Leading a product team in a startup is very different from leading one at a well-established enterprise. Having joined Mixpanel in the early years and growing with it for close to a decade, I’ve learned that priorities change as you move from startup to scale up and then mature into an enterprise.

Startups: Prioritise ruthlessly

Startup companies are at a stage of their business where they are constantly experimenting to find product-market fit. The importance of product-market fit isn’t something to brush off — a 2019 CB Insights study found that “no market need” was the top reason why startups don’t succeed.

This is crucial for product teams and you need to be ruthless in prioritising product differentiators that allow you to solve user problems that your competitors can’t (or in a way that they don’t).

When you deliver a product that does that, your early customers become your biggest fans. They’ll value your product and that will make up for areas where you may be a bit rough around the edges.

This happened in the early days at Mixpanel.

There was a time when if you forgot your password, you’d actually have to write to someone in Support to manually reset it for you. At that time, we (rightly) concluded that our success wouldn’t hinge on the availability of a self-service Forgot Password flow and focused our resources on other, more impactful product features.

Scaling up: Listen to your customer

Once your business starts to scale, the focus switches to matching innovation with follow-through. This is the time when you’ll need to start ironing out the little kinks.

At Mixpanel, we were so far ahead of everyone else by this time. The mistake we made was that we branched out into more things when we should have been focused on building more depth in our product and fixing existing problems. Innovate on doing what you already do better; not on doing more things.

Also Read: Monk’s Hill Ventures head of talent’s guide to startup jobs search in Singapore

As you grow, your customers become your most valuable asset. Their complaints, feedback, input, and feature requests are all invaluable sources of information that inform your product strategy. Take time to listen to them and understand how they’re using your product and what they’re using it for.

Enterprise: Stay nimble and think like a startup

So what happens when you’re an established player? You’ll find yourself on the other side of the fence. Where you were once the hot, innovative startup that’s disrupting the market, some startup is now disrupting your business.

That’s why it’s important to stay nimble and innovative even as you grow. One way to do this is to keep decomposing your teams into units that can function efficiently, almost as if they were little startups within your company.

For example, Amazon tries to break their engineering teams into “two-pizza” teams  — essentially you’ll only need two pizzas to feed the entire team.

In my own experience, when it comes to software development, a unit consisting of a product manager, a designer, and a few engineers functions really well. This unit can make its own decisions without a ton of authoritative coordination with other people.

You’ll certainly need to balance this autonomy with the broader corporate vision. An example of this is how Netflix aims for “context, not control” (you can take a look at their culture deck here). This balance is built by instilling a sense of purpose.

If your teams know why they’re doing what they do and how that feeds into the business’s success, they’ll make decisions on their own, yet stay aligned to the company’s goals. The key is to make sure that you don’t fall into the trap of endless meetings, check-ins, and red tape that make your company slow and bureaucratic.

There’s nothing quite like watching your product team and business grow from startup, to scale up and progressing on the path to becoming an established enterprise. My experience at Mixpanel has been a rewarding journey that’s both inspiring and creatively satisfying.

The trick is for us, as product leaders, to keep as much of that agile one-team atmosphere and focus that helped to drive our growth while learning to cede responsibilities to our teams as they continue to build on what we created.

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Thai accounting SaaS firm FlowAccount has raised US$4 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India, Tech In Asia reports.

US-based Money Forward and Japan’s SBI Investment also participated.

The new funds will be used to expand the platform’s functionality while also increasing its small-business offerings. Anticipating to become a pandemic winner, the firm also plans to grow beyond accounting into fields of payments, e-commerce, and fintech.

“Our vision is to become the go-to, seamless solution for anyone starting a new business in Thailand and beyond,” Kridsada Chutinaton, CEO and co-founder of FlowAccount, said told the publication.

Launched in 2014, FlowAccount is an online accounting firm using the cloud SaaS to help freelancers, small business owners, and accountants in Thailand handle their accounting, payroll, and expense tasks on a single platform. The startup claims its services are used by 50,000 clients and are connected with banks and e-commerce platforms.

