Konvy, a beauty e-commerce company based in Thailand, has secured US$10 million in a Series A round of funding from Insignia Ventures Partners.

The company will use the capital to expand its omnichannel and international distribution for health and beauty brands and for hiring.

“With this round of funding, we are aiming to scale up our distribution capabilities to help more local and global brands and solidify our position as the platform of choice for beauty brands in Thailand and Southeast Asia,” said Konvy CEO and Co-Founder QingGui Huang.

Launched in 2012, Konvy carries more than 1,000 global and local beauty brands, ranging from skincare and makeup to perfumes. The products are offered through various channels, including its in-house e-commerce retail platform, marketplaces, and over 800 physical retail stores.

Also Read: Echelon 2022: The search for alternative funding options for VCs

Konvy’s brand portfolio includes globally recognised brands like L’Oréal, Shiseido, Sulwhasoo, Eucerin, and La Roche-Posay.

Health & beauty is a fast-growing sector in Thailand. Thai consumers purchase products through e-commerce and social media platforms. Within the beauty segment, skincare products have the highest revenue share of 42 per cent.

In 2021, Thai beauty, health, personal and household care was estimated to be US$4 billion and is expected to grow to US$6.4 billion by 2025.

“Over the past few years in Southeast Asia, we have seen the rise of the omnichannel commerce platform, widening the connectivity of brands to end consumers. In Thailand, Konvy has already been leading the health and beauty market with an increasingly multi-channel approach, leveraging both the country’s affinity for beauty products and purchasing behaviour through various online platforms,” said Yinglan Tan, Founding Managing Partner at Insignia Ventures Partners.

Konvy previously raised seed funding from Alpha Founders Capital and ECG Ventures Capital.

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The Asia Pacific is home to 450 million smallholder farmers who account for more than 80 per cent of the region’s food production.

Despite being the key to addressing food security, smallholders are underserved and lack access to basic tools that can unlock the full potential and value of their farms. Most commonly, smallholder farmers struggle to access suitable farming inputs, better farming practices to produce better yield and quality, and connections with the right buyers for the right prices.

It does not help that the current agricultural value chain is highly inefficient – with layers of intermediaries standing between smallholders and consumers. This means more hands vying for their slice of the pie and lesser profits for farmers.

For example, returns from small-scale rice farming are only between US$2 – US$6 a day per farm. It is not surprising that many choose to leave the land, putting more pressure on a system at its breaking point.

To make farming a profitable profession, we need to ensure that the people growing the crops are rewarded fairly for their work. And that starts by placing the farmer at the centre of an ecosystem of integrated solutions.

Introducing the ecosystem concept

Many are familiar with the success of Apple’s ecosystem and the value that it brings to its users.

While any individual Apple product is good on its own merits, the Apple ecosystem is not about a single product. It is about a whole array of technology and offers, from Apple or external partners, that, when used together, is more than the sum of its individual parts.

Similarly, a farmer-centric ecosystem in agriculture involves an interconnected and interdependent network of diverse providers that address various farmer needs throughout their farming journey.

Also Read: Can agritech solve the world’s growing food security problem?

This is a concerted effort across the value chain, from suppliers of farm input and agronomic expertise to providers of farm services, financial and insurance services, tools for smart agriculture, and linkage to the offtake market, food processing companies and consumers.

Furthermore, just as Apple led the orchestration of their ecosystem, an ecosystem in agriculture requires a trusted party to convene partners that share a similar vision of continuously creating new value for farmers and the whole community.

Syngenta has taken the lead in catalysing this unique Farming Ecosystem, whereby the benefit to farmers is not merely derived from individual transactions but elevated overall through new value architecture and customer experience.

Technology is a key enabler of the farming ecosystem

Many services in an ecosystem rely on various technologies to complete a holistic offering. This does not refer only to the big, transformative technologies. Even the simplest of technologies can make a huge difference in emerging markets.

Soil testing, for instance, can determine the current fertility and health of soils so that farmers can apply the right amount of fertilizer. This helps manage the use of inputs compared to the current norm of blanket application and greatly reduces the overall cost to the farmer. Some examples of emerging technologies in this area include devices that provide real-time analysis and results.

Another example is using AI-assisted recognition of high-resolution images to identify pests or diseases affecting different crops. Through this, farmers can obtain an accurate and immediate diagnosis, followed by advice on solutions such as optimal pesticide use.

