Shift4Good, a Singapore- and Paris-based impact VC fund focusing on sustainable mobility, has announced the first close of its first fund at over €100 million (US$98 million).

In a LinkedIn post, Shift4Good Fund shared the names of the investors. They include the European Investment Fund (EIF), Renault Group, French Sovereign Fund Bpifrance, MOTUL, some mobility players from MOBILIANS, renowned family offices, and successful entrepreneur-investors.

At a time when the transport of people and goods has a carbon impact of eight billion tonnes each year, Shift4Good focuses on sustainable mobility and the circular economy, with a fundraising target of €300 (US$293 million) million.

Shift4Good Fund-I will invest in approximately 30 Series A and B startups over the next five years. Of these, two-thirds will be in the European Union and one-third in the rest of the world, focusing on Southeast Asia.

The first two investments will be announced in October.

Also Read: Venture accelerator Brinc joins hands with Fusang to make startup investments more inclusive

Shift4Good was co-founded by Matthieu de Chanville, Sébastien Guillaud, Yann Marteil, and Thierry de Panafieu — four French investors with expertise in VC and mobility. It is an independent management company approved by the French Financial Markets’ Authority (AMF), with offices in Paris and Singapore.

This investment fund, classified as Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (Article 9), meets the strictest sustainability criteria in the European taxonomy.

The VC firm allows entrepreneurs in the sustainable mobility sector with a growth platform that enables them to become world champions. This covers in-depth sector knowledge and financing coupled with tailor-made support leveraging its corporate investors and vast network of experts and partners, all integrated into a collaborative ecosystem, fully mobilised to answer the climate emergency.

“This closing will allow us to launch our support programmes for entrepreneurs committed to developing sustainable mobility solutions, making it possible to contribute to reversing the climate trend (knowing that almost 30 per cent of CO2 emissions in Europe come from mobility), the abundance and quality of the deal flow illustrate that there are bold and profitable solutions to offer sustainable mobility,” said Managing Partner Marteil. 

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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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Digital infrastructure is defined as an interconnected ecosystem of both physical and digital infrastructures working together to create a cohesive system. With COVID-19 having accelerated the widespread adoption of technology, startups are becoming more and more dependent on a reliable digital infrastructure for their businesses — whether you are running an e-commerce marketplace, a ride-hailing app, a fintech, or literally any other emerging business model.

Southeast Asia, being home to a vibrant tech startup ecosystem, is at the forefront of these digitalisation efforts. Not only are startups accelerating their digital adoption, but the market itself also saw a shift that has made digitalisation an absolute necessity, so much so that reports predict 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies will become digital providers by 2025.

The perks of a digital infrastructure

On top of being able to interconnect with the rest of the world through a digital ecosystem, a digital infrastructure affords companies a plethora of benefits. Internally, digitalisation enables businesses to modernise legacy processes, accelerate efficient workflows, strengthen security, and increase productivity, among many others.

Also read: SEA’s mobile-first population are spending all their time on mobile phones: Are you?

Meanwhile, from an external standpoint, businesses benefit from a digital infrastructure through improved customer journey experience, smarter marketing possibilities, and increased profitability.

A panel discussion on digital infrastructures

In order to shed light on the different issues surrounding digital infrastructures, Echelon Asia Summit 2022 will feature a panel discussion on the matter to be moderated by Weisheng Neo, (General Partner, Qualgro). Entitled “The evolving role of digital infrastructure in helping companies expand regionally,” the programme will also feature a diverse panel of industry insiders that include Rachel Beh Li Shan (Director of Sales & Business development, 1CLOUDSTAR Pte Ltd), Shaun Chong (Co-founder & CTO, Ninja Van), and Sam Ho (Senior Manager, Global Solutions Architect, Equinix).

Also read: 5 innovative startups to showcase at Echelon 2022

The panel discussion seeks to elaborate the complex topic and provide answers for the following key points:

• What constitutes a good digital infrastructure?
• How has the South East Asia market has changed since the widespread adoption of technology due to the pandemic?
• The New Shape of the Enterprise Network and what it means for global businesses, especially in Southeast Asia?
• How can Southeast Asia businesses interconnect with the rest of the world through a digital ecosystem?

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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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Photo by Canva Studio via Pexels

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Skuad, a Singapore-based company that enables global hiring and payroll, today announced that it had raised US$15 million in Series A funding.

The funding round is led by an undisclosed Southeast Asian venture capital fund alongside a US strategic investor specialising in staffing and two leading global payments platforms.

It also saw the participation of existing investors BEENEXT, Anthemis, and other angel investors.

This funding follows on from the US$4 million seed funding round announced in December 2020, taking the total capital raised to US$19 million.

In a press statement, Skuad also said that it is finalising its acquisition of Codejudge, a data-driven talent assessment platform that automates the tech interview process.

“Finding the right talent is only half the battle — being able to assess, interview and hire this talent qualitatively is fundamental to the success of talent acquisition and retention strategies. The acquisition of Codejudge will strengthen Skuad’s existing hiring and onboarding capabilities with an added layer of data-driven talent assessment functionalities,” Skuad Founder and CEO Sundeep Sahi commented on the acquisition.

“Skuad will leverage Codejudge’s robust code-simulation platform and code sandboxes to enhance its product offerings further and scale its acquisition capabilities,” he continued.

Also Read: Why we need to bring more humanities students and graduates on board the tech ecosystem

Skuad was founded in 2020 to simplify the process of finding and managing the right talent while removing the limitations of boundaries. It allowed companies to build a distributed team by hiring global talent without setting up a legal entity in new markets.

Its services include onboarding, payroll, benefits, taxes and local compliance (at a fraction of the usual cost and time).