Also read: Sequoia Surge’s new cohort comprises a vegan makeup startup, an innovative email marketing platform and more

Earlier this year, Thai 70-year-old bank KBank offered its 1,000 SME customers the FlowAccount solution to help them run more efficiently by keeping them updated on their financial status timely, controlling costs more adequately, and obtaining better access to funding sources.

In 2017, FlowAccount had raised US$1.15 million in a pre-Series A round led by Beacon VC, Kasikornbank’s venture capital arm, with participation from SBI Investments, Singapore’s Golden Gate Ventures, and Thailand’s 500 Tuk Tuks.

Global tech research firm Gartner predicted that Thai enterprise software spending would grow 13.6 per cent to 45.9 billion baht (US$1.4 billion) in 2020. In another report, Gartner indicated that cloud spending in Thailand could grow 28.2 per cent to 34.4 billion baht (US$1.1 billion) in 2022.

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Image credit: FlowAccount

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Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, with the ups and downs, challenges and changes that we are all experiencing in recent times, the way of working and organisational decision making have entered a new era. Enterprises must reassess their digital transformation strategies and core competitiveness in a timely manner.

Through advancing enterprise agility, it accelerates the speed of digital transformation, innovation and other new processes. Hence, it is essential to adopt the right enterprise agility strategy for your organisation.

Impact on business

While enterprise agility is very different from agile software development, many parallels and principles can be drawn from the Agile Manifesto and Agile Principles beyond the context of IT.

Applying the spirit of elaboration, harmonisation and user-first approach from software to enterprise agility in providing services, is one of the centre themes of  current Agile thinking. In other words, agility must be manifested within the enterprise DNA to generate value.

Imagine a traditional enterprise, burdened with legacy processes, systems and policies that are decades old that no one questions, “Why?”; intertwined with politics, silos and a culture of fear, where people do not feel free to voice out their feedback and ideas.

What if we can transform that organisation into one that is highly collaborative and interactive; focused on products and services that customers want; quick to respond to change and feedback, thus having a competitive advantage in stability and flexibility.

All the while keeping pace with an era of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Sounds too good to be true? In that case, enterprise agility is crucial more than ever for such transformation.

As part of the global agile research, McKinsey analysed the impact of enterprise-wide agile transformation, and their preliminary results identified three main outcomes of agile transformation: improved customer satisfaction, employee engagement and operational performance.

Also Read: A sneak-peek at the 28 startups joining NUS Enterprise’s SEA Booster Programme

The benefits are complementary to each other leading up to the fourth result: improved financial performance.

It starts with connected teams

You may be well aware of the numerous disrupters you face every day. It is not just the unpredictability of what is to come, it is also the velocity and pace of change that is creating silos and inefficiencies with your biggest asset– your people.

Can we get real-time visibility, can we align every team with the company strategy; can we optimise the internal workflow to enhance customer value?

All that has led to a fundamental question, how do we harness the power of digital transformation and enable new ways of working? Today’s market demands a higher level of cross-team collaboration and movement in order to successfully compete.

• Dev and IT need to work closely together to ship delightful customer experiences.
• Marketing and support teams may need to prepare for weekly or daily launches as product changes roll out faster.
• Finance and sales teams may need to be aligned to adapt to new pricing and packaging models.
• Executive teams need to make sure that shifting priorities gets reflected in the work that gets done.

These are just some examples of the cross-collaboration that modern companies need to adopt, but the bottom line is – it cannot just be your software teams that operate in an agile fashion.

The best innovation emerges when teams across your organisation are able to work better together.  As the leader in your organisation, you have the opportunity to lead your teams into this agile way of working.

How to scale with enterprise agility

As your business grows and objectives evolve,  your teams have to navigate even more complexity– across departments, business units, regions and timezones. The demands on modern teams increases the complexity of teamwork.

