NGC Ventures closes US$100M fund to invest in Web3 projects
NGC Metaverse Ventures has already made early investments in Everyrealm, VR Jam, and EthSign; In 2021, NGC Ventures, in partnership with Solana Foundation, announced the launch of a US$20M strategic investment fund.

VCs raise record funds for Southeast Asia, India as money leaves China
SEA- and India-focused VCs have raised US$3.1B so far in 2022, already nearing the US$3.5B they raised in all of 2021, says a Preqin report; In comparison, fundraising by China-focused VCs fell sharply from US$27.2B in 2021 to just US$2.1B.

MDI Ventures to launch an impact fund with Alvin Evander at the helm
The new fund will explore sectors with tremendous opportunities in Indonesia, such as agri, education, healthcare, SMEs, energy, and waste management; A DealStreetAsia report said the VC firm is exploring a US$100M impact fund.

Tech layoffs top 15K in a brutal May
A number of tech companies that enjoyed pandemic-related surges are facing a correction, due to a number of factors, from rising inflation, economic distress, war and shifting consumer taste buds.

Temasek’s Fullerton raises US$100M for Thai private equity strategy
Fullerton is partnering with KBank Private Baking, Land and House Asset Management and Hatton Equity Partners for this; It has plans to invest in eight to 12 mid-sized Thai companies.

HK Crypto firm First Digital Trust raises US$20M
Investors include Telegram backer Nogle and Kenetic Capital; The company will use the funds to expand into Singapore, the UK, and Canada; First Digital Trust offers solutions for the delivery of digital asset custody.

Indonesian quick commerce firm Astro bags US$60M
Investors include Tiger Global, Accel, Citius, AC Ventures, GFC, Lightspeed, and Sequoia India; Astro is a quick commerce form currently operating in almost 50 locations across Greater Jakarta and has 1,500+ products.

Fundnel to launch SEA secondaries fund for European investors
It could launch in Q3 2022 with a target corpus of US$75-100M; The fund is being launched in partnership with Singapore-based Aris PrimePartners Asset Management.

Seedstars bullish on Asia, appoints new partner
The Swiss pre-seed and seed-stage VC aims to increase the exposure in Asia to 25-30% of its portfolio; Asia partner Patricia Sosrodjojo said the firm intends to expand its SEA portfolio.

Jungle Ventures may invest in Vietnamese edutech startup Edupia
The startup is reportedly raising US$8M; Edupia is an English learning app targeted at primary school students; The firm also offers Babilala, a similar app for preschool children; It has earlier raised US$2M from eWTP and ReDefine Capital.

Golden Gate Ventures to open two offices in Vietnam
The VC also signed an agreement with the Vietnam National Innovation Center to bring investments into the market and help Vietnamese startups build regional businesses; It currently has offices in Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia.

Indonesia promotes gender equality in digital entrepreneurship
A survey reveals that Indonesia has the highest rate of female entrepreneurship engagement in SEA; 8 out of 10 women who are already or new to entrepreneurship in Indonesia, desire to improve their skills in doing business.

Co-working spaces in Singapore here to stay despite mass return to office
Experts and co-working spaces said that more MNCs are jumping onto the “hub-and-spoke” model, where they have a smaller, traditionally leased headquarters and co-working spaces.

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DeFi, or decentralised finance, is the future of banking and gaining mainstream adoption.

DeFi enables users to make deposits, earn interest, lend, and borrow. But what makes DeFi unique is that it is much faster and no paperwork/third party required. All thanks to blockchain.

Singapore-headquartered Matrixport is a DeFi company offering crypto investment products. It provides a suite of cryptocurrency financial services, including institutional custody, trading, lending, fixed income, spot OTC, structured products and asset management to institutional and retail clients.

Its mission? To make crypto easy for everyone.

“Our name Matrixport reflects its vision to make crypto easy for everyone. ‘Matrix’ represents a future empowered by digital assets, and ‘port’ means a gateway where you can get more from your crypto,” Ross Gan, Head of Public Relations at Matrixport, told e27.

The fintech venture was established in 2019 by Bitmain’s billionaire founder Wu Jihan.

Also Read: What is the next big step in DeFi?

Matrixport provides a gateway to invest directly into DeFi within several taps on its app “with full transparency” on yields. It provides one-stop crypto financial services to meet the emerging needs of generating long-term wealth in digital assets. The services include Cactus Custody, spot OTC, fixed income, structured products, lending, and asset management.

Institutions, corporates and high net worth segments in Asia represent a majority of Matrixport’s customers.

