As an alternative fundraising tool, venture debt has gained traction in Southeast Asia. Singapore-based Genesis Alternative Ventures, which launched its second fund with a target of US$150 million in August, is one of the leading companies in this space. Japan’s Aozora Bank is one of Genesis’s investors.

Genesis was co-founded by Martin Tang, who has strong business development professional skills in corporate finance, working capital, venture debt, private equity, and financial modelling. Before founding Genesis in 2018, Tang was Vice President at DBS Bank and previously held the Associate role at Standard Chartered Bank. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Commerce from Curtin University.

Tang speaks at Echelon Asia 2022, to be held in Singapore from October 27-28.

In this conversation, Tang shares why offline events like Echelon are crucial for the region’s startup ecosystem.

Excerpts:

Offline events are making a comeback. Do you think they are relevant in the new post-COVID era? Why?

Offline events are coming because they are relevant and fill our innate need to connect with each other. We have all missed the spark of inspiration from seemingly causal conversations over lunch, waiting at lift lobbies or the water cooler.

How startup events like Echelon are important when the world is going through a tough investment climate. What do you expect from Echelon?

Events like these are even more important during tough times because there is strength in unity. There is an African proverb: “‘if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together’. When people get together, we can encourage each other to keep going and provide support.

I look forward to many meaningful conversations leading to collaborations during the event.

How does Genesis help its portfolio companies tackle the current crisis? Have you become more prudent and cautious when it comes to investing?

In addition to deploying capital to our portfolio companies, we constantly value add by making strategic introductions to expert networks, other founders and investors.

Also Read: ‘Economic crises become less important when investing with a longer-term mindset’: Qin En Looi

We are laser-focused on ensuring that companies have sustainable businesses with strong unit economics. Some CFOs are grateful to us for helping them enforce financial discipline. We continue to seek potential portfolio companies to add to our stable actively.

Many Japanese investors are now turning their focus on Southeast Asia. Is it because Japan’s potential has already been tapped, or does SEA present better opportunities?

Japanese investors have always been focused on Southeast Asia — in construction, infrastructure, automotive, etc. The potential in Southeast Asia is huge, and investing in the startup ecosystem here is an extension of their thesis.

How do Japan’s startups tide over the current crisis compared with their counterparts in Southeast Asia?

I believe it would be the same as any other startup in SEA: Cut costs, raise capital, preserve cash flow, and ensure strong unit economics to tide over this turbulent period.

Why sustainability and climate tech are important in Southeast Asia?

It is not just important for Southeast Asia but for everyone in general. While making a return is important for all businesses, doing it sustainably is equally important.

Also Read: Nothing can truly replace the offline element of community building: Yinglan Tan

The opportunity for climate tech in Southeast Asia is a large one, given our vulnerability to the effects of climate change. Most major cities here are coastal ones and, therefore, vulnerable to rising sea levels and climate change. So it has gone from merely being a buzzword to something in urgent need of action.

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Echelon 2022 aims to provide intimate and focused discussions on key topics and business matching services to facilitate business-driven connections during the two-day event. e27 will curate and invite key stakeholders of startups, investors, corporates, and ecosystem enablers to drive towards fruitful business outcomes at Echelon. The event will be co-located with SWITCH at Resorts World Sentosa from 27 to 28 October 2022. 

We are looking for top-notch speakers for the 2022 edition to join our line-up of speakers, such as Steve Melhuish (Co-Founder, PropertyGuru), Yinglan Tan (Insignia Ventures Partners), Looi Qin En (Saison Capital), Aaron Tan (Carro), Aaron Sharma (Scaleup Malaysia), Carmen Yuen (Vertex Ventures), Shao-Ning Huang (AngelCentral), and Grace Sai (Unravel Carbon).

Learn more here. 

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Malaysia’s global drone services company Aerodyne Group has raised US$30 million as part of its latest bridging round led by Petronas Ventures, the corporate VC arm of energy major Petronas.

The round also included a follow-on investment by KWAP, initially invested in Aerodyne in 2020.

Also Read: Malaysia’s Petronas sets up US$350M VC fund to invest in tech startups around the world

Petronas is Aerodyne’s long-time client. A memorandum of collaboration (MoC) was signed on April 21, 2022, between Aerodyne Oil & Gas, a subsidiary of Aerodyne Group and Petronas’s technology commercialisation arm Petronas Technology Ventures. It explores opportunities for deployment and commercialisation of drone-based solutions, as well as enabling remote and autonomous operations through the expansion of robotics and digitalisation.

The drone company will use the capital to support its expansion into Europe, Africa, Latin America and South Asia. A portion of the funds will also be utilised to support its agriculture scaling efforts and bring the solution to Indonesia and India.

