Singapore-based cybersecurity firm Blackpanda, which specialises in incident response and digital forensics, has secured US$15 million in its Series A funding round.

Primavera Venture Partners and Gaw Capital Partners led the round, with participation from San Francisco-based WI Harper.

The company will use the capital to expand its technology-enabled cybersecurity services, including digital forensics and incident response. It will also develop its underlying Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning cybersecurity insurtech platform.

Also Read: ‘From a cybersecurity perspective, the Asian market still uses legacy tools’

Moreover, the startup plans to deepen its presence across Asia. At present, it has offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila, and San Francisco.

Founded by Gene Yu (Group CEO), Matt Pecot, and Kevin McCaffrey, Blackpanda aims to protect, defend, and insure across Asia and claims to provide a holistic and practical cyber resiliency solution for its clients of any size. It develops and leverages innovative cybersecurity services, digital forensics data, and loss-adjusting capabilities for its insurtech platform.

The startup claims it has elite special risk and security experts from best-in-class military special forces, intelligence, forensics, and law enforcement backgrounds worldwide.​

CEO Gene Yu said: “Cybercrime caused a staggering US$1 trillion-plus in losses in 2020 and is rapidly climbing in Asia. Nearly half of all Singapore businesses suffered a cyberattack in 2021.”

“The first step to cybersecurity is ensuring a response-based plan is in place before a sudden hack. A business owner wouldn’t open a physical office without access to firefighters. Yet chances of a fire are only one out of 2,000 for businesses while a cyberattack is an incredible one out of five,” he added.

Also Read: watchTowr can tell an organisation in real time if it can get compromised

Philip Hu, Founding Member and Managing Director of Primavera, said, “Cybersecurity and cyber insurance are environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. Cyberattacks present a huge risk to the value of companies and, ultimately, the stability of society. Blackpanda is leading the charge in Asia to help companies, particularly the largely underserved SME market, manage cybersecurity and cyber insurance as part of their ESG strategy.”

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As companies seek to become more agile in their business processes to better serve clients, as well as achieve growth and sustainability in the long run, many look towards digital transformation via mergers and acquisitions (M&As) as they provide the speed and flexibility to capture emerging opportunities before the competition.

This option becomes an even more attractive measure as it also sidesteps today’s supply-side challenges on the talent and skills front without compromising on growth.

With the growth trajectory of M&As set to remain robust throughout 2022 and onwards to 2023, we are also seeing strong evidence supporting the use of consolidation to drive digital transformation.

According to EY and Deloitte, not only does digital adoption of new technologies account for over one-quarter of deal volume and one-third of the deal value in the first half of 2022, but more than a third of business leaders report that the most ideal time period for digital transformation occurs during the transaction.

Hence, it comes as no surprise that M&A has become an effective mechanism to help support the digital transformation of a company using the power of transformative deals to unlock value.   

Companies that are interested in pursuing consolidation must therefore consider the initial challenges of bringing multiple disparate businesses together in a single global strategy. Some of these challenges include disparate groups within the company undertaking digitalisation efforts in silos, asymmetrical expectations on desired business outcomes, as well as misalignment across business functions and operation processes.  

However, these pitfalls can be circumvented by establishing clear governance and leadership to ensure that the company adopts a strategic and focused approach towards transformation – breaking down the project into smaller streams and prioritising key elements without losing sight of the strategic vision wherever applicable.

Additionally, it is key that leaders ensure that similar functions and processes are aligned from the get-go so that they not only cut down on redundancy but, more importantly, can leverage the capabilities across the departments to come together to facilitate the transformation process.   

Therefore, it is key that business leaders develop a calibrated and cohesive digital transformation strategy that integrates digital capabilities throughout the business to ensure a successful outcome.  

In this regard, there is the “triangle of trade-offs” to consider, with three key yet diametrically opposed sides that represent the peak outcomes that businesses desire to achieve.

