Tiger Global-backed Ula lays off 134 employees
It is about 23% of its workforce; The B2B e-commerce marketplace cited market turbulence, commodity price volatility, supply shortages, regulatory changes, and rising crude oil prices as its reasons for the move.

Temasek’s FTX investment scrutinised in Singapore parliament
An internal unit at Temasek will conduct the review separately from the team that decided to invest in FTX and will report directly to the board; This is a step up from the company’s usual review process for all its investments.

Animoca Brands to launch US$2B metaverse fund
The firm has made a staggering 66 investments in H1 2022, making the record for the most done in the cryptocurrency space; Animoca was valued at US$5.9B last July after raising US$75.3M.

Binance reenters Japan with crypto exchange acquisition
Binance has acquired a 100% stake in Sakura Exchange Bitcoin (SEBC); In 2018, Binance exited the country after receiving a warning from the Japan Financial Services Agency for operating without a license.

GoTo shares fall to a new low after stock lockup expires
The stock price plunged 6.6% to US$0.009 on Thursday morning, down 58% from the IPO price of US$0.022; Its valuation has now fallen to ~US$10B from US$15B in October-end.

Carousell posts US$49.5M in revenue in 2021 as growth slows
In the year ending December 31, 2021, the Singapore-based firm’s losses before taxes narrowed 33.5% year on year to US$43.9M as it trimmed total expenses by 14.4% to US$95.4M.

Asia Partners eyes US$600M fundraise for SEA fund
Asia Partners invests in startups with ticket sizes ranging from US$20M to US$100M, which commonly lies within the Series C or Series D rounds of investments.

SG’s Iterative closes US$55M Fund II for early-stage investments
The LPs include Cendana, K5 Global, Village Global, and Goodwater Capital; The new funding will allow Iterative to increase its check sizes to US$500K and add more programmes for founders in different stages.

Beenext said to be raising large Asia fund
Sources told DealStreetAsia that the fund could target a corpus of around US$280M and may rope in a Japanese bank as one of the leading LPs; The fund has already raised a few double-digit million dollars.

Alibaba launches e-commerce platform in Spain
Miravia’s launch comes after Lazada received infusions of US$912.5M and US$378M in funding from its parent firm Alibaba this year; It was reported then that Lazada was eyeing an expansion into Europe.

Indonesia’s top Islamic group trains slights on tech investments
It plans to launch an endowment fund to invest across various sectors; The organisation made its first investment in Jakarta-based healthtech firm Zi.Care.

Igloo extends its Series B to US$46M with a US$27M tranche
The investors include InsuResilience Investment Fund II, WAM, Finnfund, La Maison, and Cathay Innovation; Igloo provides “competitively-priced” insurance for delivery riders in Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

MAS awards major payment institution license to MetaComp
With a major payment institution license, the crypto platform can provide digital asset services to corporates as well as traditional and crypto-native institutional investors.

Malaysia’s Al Rajhi Bank launches digibank offering
ARBM said a wide range of services is already available on its digibank app Rize, including deposits, account and personal finance management, debit card application, and ATM services.

In photos: SCB 10X’s 10,000 sqft web3 collaborative space DISTRICTX in Bangkok
The space is equipped with meeting rooms, a town hall, an operational war room, a podcast room and a dining space; DistrictX will host a bi-monthly workshop to engage the community by sharing knowledge and building projects.

CeFi, a ‘necessary evil’ today: 7 reasons why trustless DEX is the future
An increasing number of DEXes are integrating scaling solutions that will massively increase transaction workload while keeping costs low.

Connectivity, infrastructure are key barriers for fund managers to adopt tokens: Calastone
How can we eliminate this barrier? According to Ross Fox of Calastone, adoption is a key challenge for tokenised investments.

Is “teleporting” between workspaces truly possible?
How Japanese startup, tonari, helps people “teleport” to different workspaces in our increasingly remote work environment.

Are you a human resource?
When an organisation describes their people as “human resources”, they were diminishing the fundamental miracle of each and every person.

Building bridges: Asia’s fintech firms look to DIFC to cross into MEASA markets
Fintechs from Singapore and wider Asian markets are looking to establish themselves in DIFC and make sizeable investments in our ecosystem.

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From public health scares to ongoing conflict and geopolitical tensions, supply chain disruptions are becoming more frequent.

Past lockdowns in key port cities, military conflicts, and trade disputes slowed the flow of raw materials to manufacturing hubs and finished goods to consumer markets, forcing companies to reconfigure their supply and production networks. More companies are following in response to ongoing conflict-related shortages.

Aside from strategies such as near-sourcing production and regionalising supply chains, companies are also investing in digital solutions to address disruptions. These include tools that enable complete supply chain visibility for decision-makers, the utilisation of data and analytics for better planning, and predictive models to identify future disruptions.

