Micro-mobility company Scooterson has bagged a US$74-million contract to build electric scooters in Singapore.

The company didn’t disclose the contractor’s name since it has signed a non-disclosure agreement with the firm. “I can reveal that it is an electric vehicle (EV) unicorn in the US,” Scooterson’s Co-Founder and CTO Deepansh Jain told e27.

Scooterson is setting up a manufacturing facility at JTC Launchpad, one of the hottest startup spaces in Singapore. “We plan to produce around 850 units monthly (over 10,000 units annually). We will go in full swing starting April-March 2023,” he shared.

The company chose Singapore to base its factory because it is an ideal hub for innovation and enterprise in Asia and globally. The island nation also occupies a unique position for hardware development with many key advantages.

“Because of Singapore’s strategic location and how it provides access to resources and industry knowledge, we’ve been able to focus on enhancing our R&D to create products in the island nation that can be marketed in countries like the US,” said Scooterson Founder and CEO Mihnea de Vries.

Also Read: Now, Scooterson’s AIR smart scooter can be moved from one place to another remotely

The mobility company will also strengthen its R&D department in Singapore to create streamlined components and reduce hurdles related to manufacturing and costs. “We plan to lower manufacturing costs by doing away with the margins being paid to the component suppliers, particularly costly components like batteries for its e-scooters,” added Vries.

The EV venture plans to hire 15 employees to strengthen its R&D department, which currently employs nine people. It plans to employ 20-25 more people in the manufacturing department in the next six to nine months.

Originally founded in 2016, Scooterson offers Rolley+, a semi-autonomous e-scooter that requires zero learning curve and can accelerate on its own. Its Smart Mode Acceleration feature works in tandem with the scooter’s sensors, phone sensors and prior ride data to optimise speed.

Unlike conventional scooters, Rolley+ doesn’t have a gear shifter or acceleration lever. It adjusts the speed and performance according to the rider’s body movements.

Rolley+ also boasts of a minimalist dashboard with an intuitive interface. Backed by AI technology, the e-scooter can adjust its torque settings to match its battery levels, allowing riders to enjoy peak performance without sacrificing power. The technology also makes the e-scooter energy-efficient and safe by analysing the rider’s riding patterns, profile, and surroundings.

The model uses components made of magnesium alloys and aerospace-grade aluminium alloys. It has a polymer chassis reinforced by Carbon/Kevlar and sports a lightweight composite body 3x lighter than conventional e-scooters. Its battery supports a 120km range.

The other model is AIR (short for Artificial Intelligence and Remote operations). This scooter is designed as a teleoperation and autonomous fleet-rebalancing solution for micro-mobility operators. This enables scooter-sharing companies to do fleet distribution for their customers remotely.

According to Jain, AIR is specifically designed to lower operational costs by reducing the staffers required to rebalance the fleets on the streets or deal with footpath obstruction and urban clutter. It will also curb the misuse by recording the errant user’s actions and restricting him/her access to the service in case of vandalism.

The Scooterson mobile app allows users to remotely lock/unlock their scooters, share their travel information and the scooters with family and friends, and send charging notifications when the battery is running low. Moreover, its anti-tapering alarm system and Find My Scooter function allow users to locate their scooters if they are stolen or lost.

Vries also shared that most of Scooterson’s sales are online, with most buyers coming from the US. As of now, the US is its biggest target market, and it plans to set up a brick-and-mortar store with a partner. “We are looking to enter other potential markets, including Europe and Asia, specifically the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan.”

In 2018, Scooterson bagged Red Dot Design Award for Rolley. A year later, the startup unveiled a new foldable lightweight smart e-scooter Elf, with plans to launch in Singapore in October. However, the plans hit a roadblock when the government restricted the use of personal mobility devices.

The startup is backed by Singapore-based ElevateVC.

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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. 

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Cyberwar is the new, rapidly increasing mode of combat, as it knows no boundaries and can be detrimental to the foundation of a country’s defence and government.

A prime example of this can be seen within the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, as before Russian troops even made their way into the opposing territory, Ukraine had already been hit by new malware that was designed to wipe data.

Many experts say that cyber war is already here, as opposing countries are using this technological weapon to weaken government power and hack into databases that are vital to the well-being and operation of their enemies. Microsoft even discovered malware in Ukrainian government systems that had the ability to be triggered remotely.

In February 2022, the FBI asked US companies to alert them to any increased cyber activity that was launched against Ukraine or the US. This was issued alongside a “shields up” alert that recommended that all organisations adopt a heightened cybersecurity posture.

All of these precautions can be attributed to the fact that Russia, Ukraine, and the US are currently the top three most targeted countries for cybercrime. The likely explanation for this, as experts say, is that Ukraine is likely being used as a live testing ground for Russia’s next generation of cyber weapons.