Thus far, Matrixport has raised US$129 million in multiple funding rounds. It included a US$100 million Series C round from DST Global, C Ventures and K3 Ventures, among others, in 2021, making it a unicorn. Its other backers include Qiming Venture Partners, IDG Capital and Dragonfly Capital.

The company holds licenses in Hong Kong and Switzerland, besides Singapore.

According to Gan, the number of investors using its app increased 427 per cent in 2021 over the previous year. “In 2021, NFTs witnessed tremendous growth in volume, reach, and new users and their applications. NFTs have grown across industries, such as art and collectibles, games, entertainment and fashion, with use cases for community engagement, content monetisation and social interaction.”

He believes that with the rise of Web3 virtual content consumption, another wave of crypto adoption will be via gaming and NFTs besides crypto financial services.

“The rapid development and ambitious roadmaps published by NFT brands, games and metaverse have exposed bottlenecks in the current NFT technology stack. We’ve kept a close eye on the space as the need for a financial layer of NFTs becomes increasingly apparent to support the accelerated growth of the NFT industry,” he explained.

Matrixport has also set up a venture arm to forge strategic collaborations with early-stage Web3 innovators, helping them build, grow and scale. An example of this is its strategic investments into players in the NFT space, such as BendDAO, Stakes and Polemos.

In Gan’s opinion, blockchain technologies and digital assets will eventually disrupt and enhance nearly every industry and sector of modern society. Matrixport believes in its potential to complement and improve the existing global financial services infrastructure through innovations, such as DeFi.

“As adoption widens, we believe user needs will transition primarily from trading and mature into asset management. Matrixport’s mission is to provide one-stop digital asset financial services to meet this emerging desire to generate long term wealth.”

The future of cryptocurrency

The valuation of digital assets is on the rise, and according to Gan, there are two fundamental countervailing factors driving this.

The first is the global adoption of digital assets. This adds liquidity to the overall market capitalisation of digital assets. Demand for exposure to them will continue to grow, supported by the development of new use cases, such as DeFi, with continued VC investments.

These innovations will impact a larger footprint of stakeholders by enhancing efficiencies, lowering costs and filling market gaps not well served by the existing financial services infrastructure.

The second is the overall macro-economic sentiment and outlook. The current inflationary environment and the expected rise of central bank interest rates, particularly the US Federal Reserve, will dampen valuations across all asset classes, including digital assets.

The future of finance

The nature of blockchain technology is that it empowers localised interest groups, regardless of scale, with tools to build and financialise their own assets and currency within their communities, including NFTs and governance tokens. This has catalysed a new wave of fintech innovation that will see Bitcoin’s dominance continue to wane as more tokens are introduced, where those with strong use cases and robust utility will become popular and widely used.

Also Read: The unrealised importance of DeFi in fixed-income securities investments

While there are liquidity benefits of having a “global cryptocurrency”, its associated natural monopolistic tendencies will mean it will be less relevant in the immediate future.

He also spoke about the central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). In his opinion, CBDCs could significantly reduce the layers of intermediaries involved in domestic and international remittance. There are several projects in the region at various stages of research and development to study how CBDCs could be applied to their financial systems.

“A major motivation for many national banks in launching CBDCs includes building a more efficient and inclusive payment system. These cost savings could consequently be passed on to businesses and individuals. Once CBDCs are widely launched, there is a possibility that they will be competing with privately issued stable coins, as these digital currencies would bear digital identity features and compliance with the issuing authority,” he said.

“Overall, we can expect a diminishing role of stable coins, as their use case would be reduced if the CBDCs can be used across regulated and unregulated spaces,” he concluded.

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A business that does not invest in marketing and client acquisition is like a country that does not build water plants. A country without water plants has no predictable and consistent source of water and will have to constantly hope and pray for rain.

Some months they’re comfortable and have sufficient water, some months they go without water. Customers to a business are what water is to a country, and every business should have its own ‘water plant’.

Prior to engaging GENIA, Michael Lin, Managing Director of Auston Institute of Management was concerned about a consistent flow of lead generations. He was worried that without leads, there will not be a future for his business.

To generate leads, he invested in content syndication and various forms of paid advertisements across Facebook, Instagram and Google. However, he soon found that the quality of leads varied according to the costs associated with the different seasons. Additionally, if he did not pay for these advertisements, he would not get any leads and the conversion rate was relatively low.

Michael shared that his lead flow previously was akin to, “praying for rain. Every day you go out there and do your dance, burn your fire, slaughter the lamb, drink its blood, and you hope that it drops. Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t.”