• Can you adjust your budgets and resources monthly or even weekly?
• How do you identify and resolve bottlenecks?
• Are you able to make tradeoffs decisions or pivots without having all the information?
• How do you account for changes in work allocation across teams, products and platforms, and are you able to properly staff the most important initiatives?
• What are all the dependencies between your teams and do you have visibility to them before they become a problem?
• How do you set objectives and ensure the entire company is aligned to the same goals?

Our experience shows that there are two things you need to master at scale. You need to be able to build the capability for your business and technical teams to rapidly deliver solutions while at the same time linking the work your teams are doing with clear outcomes and objectives.

How do we do this? One way is to provide a connected platform that takes into consideration your business’s strategic direction; identifies the outcomes that are important for your business; and connects them from epics to features to stories and tasks at the working level, in order to achieve clear alignment for management, business and technical teams.

Again, why do organisations take on this change to enterprise agility at scale？

Also Read: Why it is time to reinvent The Agile Manifesto to answer challenges of a remote team

Here are a few examples of how we have seen companies winning customers as they have pursued their transformation goals.

• Decreasing time to market – in helping one customer tackle predictable delivery, we helped them to reduce their time to market by 40-50 per cent
• Improving quality – uncovering duplicative work, a major cost savings to the customer, which never would have happened if their work was not visible and connected across the organisation
• And finally, the opportunity to reduce the variance in team tooling and need for manual reporting. A single solution powered by real-time team tool data solves complexity and creates savings along the way.

Here is just a sample of the companies that have embraced enterprise agility. Ready to unlock the potential of your enterprise?

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Apps are taking over the world. Grab, Robinhood, DoNotPay, Snapchat, mobile apps are expected to generate over a trillion in revenue by 2024. On the other hand, third-world countries are considered now the new breeding ground for app innovations and next-gen app entrepreneurs.

Why?

There’s no doubt that developing nations have more real-world problems than first-world countries. Areas such as community, logistics, education, legal, and environment are only some of the spaces to which there’s a ton of potential for innovation.

As we all saw, there’s an increasing trend of investors pouring funding into startups in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam.

This is because first, there are a lot of problems yet to be solved in Southeast Asia, which means there’s a lot of market potential and a lower barrier for entry.

To address the opportunity and problem statement, we founded Hikre School with one concept in mind, to create an all-in-one program for aspiring app entrepreneurs. Students get to learn from scratch how to design and build apps from their computers while working on finding a solution for a real-world problem.

To make our vision possible, we leverage a learning and teaching framework called challenge-based learning, which is similar to project-based learning, however, challenge-based learning incorporates technology into the process. The goal is to have students come up with possible real-world solutions to problems.

A bit of history, challenged-based learning first appeared from the “Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow — Today”, a project initiated in 2008 by Apple to identify the essential design principles of a 21st-century learning environment.

In this model, students are instructed to simulate problem-solving solutions through collaboration, hands-on learning, and app challenges. For instance, before they go to design or code apps, they first have to go through brainstorming their big ideas, essential questions, and challenges.

Also Read: Gojek wants to move from the idea of a super app to an on-demand company for everything: Group CTO

Within the first three months of launch, we’ve gathered 200+ feedbacks from social media and nearly 200 student applications. This shows an increasing interest in app development among college students, freelancers, and business owners.

Take a look at one of the student projects.

Source: Youtube/Hikre School

The team designed a healthcare app to help transition physical health services to online services.

According to Philippine Statistics Authority, in 2020, suicide in the Philippines went up 26 per cent. When the pandemic started, unemployment rose, stress levels skyrocketed, reports of domestic abuse are up.

In times like these, we need to use technology to fill in the gaps. One way to we can do that is through mobile apps.

The app also features an AI called Moxie that guides you through your medical needs. It asks you questions for instance regarding the pain level of your headache to which it provides you the right consultation and advice. Plus, you can connect and consult with doctors directly from the app.

It’s your medical care within your reach.

Another team applied to Impact Hub Manila’s hackathon, which is one of the biggest organisers in the Philippines. The event was a three-day-long where students from all over the Philippines came together to brainstorm an idea, build a demo prototype, and propose a solution to the big idea of Climate Change.