However, organisational constraints create opportunity costs for the side that is deprioritised in the interest of the others. Hence, it is imperative for key decision-makers to understand the chain of implications when deciding to prioritise one outcome over another.

Setting a strong foundation to integrate disparate businesses

The challenge of bringing multiple, disparate businesses together is exceptionally complex – not just in terms of technological alignment through a shared architecture, but also to ensure the right balance between conflicting outcomes that the business is trying to achieve as well as having clarity on what are the desired business objectives that need to be achieved.

Also Read: In this age of digitalisation, is edutech a bane or boon for educators?

Due to the aforementioned “triangle of trade-offs”, compromise and operational gaps are bound to occur. Every transformation initiative requires time, resources, and finances, therefore, prioritisation is key, especially as the integration process ensues.

For instance, if the leadership team decides to minimise changes to legal and contractual implications for clients and to its taxation structure, this will come at the expense of operational efficiency in the short term. Without clarity on the priority objectives, it hinders leadership and employees’ buy-in on the project, disincentivising progress. 

Another strong pillar of this integration is people and culture, the backbone and changemakers of companies. Bringing multiple unique businesses together requires a correct balance in the leadership team, with as smooth a transition as possible for the workforce. The team’s calibre of leadership and alignment with the global strategy is critical to rolling out initiatives faster and with trust and confidence.  

This entails having a leadership team that is representative of the major businesses forming the new entity. Cultivating organisational listening and inward reflection as part of the new company culture is critical as everyone comes with a bias of what we know and what is more intuitive to follow.

While a company’s culture is not created overnight, carefully thought-out and calibrated decisions that promote employee confidence will be advantageous during this transitional period and forward.

Furthermore, with disruptive innovations constantly emerging and evolving, it is essential to have an involved leadership team that can evolve what “digital” really means to the combined business and bring along far-reaching transformative benefits to the organisation.  

Data is at the heart of digital transformation

One of the core changes and critical enablers for a digital transformation programme is a focus on becoming cleaner in master data and master data governance. When executed successfully, its impact is felt across the whole company, not just in terms of income generated but, more importantly, client and employee experience.

While a change was previously viewed across three capabilities – people, process and technology, this new digital world requires change management and a shift to a client-centric model.  It is imperative for companies to utilise their skills to align back to the client experience.  Therefore, companies should view data as the vital fourth cog in the client experience wheel. 

The impact of data can be tracked across three stages – short, medium, and long-term. 

• Short-term: understanding how data can be an asset and generate the most tangible benefits for you immediately, i.e., cost savings 
• Mid-term: simplifying and standardising data across different countries and potentially different enterprise resource planning systems 
• Long-term: deriving insights from data that will inform the company’s future direction 

However, data programmes are not something technology teams can manage alone. It must be done in alignment with the business goals and objectives. Once again, the “triangle of trade-offs” means that the leadership team must prioritise important data functions based on the current business demands.  

It is paramount, then, that leaders anticipate which areas of their business will be hit hardest by the changes and ensure that there is enough bandwidth to manage it. Otherwise, it would be ideal for acknowledging early when they do not know something and bring in the experts. 

Partnership is key to unlocking and driving agility and innovation

To remain relevant and competitive in this increasingly complex digital world, companies must continuously improve both the end-to-end service provided to clients and the efficiency of internal processes. Partnerships with relevant service providers are a source of competitive advantage, freeing up other organisational resources to focus on core business functions. 

Also Read: Five digital payment trends to watch for in 2023

For instance, NTT Ltd initiated a global Excellence Programme, which was supported by best-in-class business process service partners. Through this partnership, NTT Ltd was able to introduce operational efficiencies in select back-office functions. This was necessary to maintain efficient, controlled processes and enable the team to become a more agile, innovative and sustainable business. 

