Preparing to raise funds is not only a pivotal moment for any startup on their entrepreneurial journey, but it is also one of the most significant challenges they face.

The venture capital financing landscape is constantly evolving; therefore, new businesses must know how to successfully approach the right investors to secure funding for their company’s growth and development.

Finding the right match

The first stop on the road to securing funding is finding the right investor. Whilst it might feel like a difficult task, several online platforms available, such as Crunchbase, will help with the research and narrow down the pool of potential venture capitalists or angel investors.

Whether or not an investor is suitable will largely depend on the space they are operating in, their knowledge of that space, and how invested they are in it. At the end of the day, any new business wants someone who will be able to look beyond the monetary gains and rather be a catalyst to the company’s growth and future possibilities.

Without the shared passion, the investors will not put in the time required to help the start-up out with customer connections, hiring in different geographies, or fundraising in the future. Therefore, finding the right one is vital to the company’s growth.

In a sense, a startup is practically marrying its investors, so the founders should perform their due diligence before committing to a long-term relationship. Investors will act as partners, advisors, mentors, and board members; hence reference checks need to be done to help make an informed decision. It is also best to ask the investor directly if they would introduce any of the founders they have worked with in the past; the transparency will help get the relationship off on the right foot.

Also Read: SEA tech founders playbook: A to Z of becoming a fundraising legend (Part 1)

Telling a story

Different types of funding rounds require slightly different approaches. However, there is one common and very important element to all of them– storytelling. Startups need to focus on telling a compelling story that will ‘sell’ their idea. The first eight to ten minutes of any pitch are the most critical as that’s how long it usually takes an investor to decide if they want to fund the company.

It might not seem like a long time, but start-ups can grab investors’ attention and get them excited about the project idea with the right preparation. Hiring a pitch deck-making agency as well as involving a content expert are two ideas worth exploring. Together they will help the start-up put the best slides and ensure the best narrative and story flow.

Crunching the numbers

As well as great storytelling, numbers matter a lot as they have the power to support the claims and ideas. For example, during a series B fundraising round, investors will expect to see signs of business growth. Therefore, the pitch deck has to include metrics, such as revenue, customer numbers and acquisition costs, lifetime value, the cost of goods sold, to name a few.

The deck also has to set out realistic targets and projections as well as include the amount of financial investment that is being sought. The latter number will differ in each round, but it should help the business for the next 18 months as a rule of thumb.

Knowing the numbers and showcasing the most relevant metrics will not only underpin the pitching narrative but also compel investors to believe in the company, resulting in them funding it.

Setting deadlines

The truth is, if a start-up does not set a pitching deadline for potential investors, they will always be in a fundraising mode. That could be detrimental for the business as less time will be spent on actually building the company. Additionally, if no deadline is set, investors might not take the business seriously.

Determining the deadline is an individual matter, and there is no perfect answer for defining one; different timelines work for different companies. However, start-ups should remember to give the investors enough time to do their work and outline their conditions in a term sheet.

Also Read: SEA tech founders playbook: A to Z of becoming a fundraising legend (Part 2)

Ready, set, fundraise

Founders and CEOs should consider fundraising as an obligation to their company. Raising capital is the most important and time-consuming job of any CEO, which requires a lot of preparation and research. While pitching rounds offer the obvious benefit of money; they are also an opportunity to expand the market knowledge and receive guidance moving forward.

Therefore, startups should approach fundraising pitches with the aim to learn first and foremost. Pitches start conversations. Making them fruitful and engaging, and showing passion, will increase new businesses’ chances of fundraising success.

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KoinWorks secures US$108M Series C led by MDI Ventures to hire 400 new employees
Other backers include Quona Capital, Triodos Investment, Saison Capital, AC Ventures, and East Ventures; The KoinWorks platform features a marketplace of integrated apps, such as accounting software, POS, e-commerce, HRMS for SME, and a budgeting app.

