My name is Mike Sim from Singapore. After six years in the financial industry, I started my “ouch” Fund Management Company in 2017.

Why did I start my fund management company?

I got bored working in a bank. Many are selling flavour of the month, ranging from insurance, unit trust, new structured products launch, bonds that require to be sold off.

Especially for bonds, sometimes, I don’t even know if the specialists are trying to get rid of the investment products for another investor or want to make his commission or both.

Don’t get me wrong, I came from the banking industry, and I respect them for that. I got nothing against them. I only market financial products that my investors need and earn the commission.

Just that I do not like to sell flavour of the month in exchange for some “incentive” vouchers or some Quarter sales target incentive trip just by selling a particular financial product.

It doesn’t make sense that everyone’s financial needs are the same for that same period for that single product.

With that, from my banking days, I had a clear goal, a vision, a mission that I want to set up my own fund management company and help my investors manage their funds and make them good money.

Also Read: Finance your startup: 10 types of investors you should know

With profits made above a certain percentage, that is where I will start to receive my bonus, therefore creating a win-win with my investors.

Are you having this urge and feel inside you roaring for you to start your own fund company?

Why is it so hard to find an aligned partner?

My first director was an ex-colleague from the bank. He was a simple man, well at least he looks and gives me the feeling he is simple. He is not a top producer, nor was he at the bottom of the food chain; he was just okay.

My observation was that he did not sell his clients on products. He looks like a banker that is not a product pusher. Therefore, I discussed with him and got him into my firm, but things soon turned south.

He had other plans, and he went into cryptocurrency, and eventually, we part our ways, and he is involved in scams.

Finding an aligned partner is tough; finding one with integrity, trust and transparency are even harder. It took me two years to unwind this successfully, but it caused a big learning experience. This, for anyone who wants to start their funds, can be avoided.

What are services providers?

You come from a banking background, and you want to come out and start your funds. You think you can take over the world, and your fund is so great that it reaches US$1 billion or US$100 million in assets under management.

It is possible, but there is much work to be done. You require a strong team and a vital service providers team, including custody, fund admin, auditors, legal, bank, corp sec, prime, etc.

Also Read: Investing with gender lens: Proven strategy to achieve 2x+ in returns

The setting up time and cost is substantial enough to kill you, and if it doesn’t and you manage to pull through, you will be lucky to get it up in six-nine months and that your investors still stay invested with you.

I have been through the above, and it is not easy. The hardest part is every service providers claim they are the best. It is only when you get involved with them that you realise if they are good or bad, or worst.

I went through unwinding from some of my service providers, and this unwinding process took me one year to complete. It is a truly terrible experience. Imagine you can avoid all these right from the start! Wouldn’t you like to avoid all these?

I have been there, suffered and done that, kick-started with Cayman Islands Investment Funds, come back to Singapore and continued in a Singapore Variable Capital Company Fund. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

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Regeneration-as-a-service startup Handprint raises US$2.2M from Thunes, others

Handprint, a Singaporean startup building sustainability infrastructure for the digital world, has raised US$2.2 million in seed funding, led by leading payments network Thunes, with participation from unnamed angels.

The funding will be used to build Handprint’s technology further and expand its network of impact partners. The startup aims to advance its mission to transform the extractive economy into a regenerative economy — making it simple, easy and impactful for companies of all sizes to protect and regenerate the planet.

Also Read: Climate tech is in a chicken-and-egg situation in Southeast Asia

The strategic investment will also combine the Thunes global payment network with Handprint’s technology, allowing funds to reach unbanked and hard-to-reach communities worldwide and cutting the cost of intermediaries.

Launched in Singapore in 2020, Handprint allows companies to select from verified impact projects, embed impact into their business functions (like payments processes and e-commerce tools), track how their positive impact grows over time, and create opportunities for customers engagement.

Its clients include Lazada, the healthy food chain SaladStop, and global media platform Teads for its Asia operations.

Do Ventures backs South Korean edutech startup Ringle

Early-stage VC firm Do Ventures has invested in South Korea’s edutech startup Ringle, a premium online English tutoring service that connects learners with tutors from leading universities in the US and the UK.

The edutech startup will use the funding to expand in the Vietnam market. The capital will also be used to enhance its AI-based platform.

Also Read: Edutech in a post-pandemic world: Where do we go from here?