But while enterprises are progressing in these fields, the trade finance sector continues to lag behind other components of the supply chain network. Financial institutions’ processes are still paper-intensive and highly manual, slowing down the entire supply chain and generating more operational costs for all parties involved while remaining vulnerable to fraud.

Traditional processes are holding the trade finance sector back

Trade finance has been a paper- and labour-intensive sector throughout its long history. But with the astronomical growth in supply chain networks’ complexity, as well as the sheer volume of goods being shipped, the highly-traditional trade finance system is hindering business efficiency, agility and scalability.

Also Read: Can blockchain function as a medium for social good and digital philanthropy?

With its preponderance of manual processes and overreliance on physical documents, supply chains are littered with process inefficiencies, susceptibility to fraud, and unnecessary increases in costs.

Large amounts of physical documentation, such as product, shipping, and transaction details, are exchanged through multiple parties. Fairly straightforward processes can take up to months to complete.

Meanwhile, this is all against a backdrop of more stringent due diligence requirements such as know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML). These regulations are precisely in response to the lack of transparency that legacy processes exacerbate.

And failure to comply will have serious consequences on businesses’ ability to continue driving Asia Pacific’s economic growth. According to the Asia Development Bank (ADB), the region has the highest rejection rate of trade finance proposals at 34 per cent.

Little wonder, as fraud — especially duplicate trade financing — continues to be a thorn in the side of trade finance. In one of the most prominent cases in recent history, Singapore oil trading company Hin Leong, led to US$3.85 billion in losses for 23 banks. While this type of fraud, which involves financing a single invoice multiple times, is not new and has occurred in the industry as far back as decades ago, institutions are unable to make significant progress against it.

This is a result of the lack of visibility and transparency between stakeholders due to the difficulty in sharing critical data in a timely fashion. In turn, the collaboration between stakeholders takes a blow and opportunities for malpractice become commonplace.

Blockchain tech makes processes faster, cost-efficient, and transparent

When trade finance is done on a decentralised blockchain, all transactions are recorded in a secure database which is accessible to all parties to the trade.

This addresses the three major challenges facing trade finance transactions: inefficiencies stemming from the use of large quantities of physical documents, increased costs of complying with regulatory requirements, and the lack of total visibility, which makes the system vulnerable to fraud.

Also Read: Busan Blockchain Week 2022: Trends shaping the future of NFT

Conducting transactions through a decentralised blockchain entails digitalising the documentation created, exchanged, and processed by the various stakeholders in a supply chain.

Transmitting the electronic versions of these documents through the blockchain reduces transaction times from months to hours because all involved parties have access to it. The costs associated with such paper-intensive processes are also reduced.

In addition, stakeholders with access to the blockchain have complete visibility over the whole process, significantly reducing the risk of duplicate trade financing. At the same time, parties are assured of the integrity of their data due to the unprecedented security of digital ledger technology.

Successful blockchain adoption is a network-wide effort

For the utilisation of blockchain technology in trade finance to be successful, all parties must buy into it. If just one of the multiple parties in a cross-border trade scenario is not part of the decentralised blockchain, other parties will not be able to have full visibility on all transactions, and confidence in the latter’s integrity against fraud would not be possible.

Improvements in transaction speed and lowered operational costs would not reach their full potential as well. There would still be a need for physical documentation in certain links in the whole supply chain, as well as slower processes.

Financial institutions and other large organisations must take the lead with blockchain adoption. They can be the drivers of change in trade finance, influencing other stakeholders to become more efficient via improved transparency and collaboration. In addition, this can also fine-tune legislation and regulatory mechanisms to enable the pivot towards blockchain technology in the overall supply chain process.

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Binance, the world’s leading blockchain ecosystem and cryptocurrency company, has acquired 100 per cent of Sakura Exchange BitCoin (SEBC), the Japanese-registered crypto exchange service provider.

The details of the deal haven’t been disclosed.

Through this acquisition, Binance is set to re-enter the Japanese crypto market as a Japan Financial Services Agency (JFSA) regulated entity four years after it had exited the country.

Binance aims to support a responsible global environment for cryptocurrencies by offering Japanese-regulated services through SEBC.

The acquisition of SEBC marks Binance’s first license in East Asia.

Also Read: In photos: SCB 10X’s 10,000 sqft web3 collaborative space DISTRICTX in Bangkok

Binance has secured regulatory approvals or authorisations in France, Italy, Spain, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, New Zealand, Kazakhstan, Poland, Lithuania, and Cyprus. 

“The Japanese market will play a key role in the future of cryptocurrency adoption. We will actively work with regulators to develop our combined exchange in a compliant way for local users. We are eager to help Japan take a leading role in crypto,” said Takeshi Chino, General Manager of Binance Japan

Sakura Exchange currently supports 11 trading pairs, including BTC/JPY, ETH/JPY, BCH/JPY, XRP/JPY, LTC/JPY, ETC/JPY.