Building a ‘water plant’ for Auston

Auston Institute of Management competes in an extremely competitive space against schools with huge marketing budgets such as Kaplan, Management Development Institute of Singapore (MDIS) and Singapore Institute of Management (SIM).

Due to the competitive space that Auston Institute of Management operates in and Google getting more advanced in recent years, traditional SEO such as identifying easy keywords, keyword stuffing and spammy link building to manipulate search engine results would not work.

As such, we had to build a ‘water plant’ (Semantic SEO) for Auston Institute of Management. In order to attract the traffic and the right target audience from Google, GENIA provided a detailed review of the business, technical and content flaws that were holding Auston Institute of Management back from being on the first page of Google.

Michael was given tips to revamp his lacklustre website into one that is truly informative, user-friendly and trustworthy. Auston Institute of Management’s website now functions as their 24/7 salesperson where Michael can seamlessly present accurate information in many different ways and choose how he would like to present it.

Prospective students can also easily search and obtain all the engineering information they need in one place, at any time of the day.

Also Read: 3 stages of marketing for your startup that can drive effective results

The Semantic SEO process involves identifying highly searched, relevant keywords to the business (for e.g: engineering degree Singapore, etc.) providing a Semantic Gap Analysis of competing education pages, and providing an analysis of the type of copywriting that Auston Institute of Management should be producing to ensure that they reach the top spot on Google, providing on-page and technical optimisation, as well as editorial link building.

These are 100 per cent actionable information that business owners can take to scale their business right away.

Reaping the rewards

As a result, Auston went from having just 916 traffic and 6 leads at the start,

to 1150 traffic and 36 leads in four months,

and 2300 traffic and 72 leads in nine months,

generating six figures in monthly revenue from SEO alone.

‘Water plant’ for your business, a consistent source of leads and customers

Every business needs a ‘water plant’ that will consistently churn out new leads and customers or they will never be able to consistently grow. The business owner will not have peace of mind but instead be worried about keeping the business afloat.

Every day, there are thousands of people out there who will need what your business offers. Business owners just need to identify the right marketing strategies in order for their business to be seen and actively sought after.

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Japan-based entertainment company Akatsuki today announced the establishment of Emoote, a US$20 million fund that is focused on Web3 investment.

Based in Singapore, Emoote aims to invest in Asia which is considered as an important market for Web3 companies. However, the firm stated that it will continue to maintain a “global mindset.” It is also looking for Web3 companies that are able to collaborate with Japanese entertainment and media companies.

“We focus on early stage investing that includes seed capital, mainly in Asia (50 per cent) and the US (40 per cent), with the remainder in other regions (10 per cent),” the company stated.

Since September 2021, Emoote has invested in more than 20 projects that including STEPN (a move-to-earn lifestyle app that was one of the most-watched projects in 2022 with a fully diluted valuation of US$20 billion in April) and BreederDAO (a GameFi NFT factory that creates and sells NFTs to game guilds. It has counted Andreessen Horowitz and Delphi Digital as co-lead investors).

There are three focus areas that the firm is aiming for: Web3 applications of tokens, Web3 IP creation as well as NFT and digital fashion.

“We believe that digital fashion is likely to surpass physical fashion as a business as people increasingly spend more time in the virtual world – not only with entertainment that includes games, but also with other digital activities such as social media and metaverses – where physical constraints are removed,” it said.

Also Read: Demystifying NFTs and DeFi

Akatsuki is a maker of popular smartphone games based in Japan and Taiwan. With an emphasis on characters and stories, the company has developed games and other media such as comics and anime.

The establishment of Emoote was not the firm’s first foray into Web3. Through the AET Fund and Heart Driven Fund, it has invested in startups in the US, India, and Japan.

“An important keyword in Web3 is the incentive economy. This refers to an ecosystem that rewards contributors, as exemplified by the play-to-earn concept where users are contributors that earn by playing games,” it stated.

“We believe that NFT consumption, based on ’emotional values’ such as ‘likes’ and ’empathy,’ is a very important mechanism that will provide the motivation upon which tokenomics can grow soundly in order to achieve sustainable growth of the token-centered economic zone. Further, we believe that Web3 will lead to even greater growth of Entertainment and Creator, which has created characters and media works that are loved around the world.”

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Image Credit: Akatsuki

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In Southeast Asia, opportunities continue to grow for startups. Fostering innovation is instrumental to the growth of businesses and the broader startup ecosystem. Gaining access to local knowledge, regulatory know-how, and building relationships with local partners to efficiently scale are potential gains that can be achieved by being part of a startup hub.

