The startup ecosystem in Southeast Asia is booming. Some term it the “golden era” for startups here. Notwithstanding the pandemic, startups within the region saw a record number of 393 investments in H1 2021, with a total of US$4.4 billion raised, eclipsing the 327 investments made in the same period last year.

Not only is the region seeing substantial investment in startups, but it is also seeing several of its startups become large fledgling companies. In 2021 alone, the region saw 21 unicorns, bringing its total to 40 unicorns, and counting.

Broadly speaking, Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem has been driven by a top-down approach, with strong government support. In Singapore, the government has taken the lead in fostering entrepreneurship by encouraging entrepreneurship programmes at the university level and supporting the creation of a strong investment ecosystem.

In other words, the government is an active stakeholder in the ecosystem. Accelerator and incubator programmes set up by industry associations and companies have helped develop a community of startup founders, angel investors, venture capital investors and private equity firms. 

Other macro trends have been critical in bringing us where we are. Digital adoption in the region has been phenomenal, especially in terms of mobile-first. The adoption of digital capabilities is exceptional and still growing in countries like Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Developments in markets with robust data collection frameworks and strong privacy laws, such as Singapore and the Philippines, have helped fuel the adoption of digital in Southeast Asia. And while COVID-19 has accelerated digital adoption across the board, it has been a boon for three specific sectors, e-commerce, gaming and fintech, in particular. 

Most importantly, however, in just about a decade, the risk appetite of founders and investors in the region has grown dramatically.

There’s positivity in the startup community, young graduates are eager to set up their own ventures, and we are also seeing ex-employees of large regional unicorns such as Grab starting on their own as we’ve seen in Silicon Valley, or investing in other innovative startups. This has provided a strong boost to the angel investment ecosystem.

Also Read: All in the family: How to build a community that accelerates business.

In short, there’s a buzz around startups and startups investing in Southeast Asia. This is excellent news for investors because we see deepening and broadening investment opportunities. 

The ecosystem isn’t without its challenges, however. One key challenge in Southeast Asia is the insufficiency of talent. Startups often find it challenging to get the right people with specific skill sets to plug holes in their teams.

However, the pandemic has inadvertently helped alleviate some of these challenges, especially as it has normalised remote work. Startups are increasingly acknowledging that hiring people from different time zones is not as much a challenge as it was once made out to be. If anything, it can even allow for more timely service delivery.  

Driving change

I’m often asked about the importance of investing in positive change. I like to respond to that by saying that every startup, company or business exists to provide a solution to a problem or to eliminate specific pain points. By virtue of that itself, every startup is driving positive change in some form or another. 

But additionally, some startups go that one step further to offer solutions that help drive sustainability or provide products and solutions that help poorer or marginalised sections of society. This does not mean these startups want to be commercially unviable. And instead, they want to play a part in driving positive change while remaining profitable. 

In this respect, startups in Singapore have support from the government. Under its recently announced Enterprise Sustainability Programme, the Singapore government has come forward to develop, strengthen and foster sustainability capabilities among businesses in Singapore, especially SMEs.

Further strengthening its commitment towards a greener Singapore, the government has also launched the Enterprise Financing Scheme, Green, promising to risk-share 70 per cent of the capital needed by startups, focused on technologies and solutions that aim to reduce waste resources use or greenhouse gas emissions.

This outlook is also carried over to the upcoming generation of startup founders. It was very encouraging at a recent startup competition to see that almost nine in ten pitches focused on solving severe environmental or economic issues such as food insecurity, climate change, or poverty.

So, I believe what we’re seeing is greater awareness among young entrepreneurs about the scale and the severity of some of the challenges our world faces.

In some ways, these developments result in the lines blurring between what we see as traditional startups on the one hand and social ventures on the other. It’s almost an awakening of sorts that it is possible to have purpose and make profits simultaneously.

Also Read: 6 notable accelerators and incubators in Southeast Asia for startups of all sizes

These developments resonate well with the investor community, which has been making the right noises around ESG investing, with a particular focus on challenges related to the climate and the environment.

Increasingly, many limited partners incorporate stringent ESG criteria in determining what funds to commit capital to. This naturally has a trickle-down impact on venture capital funds to make the “right” kind of investment. 

Owing to these developments, it is a great time to be an investor in the region because the diversity of meaningful investment opportunities has not been seen before.