Sygnum raises US$90M to expand Web 3.0 offerings into new global markets
Investors include Sun Hung Kai & Co, Meta Investments, Animoca Brands, Wemade, SBI Holdings and SCB 10X; Sygnum provides a suite of integrated digital asset financial products and services, including bank-grade digital asset custody and fiat rails, spot and options trading.

eFishery rakes in US$90M Series C co-led by Temasek, SoftBank unit to expand to China, India
Since launching in 2013, eFishery claims to have deployed thousands of smart feeders, serving over 30K farmers across 24 provinces in Indonesia; It aims to acquire one million farmers in three to five years.

Gojek-funded wealth tech startup Pluang adds US$55M more to Series B round
Investors include Accel Partners, BRI Ventures, Square Peg, Go-Ventures, UOB Venture Management, and Openspace Ventures; Pluang, which claims to have 4M+ registered users, plans to expand its services to other Southeast Asian countries in the recent future.

Xurya closes US$21.5M Series A to construct rooftop solar power plant in Indonesia
Investors include East Ventures (Growth Fund), Saratoga, Schneider Electric, and New Energy Nexus Indonesia; Xurya offers a “no investment” method with a rental system to make it easier for industry players to transition to solar energy.

Validus, TTC Group, Do Ventures form JV to boost credit access to SMEs 
The group creates multiple synergies — one of which is TTC’s large ecosystem of SMEs across the energy, real estate, cane sugar, and hospitality industries; The JV also leverages Do Ventures’s deep expertise in the emerging fintech landscape in Vietnam.

Vietnam’s pawn shop chain F88 nets US$10M debt financing from Lendable
F88 renovates the traditional pawn shop model to provide borrowers credit access with inexpensive, transparent, and quick financial services; It plans to disburse half a billion US dollars in 2022.

Crowdo raises US$5.9M to ramp up regional ESG-driven financing for underserved SMEs
Investors include Gobi Partners, iVest Capital, and SEEDS Capital; Crowdo claims to have disbursed over US$73.8 million in financing since its Series A round and achieved profitability since mid-2020.

Sesto Robotics nets US$5.7M to tap into the growing demand for autonomous mobile robots in Europe
Investors include TRIVE, Germany’s World Trading Inovation WTI, and SEEDS Capital; Sesto’s autonomous mobile robots and automated guided vehicles have been employed by companies in manufacturing and healthcare.

Japan’s JCB injects US$5M into Malaysian fintech firm Soft Space
JCB owns and operates one of the largest payment schemes in Japan, supporting about 37M merchants and 140M cardmembers worldwide; JCB will expand the brand globally by leveraging its strength in Asia, especially in Southeast Asia.

Paywatch aims to scale its earned wage access biz across SEA with a US$5.25M funding
Investors are Third Prime, family offices in Singapore and Hong Kong, SparkLabs, Won & Partners, and CTK Investments; The capital injection will enable Paywatch to scale in its existing markets and expand into the Philippines and Indonesia.

BeLive lands US$4.5M funding to develop AI, ML capabilities in live-streaming
Lead investor is FTAG Ventures; BeLive intends to bring its live-video and live-commerce solutions to the global market by partnering with e-commerce giants, apps and brands.

Divvy Homes, Una Brands co-founders join Thai startup PropertyScout’s US$2.5M pre-Series A round
PropertyScout is an online marketplace for buying, renting and selling residential properties; It will scale into other Southeast Asian markets once the platform and processes are optimised and validated in Thailand.

Touchstone Partners leads US$1.1M seed funding of Vietnam’s social commerce platform ON
ThinkZone Ventures also invested; ON helps entrepreneurs earn extra income by starting an online business with assistance such as order handling, fulfilment, returns, shipping, and transactions.

1982 Ventures backs Indonesian agri commodity marketplace PasarMikro
PasarMikro provides various services to farmers and merchants for their daily transactions involving bookkeeping, lending, and marketplace; PasarMikro has formed a partnership with BRI and Rabo Foundation.

Superlative Secret Society, the community behind Indonesia’s first offline NFT gallery
Superlative Secret Society launches an offline gallery to educate the wider public and local artists community about the advantages of NFTs.