Why test on Ukraine? Because Ukraine’s infrastructure is similar to Western Europe and North America, but there are limited resources for counter-attacks, Russia can attack without much fear of reciprocation to prepare for much larger and well-equipped enemies.

Also Read: Why firms need a multi-layered approach to cybersecurity

These cyber-attacks have only grown in frequency over time, with notable events every year dating back to 2015 when suspected Russian hackers knocked out electricity for 230,000 customers in western Ukraine.

Fast forward to 2022, the US and the EU have tried to thwart the threat from Russia by providing support to bolster cyber defences in Ukraine, but it is unlikely that the attacks will stay within its borders. Despite Ukrainian efforts to counter-attack and cause chaos within Russia’s systems and databases, cyber warfare remains one of the largest threats to the most targeted countries.

Cyber attacks vs cyber war

Cyber war comes in many shapes and sizes, varying in different types of threats and different levels of severity. The connections between cyber and physical assets are growing, which brings greater risk to both network and physical infrastructure security.

In fact, in 2021, data breaches and cybersecurity attacks on average cost companies US$4.24 million per breach, which is a 10 per cent increase from the previous year. In addition, the pandemic has only heightened the potential for damage from these threats, as more information has been moved to the cloud, more people are working remotely and from less-secure home networks or personal devices, and more services, in general, are being provided in a digital space.

In terms of severity, cyber attacks differ from a cyber war in some key ways. Cyber-attacks are known to be less devastating, more isolated, and usually just testing new cyber weapons. They have the potential to shut down electrical grids, destroy technology, and self-destruct power infrastructure. Cyber war, on the other hand, could impact the scale of a natural disaster. A comparable disaster would be the 2021 Texas Freeze, which caused widespread damage, loss of electricity, food and water, caused massive disruption to everyday life and caused over 200 deaths.

Also Read: How can lean startups build a resilient cybersecurity posture

In general, people fear cyber war, as reports show that 93 per cent of Americans are afraid of such attacks against the US, but only 19 per cent are totally confident that the government can protect them against cyber warfare. Fortunately, countries like Japan, China, and the US are some of the leading countries in security for cyber attacks, coming in at 67 per cent, 63 per cent, and 70 per cent secure, respectively.

In addition, 75 per cent of cyber attacks target financial services, and 20 per cent target business networks, showing researchers where the defences need to be allocated. These types of attacks seek to make important resources like finances, cell service, running water, internet, food, utilities, and health records unavailable to users.

Despite these grievances, citizens globally are already taking measures to protect themselves from cybercrime, such as updating software, changing passwords, backing up computers, stashing cash reserves, and backing up emails offline.

The lines on the battlefield of cyber attacks are blurred and complex as this new generation of crime and warfare increases in frequency, forcing citizens of every nation to take action to protect themselves and their assets.

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Line Man Wongnai, an e-commerce platform for food delivery, grocery delivery, taxi, messenger, restaurant reviews, and restaurant solutions in Thailand, has raised US$265 million in a Series B investment round led by Singapore’s GIC and LINE Corporation.

BRV Capital Management, PTT Oil and Retail Business Public Company Limited (OR), Bualuang Ventures, and Taiwan Mobile also joined the round.

With this investment, Line Man Wongnai has achieved over US$1 billion to become Southeast Asia’s latest unicorn.

The funding will be used to expand new service categories, recruit tech talent, and improve tech infrastructure. The firm aims to employ more than 450 tech professionals by end-2022.

Line Man Wongnai was established in 2020 following the merger of Thailand’s leading on-demand assistant app Line Man and restaurant review platform Wongnai.

Also Read: Thai restaurant reviews platform Wongnai invests US$1M in restaurant PoS startup FoodStory

Line Man’s services include food delivery, grocery delivery, messenger, and taxi. It claims the number of orders made each month through the food delivery service grew by more than 15x between January 2020 and August 2022. Now, it operates in all 77 provinces in Thailand, offering delivery options to 700,000 restaurants.

On the other hand, Wongnai connects close to one million merchants to users nationwide through search and reviews. In addition, Wongnai’s point-of-sale solution has won over 50,000 merchants in the F&B industry.

Utilising a large base of customers, riders, and restaurants, Line Man Wongnai offers advertising and financial services, among others, to incrementally add value to the stakeholders in the ecosystem.

Yod Chinsupakul, CEO of Line Man Wongnai, said: “Food has been our passion since I co-founded Wongnai, and now, to connect millions of users with the biggest pool of restaurants we have is a dream come true. We are also proud to create over 100,000 rider jobs, most of whom earn more than twice the minimum wage.”

