about it in April.

More than half of those surveyed expect their use of digital tools to be permanent. In the Asia Pacific, nearly 50 per cent of SMBs we studied on Facebook reported at least 25 per cent or more of their sales were made digitally.

The other silver lining is that women-owned businesses in the countries we surveyed in the Asia Pacific are doing as well or even better than their men-led counterparts in closures and sales performance. Taiwan is leading this trend with 92 per cent of female-led SMBs (vs 80 per cent of male-led SMBs) on Facebook reporting that they were operational or engaging in any revenue-generating activities, followed by Vietnam, Indonesia and Australia.

This is an exciting trend as last year; we saw the female-owned businesses were consistently harder hit than male-owned businesses.

Supporting these gains is vital as one Boston Consulting Group study has shown that if women and men participated equally as entrepreneurs, global GDP could rise by approximately three to six per cent, boosting the global economy by US$2.5 trillion to US$5 trillion.

So what does this all mean? Throughout 2020 and 2021, our State of Small Business reports has painted a consistent and sobering picture. But the consistently positive takeaway from all the surveys is the power of digital transformation in helping businesses weather the storm.

This is why we continue to invest in new products and tools to help businesses connect with their customers and simplify day-to-day management.

Today, I’m excited to share five critical updates that will help businesses meaningfully connect with people:

Ads that click-to-message

Businesses can already buy ads that encourage people to message them, whether in Messenger, Instagram Direct, or WhatsApp. For example, Organicwa, a Thai restaurant, leveraged click-to-message ads to scale up its delivery operations.

Now, businesses can choose all the messaging platforms where they’re available to chat, and we’ll default the chat app in your ad based on where a conversation is most likely to happen.

Start a WhatsApp chat from an Instagram profile.

Instagram is the virtual storefront for many small businesses for customers to discover brands, and WhatsApp is the counter to discuss products, answer questions, and close sales.

Businesses can now add a WhatsApp click-to-chat button to their Instagram profile— and, starting soon, the option to create ads that click to WhatsApp directly from the Instagram app so that people can start a chat with just one tap. These updates will help small businesses find new customers and get business done.

Also Read: How one LinkedIn message changed the fate of my failing startup

Lead generation on Instagram

We will begin testing paid and organic tools to help small businesses find and qualify leads directly within the Instagram app in the coming months.

Advertisers use lead generation ads to connect with customers and connect leads in a more personal way while reducing costs — like Seoul Spa, a Vietnamese beauty clinic, did with their Messenger campaign, lowering their cost per lead by 72 per cent.

Facebook Business Explore

We will soon expand Facebook Business Explore in Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Singapore. By putting more businesses in front of interested people who are actively looking for them, Facebook Business Explore will help connect people with new and relevant companies in one easy and centralised place.

This will also help businesses reach new customers and drive deeper consideration that can lead to purchases.

Lastly, business owners have told us they want more separation between their personal and professional identities. To simplify this, we are testing Work Accounts, which will allow business users to log in and operate Business Manager without requiring a personal account.

Businesses will be able to manage these accounts on behalf of their employees and have access to enterprise-grade features like single sign-on integrations, giving them more control over the security of their employees’ accounts.

We are testing Work Accounts through the remainder of the year with a small group of businesses and expect to expand availability globally in 2022.

If you were to take away one thing from all this – it is the importance of business messaging in the post-COVID-19 world. Over the years, we’ve seen how person-to-person messaging has defined the norm for person-to-business communication. 

This is why we will continue to invest in ways to help drive better business results across the customer journey. We see messaging as a powerful way for businesses to connect, support and build a bridge to their increasingly digital-savvy customers. 

My goal in sharing these updates is to bring you along as we reimagine discovery and relevance for people, creators, and businesses. Together, we can build a vibrant digital economy with the potential to drive recovery and the next lap of economic opportunity for all. 

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Ascend Money, a Bangkok-headquartered fintech firm providing payment and financial services in Southeast Asia, has secured US$150 million funding at US$1.5 billion.

With this, Ascend Money has become Thailand’s first fintech unicorn.

US-based Bow Wave Capital Management and existing shareholders — Thai conglomerate Charoen Pokphand Group and Ant Group — invested in the round.

The new capital will be used to enlarge the user base of its TrueMoney Wallet and expand its digital financial services, including digital lending, digital investment and cross border remittances across Southeast Asia.

So far, Ascend Money has made inroads into six Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Also Read: Flash Express adds US$150M more to its kitty, becomes Thailand’s first unicorn

Founded in 2013, Ascend Money operates the digital payment and financial service platform TrueMoney, aiming to drive regional financial access and inclusion for those financially excluded and SMEs around the region.

According to the press statement, TrueMoney serves more than 50 million users through its e-wallet application and 88,000 TrueMoney agents.

A study by Visa in 2021 showed that 85 per cent of consumers in Southeast Asia had adopted some form of cashless payment solution. While Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia are taking the lead, countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand are drawing near with an average cashless payment adoption rate of 88 per cent.

Buoyed by these favourable signals, Thailand’s payments segment has witnessed a leapfrog growth. The total transaction value is forecast to increase at a CAGR of 10.94 per cent during 2021-2025, resulting in a projected US$24,127 million by 2025.

Ant Group entered Southeast Asia with its first investment into Ascend Money in 2016.

Ascend Money’s is the second tech company from Thailand to enter the unicorn club. The first is Flash Group, the company behind the leading express delivery service Flash Express in Thailand, which made it to the club with a US$150 million round in June this year.

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Image Credit: Ascend Money

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Vietnam-focused Touchstone Partners has launched a bespoke incubation programme for high-potential founders to develop their initial ideas in Vietnam.

Touchstone Fellowship Program (TFP) is open on a rolling basis. As per a press release, TFP aligns with the VC firm’s sectors of interest, including fintech, real estate, healthcare, edutech, and technology that enhances efficiency in major Vietnamese value chains such as manufacturing and agriculture.

Touchstone will invest between US$50,000 and US$100,000 in convertible notes with “simple, straightforward and founders-friendly” terms to kickstart founders’ ideas.

There are no hidden costs or fees. 

“Through the small cheques we provide to founders, they will be able to move along faster and deeper to prove their market fit and validate the business model. We saw how even a small amount of investment could help startups grow at least 3x,” said Touchstone’s Director of Entrepreneurs-in-Residence Bobby Liu.

Also read: Why these four Vietnamese startups made it to the Forbes Asia watchlist

Construction B2B marketplace Debion and no-code automation SaaS Autotable are the first two startups receiving fundings from the programme.

Founded and led by Khanh Tran and Tu Ngo in 2021, Touchstone Partners also provides US$1 million in seed funding for startups, aiming to catalyse Vietnam’s tech ecosystem.

Last month, the firm injected US$1 million into the telemedicine platform Medigo, one of the first investments of its US$50 million debut fund since April.

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Image Credit: Touchstone Partners

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