The team designed and developed a beautiful solution for managing the issue of plastic waste. It’s a combination of education and gamification in one platform designed to encourage a call to action among high school and college students show below.

Also Read: A new approach to hybrid working: Let the employees decide when, how and where to work

As a result of the students’ creation, they walked away as grand champions along with $20,000 worth of incubation support from Impact Hub Manila and a 35,000 PHP cash prize.

These are just some case studies and projects proposed by the students on how to tackle problems not only in the Philippines but for entire Southeast Asia. Just like how the Western is ruled by apps, soon Southeast Asia will follow its path.

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Lucy, a neobank focused on women entrepreneurs, has secured an undisclosed amount in seed financing from Hong Kong-based global investment firm EmergeVest at a US$10 million valuation.

As per a statement, this deal will help Lucy refine its tech platform, round out the team in Singapore, and pilot in the local market before expanding regionally through strategic partnerships.

Before this round, Lucy secured US$450,000 in a women-only round of 21 diverse women, including Sephora Asia MD Hanh Nguyen and a number of other high-profile women from the region and the world.

Also Read: Why neobanks are better than digital banks

The initial funding came from Lucy’s co-founders Debbie Watkins (former MD of Fern Software APMEA), Hal Bosher (former CEO of Yoma Bank and Chairman of Wave Money), and Luke Janssen (former CEO and Chairman of Tigerspike), besides the Savearth fund.

Through her over 20 years working with underserved communities, Debbie saw first-hand that women were a financially excluded group. However, Hal’s experience with his customers at Yoma proved that women were great customers. So the duo decided to set up Lucy, a neobank and community focused on women entrepreneurs.

The app helps women entrepreneurs set up, run and grow their businesses, with affordable financial services including fee-free accounts with Mastercard, no-interest salary advances, savings accounts, loan management, and low-cost remittances.

Lucy also offers a community-based platform for women to connect with their peers and mentors for inspiration, support, e-training modules, and a networking marketplace.

The startup will focus on two underserved groups of women entrepreneurs for its pilot launch in Singapore. They are 1) home-based entrepreneurs or women with a ‘side hustle’, and 2) domestic helpers, many of whom run small businesses in their home countries.

The second category will help it drive expansion to nearby markets of Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar (Lucy has recently won a UNCDF grant to help support low-cost remittances to these countries). A recent study noted that the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam have the highest prospects in Asia for neobank.

Also Read: Neobanks: the future of banking?

Formed in 2013, EmergeVest is an investment firm with US$500 million in assets under management. It invests across the capital structure at the intersection of the supply chain, technology and financial services.

A pre-pandemic analysis conducted by Boston Consulting Group showed that if women and men worldwide participated equally as entrepreneurs, the global economy would get a boost of US$2.5-5 trillion. Post-COVID, the need to support women entrepreneurs is even greater.

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Image Credit: Lucy

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Indonesian e-commerce giant Bukalapak today made its debut on the Indonesia Stock Exchange, raising US$1.5 billion in its initial public offering (IPO).

Debuting at IDR850, the shares price rose 25 per cent and was capped at IDR1,060 (US$1=IDR14,369).

Bukalapak wants to use the proceeds from the IPO to support the operations of its holding company and its subsidiaries.

According to a The Straits Times report, based on the Bloomberg data, the debut gain has pushed Bukalapak’s valuation to IDR109 trillion (US$7.6 billion), putting it on par with state-owned enterprise Jasa Marga and telco Axiata.

In a press conference, CEO Rachmat Kaimuddin said Bukalapak remains committed to maintaining its performance and supporting Indonesian MSMEs through its various services. 

The firm also aims to implement a business strategy that includes strengthening its “all-commerce platform” and partnering with Mitra Bukalapak, the MSMEs using the platform.

It will also increase its focus in tier-two and tier-three cities in Indonesia.

“We aim to create a fair economy for all,” Kaimuddin said. 