In Young Chung, CFO, Line Man Wongnai, added: “The announcement opens the next chapter for us to grow from a local Thai startup to a regional tech platform.”

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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. 

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Central and Southern Asia and Oceania (CSAO) is the third largest cryptocurrency market in our index this year, with citizens of CSAO countries receiving US$932 billion in cryptocurrency value from July 2021 to June 2022.

CSAO is also home to seven of the top twenty countries in this year’s index: Vietnam (1), the Philippines (2), India (4), Pakistan (6), Thailand (8), Nepal (16), and Indonesia (20).

Let’s analyse the main drivers of and barriers to grassroots cryptocurrency adoption in these countries. But first, let’s look at CSAO in aggregate.

India continues to lead CSAO in the unweighted crypto activity, receiving US$172 billion in cryptocurrency value from July 2021 through June of this year. Thailand, Vietnam, Australia and Singapore follow close behind, with each receiving more than US$100 billion. Less engaged with cryptocurrencies, however, are Central Asian countries like Uzbekistan and Oceanian island nations like the Maldives.

NFTs are perhaps the biggest on-ramp to cryptocurrency in CSAO today. 58 per cent of web traffic from CSAO IP addresses to cryptocurrency services in Q2 2022 was NFT related; another 21 per cent was to the websites of play-to-earn blockchain games.

Play-to-earn games and non-fungible tokens are intimately related. In most blockchain games today, the in-game items are NFTs, like Axie pets in Axie Infinity and Sneakers in STEPN, which can be resold on many different NFT marketplaces, like MagicEden and OpenSea. For countries with high web traffic to NFT marketplaces, especially Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines, a large portion of that NFT-related traffic may therefore come from players of blockchain games.

As the heatmap above shows, NFT-related websites account for a majority share of web traffic in almost every CSAO country, but most of these same countries have their second-highest share going to blockchain games and entertainment.

This is not necessarily surprising. CSAO is a hub for innovation in blockchain-based entertainment. Game-centric blockchain developers Polygon and Immutable X are headquartered in India and Australia, for example, and Axie Infinity and STEPN, the two largest play-to-earn games, are operated in Vietnam and Australia, respectively.

Also Read: A look into the Chainalysis 2022 geography of cryptocurrency report

Traffic to websites related to subjects like decentralised exchange contracts, however, has declined in recent quarters. This is likely connected to the bear market overall. Manan Vora, Senior Vice President of Operations and Strategy at Liminal, a Singapore-based wallet infrastructure provider, found this to be the case. “The UST crash played a big role in shaking the confidence of the crypto market. When a top ten coin goes to zero, it becomes very difficult to get people who have just entered the market to stay in the market. These are the users that you may lose forever.”

Now that we’ve looked at CSAO’s crypto markets at large let’s zoom in on the most active countries within the region.

Rapid adoption in Vietnam and the Philippines

For the second consecutive year, Vietnam ranked the highest in our cryptocurrency adoption index. The Philippines, meanwhile, made a giant leap, jumping from 15th to second. Both of these countries have similar growth drivers: play-to-earn (P2E) games and remittances.

The first of these, P2E games, we’ve already addressed in part above, but it’s worth noting the sheer scale of P2E penetration in these two countries in particular. An estimated 25 per cent of Filipinos and 23 per cent of Vietnamese citizens have played a play-to-earn game. At one point, players based in the Philippines made up 40 per cent of Axie Infinity’s player base. Meanwhile, Axie Infinity’s developer, Sky Mavis, is based in Vietnam.

Vietnam and the Philippines are also massive remittance markets, with remittance inflows accounting for five per cent and 9.6 per cent of their respective country-wide gross domestic products. In Manan Vora’s view, cryptocurrencies, especially stablecoins, help bridge the gap in cases where parents don’t have access to traditional banking channels and money transfer services like Western Union charge high fees. “It makes a lot of sense. Why pay three per cent to a banking intermediary and wait two days for the funds to reach them when USDT/USDC can reach them within one minute, with almost zero fees?”

The same remittance thesis resonates for other CSAO countries as well. Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh each have US$20+ billion in remittance markets, and blockchain-based payment providers are beginning to disrupt traditional intermediaries. Some of these payment rails are even being built in coordination with government agencies, such as the Pakistani central bank’s work with Alipay. These transfers are generally made via stablecoins, so that the value being transferred is preserved in transit.

As the graph above shows, stablecoins and ETH/WETH are the top two most actively traded asset types in many CSAO countries, consistent with the remittance and NFT-centric adoption model.

Indian and Pakistani crypto regulations likely dampen activity, but not the pace of innovation

In our 2021 crypto adoption index, we found that Indian and Pakistani citizens were the second and third highest cryptocurrency adopters globally, respectively. In 2022, they’ve fallen to fourth and sixth. Recent regulatory developments may help explain why.

