Jungle Ventures leads e-bike startup Dat Bike Series A

Dat Bike, a Vietnamese e-motorbike startup, has announced a US$5.3 million Series A funding led by Jungle Ventures with participation from existing investor Wavemaker Partners.

This brings the total fundraise by Dat Bike since inception to US$10 million.

Dat Bike intends to use the new money to invest in technology, scale production, expand to metro and tier-I cities across north, central and south Vietnam, and hire top talent.

Founded in 2019 by Son Nguyen, Dat Bike aims to drive the mass adoption of green transportation in Vietnam, and, in the near future in Southeast Asia. It wants to convert the 250 million gasoline motorbikes to electric.

Also Read: Dat Bike bags US$2.6M pre-Series A to bring more electric motorbikes to Vietnam

Dat Bike claims it has a competitive advantage in its performance against gasoline bikes. Its first line product Weaver (2019) offered 3x the performance (5kW versus 1.5kW) and 2x the range (100 km versus 50 km) of most e-motorbikes at the same price point.

In November 2021, Dat Bike launched its second model Weaver 200 (2021), which is double the range (200 km) and more powerful (6kW) compared to the Weaver. Further, charging time has been reduced to 1 hour for a 100 km charge and 2.5 hours for a full 200 km charge, compared to 6-8 hours for other electric bikes.

Since the launch of Weaver 200 (November 2021), the company says it has seen strong customer response, with revenue increasing 10x. The company has also opened a new store in Hanoi in April 2022 and will open one more in Danang soon, to meet the growing demand.

Accel Partners injects US$3M Series A into Finbots.ai

Singapore-based Finbots.AI, a company bringing innovation to banks and financial institutions, has raised a Series A funding of US$3 million from Accel Partners.

With this capital, Finbots.AI will look towards accelerating product enhancement, marketing and sales, and customer support. The firm is also looking to recruit senior talent and expand its team across its offices with the fresh funds raised.

Also Read: Ethics and AI: Is the technology only as good as the human behind it?

Finbots.AI was founded in 2017 by Sanjay Uppal (CEO) and Shripad Keni (CTO). Since its inception, the firm identified an opportunity to use AI-powered solutions to aid banks and financial institutions to overcome industry challenges. ZScore is a full-scale AI-driven credit scorecard system for lending institutions that spans the entire credit lifecycle. Equipped with an intuitive user interface and robust scorecard development capabilities, ZScore rapidly develops higher accuracy credit scorecards by using advanced Machine Learning (ML) algorithms that utilise historical traditional and alternate data to automatically build, validate, and deploy real-time, high-performing risk models.

With ZScore, financial institutions have better visibility over potential borrowers’ credit capacity which consequently and indirectly, lead to higher financial inclusion. The World Bank Group considers financial inclusion a key enabler to reduce extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity. According to the latest Global Findex database, 1.7 billion adults worldwide are unbanked, meaning they do not participate in any basic financial products or services.

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Ramadan is a month of celebration and the biggest holiday season for Muslim majority countries around the world. In Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Southern Thailand, and Mindanao island in the Philippines will celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr (Hari Raya in Singapore, Malaysia and Lebaran in Indonesia) after a month of fasting. 

It is expected some businesses and government offices to be closed for this major holiday, which will be on May third and fourth of 2022 and the number of holidays may extend to a week or sometimes more.

The holidays may be seen as a time for celebration, but families are not the only ones who see these occasions as the most wonderful time of the year. Cyber-threat actors or cybercriminals know exactly that due to low staffing because on vacation, have a higher workload, and get distracted more than usual, the holidays are one of the best times to attack.

As a result, the long holidays such as Hari Raya will put your organisation at a higher risk of cyberattack.

Throwback attack: Shamoon malware on The Saudi Aramco

The attack was started in mid-2012 when one of the IT team at Saudi Aramco, the state-owned Saudi Arabia oil company, opened a scam email and clicked on a bad link containing malware, later called Shamoon.

The hackers were into their system but not immediately attacked. The actual threats began during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan when most Saudi Aramco employees were on holiday. On the morning of Wednesday, August 15, 2012, some employees noticed their computers were acting weird: screens started flickering, files began to disappear, and some computers just shut down, according to CNN Business.

More than 30,000 workstations at the company were affected by the malware. Saudi Aramco’s computer technicians had no choice but to rip cables out of the backs of computer servers at data centres all over the world.

Also Read: How much does cybersecurity cost and how to budget for it?