Also Read: Ecosystem Roundup: Firms in SEA raise record US$4.9B via IPOs in H1; Temasek, DBS form US$500M debt platform

Bukalapak’s journey began in 2010 as a C2C online marketplace. Over the years, the company has ventured into various verticals, including fintech and O2O e-commerce.

The firm became a unicorn in January 2018 and counts GIC and Microsoft among its investors. It is also the first unicorn in the archipelago to go public both domestically and abroad.

According to Kaimuddin, Bukalapak chose IDX to list its shares, given its status as a local company with stakeholders primarily based in the country.

Bukalapak, however, is not the first company to list on the IDX. In 2017, two Indonesian tech startups Kioson and MCash had gone public on the local exchange. Kioson raised US$3.3 million on the very first day, while M Cash raised US$22 million.

In an interview with e27 in June 2020, IDX commissioner Pandu Sjahrir spoke about the organisation’s plan to encourage more Indonesian tech companies to get listed on the stock exchange.

“What we are doing here is deepening the demand, particularly by having more young investors on board. It is something that starts with education about the capital market,” Sjahrir said.

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Image Credit: Bukalapak

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Although its fintech industry is still relatively nascent compared to major players like London, the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur climbed 11 places in this year’s Global Fintech Rankings. There is no shortage of homegrown success stories. Among them is Jirnexu, which provides digital acquisition solutions for financial service providers and has raised US$37 million to date. In January, supply chain finance startup and P2P financing platform CapBay bagged US$20 million in a Series A fundraise.

Malaysia’s consumers are spoilt for choice when it comes to e-wallet providers with a number of major players as listed by Jobstreet, such as GrabPay, CIMB Pay, AEON Wallet, Boost, and Touch ‘n Go. Cashless transaction has taken on an increasingly prominent role in people’s lives, so much so that the active user base for the e-payment system used for expressway tolls has ballooned to 21 million people. In fact, Malaysia boasts an ASEAN-leading digital wallet usage rate of 40%, ahead of neighbours like the Philippines (36%), Thailand (27%), and Singapore (26%). Cash usage has correspondingly dropped by 64% since the beginning of the pandemic.

These statistics are all reflective of the country’s thriving digital market. With more consumers prioritising convenience and hygiene, they naturally turned towards contactless methods like e-wallets and digital banking. These developments have also manifested in the overall growth and expansion of these fintech companies. For example, AIA Malaysia recently purchased a minority share in Touch ‘n Go, putting their value at RM 3 billion. On the other hand, Boost recently teamed up with RHB Banking Group, signalling their move into the highest-margin segments of financial services.

Also read: How these four India-based startups are impacting the earth

The recent pandemic has accelerated this growth, enabling the market to adopt fintech solutions at a much faster and larger rate. According to the Fintech Malaysia 2021 report, mobile banking transactions reached a record high of US$109.7 million in 2020, an increase of 125% compared to the year before. Unprecedented nationwide lockdowns have forced people to work from home, pushed businesses online, and encouraged the use of digital payments. All these have spurred Malaysian fintechs to shine amidst the challenges.

The growth of Malaysia’s fintech ecosystem is also partly thanks to regulatory support from both Bank Negara Malaysia (Malaysia Central Bank) & the Securities Commission. To support the efforts of regulators, the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) has launched the Fintech Booster which is a capacity building program, in collaboration with Bank Negara Malaysia to assist fintech companies, both local and foreign in developing their products and services via three strategically crafted modules; Legal & Compliance, Business Model, and Technology.

Malaysia fintechs going global

Among the companies that have benefitted from MDEC’s programmes is Soft Space, which provides fintech infrastructure services for the financial services industry (FSI). It delivers these solutions via a “fintech-as-a-service model”, allowing FSIs to pay only according to their usage demand. Specifically, they help FSIs accept payments and issue physical white label prepaid cards via e-wallets.

One of Soft Space’s innovation is the “Tap to Phone” introduced with PayNet back in 2018. The solution, a world’s first, is a gamechanger to the payment landscape by allowing any Android device with near-field communications to accept contactless cards.