Carb0n.fi raises US$600K seed funding to provide carbon offset NFTs in ASEAN
Investors include Owl Ventures, Blockseed Ventures, Lancer Capita, Antler Singapore, and CryptoFOMO; Carb0n.fi’s platform allows users to put their crypto to work and be rewarded with carbon offsets and the project’s governance token $ZRO.

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Although Web3 is gaining momentum and drawing significant attention in many parts of the world as it promotes decentralisation, well-known entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey dismiss the concept.

“You don’t own “web3.” The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralised entity with a different label”, tweeted Dorsey in December.

Is Web3 a fad and too idealistic? Or is it the future?

We posed these questions to Chris Sirise (Partner at Singapore-based VC firm Saison Capital), who has been dabbling his hands in Web3 for the past few months.

Below are the edited excerpts from the interview:

Web3 is gaining popularity globally, including in Southeast Asia. How does Web3’s future look like in this region? What changes can it bring to the region’s startup ecosystem?

Southeast Asia is one of the best markets for Web3 to take off; consumers and businesses, used to higher traditional finance infrastructure challenges, can be more open to fintech innovation.

In our region, tokens have made it possible for companies to build strong and authentic communities around their products and brands. It won’t be surprising to increasingly see founders utilising these communities as a resource for growing their companies and brands.

Also Read: The transition is now: these Web3 apps are transforming global finance

The implications could mean significant changes in the dynamics built into the tech ecosystem as we know it. It will no longer just include founders, VCs and operators but also anyone involved in one of these communities through token ownership and is active in the community engagement. Founders will have more resources at their hands, and it will be increasingly easier to build a product to solve a problem.

What are the applications of Web3 and metaverse technologies in real life? Can you share some examples?

Adidas recently launched an NFT sale where holders of their NFTs will receive access to the limited edition Adidas merchandise. The holders of those NFTs have also become a community of Adidas’s most fervent fans.

FlamingoDAO is a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) that makes investments into NFTs and other assets through collective decision making among token holders.

Is Web3 a fad as it is still in its early stages of development and remains abstract and speculative? Why is the concept drawing widespread attention?

Web3 is definitely in its nascent stage, but the growing traction and real use cases have made it undeniable that Web3 as an industry will grow quickly and become enormous. Decentralisation and authenticity may seem like terms that have been overused in the context of blockchain’s history. However, with Web3, we see the theory of these terms turn into real shifts in culture.

While its proponents describe Web3 as the next framework for the next digital era, many like Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk have dismissed the concept as too idealistic, suggesting its promise of broad ownership is too good to be true. How do you view these comments?

Absolute decentralisation is unlikely to be the panacea for everything. In some cases, centralisation can be helpful to ensure there is a way for appropriate intervention when prejudices or nefarious activities occur.

Also Read: 7 Metaverse companies in Southeast Asia that caught our attention in 2021

However, Web3 should have more distributed ownership because tokens have introduced new ways to build communities around any company or product with aligned incentives.

A UK-based engineer and blogger, Stephen Diehl, says web3 is a vapid marketing campaign that attempts to reframe the public’s negative associations of crypto assets into a false narrative about the disruption of legacy tech company hegemony. Is there some truth to it?

The layman in the digital age is smarter than most people expect. Most recognise that the ideological benefits or disadvantages of both crypto assets and Web3 are very much the same. We see potential contrasts in the application, and in reality, that is what individual users will take away the most. Any piece of technology used in different hands will result in different outcomes.

Facebook recently expressed its intention to become a metaverse company and re-branded it as Meta. Don’t you think metaverse in the hands of one corporation will be detrimental to the entire Web 3.0 decentralisation movement?

Yes, it would be. However, it is too early to tell if that will happen. A safer assumption would be that Facebook will have many capable competitors with the same objective, and the end state will not be Web3 in the hands of one corporation.

Some say Facebook’s monopoly over metaverse will encourage competitors to come up with their own versions, leading to several ‘closed’ metaverses, which would be the Web 2.0 system all over again. Your comments…

Web2 ended up with closed ecosystems mainly because no other model was available. Now both businesses and consumers have options and choices. Blockchain as technology also has the fundamental advantage of being interoperable. Those two factors coupled will ensure the metaverse will unlikely be a monopoly.