Such partnerships enable companies to focus on their core businesses and empower them to make continued investments in various aspects – including their people and innovate across the IT services and infrastructure, networks, cloud, and the edge – that will further enable them to unlock more growth opportunities, ensuring their continued success and longevity. 

Driving such changes calls for business leaders to consider the balance between speed and the quality of delivery based on their priorities.  It is imperative that the companies receive a solid communications plan and give leaders plenty of time to prepare. Once they are fully on board, the rest of the business follows.  

The need for a strategic enterprise-wide approach

In summation, a successful digital transformation exercise requires a strategic enterprise-wide approach, an innovative culture, and a clear vision from the top management. M&As offer the opportunity to quickly acquire essential technologies and talent for digital transformation. 

It can be extremely challenging to successfully execute a comprehensive and large-scale transformation across the entire organisation. Companies may therefore need to break the transformation project into smaller work streams and prioritise the ones to focus on without losing sight of the strategic vision.  

In identifying these priorities, companies will need to balance investing for growth, reducing costs, and driving profitability. In this regard, digital transformation must not be merely perceived as a destination but an ongoing journey that companies are still navigating. It is important to keep an open mind to maintain the agility of the business strategy during the digital transformation process.

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e27 recently had the honour of speaking to Wilson Yanaprasetya to talk about the role of rural commerce in the age of sustainable growth.

Wilson Yanaprasetya is the President and a Co-founder of Dagangan, an e-commerce platform focusing on rural Indonesia. They provide same-day or next-day delivery services to both micro SMEs and resellers that typically live at least 10 kilometres away from the wet market where they usually get their products. Dagangan currently covers more than 17,000 villages, serving over 30,000 customers.

e27: Last year, the business ecosystem kept throwing around words like ‟growth, growth, growth.‟ This year, the word we kept hearing is ‟profit.‟ What is your perspective on how leaders should approach business growth?

Wilson Yanaprasetya: The definition of growth has shifted in the last few years from ‟growth at all costs‟ to ‟sustainable growth.‟ So much money was pouring in the last few years, and many venture-backed companies were pressured to focus on growth.

The thing is, for many VC,, putting more money in should provide a competitive advantage. This leads to blitzscaling. Let’s say, you have not really reached your product-market fit yet, which obviously leads to negative scaling; this means every time you expand or sell something, you’re actually losing money. This may force you to raise more money to extend your runway. This becomes a vicious cycle.

There’s nothing wrong with scaling in general. In fact, for some companies, Airbnb, Google, Facebook — they all build scale. And because they build scale, they managed to get to where they are today.

I think that is actually what a lot of companies and investors are starting to realise: that more money doesn’t mean that you’re actually winning. It’s important to focus on product market fit before you scale and make sure that you are creating positive cash flow.

Also read: Airwallex: making business transactions easier than ever with physical cards launch

e27: How are you adapting to the current market conditions?

Wilson Yanaprasetya: For Dagangan, we are focused on creating an operationally efficient business. When we started doing Dagangan, we tried to figure out, ‟Okay, in what ways would cost be an issue?‟ So we avoid burning through our runway and create negative blitzscaling.

The first thing that we had to do is experiment as much as possible to figure out how to reduce costs. We are dealing with rural communities, providing same-day delivery in areas 20 kilometres into the forest, jungle, and so on. So that’s basically what we focus on. We figured out that offline currently is the best way to acquire customers. And so we focus on offline customer acquisition which takes more time but is more stable.

We keep growing, achieving what we call hub and spoke, which is using warehouses that may be located deep inside the forest, inside the villages. We focus on the network effect, working with the head of villages in the area, the local key opinion leaders, and so on — to make sure that we get the trust.

After doing multiple experiments, we found that culture building is important when you’re actually building the company. Answering questions such as: what is our purpose? Our purpose is to empower the people in the rural communities in Indonesia.

Today, we have 50 different hubs and are growing. Our 50 locations span all across Java right now. That enables us to deliver at 95% cheaper than the nearest alternative. Our data analysts also see how deep we penetrate the communities as we onboard more suppliers.