Equally, digital platforms can provide farmers with live access to the latest knowledge to support better crop decisions and respond quickly to challenges. It is a powerful tool to connect farmers, suppliers, retailers and consumers at scale and facilitate communication and transactions among them. During this process, valuable data is also generated and shared, building trust between each stage of the production chain.

Partnerships are key to the ecosystem’s success

As a leading Ag company, Syngenta is pioneering and convening CENTRIGO Farming Ecosystem alongside partners to develop a scalable combination of physical and digital (also known as ‘phygital’) solutions that will empower farmers to overcome inefficiencies, improve livelihoods and ensure the resilience of food security in the Asia Pacific.

The quality and reliability of partnerships within such an ecosystem will determine its strength and success. If you are a technology provider or an investor, now is the time to get involved.

Meeting the food demands of consumers will require connecting millions of farmers through innovative technologies, an opportunity you don’t want to miss.

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Entrepreneurs have been living in a world run by the rise-and-grind mentality, working themselves to exhaustion with their cash-burning and growth-at-all-costs business models. But, unfortunately, times are changing, and the hustle culture will not cut it in today’s startup landscape.

 The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken markets across the globe, making it dangerous for startup founders to rely heavily on venture capital (VC). So while the startup ecosystem remains filled with opportunities, the question remains: how can founders build a path to profitability now that cash burning and accelerated growth are losing their effect?

Also read: Echelon 2022: The search for alternative funding options for VCs

Shaping a new culture

Capital efficiency is becoming the culture more than speed and amount of growth. Growth remains essential, of course, but it should no longer be the only goal. Working on growth and profitability is a balancing act that startup founders may want to master to avoid crashing down. Resiliency in models and a long-term outlook will help them find their footing in a COVID-hit fundraising ground.

Developing a new founder’s mindset

The post-pandemic era requires a fresh perspective to navigate. Capital constraint, instead of cash burning, helps a new business to harness its ability to operate efficiently and to develop creative and logical ways to invest since too much capital comes with risks of bad investment choices and waste of resources.

Also read: The evolution of early-stage investing and fundraising in SEA

Learning about sustainable growth

Startups must learn how companies evolve and pivot to profitability and sustainable growth in today’s climate. This is one of the topics that will be tackled at the Echelon Asia Summit 2022. Experts will hold a panel discussion about “Breaking away from the cash-burning model and focusing on achieving sustainable growth.” Jeremy Au, Chief of Staff at Monk’s Hill Ventures, will moderate the discussion among Toh Ting Feng (GetGo), Ahmad Rizqi Meydiarso (Feedloop), Wilson Yanaprasetya (Dagangan), and Zheng Wei Quah (Accredify). In addition, they will attempt to answer the questions that startup founders should ask to survive the current environment, such as:

• What actions are startups asking to get to profitability?
• Google’s Sundar Pichai recently said that fun shouldn’t be equated to money. Is that a problem for startups these days, especially in all the large fundraising rounds in the past few years?
• How has the culture changed as your startups moved to the profitability model?
• Do more profits equal more bonuses and benefits?
• Are founders thinking of bridge rounds to close the financial sustainability gap?

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Echelon Asia Summit 2022 (October 27-28) returns after a three-year hiatus. It aims to gather the most influential decision-makers and industry leaders from the Southeast Asia tech and startup ecosystem.

Register for Echelon Asia Summit 2022 now!

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English teachers of public schools in rural Thailand are not so fluent in the language. Private classes are available, but they are expensive for parents. This creates a hurdle in the career growth of rural students.

Takarn Ananthothai, former President of the non-profit AIESEC Thailand, believed there must be a better way to help local people learn English.

With this goal in mind, he asked his friend and ex-management trainee at Uniqlo Thailand, Juice Chuencheewan (who later married him), to start an edutech startup and onboard globally certified part-time teachers to address this problem.

That was the genesis of Globish.

Globish, which stands for Global English, provides online English and Chinese communication courses to professionals, kids, corporates, and schools in Thailand. It uses a simplified version of English used by non-native speakers consisting of the most common words and phrases.

Also Read: BrightCHAMPS acquires SEA-focused edutech startup Schola for US$15M

The core curricula focus on building communication confidence using post-method pedagogy combined with local contexts matching learners’ behaviours.

“At Globish, students can attend one-on-one and one-on-five discussion classes, one-on-ten instructor-led classes, AI pronunciation practices, and offline workshops using real-time updated e-learning content. They get all this in one course,” Ananthothai explains. “The variety of class sizes, teachers’ nationalities, peak time slots management and teacher incentives allow us to control the quality. Besides, we have in-house video calls and a teacher rating system.”