It will also invest strategically in technology acquisition and enter the advanced air mobility space. A large-scale commercialisation plan for the air mobility solution is underway. This solution includes using heavy lifter drones, which can replace the more costly traditional methods and is well-suited for oil & gas operations such as shore-to-platform and platform-to-platform deliveries. This also accelerates extensive logistic operations, such as delivering medical supplies in rural areas and potentially in urban air mobility, where it can provide fast and cost-effective transportation shortly.

According to Kamarul A Muhamed, Founder and Group CEO of Aerodyne, the firm has plans to raise US$100-200 million shortly to bring Aerodyne to the next stage of its growth.

Established in 2014, Aerodyne is a DT3 (drone-tech, data-tech and digital transformation) company. It uses Artificial Intelligence as an enabler for large-scale data operations, analytics and process optimisation. Its flagship precision agriculture solution is powered by in-house developed AI capabilities, with more than 300,000 secured effective hectarages for major industry players in Malaysia.

Also Read: Malaysian drones services firm Aerodyne adds Japanese investors to its cap table

The group employs over 1,000 drone professionals in the UAS (unmanned aerial vehicle) services sector. It claims to have managed more than 560,000 infrastructure assets with 458,058 flight operations and surveyed over 380,000 km of power infrastructure across 35 countries.

Early this year, the group acquired a principal stake in Malaysia-based AI and data analytics company Synapse Innovation for an undisclosed amount. Last year, it announced a strategic investment from a consortium of Japanese investors, comprising Real Tech Fund, Kobashi Holdings and ACSL.

Two years earlier, the group secured US$30 million in a Series B investment round, led by InterVest/Kejora Ventures, with participation from VentureTECH, Gobi Partners and 500 Global. This round was extended with an investment from North Summit Capital, Arc Ventures, and Leave a Nest in February 2020.

In December 2019, Aerodyne acquired a controlling stake in the services business of Measure UAS, an aerial intelligence company in the US.

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Echelon 2022 aims to provide intimate and focused discussions on key topics and business matching services to facilitate business-driven connections during the two-day event. e27will curate and invite key stakeholders of startups, investors, corporates, and ecosystem enablers to drive towards fruitful business outcomes at Echelon.

The 2022 Echelon edition will be co-located with SWITCH at Resorts World Sentosa from 27 to 28 October 2022. Learn more here. 

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Manila-headquartered CloudEats, which operates cloud kitchens across the Philippines and Vietnam, announced today it has raised US$7 million in a fresh funding round led by London-based VC firm Nordstar.

The ghost kitchen startup will use the new funds for regional expansion and the development of its brands Burger Beast, 24/7 Eats, and Sulit Chicken.

Resources will also be allocated to developing stronger content and expanding marketing efforts for CloudEats’s celebrity brands, such as Pia’s Kitchen with Pia Wurtzbach and Healthy Appetite with Rhian Ramos.

CloudEats is also doubling down on its smart kitchen technology, expanding its development team’s capabilities and onboarding crucial talent in brand and marketing.

CloudEats has become a major player in the region with its portfolio of persona-driven, innovative cloud restaurants and technology-powered cloud kitchens. It claims to have served over 2.5 million orders so far.

On the back of its successful Vietnam launch, the company is looking to open a third market in H1 2023.

Also Read: CloudEats raises US$5M in Series A for SEA expansion

“The massive growth of our Vietnam business over the last two quarters is highly encouraging. We are taking the best practices and key learnings to our next market launch,” said CloudEats Co-Founder Kimberly Yao.

His Co-Founder Iacopo Rovere said the firm has identified key focus areas in the next twelve months. They include a suite of integrated SaaS solutions for food service as well as intensifying brand building and marketing efforts for its hero and celebrity brands in the form of deeper partnerships with the food delivery platforms, creative offline executions, advanced product innovation, and exploration of new channels.

“As a global investor in the cloud kitchen space, we are capturing the white space in Southeast Asia’s food delivery market through our investment in CloudEats,” said Kimberley Ong, principal at Nordstar. “CloudEats generates the best brand and kitchen-level economics in the market. This is all due to the company’s sophisticated technology and operations backbone and the team’s unique data and partnership-driven approach to brand building.”

The firm has raised US$14 million since launching. In November last year, it announced a US$5 million Series A round led by Vulpes Investment Management of Singapore and Gobi Partners.

The US$15-billion food delivery market continues to explode in Southeast Asia and is expected to reach US$50 billion by 2030, according to a recent report by Frost & Sullivan. Euromonitor also projects the industry to be a US$1-trillion global opportunity by 2030.