Company building ideas often come from the people we work with. The feedback we receive from principals, suppliers, help us with cost efficiency. Today, we have a 10x deeper footprint than our nearest competitor and have achieved a positive contribution margin.

Now, we have a network of 500 local community leaders to help educate their communities and support us on onboarding more MSMEs to our platform. We also provide job opportunities to the local villages we work with. They are talented individuals that are likely to have limited exposure to the whole digital world, but they want to learn. Without them, we would not be able to achieve our coverage of over 17,000 villages today.

Also read: BuzzAR is building the next big thing in Metaverse Marketing

e27: What advice do you have to bring down the client acquisition costs (CAC) for B2B companies?

Wilson Yanaprasetya: 

Given the nature of our business and focus on rural communities, a great part of our customer acquisition strategy is actually done offline. We leverage the network of people in a village, and there are many different examples on how you can do that. We work quite closely with the heads of the villages and with the people in the field who are the farmers and who can help promote our brand. Through this process, we are able to reduce our CAC over time.

e27: For the benefit of those thinking about fundraising for a future round or being part of a team that’s looking at fundraising for the next two years, what do you think about bridge rounds, inside rounds, and raising growth rounds, etc?

Wilson Yanaprasetya: Fundraising in general can be supportive of company growth when you find a partner in the ecosystem that may be able to provide additional value to the company.

We actually raised a strategic round from a bank that had never invested in a startup before. After we met and had discussions, we found that there is a potential collaboration here where we can leverage their ecosystem without spending too much effort on increasing our CAC. In fact, they will even reduce our customer acquisition costs.

If you can find someone in the ecosystem within your supply chain who can strategically invest in you during this time as a strategy round, I think it will be beneficial. For the bank, we are able to help them deepen their footprint in tier-3 and tier-4 markets.

Also read: Customer retention in the new normal? Learn from The Big Leap roadshow

e27: What are the challenges that you are facing, and how did you overcome them?

Wilson Yanaprasetya: Our biggest challenge at the beginning was finding product market fit. And then after you find your product market fit, we still need to adapt. In Indonesia, when you go to one village and you go to another village, they may have completely different behaviours. So that’s basically why we always apply an experimental approach.

With the finite resources you have — we keep our experiments as focused as possible and see what actually works and what doesn’t, and then localise it. Nowadays, you cannot just look into China, India, and the US and think: ‟this will probably work in this market‟.

Another challenge is localisation. In Dagangan, we have been fortunate to have very strong team members who are culturally fit, and who really understand people in the rural markets, specifically, in their own market. They are able to bring in a localised approach on how they acquire, retain, or even get customers to spread the word about Dagangan even further.

For more information on Dagangan and their services, visit their website.

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This article is produced by the e27 team, sponsored by Dagangan

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The demand for embedded finance is unlikely to be affected by the rise of digital-only/neo-banking, and they can beautifully co-exist, according to Rajat Deshpande, Co-Founder and CEO of Indian embedded finance startup FinBox.

“Neo-banking may transform banking in terms of convenience and experience. However, the fact remains that financial transactions are an intrinsic part of commerce. Therefore, the demand for embedded finance on commerce platforms is unlikely to be affected by the rise of digital-only banking,” he said.

The effect can indeed be the exact opposite; legacy banks may see embedded finance as a potent channel to grow their loan book and go to market quickly with personalised credit products. They may do it with a vengeance to catch up with challenger (digital-only) banks.

“Convenience and security are the future, whether embedded finance or neo-banking. Any player that can deliver secure services seamlessly has a world of opportunity awaiting them,” he explained.