Every office was physically unplugged from the internet to prevent the virus from spreading further. Everything, from managing supplies, shipping, and contracts with business partners to reporting was done manually with typewriters or fax machines. Not only that, Saudi Aramco bought 50,000 new hard drives to replace the infected ones.

After the attack, a group calling itself “Cutting Sword of Justice” claimed responsibility for the attack, saying they were retaliating against the Al Saud regime for its crimes against humanity. There is no ransom requested by Shamoon and it is an example of weaponised malware that is designed for use in cyber-war. 

Shamoon, known as W32.Distrack, is an aggressive, disk-wiping malware program that can wipe the master boot records and replace them with various images, such as an image of a burning U.S. flag. The Shamoon malware was also used against Qatar’s RasGas oil company.

After the 2012 attack, Shamoon resurfaced in 2016 and in 2018 in a new version that targets energy sector infrastructure in the Middle East.

Other cyberattacks cases during the holidays

Besides Shamoon, several major cyber-threat cases during the holidays in 2021, such as: 

• The largest fuel pipeline operation company, Colonial Pipeline, was forced to pay a ransom of US$4.4 million to the Darkside hacker group after a ransomware attack during the Mother’s Day Weekend on May 9, 2021. The attack successfully disrupted fuel deliveries in the South-East US for several days.  
• JBS, the world’s biggest meat processor, paid US$11 million after a cyber-attack sabotaged its operations, including abattoirs in the US, Australia, and Canada during Memorial Day weekend on May 31, 2021.
• On the July 4 holiday weekend in 2021, when millions of Americans logged out to spend time with friends and family, one of the most significant ransomware attacks of the year began. It was targeted against Kaseya’s software technology which caused national railway systems, schools, broadcasters, etc. to shut operations as file-encrypting malware hit them. 
• Over the Labour Day weekend, Howard University in Washington DC was taken offline and forced to cancel classes for a week as its network was held hostage by cyber-criminals. The cyber-criminals used phishing emails to gain access to credentials from unsuspecting university network users and used the credentials to orchestrate this holiday ransomware attack.

Cybersecurity tips during the holiday season

It is important to prevent cyber threats because security breaches risk financial pain, fines, and endanger your brand, reputation and customer trust in your organisation. Several best practices to reduce the risk and impact of cybersecurity attacks, such as:

• Make an offline backup of your data

Make and maintain offline, encrypted backups of data and regularly test your backups. It is important that backups be maintained offline as many ransomware variants attempt to find and delete or encrypt accessible backups. Review your organisation’s backup schedule to take into account the risk of possible disruption to backup processes during weekends or holidays.

Also Read: Shouldering the responsibility of digital payment security

• Do not click on suspicious links

Minimise the risk of human errors through user training programs and phishing exercises to raise awareness about the risks involved on click or opening malicious websites and attachments.

• Use strong passwords and multi-factor authentication (MFA)

Passwords should not be reused across multiple accounts or stored on the system where an adversary may have access. Require multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all services to the extent possible, particularly for remote access, virtual private networks, and accounts that access critical systems.

• Secure your network(s) by maintaining the highest standards of cyber-hygiene across the organisation

All of your networks, application and devices should meet certain cyber hygiene to protect your most valuable data and information and prevent cyber threats. Automated cyber hygiene and policy enforcement to meet your needs and your industry security compliance.

• Choose a comprehensive security solution

A comprehensive security solution that provides real-time cyber-attack warnings, actionable insights and security analytics to continuously strengthen your security posture and minimise the risks of cyber-attacks during the holidays.

This article has been published on ArmourZero blog on April 21, 2022

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In October 2021, the US and Israeli IT security company Check Point Software Technologies (CPST) identified security flaws in the world’s largest NFT marketplace OpenSea. Later, it also detected similar vulnerabilities in Rarible, an NFT marketplace with over two million active users.

According to Oded Vanunu, Head of Products Vulnerability Research, CPST, if exploited, the vulnerability would have enabled threat actors to steal users’ NFTs and crypto tokens in a single transaction.

“In terms of security, there is still a huge gap between Web2 and Web3 infrastructure. Any small vulnerability opens a backdoor for cybercriminals to hijack crypto wallets behind the scenes,” he said in an interview with e27. “Marketplaces that combine Web3 protocols still lack a sound security practice. The implications following a crypto hack can be extreme. We’ve seen millions of dollars hijacked from marketplace users that combine blockchain technologies.”

Popular metaverse game Axie Infinity, owned by Sky Mavis, also faced a similar attack last month, resulting in the loss of digital assets worth US$625 million from its Ronin Network platform.