India

On April 1st, 2022, the Indian government implemented a 30 per cent tax on all crypto gains, with no ability for users to offset their losses. Then, on July 1st, the government also implemented a one per cent transaction deduction at source (TDS), meaning that crypto users must pay an additional one per cent fee on every transaction. “This led to a lot of brain drain,” said Vora, “first to Singapore, and now to Dubai because even if your business is market-making, it is now effectively being treated as a lottery business.”

Also Read: A new type of digital arts are on the rise. How is Web3 redefining content ownership?

Vikram Rangala, the Director of ZebPay, an Indian crypto exchange, helped us understand the government’s perspective on these new rules. For them, he explained, it’s about consumer protection.

“From the conversations I and my colleagues have had, people in the Indian government, including members of parliament, aren’t anti-crypto per se. Some are very pro-crypto. But they’re worried about their constituents trading a volatile asset without adequate information. A 25-year-old saving to get married or provide for his family might trade some meme coin and get wiped out. No public servant can be seen backing something so risky for most people. Rich people can survive such losses, but a house cleaner, farmer, or rickshaw driver cannot.”

And in Rangala’s view, crypto innovation in India has continued unabated.

“India has dozens of [crypto] projects working on establishing property rights, accessing tickets and membership passes, helping rural artisans monetise, even giving token holders a chance to go skydiving with a movie star in Dubai, and more.”

Pakistan

In January this year, Pakistan’s central bank and government recommended a ban on cryptocurrencies. Since then, the federal government has formed three subcommittees to deliberate the matter further and eventually propose their own crypto policies. It remains to be seen whether or not the policies implemented will be as restrictive as the proposed ban.

Other issues further complicate Pakistani crypto adoption. The country has been on the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) grey list since 2018, hurting its ability to get international financial aid and hardening the government’s negative attitude towards cryptocurrencies.

State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) Governor Reza Baqir stated in February that the potential risks associated with cryptocurrencies “far outweigh the benefits” and named the “widening grey economy” and “capital flight” as key worries.

Given Pakistan’s current civil unrest, its former prime minister was recently charged under the country’s antiterrorism act yet remains one of Pakistan’s most popular leaders, Baqir’s concerns about crypto-based capital flight may prove prescient. Vikram Rangala suspects as much, “After watching Venezuela and Argentina, I think that anybody who’s in a country where things are not that stable, they’re starting to see cryptocurrency as a possibility.”

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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

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Mycotech develops a new scientific process to grow mushroom mycelium-based products. It uses mushroom mycelium, the vegetative part of mushrooms, as a natural adhesive. It employs mycelium as a binding agent to create biomaterial composite (Biobo) and cultivate it to create strong, leather-like material (Mylea).

CEO Adi Reza Nugroho co-founded Mycotech with the mission to create the highest quality materials made from mycelium that meet the highest standard of the biotech industry. He also wants to make a real impact by reducing the use of animals in the fashion industry and delivering sustainable material that meets the uncompromising standards of the fashion industry.

Mycotech has shipped Mylea material samples to 16 countries following its original Kickstarter campaign. In collaboration with LVMH prize-winning designer Masayuki Ino from Japan, its products were showcased at Paris Fashion Week S/S 2021 and F/W 2022.

In March and April 2022, Mycotech brought one collaboration product with Hijack Sandals in Indonesia to the overseas market to launch the first mycelium leather sandals called “Mimic Mylea” exclusively in Japan. The launch marks its first step to start penetrating the East Asian market.

Also Read: This startup by an Indonesian farmer produces ‘leather’ used in shoes and wallets without killing a single animal

Currently, Mycotech operates a production facility with a capacity of 10,000 sq ft per year in Indonesia. Besides that, Mycotech brought six global brands, with one of the brands coming from Fashion for Good, for piloting to create prototypes, bring the products to the market, and make capsule collections.

In addition to focusing on Mylea, the company will also develop research and penetration for two other products made from mycelium for the long term. Biobo for creating remarkable structural patterns that rejuvenate residential, industrial, and public spaces, as well as composite research that allows exploring more about the many possibilities of mushrooms as the key to the future.

“Biomaterial innovations, such as mycelium leather, are instrumental to the industry’s transition towards more sustainably sourced materials and better practices. There has been an observable increase in demand for mycelium-based materials over the last decade. Fashion for Good believes Mycotech is rightly positioned to be a commercially viable solution in this space,” said Priyanka Khanna, Head of Global Expansion at Fashion for Good.

Peter Chia, CEO at Temasek Life Sciences Accelerator and Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, added, “Mycotech is at an inflexion point where transdisciplinary bioengineering research is poised for significant contributions toward sustainability.”

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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. 

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