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Echelon 2022 aims to provide intimate and focused discussions on key topics and business matching services to facilitate business-driven connections during the two-day event. e27 will curate and invite key stakeholders of startups, investors, corporates, and ecosystem enablers to drive towards fruitful business outcomes at Echelon.

The 2022 Echelon edition will be co-located with SWITCH at Resorts World Sentosa from 27 to 28 October 2022. Learn more here. 

The post Cloud kitchen startup CloudEats raises US$7M to expand to more SEA markets, develop its brands appeared first on e27.

X-PITCH is one of the largest startup contests in Asia. Organised by Taiwan Accelerator (TA), the pitch competition is known as the X Games for Startups. Contestants go through 15-second, 60-second, and 3-minute pitches all the way to win awards and investments. In the past three events, the 60-second pitch has been held in TAIPEI 101 high-speed elevator and autonomous vehicle. This year, X-PITCH is the first in the world to use MRT train and Metaverse as the competition carrier.

This year’s theme is Tech for Good which highlights the challenges in the post-pandemic world and innovations that will make meaningful social impacts for the public good and sustainable development. Participating startups focus on applications and services that enable digital transformation around five categories, backed by AI, 5G, edge computing, VR/AR/XR, Web3, and next-gen technologies.

Also read: 18 X-PITCH startups raised crossborder funding

Semi-finalists represent diverse next-generation tech industries

Compared to 2021, the proportion of non-Asian teams has increased by five per cent, while the number of pre-seed startups decreased by five per cent. AI startups still account for half of the share, but next-generation tech rose sharply to 33 per cent from seven per cent last year. 

It is exciting to see more new technologies emerge and enter the market. The percentage of Web3 startups is twice that of 2021, proving the rapid development of this field. On the application side, Banking/Commerce saw a notable increase of 14 per cent, while Consumer Lifestyle declined by nine per cent. These data provide some insight into current trends in innovation and entrepreneurship.

More than just a pitch competition

In the following weeks, semi-finalists will go through a series of activities to help the startups progress in their X-PITCH journey. Together with its partners, the startups will go through fundraising workshops, investor matching programs, country access webinars, corporate access programs, and online exhibitions.

To kick off the activities, a fundraising workshop will be held on October 29, 2022, to help prepare the startups for the investor matching program that will be facilitated by e27 through its Pro Connect. 

The fundraising workshop on the 29th will cover the following topics:

• How to value your startup? This discussion will be led by Equidam, the official valuation partner for the competition.
• How to effectively reach out to investors?  For this topic, e27 will lead the discussion to provide not just insights but a technical demonstration for the investor matching that will happen on e27.

Investor Matching on e27’s Pro Connect

As the official investor relations partner, e27 will be facilitating the investor matching program through Pro Connect. Pro Connect is one of the e27 Pro membership plans that gives its members access to 400+ active and verified investors and tools to assist startups in discovering and connecting with the right investors for their fundraising goals.

For X-PITCH Investor Matching Program (XIMP), the startups will be given complimentary access to Pro Connect to access a list of X-PITCH’s investment partners. They will be able to connect directly with the investors, schedule meetings, and manage the deal status for each investor. 

After the investor matching program, the TOP150 startups will be able to continue their fundraising journey on their own and connect with more investors from e27’s 400+ active and verified investors in the region. 

The grand finale

Ten awards will be presented at the Grand Finale on 10 November. The top three teams will win up to US$1 million in investments in total. 

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At e27, we are kickstarting a new articles series to know startup professionals and their lives beyond working hours.

With an immense experience as a corporate venture specialist, ST Chua recently joined Ikano Insight as its Regional Business Director of SEA. His primary task is to lead the company’s growth in Southeast Asia, helping both corporates to grow startups on any customised advanced analytics needs.

Before this role, he was heading PETRONAS Dagangan’s digital transformation “SWAT team” TipTop. His achievements included streamlining maintenance processes to significantly reduce equipment downtime at retail fuel stations nationwide and introducing an internal super app for dealers across 1060 stations.

Chua has developed a multi-million-dollar international e-commerce business and is a co-founder of an FMCG distribution firm, a predictive analytics company and a fintech startup.

He enjoys mentoring startups and frequently speaks at technology-related events. He holds an MBA from INSEAD, France.

In this candid interview, Chua talks about his personal and professional life.

How would you explain what you do to a 5-year-old?

To 5-year-olds who like chocolates, I will say that I manage a team to help the company selling those chocolates, and I want to determine what type of chocolates he/she likes. I will also ask the kid how much to price those chocolates, what else to bundle with, and how to ensure a sufficient supply of chocolates, optimising the retail location where he or she is most likely to buy those chocolates. This is to ensure you are one happy kid eating those healthy chocolates.