Also Read: Sky Mavis raises US$150M led by Binance to reimburse users hit by Axie breach

“In the Axie hacking incident, we have seen the importance of a decentralisation network. In this case, Axie only had nine validators, although you only needed five of them to verify deposits and withdrawals. However, all these five validators were saved in the same place. Decentralisation could have reduced these points of weakness in the systems,” he noted.

While explaining the modus operandi behind the Axie attack, he said that the Ronin network requires five signatures, known as a multi-sig system, to verify deposits and withdrawals. The validators were held by Sky Mavis, the blockchain gaming platform that created the Ronin network. The hacker found all the five multi-sig signatures they needed to sign off on a transaction when they breached the Sky Mavis servers.

“Blockchain bridges are platforms that connect two different networks enabling a cross-chain transfer of assets and information from one blockchain to another. Attackers are targeting bridges because they are the weakest point in the system. All the complex code creates many opportunities for exploitable bugs, and as these bridges usually hold a large amount of money, this makes them even more attractive to attackers,” he further shared.

Vanunu recommends being careful and aware of sign-in requests even within the marketplace itself. Before approving a request, users should carefully review what is requested and consider whether it seems abnormal or suspicious. If there are any doubts, users are advised to reject the request and examine it further before authorising it.

In his view, crypto exchanges and blockchain/metaverse firms face the same security risks as any other company. In addition, crypto exchanges and blockchain/metaverse firms face the new kind of attack vectors related to the smart contract with all the reentrancy, flash loans and other smart contact security bugs and attacks on user wallets.

Also Read: Play-to-earn: Understanding the popularity of Axie Infinity

“The difference between a regular company and a crypto company is that a regular company is well familiar with the cyber-attacks. There is multiple security protection they can add, like Firewall. On the other hand, Crypto companies have to face new kinds of attacks and pioneer new means of protection from such attacks,” he said.

Vanunu, however, doesn’t think that such cyberattacks will discourage users from joining P2E games. “The users are there mainly for the profits, rather than the technology (that sometimes gets hacked). As long as the games are profitable to the players, they will continue to be there. Also, we can see that from every attack, the game developers improve their security, transfer the users to new contracts and try to protect their systems as much as they can.”

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Trusting Social, a credit scoring company headquartered in Singapore, has received US$65 million as part of its Series C round of financing from The Sherpa Company, a subsidiary of Vietnam-based Masan Group.

The strategic collaboration intends to develop an AI-powered consumer tech platform. It aims to provide customised retail and consumer financial products to serve 27 million families in Vietnam, as per a press statement.

In addition, the partnership will enable Masan to drive efficiencies in its core business by leveraging Trusting Social’s AI capabilities in areas such as retail store selection, demand & supply planning, and product assortment & development.

With this collaboration, Trusting Social said it is a step closer to providing one hundred million lines of credit to underserved borrowers across Asia. “Our partnership with Masan is exciting since we broaden our platform from credit access to a total consumer life solution. Masan and Trusting Social believe that Vietnam can create transformation and disruption on par with global peers,” said Trusting Social’s Founder and CEO Nguyen Nguyen.

Also Read: How voice AI is revolutionising the fintech scene

Masan Group CEO Danny Le said, “Walmart has invested heavily to develop an AI and ML platform and has leveraged it to become the leading offline and online daily, consumer life platform. The Trusting Social partnership provides Masan with a similar cutting-edge AI and ML platform but tailored for 100 million Vietnamese consumers. Our job together now is to develop it from a pure credit scoring use case to a holistic Consumer engine.”

Trusting Social is an AI techfin company aspiring to democratise financial services through AI-based consumer insights and embedded finance. It drives financial inclusion by providing credit insights covering over a billion consumers to over 170 financial institutions across Vietnam, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines.

The AI company’s other backers are Sequoia Capital, Beenext, Tanglin Ventures, 500 Global, Kima Ventures and Genesis Alternative Ventures.

Masan Group is a leader in fast-moving consumer goods, branded meat, modern retail, F&B retail, financial services, telecommunications, and value-add chemical processing.

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Zilingo CEO Ankiti Bose weighs options to ‘gain back control’
She is exploring talks with new investors to buy out a majority stake of the fashion company; This comes as the board of Zilingo is set to meet to decide the fate of the company’s leadership changes.

Sea Group offered 10% stake in Indonesian digital bank Bank Mayora
Sea helped state-owned BNI transform Bank Mayora into a digital bank by providing services to develop its tech and business model; BNI recently acquired Bank Mayora by buying 1 billion new shares.