Hitomi Yamamoto, CEO of SEBC, said: “On top of our effort to prioritise user protection, Binance’s strong compliance system will build a more compliant atmosphere for users in Japan and help them access key crypto services needed for mass adoption in the future.”

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According to a climate market map of India and Southeast Asia (SEA) authored by Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed, while urgency and adherence vary across the SEA region, Singapore seems to be “well ahead” when it comes to the role of businesses in curbing the impact of climate change.

There are several examples, including SGX’s carbon accounting mandate for listed companies which threatened a delisting for those who do not adhere to it by 2024.

But Mohapatra wrote that the “most exciting development” in the role of businesses in tackling the impact of climate change is the shifting of talent from “not green” to “green” job options.

“Employees are increasingly acquiring green skills and transitioning into green and greening jobs, resulting in positive net transitions into these jobs. Younger generations are the largest sources of incoming talent into green careers across the world, with millennials leading the charge,” he detailed.

“Companies such as terra.do are helping accelerate this shift. While this volume of talent entering climate-related
roles are still too low to have a transformative impact by itself; we are encouraged by these shifts.”

Also Read: Beyond buzzwords: How climate tech startups can create an impact in green recovery

In addition to the trends related to talents and jobs, Lightspeed also noted down the spectrum of companies in SEA and India that are solving the challenges of climate change. The firm noted that these companies can be divided into four major categories:

– Companies that measure and report individual or institutional carbon or GHG footprint
– Companies that reduce other businesses’ footprint through operational or efficiency-related changes
– Companies that replace businesses’ current footprint with greener options
– Companies that offsett whatever remains via directly sequestering carbon or buying credits for it
via a marketplace that does sequestration on the clients’ behalf.

“Given how early the entire climate change category is, there are still a lot of misconceptions around what is needed, what is urgent, and what is sold as a product vs as a service. We attempt to simplify some of this,” Mohapatra wrote.

He also added how, having been evaluating climate investments in India since 2019, Lightspeed saw the exercise as “both sobering and alarming”.

Capitalism is part of our job profile, so it hasn’t been easy to come to terms with the role we, as venture capitalists, might have played in damaging our world. Large amounts of venture and entrepreneurial resources have gone to help serve more targeted advertisements to drive overconsumption of things — clothes, gadgets, household items — that are themselves built to last only a few years by design,” he concluded.

The full report is available here.

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Singapore’s leading mobile classifieds unicorn has laid off 110 employees (10 per cent of the group’s total headcount), citing a worsening macroeconomic environment.

Only workers of some business units are affected. The outgoing employees will be offered a month’s salary for every year of service, rounded up to the nearest half year. Everyone will have at least three months of compensation.

Announcing the job cuts in a blog post, Carousell Co-Founder and CEO Quek Siu Rui said: “As we emerged from the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2021 across key markets of our group, we were optimistic about the recovery to come and eager to reignite growth in our core classifieds business. Additionally, we doubled down on a number of new initiatives to make selling and buying more convenient and trusted, to make secondhand the first choice for even more people across the region. That meant creating more teams to work on these initiatives, which included new teammates that we had to hire.”

Also Read: Carousell enters unicorn club after a new US$100M round led by Korea’s STIC Investments

“Looking back, I’d made the following critical mistakes: First, I was too optimistic about the pace of our impact versus our increase in investments. The reality is that we were quick to grow our expenses and hire, but the returns took longer than expected. Second, while it is easy to blame market conditions, I also underestimated the impact of growing our team size too quickly — larger teams lead to a lack of clarity in decision-making and the additional coordination required to get things done,” he continued.

Siu Rui admitted that the company saw the signs of a perfect long storm: high inflation, geopolitical risks and supply chain disruption as early as March this year.

In recent weeks, things have taken a turn for the worse. The global economy continues to face steep challenges, with economists expecting a broad-based slowdown in 2023. The worsening macroeconomic environment presents more headwinds to the expected growth.

“We cannot change the wind, but we can adjust our sails,” he said. “As we do not know when market conditions will improve, it is only prudent that we get to profitability as a group as quickly as possible, to be masters of our destiny and build an enduring company.”

He further said it is important to act swiftly, course correct, and right-size the investment levels to better align with this new reality. The company is moving to an office with significantly lower rent, and the co-founders and group leadership will take voluntary pay cuts.

Also Read: Carousell acquires Ox Street to double down on its re-commerce efforts in Greater SEA

Carousell needs to reorganise to focus on critical priorities and operate more efficiently to accelerate the path to profitability.

“We will learn from our mistakes, adjust and course correct quickly to make the biggest impact for our community. Moving forward, we will sharpen our priorities as a company, keep a watchful eye on costs and only invest in high-conviction initiatives that are correctly set up for success,” the Carousell CEO said.

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