Founded in 2015, Ringle claims it helps learners achieve a high level of English proficiency. During the lessons, tutors use Ringle Docs, a tool developed by Ringle that enables tutors to correct the users’ English in real-time. The corrections are available both throughout and after the lessons, helping the users with initial comprehension and post-class review.

After each lesson, Ringle generates a script of the conversation using speech-to-text technology and provides a recording of the conversation to help students review.

The company also leverages AI to analyse students’ speech pace, vocabulary range, and frequently-used words and phrases, assisting with diagnosis and maximising learning efficiency.

Most of Ringle’s current users are professionals seeking career advancement and aspiring high school students looking to study abroad.

The platform has over 1,300 active tutors, 950 lesson materials, and an extensive video and snackable content library. Ringle has earned over 100,000 users worldwide since its launch.

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Making a living was no easy task for Bu Sumini. The single mother of two suffered a work accident that set her back two months in the hospital and left her in debt.

To make ends meet, she started selling sembako or daily necessities, only to end up getting scammed for IDR100 million (US$ 7,000) by a fake supplier.

The sad reality is that Sumini is not alone in this circumstance. Despite making up some 43 per cent of Indonesia’s entrepreneurial force, many women in the country still face numerous hurdles on their path to success.

Closed doors and sticky floors

Women-owned businesses are a critical component of Indonesia’s growth journey, even with so many factors working against them. For starters, simply entering the workforce is a daunting task as they struggle to balance family responsibilities and navigate a host of cultural factors that set them back.

Marriage and childcare responsibilities, for instance, push back the age at which many women start working, sometimes to as late as 45 years old.

Then there’s the gender wage gap, colloquially referred to as “sticky floors”, which is another major challenge, especially in lower-earning jobs where women reportedly earn 63 per cent less than their male counterparts.

Also Read: From a woman to women: Celebrating empowerment in tech

All of this has contributed to a startling disparity in Indonesia’s labour force participation, with only 56 per cent of women being able to work, compared to 84 per cent of men. With the odds stacked against them in the corporate world, it is not surprising that many women in Indonesia are turning to entrepreneurship to change their fates.

Investing in women entrepreneurs in Indonesia

Investing in women entrepreneurs not only addresses financial inclusion, social justice and gender equality, but a growing body now points to its business case.

The local government is already taking steps to enable better digital and financial inclusion. But businesses also have a role in empowering and transforming women-owned enterprises into powerhouses for collective growth.

Of course, shifting more capital towards women is one way to do this, but equally, it is about developing the right products and solutions for female entrepreneurs.

At Ula,  we recently launched Teman Ula,  a unique new solution that allows micro-entrepreneurs to start or expand their business by aggregating orders and selling within their community.

Solutions like this have helped thousands of women, including Bu Sumini, get back on their feet and grow businesses.

In fact, 63 per cent of all Ula users are women, including proud owners of neighbourhood provision shops, home retailers and more.

Teman Ula has been especially successful in helping more women earn up to five-six times additional income, which is especially meaningful for those with children or elderly family members to take care of.

We’re so proud and humbled to be able to put power back in the hands of these resilient women and help them emerge stronger from their circumstances.

Also Read: A woman among women: 27 female-led startups in SEA that are going places

It takes a village to raise a nation

According to a study in collaboration with the Australia Indonesia Partnership for Economic Governance (AIPEG), if the proportion of women in Indonesia’s workforce were to be increased by just ten percentage points, it may potentially raise the country’s GDP by one percentage point to a total of US$432 per person.

Ula strongly believes in this, and we have made conscious hiring decisions to ensure that over 39 per cent of our team are women, and this number continues to grow.

As caretakers of their families and a key force in the local neighbourhood, women around us have the power to drive transformation at the grassroots level.

Women using Teman Ula aggregate orders from their neighbourhood to bulk-buy provisions and daily necessities at a cheaper price. Not only does the entire community benefit from the price discounts, but these women can also maintain a steady income and earn a small margin while reselling the supplies.

For the 27.55 million people in Indonesia who live below the poverty line, products like Teman Ula are enabling a new generation of micro-entrepreneurs, led fiercely by women, growing businesses, sustaining families, and gaining greater financial independence.

Bu Sumini’s story is just one of many examples that stand testament to this.