“We started Skuad because we realised that talent was everywhere, but opportunities were not. With the complexities of hiring in foreign markets and cross-border payments, companies found it hard to discover and hire the right talent and build global teams. On the other hand, talent did not have the right discovery platform for finding remote employment that invests and helps them grow in their career rather than working for transactional short-term gigs,” Sahi said.

“We want to change this status quo and actively work towards enabling 1 million workers to discover the best opportunities globally, work anywhere in the world & get paid anytime in their currency of choice.”

In the last two years, Skuad said that it had secured customers across 34 countries (50 per cent from North America and Europe), talent in 94 countries (80 per cent from emerging economies) and 3X growth in ARR since January 2022.

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Fundraising or preparing your startup for fundraising? Build your investor network, search from 400+ SEA investors on e27, and get connected or get insights regarding fundraising. Try e27 Pro for free today.

Image Credit: Skuad

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In this episode, we are excited to welcome Jerry Luk. Luk is the co-founder and president of Firework, which empowers businesses to better engage with customers through video. Prior, Jerry was one of the Head of Mobile Business Strategy at Edmodo, Co-Founder and CTO of Presdo and was an early LinkedIn employee and creator of LinkedIn Mobile.

In our conversation, Luk offers insights into LinkedIn’s global success, looking back on the growth of mobile technology, explains why in business today, the opportunity is outside of the US, why it’s best to think of the progression of an expansion on a spectrum for testing new products and expanding instead of making leaps between vastly different markets and the importance of building a diverse team but while fostering common beliefs and universal core values.

Also Read: Stripe, LinkedIn Co-Founders back Entrepreneur First’s US$158M Series C round

Get your copy of our Wall Street Journal Bestselling Book, Global Class, a playbook on how to build a successful global business.

This episode is sponsored by our partner ZEDRA. Learn more about how the ZEDRA team can support you in expanding to new markets here.

Find our entire podcast episode library here.

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The content was first published by Global Class.

Image Credit: Global Class.

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Despite all of the setbacks, the pandemic accelerated the rate of change in many ways. It has driven companies faster and farther down the digitisation path than they would have otherwise. Static networks became redundant and were no longer meeting growing business demands or supporting changing security requirements.

Adopting a modern network architecture for enterprises embarking on digital transformation initiatives and adapting to hybrid work environments became near mandatory. This created a need for seamless and secure connections for companies of all sizes to facilitate their core business functions from anywhere.

As-a-service solutions are going through a global boom coupled with the proliferation of hybrid work environments. Network services provider Aruba (also a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company) did not want to be left behind in this revolution. Their cloud-native approach helps customers meet their connectivity, security, and financial requirements across campus, branch, data centre, and remote worker environments, covering all aspects of wired, wireless LAN, and wide area networking (WAN) is now as-a-service making it one of the first few players in the network industry to do so.

We chatted with Chief Product and Technology Officer Aruba WAN Business at HPE David Hughes to learn more about what network-as-a-service means for this industry, and they will adapt to it. Hughes joined HPE after his startup Silver Peak was acquired by HPE-Aruba in 2020.

New world order

“The big next thing in networking is NaaS (Network-as-a-service). We first embarked on this journey a couple of years ago and are now leading the industry in actual deployments and learning,” said Hughes.

The networking industry is characterised by a big player dominating the market. And many consumers, after years and years of being frustrated with the slow innovation and the lock-in for services, are looking for alternatives. One of the things the folks at Aruba learnt was that businesses want a broad company that can offer everything from wired to wireless to distributed networks across offices, branches, retail outlets, via two data centres, factories, and so on.

Also read: To Voice AI or not – The changing face of customer experience

“So what we’ve done at Aruba is build out that broad portfolio that our customers have been asking for with added flexibility”, said Hughes. Aruba has one management system to manage all types of products and all types of locations. And this is a big contrast to their main competitors in the space, who offer three or four different management systems and architectures. And so it’s very frustrating for customers; they don’t understand why they need to have all these different management systems.

With this centralised management, Aruba also wishes to acquire market share in data centres to add to its dominance in campus and distributed enterprises.

The importance of CX

With this integrated one-stop-shop approach, customer service is much more prominent as it’s all about the service now. “I think it’s really at the forefront. “That’s how modern consumers judge consumer products, and enterprises are no different now,” said Hughes.

One of the important things Aruba always include is a technology they call user experience insights. It allows them to put probes, either hardware or software, that measures the user experience as the client engages with all the apps that are important to them. They use this to check and ensure they are meeting the objective of the service.

Over the next year or two, network and allied services will become increasingly central as people kind of undergo the shift of thinking about the network as a whole set of devices that they own and operate to kind of activity as a service. And it may be that they want to do it themselves and offer that service. So it may be that they want to outsource it. But either way, they need to shift; there has to be a shift to thinking of this as a service. And NaaS is all about measuring that end-user experience and using that to drive everything else.

With NaaS, the responsibility for more excellent customer experience is much higher now, especially for the technology providers. Earlier, they were a lot more detached from the customer. “I feel like the focus for CX in this industry, almost like what it did to SaaS as well, we saw people being extremely excited about just customer experience,” affirmed Hughes.

Also read: The importance of a seamless customer experience: Lessons from Amazon and Nike

NaaS also opens the doors for better network capabilities for SMEs and startups as they can now afford to work with the major service providers. “Many of the smaller businesses work with a partner they trust that ultimately uses our foundational network so that they can pay the partner monthly. Users can now access bespoke value-added services whilst continuing their month-on-month relationship with their partner.

As compared to SaaS, networking has a real physical element to it. And Hughes thinks that physical nature has held back people from thinking that networks could be offered as a service. And what we’re seeing is people are getting over that hump, as they realize that yes, you can have a service that involves something physical and needs to be installed.

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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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