Accelerator programmes

Good accelerator programmes have also been an effective tool in catalysing the development of a strong startup ecosystem in the region. Large global ones provide essential platforms for startups to network and exchange ideas with peers from around the world.

Startups use these as a vehicle to bring change. Large global accelerators also act as catalysts to drive conversations around stigmatic or less openly discussed topics such as mental health among startup founders and investors.

It is difficult to underscore the importance of accelerators in this global exchange of ideas and criticisms and the osmosis of thoughts and conversations.

I’m fortunate to be associated with early-stage startups that are part of or have emerged from accelerator programmes such as Y-Combinator, Antler, Accelerating Asia, and SuperCharger.

These programmes all serve different requirements of startups and help strengthen the startup ecosystem in several ways, ranging from funding to fresh ideas and everything in between.

Also Read: This is the era of virtual accelerators. Are you ready?

These accelerators and the startups that have come through them provide me with enough confidence as an investor that we’re witnessing something different in Southeast Asia than we have ever before. 

A golden era?

Many have asked me. Is this a golden era for startups in Southeast Asia? Indeed, it is not just for startups but also investors in startups.

This is an ideal time from a founder’s perspective because the appetite for risk among families and society more broadly is much higher today than earlier. And similarly, capital is readily available today. Raising money to the tune of SG$250,000 to SG$500,000 in Singapore has never been easier.

As investors, the range of investable opportunities is greater than ever before. And that’s a good thing. 

But I believe we still need a bit of a mindset change in some respects. Given the seeming ease with which founders are raising capital, I believe many are setting up ventures solely with the view to making a quick return and exiting the market in a few years.

I believe this: founders must be passionate about the problems they are trying to solve, whether for purpose or profitability, or both.

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wagely, an earned wage access company in Indonesia, has raised US$8.3 million in an oversubscribed pre-series A funding round, led by East Ventures (Growth Fund).

Existing backers, including Integra Partners, Asian Development Bank, Global Founders Capital, Trihill Capital, Blauwpark Partners, and 1982 Ventures, participated.

The EWA startup also disclosed that it secured the backing of Central Capital Ventura, the VC arm of Indonesia’s Bank Central Asia.

With this, wagely’s total funding raised to date has touched US$14 million.

The new capital will enable the company to further scale its business in Indonesia and Bangladesh. In addition, wagely looks to develop its holistic financial wellness platform, to be rolled out later this year.

The latest deal follows a US$5.6 million strategic financing round led by Integra Partners in June 2021 and comes in a few months after it expanded to Bangladesh.

Founded by former Grab and Tokopedia executives and launched in 2020, wagely lets employees of its partner organisations access their earned wages in real-time. Its partners include Indonesia’s largest employers, including British American Tobacco, Ranch Market, Adaro Energy, and Medco Energi. This helps them reduce turnover, enhance productivity, and increase business savings.

Roderick Purwana, Managing Partner of East Ventures, said: “With wagely’s rapid growth in recent quarters, we believe they will be the preferred partner for large enterprises that aim to challenge the status quo of worker financial wellness in Indonesia and beyond. They are changing the lives of millions of workers across Asia, where over 75 per cent of the population lives paycheck to paycheque.”

In Bangladesh, which is home to the 7th largest labour force globally, wagely has partnered with leading companies, including SQ Group, Classic Composite, and Vision Garments. “We are proud to be successfully operating in two of the largest markets in Asia, employing more than 150 million workers. Instant access to salary plays a pivotal role in reducing costs for employers and increasing the productivity and wellbeing of workers,” said CEO and Co-Founder Tobias Fischer.

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Webinars are a vital content strategy for modern business, and respondents to a recent survey say webinars are critical to their sales, marketing, and lead generation strategy.

Yet, audiences are experiencing video fatigue and burnout at a far higher rate today with webinars than they have previously.

Getting back to in-person events is an easy answer to solve the burnout. However, taking this route means you should be smart about your investment and formulate a strategic approach. From cutting-edge innovation and diversity and inclusion efforts to broadening your brand’s global reach, hybrid and virtual events have exploding potential for engaging audiences.

In an era where marketing dollars have to cut through a lot of noise and short attention spans, digital event solutions are impactful, efficient, and economical.