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Finch Asia and IndoGen Capital are joining hands to create Cydonia Fund, which seeks to invest in pre-seed to Series B startups in the web3 domain in Southeast Asia.

Cydonia Fund has onboarded notable personalities in blockchain, including top Tokocrypto (Indonesia-based crypto exchange) executives Teguh Kurniawan Harmanda, Chung Ying Lai, and Nanda Ivens.

“Cydonia Fund will focus on growing the web3 ecosystem here and beyond, supporting the likes of TokoLabs by Tokocrypto portfolio (the exchange’s startup empowerment programmatic arm),” said Ying Lai, an advisor to the fund.

Also Read: Web3 has created the metaverse, but how do we navigate it?

As part of the agreement, IndoGen will bring in its whole ecosystem participation to support its growth, including Jababeka, Mahaka Media Group, and the Japanese Trade Organization (JETRO). IndoGen runs two funds with over 25 portfolio companies, including unicorns (Carsome, Shipper, Aruna, Evos, and Travelio). “We are confident that this collaboration will take Cydonia Fund to the world stage. The size of the fund is significant; imagine around 40-50 portfolios of diverse stages,” said Chandra Firmanto, Managing Partner of IndoGen.

Finch Asia is an international VC firm with close to US$400 million assets under management. An active fund, it has made notable investments in Grab, AyoConnect, Tada, Cermati, and Jojonomics.

Tokocrypto is a leading crypto exchange. Under the wings of Harmanda, Ivens, Lai, the exchange claims to have amassed over 2.5 million registered users since its establishment in September 2018. In November 2019, it became Indonesia’s first-ever regulated crypto-asset exchange. “Like many other ventures, we began as a startup until we could finally stand firm and secure our position in the rapidly developing web3 sector. We’re excited to see more players appearing in the blockchain scene in the region and provide all the support we can give as experts in the field,” said Lai.

“By collaborating with Tokocrypto execs, Cydonia Fund seeks to participate in discovering the latest web3 adoption, and in doing so, leveraging Tokocrypto Execs’ first-hand experience and expertise as key figures in the development of the web3 landscape in Indonesia. We saw similar collaborations happening on the other side of the world, such as the one initiated by FTX, Solana Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners in the US in 2021. Very few VCs have built a strategic relationship with the leading crypto exchange as the domain expert,” said Hans de Back, Managing Partner of Finch Asia.

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Indonesia’s leading B2C and B2B e-grocery startup Sayurbox has raised US$ 120+ million in an oversubscribed Series C round of financing, led by Northstar and Alpha JWC Ventures.

Participating investors are International Finance Corporation, Astra, Syngenta Group Ventures, Global Brain, and unnamed angels.

The company will use the funds to expand in new and existing cities and extend its end-to-end supply chain nationwide.

Founded in 2017, Sayurbox is an e-commerce grocery platform that aims to make fresh produce accessible and affordable to end consumers. It offers more than 5,000 SKUs, ranging from fresh produce, meat and poultry, snacks, and ready-to-eat dishes.

Sayurbox claims it currently serves around one million customers in Java and Bali and works with more than 10,000 farmers nationwide.

Also Read: Sayurbox secures Series B to grow its e-grocery marketplace in Indonesia

The new funding round comes less than a year after it raised US$15 million in Series B funding led by Astra. Since then, Sayurbox has increased its range of products, expanding from the Greater Jakarta area to Surabaya (East Java) and Bali and building a network of micro-fulfilment hubs to service Sayurbox’s quick commerce service, SayurKilat.

Eko Kurniadi, Partner at Alpha JWC Ventures, said: “Growing in this vertical is difficult as there are huge execution risks especially given the fragmented logistics and different consumer behaviour in cities across Indonesia. However, Sayurbox has figured out the playbook to tackle these challenges by building a proprietary supply chain comparable to global e-grocery leaders.”

Groceries is one of Indonesia’s most prominent consumer segments at more than US$120 billion in retail value. However, food supply chains remain highly fragmented and inefficient. Direct from farm e-grocery businesses help shorten the supply, reducing food wastage and logistics costs while providing better margins for farmers and lower prices for consumers.

According to the e-Conomy SEA 2021 report by Google, Temasek and Bain, the recent pandemic has driven higher e-Grocery adoption among consumers in SEA, with 1 in 4 grocery dollars expected to be spent online by 2030.

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