Tap to Phone has been endorsed by major card schemes like Visa, Mastercard, JCB, and most recently UnionPay International. It is also used by clients in Australia, Europe, and Japan where, JCB, one of the largest card brands with over 140 million cards in circulation, has introduced this payment technology to its member banks across 24 countries.

“Soft Space has already introduced this technology to 13 FSIs and 8 partners globally, some of which are unicorn payment giants that have the most stringent business and security requirements,” said chief strategy officer Chris Leong.

Also read: Angel Investors: leading the charge for startup growth in Thailand

Soft Space has also ventured into the transport and logistic sector in two advanced markets. In Japan, Tap to Phone is the first in the market to enable expressway buses to accept contactless credit cards. Meanwhile, in Australia, it is used by Transport for New South Wales to validate payments. This is a further testament to Soft Space’s capabilities.

The fintech has also successfully expanded to other overseas markets, including Taiwan, Australia, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia.

Soft Space has managed to hit these key milestones because of the rich Malaysian fintech ecosystem and the support of the government. The country’s central bank, for instance, actively emphasises the need for Malaysia’s regulations to be aligned with global standards, which ensures that local fintech companies are always well-positioned to go global.

But Soft Space isn’t alone in this feat. Joining them among the roster of Malaysian fintechs that have gone global are Tranglo, JurisTech, and Merchantrade.

More local players scaling globally

Tranglo is a fintech that specialises in cross-border payments. They provide three solutions: Tranglo Connect, Tranglo Business, and Tranglo Recharge, which respectively provide remittance payouts, payouts for businesses without money service business licences, and international airtime transfers.

Recently, US fintech giant Ripple announced that it would be acquiring a 40% stake in Tranglo. With this partnership, Tranglo is ready for its next stage of growth.

“This acquisition supercharges Tranglo’s capabilities to include digital currency as settlement and blockchain technology to speed up and secure transactions further,” said chief executive officer Jacky Lee.

Despite challenges like regulatory differences and language barriers, Malaysia’s multilingual and multicultural uniqueness has enabled Tranglo to thrive abroad. It currently has a presence in more than 22 countries, such as the Philippines, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom.

JurisTech, which develops a variety of fintech solutions for different client classes, is also among Malaysia’s success stories. It offers credit management software solutions for banks and financial institutions. Furthermore, it provides “software-as-a-service” products for small and medium-sized enterprises and customised marketing solutions via its consumer’s arm, iMoney.

The company created a machine learning tool, Juris Mindcraft, that does prescriptive analytics artificial intelligence (AI). It helps businesses make better decisions through the analysis of raw data in addition to providing business recommendations. Furthermore, they also introduced Juris Access, a digital onboarding platform, for organisations to deliver an easy to navigate, interactive digital space that streamlines the customer journey from the front-end to the back-end.

JurisTech has expanded globally to Australia, Uganda, Singapore, and United Arab Emirates (UAE). As the financial industry matures to transform digitally, JurisTech already has ready-built components and solutions for banks, financial institutions, Fintechs, and SMEs to help compose this future digitally.

Also read: How Malaysia’s Glueck Technologies is revolutionising data-driven technology in Southeast Asia

Another promising player in the fintech ecosystem is Merchantrade. The company provides multiple fintech solutions such as the Merchantrade Money eWallet, which includes a visa prepaid card, remittance app eRemit, and payment gateway service Ozopay.

Today, Merchantrade is one of the largest remittance providers in Southeast Asia, with more than 100 payout partners including more than 40 banks worldwide. Partners from places as far as Europe, Canada, Oman, and Bangladesh can also access their international money transfer operator platform.

Soft Space, Tranglo, JurisTech, and Merchantrade will all feature at the forthcoming Malaysia Tech Month Fintech Showcase, a curation of the country’s top fintech companies.

To learn more about the programme and the fintech showcase, please visit the Malaysia Tech Month official page.