What has been the biggest highlight/challenge of your career so far?

There have been many challenges throughout my career. I would go with the most recent when I was the General Manager and Head of TipTop at PETRONAS Dagangan Bhd, where I led a special “SWAT team” to look into digital transformation and automation.

The business has been running for 40+ years, with strongly defined processes, multiple stakeholders, and people staying there for a long time. Naturally, someone new coming to do the transformation with no prior background in the industry will be questioned and challenged. Trying to execute transformation at pace and scale in that environment is challenging. My team and I had to put tremendous focus on change management.

The second part of the challenge was introducing innovation or new technologies to a company with the largest retail network in the country with over 1000 sites. For example, to introduce IoTs or smart cameras, the business model needs to accommodate the additional cost of three zeros behind, which is a challenge when business margins are thin.

As a leader in PETRONAS, we are also responsible for upholding the trust put on us to manage the country’s resources (we call it Amanah in Malay) and ensuring that our investments create substantial value. So there’s always a trade-off between cool technologies vs practically, long-term investment vs short-term gains to balance.

Also Read: What Pierluigi Cau loves most about working at GitHub

Besides delivering our plan, the highlight was building a high-performing team with strong startup culture — always steadfast, agile and standing together despite the pressure and challenges.

How do you envision the next five years of your career?

I hope to continue pushing my career’s boundaries, busy solving complex problems or pain points. What excites me about Ikano Insight is that data and technology adoption is growing exponentially. This company is an expert in helping others be it large corporates, to scale-ups to make sense of data, transforming them into useful insights.

The other exciting thing about Ikano Insight is its ability to help companies meet upcoming ESG compliance since we have the know-how to track and monitor ESG using global standards that we utilise ourselves across the group. How many analytics companies in Southeast Asia can say they have a sustainability practice? There is so much to learn about ESG and sustainability, which is exciting.

Sometime down the road, I wouldn’t discount the possibility of setting up my own VC fund to help startups since I have experience setting funds up from scratch, scaling and exiting companies.

What are some of your favourite work tools?

I use Trello a lot as a Kanban board for myself (Trello should give me an award for being their biggest evangelist since 2012 when no one at that time knew about it in this part of the world). I also use Slack for communication with different teams and projects, Jira for product development, Miro for brainstorming, Google Calendar, Microsoft suite of products (Sharepoint, Word, Powerpoint and Excel), and last but not least, sticky notes.

What’s something about you or your job that would surprise us?

Ever since I joined Ikano Insight, I found five points that seem to surprise people about my job and the company:

• Ikano is not a Japanese company despite sounding like one. It is owned by the late IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad’s family from Sweden.
• Being the youngest entity in the Ikano Group, we are more like a startup than a corporate.
• We are not merely an internal data arm to serve the Ikano and IKEA companies but a standalone insight and advanced analytics company providing services internally and to external clients, be it corporates or scale-ups. So you will see my team and me out and about for business development.
• We are technology agnostic. We use what clients are comfortable with and perfectly fine to work on their existing technology stack.
• One of our largest focuses is sustainability. We use data and technology to monitor sustainability efforts and automate ESG reporting.

Do you prefer WFH or WFO, or hybrid?

As someone from the startup and venture capital world, I am used to working from anywhere with a laptop, so it does not make a difference to me. So instead of WFH, I would call it WFA (work from anywhere).

Also Read: What Samar Sen’s life looks like while heading Talos in APAC

To me, the world has progressed so much in adopting digital tools that enabled us to work entirely online for two years. Why revert? One has to be practical about it and think about how to maximise productive time, and if there is a need to have a face-to-face meeting, then do that to not lose the personal touch.

What would you tell your younger self?

Experience as much as possible, try new things, go to new places, and study different languages. It’s increasingly becoming a globalised world without borders, especially in the digital space and the ability to relate to surroundings, have empathy and communicate across cultures is crucial.

Can you describe yourself in three words?

Curious, simple, trustworthy.

What are you most likely to be doing if not working?

I have lots of dogs, so I would probably be walking them, bringing them hiking or socialising with other dogs to drain their energy, or else they would be up to mischief at home. Otherwise, you would find me in some café mentoring startups or brainstorming the next business idea with people of similar interest.

What are you currently reading/listening to/ watching?

I finished reading the book Touching the Void. It’s a real-life account of two climbers and their perilous journey up the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes when disaster struck. It is a story of extraordinary resilience and willpower to survive. A brilliant book that I would recommend reading.

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