My company, Hubilo, a hybrid event platform, works hand-in-hand with event professionals to reimagine events in the virtual and hybrid world.

Through this experience, I see that you can keep your attendees’ attention where you want it by replacing one-way conversations and boring presentations with a few key strategies: on you.

No one wants another webinar

The problem with virtual events isn’t the venue. Audiences, no matter where they are, want connection.

Also Read: 8 trends for the event tech industry in 2022

People find love online. They exercise online. They cook online. Now, they can even dance, sing, play bingo, and network face-to-face online. By engaging audiences with next-generation interactivity, you’ll learn what your audiences are interested in.

You can see what they do rather than what they say or think they’ll do. The past year and a half have digitally transformed audiences. Your events should recognise that shift.

Here’s how:

Foster engagement and inclusivity

Start by really understanding your audience, their motivation for attending the event, and the calls to action you want them to answer. From there, the event begins to take shape.

With more focus than ever on work-life balance, remote workplaces, safety, and flexibility are a high priority. Offering a virtual attendance option includes those who may not travel or feel comfortable travelling.

Providing included in an event virtually means event organisers can create more diverse, immersive, and inclusive gatherings.

Whether child or elder care, women find themselves disproportionately resigning from positions or reducing their work capacity to take on these duties.

What hybrid events offer these important audiences is flexibility. Hybrid and virtual options are approaches that enable organisations to dedicate resources as they see fit, from time and distance to accessibility and budget.

It will take creativity to blend virtual and in-person audiences.

To get started, identify if you’ll have a host or a behind-the-scenes technical assistant who reminds people to participate in the chat, react to speakers, and prepare for upcoming activities or sessions. Much like a good party, marketing teams should act as hosts for their attendees, calling their attention to where it should be.

Advanced tools you can offer to aid in hosting a hybrid event include gamification features like participant leader boards, chats, Q&As, and contests.

These tactics give virtual and in-person attendees a common interactive experience that bypasses everything they want to avoid: impersonal, repetitive, and generic content.

Focus on responsiveness

Audiences want responsiveness from the services they interact with. This is how Amazon managed to topple other cookie-cutter approaches that were outdated.

Also Read: How innovations in analytics will drive the right results for hybrid events

With personalised features, two-day delivery, and a lack of shipping fees, Amazon reimagined how products should be sold and the fantastic experience that should come with it. Now, most purchases are made worldwide.

Events are no different. People have been showing us what they want from events for a long time. They want to feel part of a group or tribe, less excess and relevant information, and they want their time while receiving memorable experiences.

Even without having segmented, in-depth data on attendees, marketing and event teams can create the illusion of personal recommendations by pushing email reminders for sessions, reacting to social posts from attendees and including reminders or links, and requesting survey responses and feedback during the event.

Looking towards the future

Events will have to continue innovative as the world becomes increasingly more dynamic. Like every industry, the pandemic has upended standard operating procedures for event organisers.

When you start reimagining your events and strategy, you can deliver events at a fraction of the cost while engaging more diverse audiences and delivering personalised content at scale.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community, or like the e27 Facebook page

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With stagnant incomes, rising living costs, and a lack of savings, workers are under daily pressure to stay afloat financially. The options for this segment are minimal when faced with an urgent need for cash. The result is a vicious cycle of repeated reliance on payday loans and other costly financial products, leading to financial stress among the workforce.

Indonesia-based wagely aims to address this problem. The two-year-old startup has developed an online platform that lets workers of its partner employers access (EWA) their earned wages in real-time. (EWA is an emerging employee benefit that provides workers on-demand access to wages they have earned but not yet been paid on)

The firm has just announced a US$8.3 million in pre-Series A round from some of the region’s top VCs, including lead investor East Ventures (Growth Fund).

A few hours before this announcement, e27 spoke to wagely Co-Founder and CEO Tobias Fischer.

Below is the edited version of the interview:

You said in a statement that wagely is scaling further in Bangladesh. What opportunities do you see there? How is this market different from Indonesia?

We see a massive opportunity for financial technology in Bangladesh. The South Asian country has characteristics and attractive fundamentals similar to Indonesia in terms of demographics, large total addressable market, limited access to credit, growing demand for tailored financial services, and the ability to expand products and segments.