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

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Arise, a joint venture by Finch Capital and MDI Ventures, has announced the first close of its US$40-million debut fund.

Multiple third-party corporate investors, family offices, and high-net-worth backers joined the fund. Notable among these is Indonesia’s publicly traded ICT giant Metrodata Electronics.

With ticket sizes ranging from US$250,000 to US$3 million, the Indonesia-based fund plans to invest in 25 tech startups in the post-seed to pre-Series A stages in Southeast Asia for the next three years. 

Startups funded by Arise are given a path to receive investments at later stages of their development, all the way up to exit (IPO or M&A). 

Also read: Blibli is the latest Indonesian tech company to confirm unicorn status

Arise is currently in the process of executing new investments. The fund targets at least five closed deals by the end of 2021.

Established in late 2020, Arise goes beyond writing cheques to invest in startups early — even before the founders fully solidify their ideas and teams. 

In addition, it provides access to strategic go-to-market partners via its corporate LP network. It also empowers long-term capital through its affiliated sister funds, such as MDI Ventures and Centauri Fund.

Before receiving capital from Arise, startups will also have an option to enter Telkom’s Indigo Nation incubator. They can also benefit from a broad network of Arise’s corporate LPs and tech ecosystems in Europe, Asia, and Silicon Valley.

According to Arise Partner Aldi Adrian Hartanto, despite the significant influx of high-quality founders over the last decade, a disproportionate capital allocation makes the situation more challenging for promising entrepreneurs to secure investments during the region’s economic slowdown. 

“Many of these ‘next generation’ founders, who often come with experience from established local tech ‘unicorns’ and ‘centaurs,’ already know how to grow and scale tech ventures in the local market. But they have yet to really get their names out there and still require further support in accelerating product-market fit, validating ideas, and raising proper series A rounds after that,” he said.

“Startups backed by Arise should ideally go on to receive investment from Centauri at the series A stage, MDI Ventures at series B and later stages. Finally, in some cases, they should see a meaningful exit via acquisition with Telkom Group as one of the potential buyers or IPO,” added Hartanto.

“We’ve seen many seed-stage companies struggling to access the right markets, which is reflected by a lack of traction,” says Hans De Back, Managing Partner at Finch Capital. “Our role is to solve this problem with immediate go-to-market avenues by collaborating with our network of enterprise partners such as Metrodata and portfolio companies. In this way, we can enable companies to grow much faster and set them up stronger for series A.”

Also Read: Bukalapak raises US$1.5B on the first day of its IDX debut, shares jump 25 per cent

Earlier this year, Finch Capital, which focuses on European and ASEAN markets, announced the first close of its third European Fund (EUR150M) in high-growth fintech and AI startups. 

Meanwhile, MDI Ventures, with US$830 million in assets under management, provides startups with a wide range of opportunities to get plugged into Indonesia’s Telkom Group of businesses in telecoms, multimedia, property, financial services, and a network of other state-owned enterprises.

In recent years, with the tremendous rise of tech-based unicorns like Gojek, Traveloka, and recently Blibli, Indonesia is considered the most prominent startup hub in Southeast Asia. Today, the country’s e-commerce platform Bukalapak also announced its debut on the Indonesia stock exchange, the first unicorn in Southeast Asia to go public. 

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Image credit: Arise

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‘Gojek wants to move from the idea of a super app to an on-demand company for everything’: Group CTO
According to Severan Rault, the role of CTOs has changed over the past decade; His responsibility is now to bring technology into every function of the organisation.

Kredivo to go public via merger with Victory Park Capital’s SPAC at US$2.5B valuation
The transaction is expected to deliver over US$430M of gross proceeds; The public listing will enable Kredivo’s continued growth in Indonesia, expand into regional markets, and help it enter new business lines.

Huawei earmarks US$100M for investments in APAC startups over 3 years
It’ll focus on developing startup hubs in four new markets: Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines; This investment will be made as part of Huawei’s The Spark programme; The Spark programme is already being run in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Traveloka exploring US listing via SAPC deal, looks to raise US$400M
As per a Bloomberg report, the SPAC is backed by Peter Thiel; The deal will value the combined entity at about US$5B; DealStreetAsia earlier reported that Traveloka was in advanced talks with Bridgetown Holdings.