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Japanese soccer star Keisuke Honda has launched a new global platform to connect startups, angel investors, VC firms and influencers from Japan, Asia and worldwide.

PROTOCOL, touted as “AngelList of Asia”, will leverage technology to ease burdens on founders and investors while boosting the ecosystem. 

In addition, the platform will be available for people seeking jobs in startups, planning to start a business or investing.

According to a press statement, since its alpha version was released six months ago, PROTOCOL has attracted more than 2,000 users from over 50 countries, including some well-known Japanese companies and venture capital firms such as SoftBank Vision Fund.

As executive chairman of PROTOCOL, Honda will utilise his global influence and connections as a soccer player to create a bridge between Japanese, Asian and the global startup ecosystems. Honda himself interviewed several founders he met on the platform and invested in 10 companies.

Also read: Understanding the traction metrics that investors are looking for in an early stage startup

Honda is touted as a top-scoring Asian soccer player in the history of the World Cup and the only player to register a goal and an assist in each of the last three tournaments. He was catapulted to stardom in Europe as the first Japanese player to be in the quarter-finals of the UEFA Champions League and scoring in the knock-out stages for CSKA Moscow.

Before PROTOCOL, Honda established KSK Angel Fund in 2016 to invest in new startups. By November 2021, KSK Angel Fund backed more than 90 Japanese and international firms.

“I’m now thinking of investing in about ten companies. Not limited to this prize amount, I plan to continue angel investing using KSK Angel as much as I can to create at least a slightly more peaceful and bright future for next generations,” Honda said in an interview.

Two years later, he joined hands with Hollywood actor Will Smith a VC firm Dreamers Fund. The fund was backed by Japanese institutions such as Nomura, Dentsu, and Shiseido, targeting Silicon Valley startups. Its principal goal and value are to act as a bridge to connect Japanese firms to knowledge, personal contacts, and commercial prospects in the global startup market.

So far, Honda has managed a portfolio of over 180 firms via the two funds.

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Image Credit: PROTOCOL

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SME growth financing platform Validus Vietnam, early-stage VC firm Do Ventures, and multi-industry conglomerate TTC Group announced today a joint venture to help local SMEs get credit access.

TTC Group has participated in the JV through its group company DHA Corporation, an investor in real estate, health, and sports.

The JV aims to drive financial inclusion and empower the growth of underserved SMEs in Vietnam. It will leverage TTC’s large ecosystem of SMEs across Vietnam’s energy, real estate, cane sugar, and hospitality industries. At the same time, Do Ventures’s expertise in fintech will support Validus’s growth ambitions, and the JV will benefit from potential synergies with portfolio companies under Do Ventures in future.

SMEs play a pivotal role in Vietnam’s economy. However, access to credit remains a pressing issue for SME development in the country. The SME financing gap stands at 12 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP).

Also Read: Validus Capital enters Vietnam; eyes a slice of the US$21B SME financing market

According to a World Bank Survey, during the COVID-19 crisis, the lack of access to finance has been exacerbated as liquidity remains a challenge under a continuous demand reduction. About 50 per cent of firms have under three months of cash flow, and over 60 per cent of firms have reported some difficulties with access to finance.

Vy Le, General Partner of Do Ventures, said, “The pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of SMEs in Vietnam, and there is a big opportunity for fintech firms to create meaningful and lasting impact through partnerships and technology. We look forward to harnessing synergies to strengthen SME resilience, drive growth for SMEs, and in turn, the economy.”

Since its launch in 2015, Validus has disbursed over US$1 billion in SME loans across Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. The company is backed by highly reputed VCs, including FMO, Vertex Growth, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India, AddVentures by SCG, K3 Ventures, Openspace Ventures and VinaCapital Ventures.

Also Read: Naver, Sea, Vertex invest in Vietnamese VC firm Do Ventures’s US$50M fund I

Do Ventures is a US$50-million early-stage VC fund. It seeks investment opportunities in technology startups that can develop meaningful products and services to improve consumers’ lives in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

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