The shift from business transactions to building communities

It is crucial for startups, enablers, and venture capitalists to be plugged into a community that allows them to thrive in the long run. This was why JTC, a government agency in charge of Singapore’s industrial development, started LaunchPad. The goal? To provide a space that encourages collaboration and partnerships between like-minded businesses in their various growth stages.

Located at one-north and Jurong Innovation District, LaunchPad offers a total of 60,000sqm of modular units of varying sizes to suit the requirements of startups. This includes those from industries like advanced manufacturing and engineering, agri-food technology, biomedical sciences, infocomm technology and media, and urban solutions.

Also read: Top 5G Startups in 2022 Announced

Besides reliable infrastructure, LaunchPad seeks to foster an atmosphere of vibrancy and community. There are multiple opportunities for partnerships, programming support through learning and networking events both offline and online, and various shared facilities.

“We not only aimed to develop hard infrastructure but also curate an ecosystem where startups can flourish,” explains Sophia Ng, Director of Infocomm Media and Startup Cluster at JTC. “Overall, our journey has evolved from providing space and a playground for ideas to creating purposeful connections.”

A strong track record of housing innovators

Prolific names such as Carousell, a leading second-hand goods marketplace, and ShopBack, a shopping and rewards platform, are some of the startups that got their start at LaunchPad.

Other startups that currently reside in LaunchPad @ one-north include Motional (previously known as nuTonomy), a game-changer in self-driving technology; and Igloocompany, a startup offering smart locks that work offline through unique PIN codes or Bluetooth.

But there’s space for more. “LaunchPad has the potential to house a wider variety of industries and ecosystem stakeholders going forward. Bigger VCs and startups may want to land in LaunchPad. This will promote more deal flows and better ideas with stronger collaborations between the relevant parties,” said James Tan, Chairman of the Action Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE), a trade association advocating startups’ interests and bridging communications between startups and the Singapore government.

Strengthening partnerships for startup support

Esco Aster, the first agri-tech and biotech accelerator in the country with a wet lab space, is one of the enablers at LaunchPad. It aims to help startups and SMEs in the region link up with partners that understand and fulfil their needs to scale up.

“The Southeast Asian ecosystem, in alignment with our Asian heritage, values relationships greatly in the conduct of business. The ecosystem is kept alive by the constant referral and networking of key players ranging from accelerators to early-stage angels, pre-seed and seed investors,” observes Xiangliang Lin, the founder, President and CEO of Esco Aster.

Also read: SAP expands innovation initiatives in Southeast Asia

He adds: “LaunchPad has done wondrously in building up a vibrant environment in this area, bringing tangibility to the ecosystem by housing startups and enablers in one location, making it an ideal place for investors to scout out their next unicorn.”

With market forces remaining fluid, agility and speed are of the essence for startups looking to capture opportunities. “Esco Aster would be in a perfect position to support these given our in-house expertise in process development… for us, proximity to the right startups is always welcome as collaboration is best when it can be done in a timely, face-to-face manner,” says Lin.

Paying it forward

Grab, Southeast Asia’s leading super app, is also part of the LaunchPad network.

The company, which has become ubiquitous with ride-hailing, food delivery, digital payment and financial services in Singapore and the region, is headquartered in one-north. “This is where many of the high-growth startups and companies are based. We are very much a part of this community that’s constantly growing and innovating,” says Shawn Heng, Managing Director of Business Development at Grab.

Kaizen, a Japanese term that refers to the spirit of adaptability and continuous improvement, is an important part of Grab’s culture and has influenced how it innovates. “We recognise that we have a lot to learn from other startups. Being a part of the ecosystem ensures we stay plugged into the latest developments and trends, and we can inspire new thinking and partnerships. We have always believed in taking a partnership approach as opposed to doing everything on our own,” notes Heng.

Also read: How to build a business with scalability in Asia’s vibrant economy?

This explains why Grab is one of eight industry players throwing their weight behind LaunchPad Investor Network (LINK), a JTC-led initiative that connects LaunchPad’s startups with key corporate strategic partners, enabling opportunities for investment as well as regional and global expansion.

Heng adds: “Grab has benefitted from the startup ecosystem in Singapore and Southeast Asia. We want to contribute what we have learnt over the years back to the community. Being in one-north gives us easy access to startups in the LaunchPad community. Being part of the LINK programme formalises our intention to engage the community.”

If you are a startup, incubator, accelerator, or VC that wants to be part of a vibrant startup hub like LaunchPad, learn more here.

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This article is produced by the e27 team, sponsored by JTC LaunchPad

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