Indonesia-based property tech platform Jendela360 announced an undisclosed strategic investment round from an entity affiliated to local conglomerate group Sinar Mas Group.

This investment followed a US$1 million funding round led by BEENEXT that the company announced in June 2020.

Jendela360 plans to use the new funding to accelerate its business growth, extend the rental and sales operation and aim to be the number one player in the industry by continuing to expand its products and services, invest in its technology and, naturally, toward hiring. The startup also wants to scale into new markets and go deeper into existing markets.

In an email to e27, Daniel Rannu, co-founder and CEO of Jendela360, gave a further explanation about the company’s plan with the funding.

“Before the pandemic, we only focused on long-term rental. But because of the pandemic, we have to enter the shorter-term rental market and property sales market sooner than we expected. This turns out to be a blessing in disguise … as now, more than ever, people are willing to try on a digital solution to find their desired properties. We’ve experienced tremendous (four times) growth as a property tech in the past 18 months,” he wrote.

Also Read: Sustainability starts at home: How I aim to tackle climate change as PropertyGuru CEO

“Since the Indonesian property market is a HUGE market. Our strategy for the next few years is to simply expand nationwide. Lucky for us, we founded Jendela360 to serve the Indonesian market where we have 270 million people living here, and there are still large parts of the pie that we can take on.”

In addition to its four-times growth, the startup also claimed to be operationally profitable.

Founded in 2017, Jendela360 aims to streamline the process of property transactions in Indonesia with its O2O approach. It offers data-driven apps powered by machine learning engines to generate leads and pair them with the right agents efficiently.

Rannu believes that the key factor to help the property industry digitalisation is by utilising the right technology, combined with the wisdom on how-to-do interaction, instead of replacing agents.

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Image Credit: Jendela360

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Japan’s Arkray launches US$87M VC arm to back healthcare startups in Asia
It will invest up to US$2.6M each in startups across Japan, SEA, India and Israel; Focus sectors are digital healthcare, medtech, biotech, AI, IoT medical devices, cloud pharmacies, medical diagnostics, personal wellness & self-care, pet-tech, medical and functional foodtech.

Hyperlocal mapping: a solution for real-world interactions in retail metaverse
Hyperlocal mapping allows mobility companies to engage their workforce, vehicles, customers and products by validating pick-up locations on private maps with high precision.

Tinder founder’s JAM Fund invests in PayMongo’s US$31M Series B financing round
Other backers are ICCP-SBI Venture Partners, Kaya Founders, GFC, SOMA Capital, and angels; The B2B payments firm will venture into more financial products involving disbursements, capital lending, “buy now, pay later,” subscriptions and recurring payments.

StockViva closes US$5M Series A funding
Backers are Farquhar VC, Kharis Capital, Hong Huan Group, and Angelhub; StockViva’s mobile app provides real-time online education services by financial key opinion leaders, and online trading connection with different financial institutions in Asia.

Singapore AI startup 6Estates raises US$6.2M Series B+ round
Investors are Sinar Mas, Seeds Capital, and Farquhar VC; 6Estates is an AI fintech platform that specialises in multilingual natural language processing and machine reading comprehension technologies.

Singapore AR startup BuzzAR bags US$3.8M funding
Investors are F50 Elevate, Ian Wilson of Marina Bay Sands, and Peter Hlavnicka of SenzeCare; BuzzAR helps retail and commerce firms create personalized and location-based AR experiences for their customers; it has also acquired a mobile game called The Cooking Game VR.

Jendela360 raises funding from Sinar Mas affiliate to expand in Indonesia
Jendela360 aims to streamline the process of property transactions in Indonesia with its O2O approach; It offers data-driven apps powered by ML engines to generate leads and pair them with the right agents efficiently.

Animoca Brands acquires motorsports game developer Grease Monkey Games
The deal will allow Animoca Brands to benefit from Grease Monkey’s significant game development capabilities and expertise; So far, Grease Monkey has logged 45M downloads across both mobile and PC worldwide.

Malaysia city and property data company Urbanmetry raises US$2M pre-Series A
Lead investor is Monk’s Hill; Urbanmetry is a property data company that harvests, cleans, and analyses large amounts of city data, through AI and proprietary algorithms to extract trends and patterns in the built environment.

PRIMO gets pre-Series A funding to expand its omnichannel marketing platform
Investors are Fuchsia VC, Beacon VC, SOSV, and Infinity Technologies VC; PRIMO claimed 2x growth y-o-y on average over the past three years; It’s working with retail, FMCG, banking, finance, and insurance firms.