Also Read: wagely bags US$5.6M to give Indonesia’s low-paid workers access to their earned wages

How many customers do you have in total? Can you share the names of some of your corporate customers?

wagely is working with some of the largest employers in Indonesia and Bangladesh. We serve more than 150 million workers across both markets.

In Indonesia, we have partnered with hundreds of businesses across industries, such as Adaro Energy, Medco Energi, British American Tobacco, Ranch Market, and Century Pharma, among several others.

The recent expansion to Bangladesh has garnered 50,000 workers across the largest apparel manufacturers in the region. In Bangladesh, which is home to the 7th largest labour force globally, we’ve partnered with leading companies, including SQ Group, Classic Composite, and Vision Garments.

Do you also see opportunities in other emerging markets in Asia, Africa and America?

The additional capital allows us to double down and accelerate our market-leading position across Indonesia and Bangladesh.

What are some definite trends you read in Southeast Asia’s EWA vertical? Do you see employees increasingly preferring EWA?

Our workplaces are changing rapidly, especially since COVID-19 struck. The way people are getting paid is changing too and at scale.

What I mean is that we are making a lot of adjusting in terms of work (where we work and how we work, etc.) but the only thing that has never been questioned is how we get paid. We believe employees shouldn’t have to wait until the end of the month to get paid.

What are the key benefits employers gain by partnering with wagely?

Lower- and middle-income workers live paycheque to paycheque and struggle with unexpected financial expenses between paycheques. This impacts businesses with higher turnover, lower productivity, and more employee loans. Offering employees immediate access to their wages boosts the workforce’s financial resilience and has a measurable and proven impact on employee retention and productivity.

How does wagely make money?

Incumbent financial institutions and payday lenders make money when people are stuck paying interest, overdraft, and late fees. wagely is different and makes money only by charging a flat membership fee.

The wagely membership fee is paid by employees only when they find value in our product and make progress with us. Why do we take this approach? Because we believe membership is the only business model that truly aligns wagely’s incentives with your employees’ financial wellbeing.

Also Read: Paywatch aims to scale its earned wage access biz across SEA with a US$5.25M funding

We are also the only regional player operating in two markets, has received ISO 27001 on information security, and is directly integrated with SAP.

Do you think as COVID-19 subsides and markets go back to normal, EWA will become irrelevant?

Even before the pandemic, there was substantial evidence that over 75 per cent of the Southeast Asia workers struggled to cover unexpected expenses between salary payments, causing significant financial stress costing businesses millions in lost productivity and higher turnover. Employers were left grappling with how to support their workers and the financial burden they faced.

The pandemic shone a light on this challenge and exacerbated the need for employers to step in.

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Singapore-based Datature, which has developed a no-code MLOps platform that allows companies and teams to build breakthrough AI capabilities, has raised US$2.7 million from local VC firm Openspace Ventures.

January Capital also participated in the round.

Datature’s full suite of solutions provides teams with the ability to annotate, augment, train and deploy computer vision models, all without a single line of code. It empowers teams to swiftly create ground truths, perform transfer learning, and deploy AI models.

The firm claims to date, thousands of teams worldwide have leveraged its platform to collaborate, build and deploy breakthrough AI applications in the medical, defense, manufacturing, and retail sectors.

Also Read: How machine learning really impacts us in our daily lives

The latest funding will enable Datature to expand its platform offering to support more widespread use cases, including video analytics, medical and point-cloud data ingestions, and a neural network cloud API for users to deploy AI capabilities anywhere.

“Today, most authoritative and experienced industry experts do not necessarily possess the technical abilities to architect and deploy machine learning solutions. Datature hopes to support the next wave of citizen data scientists and deep-tech teams with a self-serve, end-to-end platform that enables anyone to orchestrate large-scale ML projects,” said Co-Founder Keechin Goh.

Javier Ng, Investor at January Capital, said: “Datature’s platform addresses the two key fundamental barriers of AI adoption: skills shortage and the complexity involved in the development process. By empowering non-technical teams to utilise computer vision, Datature accelerates the time to value for mission-critical use cases.”

The machine learning market is projected to have a CAGR of 43 per cent, achieving US$30.6 billion in 2024.

Openspace is an early-stage tech investor with over US$650 million under management. The company’s investments include GoTo (Gojek), Kumu, Pluang, Biofourmis and Halodoc.

The VC firm has four funds and has offices in Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City.

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