Biofourmis turns unicorn after US$300M Series D led by General Atlantic
To date, the medtech company has raised US$445M in total, counting SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Openspace Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and EDBI as backers; Biofourmis uses AI and ML-based solutions to enable personalised predictive care.

Openspace Ventures’s OSV+ closes growth-stage fund at US$200M
LPs include IDFC and unnamed institutional investors; OSV+ targets SEA-based firms in Series B and above, writing cheque sizes of US$20-25M per company; This means it will invest in 10 companies.

VN fintech firm Trusting Social bags US$65M Series C
The investor is Masan Group’s The Sherpa Company; It seeks to drive financial inclusion by generating credit insights from over a billion consumers; It provides this info to 170+ financial institutions across Vietnam, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines.

Neuron Mobility raises US$43.5M Series B
Investors include GSR Ventures, Square Peg, and EDBI; The capital will be used to manufacture more e-scooters and fuel its global expansion plans; The firm has grown its presence from seven cities in September 2020 to 26 cities today.

Social music creation platform BandLab adds US$12M more to close Series B at US$65M
Prosus Ventures is the new investor; BandLab’s cross-platform creative ecosystem comprises Mix Editor, a royalty-free Sounds library, Mastering, and AI-powered SongStarter; In December, it raised US$53M Series B, led by Vulcan Capital.

E-motorbike startup Dat Bike raises US$5.3M
Investors are Jungle Ventures and Wavemaker Partners; Dat Bike intends to use the new money to invest in technology, scale production, expand to metro and tier-I cities across the north, central and south Vietnam, and hire top talent.

Indonesian D2C eyewear brand Saturdays bags Series A funding
Investors include Altara Ventures and DSG Consumer Partners; Saturdays sells a range of affordable eyewear using an O2O approach; It currently operates a website, a dedicated app, and fifteen brick-and-mortar stores.

TheAsianparent acquires Vietnamese childcare platform Webtretho
Webtretho offers a platform for user-generated content covering parenthood, pregnancy, childcare, beauty, healthcare, and entertainment; It also operates Be Yeu, a social networking community for parents.

Indonesia’s Juragan Material raises US$4M seed led by Go-Ventures
Juragan operates a marketplace for construction materials and accessories and offers various payment methods and delivery options, supporting tax invoice provision.

Accel backs US$3M round of credit-scoring startup Finbots.AI
Finbots’s credit scorecard system ZScore helps banks and financial institutions process loan applications more efficiently and accurately; It has offices in Singapore, India, and the UAE.

Indonesian influencer marketplace BintanGo raises US$2.1M round
Investors include Investible, eWTP Tech Innovation Fund, Farquhar, Plug and Play, Aksara, and Redbadge Pacific; BintanGo’s SaaS-like platform provides productivity and monetisation tools and financial solutions for digital content creators.

Funding Societies enters neobanking space with investment in Indonesia’s Bank Index
Funding Societies allows MSMEs to apply for up to US$1.5M in working capital financing; In Feb, Funding Societies announced a US$294M funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

3moji aims to transform the way NFTs are used in metaverse with its composable avatars
The 3moji DApp allows users, brands and influencers to change the look of their avatars in the metaverse and across Web2 apps; It recently raised US$750K seed from Collab + Currency, Big Brain Holdings, Definitive Capital, and Gmoney.

Fintech unicorn Revolut gets MAS nod for crypto trading
The Revolut app will now support the buying, selling, and holding of cryptocurrencies, pushing the company a step closer to becoming a super app for financial services.

HK chatbot startup Ominichat bags US$1.8M to enter SEA
Investors’ names aren’t disclosed; Omnichat helps online sellers to centralise their conversations with customers from WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Line, and WeChat into a single platform.

IFS Capital leads US$1.7M seed round of Malaysian EWA firm Payd
1982 Ventures, The Hive Southeast Asia, Delight Capital and Antler also co-invested; Payd is a B2B platform that allows employees to receive up to 50% of their salaries as they earn; It currently has over 20,000 employee sign-ups.

TikTok’s e-commerce arm sets up shop in Malaysia
Business owners in the country can start signing up to sell goods using their TikTok accounts; TikTok Shop aims to support small businesses that have not yet set up physical stores due to high investment costs.

Teacher upskilling startup Akadasia US$550K funding
Investors are EduSpaze, Spiegels Future Family Fund, and former Meta director Andrew Hwang; Akadasia provides educators with professional development courses, digital tools to design lessons, and access to a network of teachers.

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