Chillchat closes US$1.85M seed funding
Investors include Solana Ventures, FTX Ventures, Animoca Brands, and Griffin Gaming Partners; Chillchat builds the pocket metaverse: a Create2Earn virtual world focused on user-generated content where players can quickly and easily create NFTs in the form of characters, pets, and worlds.

SOSV names 13 startups for 12th consumer tech cohort
SOSV has more than US$1.2 billion in assets under management from 1,120 companies in its portfolio; It said that tech firms in its portfolio raised a total of US$215 million in 2021.

US adds e-commerce sites operated by Tencent, Alibaba to ‘notorious markets’ list
They reportedly facilitated substantial trademark counterfeiting; The US Trade Representative identifies 42 online markets and 35 physical markets that are reported to engage in or facilitate substantial trademark counterfeiting or copyright piracy.

Sequoia to raise up to US$600M for new crypto fund
Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire said that the VC firm views cryptocurrency as a megatrend that would carry on over the next two decades; The cryptocurrency fund will be one of three new sub-funds under Sequoia Capital Fund.

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Singapore-based climate-tech venture firm Aera VC has announced the US$30 million first close of its new fund.

The fund, backed by families investing in climate solutions, will support startups accelerating the planet toward a sustainable future, the firm said in a statement.

Aera VC has already backed Houston-based chemical decarbonisation firm Solugen (valued at US$1.8 billion), Shiok Meats (Singapore), Carbon Chain (London), Noya and Twelve (San Francisco), and Fable Foods (Australia).

Separately, the VC firm has also launched an investment DAO (distributed autonomous organisation) called Aera Force, with 2000 ETH (approx US$6 million). It has been earmarked for pre-seed projects harnessing the power of blockchain to conquer climate and carbon-related challenges.

Established in partnership with the creators of Dream DAO, Aera Force will expand the global community of innovators, scientists and founders formed in the past five years by Aera VC.

Also Read: Investible launches new US$72M fund to invest in seed-stage climate tech startups

“The entire world needs to be rebuilt and decarbonised,” said Aera VC Founding Partner Derek Handley. “At Aera VC, our long-term vision is about investing across the sustainability spectrum by backing breakthrough technologies that reverse climate change, whether they spawn from blockchain innovations or through scientific discoveries. Every industry needs to be reimagined, from finance, food, and fashion to chemicals, cement, and construction.”

The new Aera fund expects to make up to 30 new seed investments over the next two years and contribute to follow-on rounds. The fund is continuing to accept further subscriptions up to US$100 million from institutional investors in 2022 who will join the international community of family offices.

The company’s new headquarters in Singapore positions Aera VC as one of the first global climate funds in the Asia-Pacific region. Aera VC portfolio companies have raised over a billion dollars since receiving Aera’s backing.

Aera VC was formed in 2016 by Handley, who was joined by fellow New Zealander Nick Winstone to launch the VC firm from their bases in New Zealand and New York. Handley has been investing in environmental and social-impact ventures since serving as the founding CEO of Richard Branson’s B Team sustainability collective in 2013.

In October 2021, Wavemaker Partners, an active Singapore-based VC firm, launched a US$25 million climate-tech venture builder in Southeast Asia.

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As we set out on the Agile journey, picking Kanban seemed like a no-brainer. It is visual, easy to use, and a perfect fit for the PM tool we have been developing. However, after a short few months, we realised scrum was indeed a better fit and switched. 

Here is our story. Hopefully, it will give you some insights. 

Why did we choose Kanban? 

As a small engineering team with a new product (we developed a project management tool called Teamhood), we had no strict timeliness or process to follow.

Thus, Kanban seemed like a perfect fit. It allowed us to visualise what was happening, prioritise the most necessary items and track their progress.

The team would meet for a daily standup to discuss progress, and monthly retrospectives would be held to see what could be improved. All of this was great until the product beta went live, and the engineering team’s focus had to shift. 

Why did it not work? 

With the launch of our beta version, we got the first paying customers. Yay! But with that came customer expectation management and a need to provide reliable forecasts for the new features.  

With the engineering team working in Kanban, the sales and marketing teams had issues in knowing when to expect new features. As a result, they could not plan timely marketing and sales actions to promote the new features coming out.  

Moreover, the clients needed to know when specific features would be live, and the engineering team could not provide those answers. As such, we knew it was time to change. 

How Scrum improved our process 

Thus, instead of Kanban, we switched to Scrum and introduced new practices to improve the process. 

First, we have chosen 2-week iterations to ease estimation and feature predictability. We had to think about which features could be delivered in two weeks and commit to them. This was especially useful for the sales and marketing teams that were communicating with existing and potential customers. 