Customer engagement platform MoEngage raises US$32.5M Series C+
Investors include Multiples Alternate Asset Management, Eight Roads Ventures, F-Prime Capital, and Matrix Partners; MoEngage provides marketers and product managers with consumer behaviour data and the ability to act on those insights to engage customers across web, mobile, email, social, and messaging channels.

Vietnam’s e-commerce delivery startup Loship raises US$12M
Lead investors are BAce Capital and the direct investment unit of Sun Hung Kai & Co; Skype co-founder’s MetaPlanet and Wealth Well (Saudi Arabia), and Prism Ventures (Singapore), also joined; Loship will use the money to expand into new regions, and grow its B2B delivery offering for small F&B businesses and mom-and-pop shops.

Asian tech startups drawing looks from hungry investors
Crackdowns on Chinese startups are likely to make global investors look elsewhere and bolster the share prices of other companies in the region. But this coming-of-age moment is still missing a crucial ingredient: monetisation.

Equity, fund management platform Quotabook raises US$5M
Investors include Carta Ventures, Elefund, Draper Associates, and Goodwater Capital; It helps founders organise and simplify equity including cap tables, equity rewards and valuation on its platform, where such data is automatically laid out for their investors in a view to tracking portfolio’s growth and performance.

Singapore B2B sales platform Nektar.ai raises US$6M
Investors are B Capital Group, 3One4 Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners; The latest round of funding takes the total seed amount raised by the startup to US$8.1M; Nektar.ai compares its AI-powered guided selling solution to customer relationship management systems like Salesforce.

Singapore’s Ohmyhome bags US$5M from Swettenham Blue
The proptech platform will use the money to develop a data-matching tech that fast-tracks closing of property deals; It operates on a hybrid model — DIY platform and fully-fledged agency services; Ohmyhome is planning to launch its Series B funding round next year.

Indonesian fintech Ayoconnect raises US$5M pre-Series B led by VC firm AAVCF4 PF1 LP
Other backers are Black’s Link Investment, The Next Unicorn Fund, Patamar Fund, and Mandiri Capital; The fintech startup connects bill providers with online and offline channel partners and financial institutions, so end consumers can pay their bills more seamlessly within its network.

Astronaut acquires Indonesia’s POPSkul
Astronaut enables companies to identify the right candidates from larger candidate pools whereas POPSkul enables people the opportunity to “get certified fast”, especially during the pandemic; With this acquisition, Astronaut will be integrating skills certificates into the candidate profiles on the Astronaut platform.

Sequoia India leads Thai SaaS firm FlowAccount’s US$4m series A round
The online invoicing firm offers cloud-based bilingual business solutions to help freelancers, small-business owners, and accountants in Thailand manage their accounting, payroll, and expense tasks on a single platform; FlowAccount said there are currently 50K customers.

Singapore edutech startup Flying Cape nets US$1.5M
Investors are Start-up O, EduSpaze, and undisclosed angels; The startup will use the money to scale its operations across China and SEA; Flying Cape helps parents understand their children’s learning styles, hobbies, and passions; It also helps them identify appropriate classes for their children through tailored suggestions made by its proprietary SMART diagnostic assessment tools.

IoT-enabled coffee machine startup Morning raises US$1.27M
Investors include zVentures (lead), The Lo & Behold Group, and Zopim founders; The money will go towards strengthening Morning’s international expansion; The machine uses precision brewing features, combined with a recipe-driven ecosystem, to deliver every cup of coffee precisely as the roaster intended it to taste.

Ghost kitchen startup MadEats makes it into Y Combinator;
The foodtech venture also disclosed that it is currently in talks to raise a 7-figure USD in seed funding. The firm has already raised one-fourth of this amount from some angel investors and former YC alumni, and it target to close this round by September.

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