Students can attend live classes daily, book anytime, and speak a new language practically within six months at less cost.

In 2021, the firm expanded into Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. It hired local management and set up a subsidiary. It will focus only on business English courses in the country. The curricula and packages have been customised accordingly.

Globish’s target customer base is working professionals aged ~30 years (70 per cent) and industrial and tech companies and kids aged eight to 15 (30 per cent).

The startup employs 175 people (130 in Thailand and 45 in Vietnam).

The language learning market growth in Thailand and Vietnam is estimated to be at 5 per cent CAGR. Thailand’s market size is around US$100 million, and Vietnam’s is about US$300 million.

While many edutech players exist in Thailand, such as Skilllane, Conicle, FutureSKill, and Caribre, Globish doesn’t compete with anyone in the adult education market. However, in Vietnam, it competes with Topica Native. In the kids’ segment, Globish’s main rivals are LingoAce, PalFish, and Scholar.

Global ambitions

Globish plans to penetrate new domestic and international markets, such as the UAE, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. It will hire native coach teams of more than 400 individuals from various countries, such as the UK, the US, South Africa, Egypt, India, Ukraine, and the Philippines. The plan is to increase to 1,000 coaches to support the market expansion and achieve 500,000 classes by the end of 2022.

It has set an ambitious target of generating an income of US$35 million by 2025. “We have started expanding to one new country. We plan to add three more and reach 100 schools in a few years,” he adds.

Last week, Globish announced a US$2.5 million Series A raise from the Digital Economy Promotion Agency (DEPA), Premier, N-VEST Venture, Top Itthipat, ECG Research, 500 Tuktuks, and Stormbreaker Venture. The fund will be used to upgrade the organisation to become the edutech leader of ASEAN. The capital will help it extend its platform beyond languages to other skills.

In a limbo

The lack of trust in online education for parents and schools has been a severe issue in Thailand. During the pandemic, parents were fed up with seeing their kids in front of the laptop for six hours a day learning in a one-way classroom at school. Because of this, online extra-curricular classes were perceived as boring and ineffective.

It is also challenging and requires lots of money to set up a concurrent classroom management system and prepare a pool of teachers and a tech platform. Raising venture capital is tough compared to the Vietnam, Indonesia, and Singapore markets. So it is tough to compete with global business by being local.

The government slowly realises the potential of edutech. “DEPA puts a lot of emphasis on education, and our funding is proof. We are the first government-funded startup in the history of Thailand. However, the government needs to do more to promote the edutech sector,” Ananthothai signs off.

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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. 

Here’s the full list of the speakers for the 2022 edition, which will be co-located with SWITCH at Resorts World Sentosa from 27 to 28 October 2022. Learn more here. 

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In a digital world where millions of data are coming in from millions of sources, there is no excuse for not making data-driven business decisions. But most companies are oftentimes left wondering where to start.

There are many considerations that companies have to look into when they go down the path of making data-driven decisions for their growth. This includes platform, costs, and challenges of setup and maintenance considerations, outside of the actual operations.

Enter open-source databases.

Also read: Echelon 2022: The rise of a new startup profitability culture

In a nutshell, an open source database is a database application wherein the code is free for everyone to view, download, modify, re-use and distribute, allowing users to create a system based on their own unique requirements. This allows companies to analyse massive data from a continuously growing number of sources at a lower cost.

But how can companies get started on utilising open-source databases? And is it the right path for them? 

Open-source database as a managed service? Industry leaders will weigh in

Echelon 2022 invites industry leaders to join the discussion on the current trends and future possibilities of open-source databases.

We are gathering together Southeast Asia’s industry leaders to talk about their experiences, insights, and tips on working with data for operations and growth.

The aim of this roundtable discussion is to tap on the collective experiences and expertise of the participants and share it with the community for the greater benefit of the SEA tech startup ecosystem. After the event, participant profiles and discussion insights will be published and shared with the e27 community.

Also read: The Big Leap: Bringing retention best practices across SEA

Participants will get the opportunity to discuss about:

• Context on how they measure their growth and performance
• Challenges they face in their company growth
• Experiences, best practices, and challenges in dealing with data in operations and growth strategy
• Actionable insights they could implement in their own companies

As industry leaders, roundtable participants will also be asked to share best practices and future trends they foresee on open source data platforms.

This roundtable discussion is co-hosted by e27 and Aiven, Echelon 2022’s Preferred Cloud Database Partner.

If you’re interested in joining the discussion, let us know.

 

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Photo by Christina Morillo via Pexels

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