Also Read: How can you build a living, thriving community around your SaaS product?

We have also divided the work into several boards to better separate different processes. Design, roadmap planning, backlog, UI/UK, and development are all done on different boards, thus better categorising all work items.

We have introduced various new ceremonies to ensure all the processes are under control. Roadmap planning and prioritisations, backlog review, backlog planning, backlog refinement, backlog planning, and others were added to ensure we deliver value to our customers and work on the most important features.

Lastly, we have started using T-shirt sizes to estimate the features. This helps us ensure each feature we commit to can be delivered during one iteration. Otherwise, we rework the feature to make sure it can fit the iteration or push it back to the drawing board. 

What’s next? 

We have successfully moved away from Kanban and into Scrum territory. However, the Scrum application is far from the textbook. Some could argue that it is far more resembling Scrumban. I don’t disagree. 

Will we move towards full Scrum in the future? No one knows. However, we will not do it just for the name. Instead of applying any of the practises blindly, we tend to look and see what works best for the process and our needs now.  

Have you changed Agile practices with your team? I would love to hear your comments. 

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Indonesian edutech startup Zenius acquired local offline cram school chain Primagama. According to a source, this acquisition includes all offline branches of the institution in the country. According to a statement on Primagama’s site, the company currently operates more than 250 branches in various provinces in Indonesia, serving four million students with 3,000 employees. It operates using the franchise model.

By the time this article was published, DailySocial has reached out to a Zenius representation.

Founded by Sabda PS and Medy Suharta, Zenius is known as one of the pioneers of online tutoring services in Indonesia. They debuted with offline tutoring and packaged material on DVD before becoming a fully online service.

Primagama itself was founded in 1982. The collaboration between the two organisations will allow the integration of online-to-offline learning models or blended learning, utilising their infrastructure and capabilities.

Previously, in the early 2010s, Primagama has developed an online service called PrimagamaPlus. However, due to a premature market, the service did not manage to gain traction as direct (offline) tutoring remained the primadonna of the time. Currently, the applications are available to support the learning process, but there has not been much traction.

Zenius’ corporate action was held amidst the collapse of many offline tutoring businesses due to the pandemic. The school-from-home scheme as introduced by the authority throughout the pandemic has caused declining demand for offline tutoring, especially when edutech services are gaining popularity.

On the other hand, Zenius’s collaboration with Primagama has the potential to provide a more engaging learning experience, especially once offline learning activities resume.

Also Read: The 27 Indonesian startups that have taken the ecosystem to next level this year

According to the 2021 KPAI survey, 78 per cent of students demand to return to class. Virtual spaces are considered less effective. Fifty-seven per cent of students find it difficult to follow the subject matter and conduct practicum.

Zenius growth

Zenius currently has several products with the best-selling being its online tutoring service. Throughout the 2019/2020 school year, the Zenius tutoring application was accessed by more than 20 million users. It contains around 100,000 learning videos and practise questions that are accessible for free. In addition to that, Zenius also provides Live Class services for direct guidance with selected teachers; there is also a written national exam simulation and several other learning products.

Apart from formal learning, the company also provides Zenius Land app for toddlers, ZenPro for professional learning with more general subjects, and teaching management platform ZenRu, in addition to its focus on students.

In early 2021, Zenius secured a Pre-Series B round backed by a number of investors, including Alpha JWC Ventures, Openspace Ventures, Northstar, Kinesys, and BeeNext. Earlier, they announced an investment of US$20 million in a Series A round. Zenius’s valuation is currently estimated at over US$100 million.

Market competition and value proposition

Indonesian edutech sector is growing rapidly. The two head-to-head players in the market are Ruangguru and Zenius – statistically, Ruangguru’s site visits and application downloads are far more superior. In addition to that, the two companies owned similar sub-product variants.

Zenius puts a strong emphasis on providing quality learning materials. Instead of driving students to simply memorise information, the materials by Zenius stresses the importance of understanding fundamental concepts and critical thinking through various case studies.

Apart from Zenius and Ruangguru, a number of edutech startups are performing a manoeuvre in the market. Recently, CoLearn secured a Series A funding of IDR244 billion (US$16 million). The app heavily focused on math and science subjects, helping students complete homework independently. Other than that, there are also Pahamify, Squline, and others.

Also Read: How edutech is solving the global teacher’s crisis

The presence of Primagama in Zenius’ line of business has the potential to strengthen its value proposition once it succeeds in wrapping up a hybrid learning experience – this could also be the first in Indonesia.

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The article was written by Randi Eka Yonida in Bahasa Indonesia for DailySocial.

Image Credit: torwai

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