Also Read: Why plug-and-play should be the new standard for embedded finance

FinBox was started in Bengaluru in 2017 by Deshpande, Anant Deshpande, Srijan Nagar, and Nikhil Bhawsinka. Its technology enables any digital platform (both fintech and non-fintech) to launch digital credit products, such as BNPL (buy now, pay later), personal loans, working capital loans, and invoice financing. It also provides credit risk intelligence to over 25 banks, NBFCs, fintech firms, and credit marketplaces.

Last year, the firm expanded into Southeast Asia following a US$15 million Series A round from 91 Partners, Aditya Birla Ventures and Flipkart Ventures in June 2022. It began with pilots with several renowned financial institutions in Vietnam and the Philippines. The plan is to take its entire bouquet of offerings, from credit infrastructure to risk intelligence, to these two countries and simultaneously develop its reach in other countries, such as Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.

“Southeast Asia’s digital lending landscape (barring Singapore) is far behind developed countries thanks to low banking penetration, and it is a significant challenge for digital lending players,” Deshpande pointed out. “But the good news is that smartphone penetration is growing much faster than banking. This makes room for strategic players like us who can help formal financial institutions with alternate data-based underwriting to give credit to customers with little-to-no credit history at scale.”

Embedded finance market: India vs SEA

The global embedded finance market was valued at US$54.3 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach US$248.4 billion by 2032. The major factor driving the growth is digital transformation across industries.

But unlike in the US, Europe and Japan, where a credit card is the simplest way to pay online, the Southeast Asian market operates quite differently. Only three in 100 people in this region own credit cards, which is why embedded finance revenues are forecast to reach US$140.8 billion by 2025.

This trend is very similar to India. “We have seen many takers for BNPL products in India, especially those deprived of credit card access. BNPL makes for good credit card substitutes and assures its growth in markets such as India and Southeast Asia,” Deshpande said.

Also Read: Why embedded finance is critical to Southeast Asia’s digital future

However, there exists a key difference between India’s and Southeast Asia’s embedded finance industry: the prevalence and dominance of super apps. The super app economy in India is still fledgling and has yet to take off. On the other hand, it is easier to embed financial services in SEA alongside a large basket of products and services in these super app ecosystems.

“SEA is perhaps more ready as there’s a burgeoning young and tech-savvy population, low financial penetration, a booming fintech industry, and considerable opportunity for growth,” he concluded.

He also dismissed the idea that the growth and emergence of fintech will sound the death knell for traditional banks. “The fact that banks will need to adapt for the future is beyond question. But to think that they will fall off the map is wishful thinking. Both banks and technology players have certain comparative advantages. There is enough opportunity for both to play to their strengths while collaborating. There is more merit in cooperation than competition,” Deshpande concluded.

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Biogenes, a Malaysian molecular diagnostics and genomics startup, has secured US$5.7 million in a Series A investment round from local VC firm Pembangunan Ekuiti.

This capital will help Biogenes to expand its proprietary technology platforms across Southeast Asia.

Biogenes designs and supplies biosensors products and services for R&D and commercial use in healthcare, animal breeding, agriculture, aquaculture, and food safety & environmental testing.

Its platform technologies include printed nano-coated sensors, immobilisation of DNA probes and aptamers (synthetic antibodies), and in-silico design and validation of new aptamers.

Also Read: The role of biotech in taking India from developing to developed

The startup has signed two agreements, enabling its entry into the Philippines and Indonesia in 2023.

“Biogenes will invest in a medical-grade manufacturing facility, advancing our technology portfolio and expanding our sales outreach to the Southeast Asia region and other parts of the world. We target to have the capacity to produce 10 million test kits per year and, in parallel, to usher in the new age of aptamer-based diagnostic solutions. Aptamer diagnostics will disrupt the current antibody diagnostics by enabling lower-cost, stable and more accurate diagnostic solutions,” said Tang KM, Co-Founder and CEO of Biogenes.

Since its founding, the biotech firm has also received support from key government agencies, such as Platcom Ventures, Cradle, Malaysian Technology Development Corporation (MTDC), MOSTI, and Bioeconomy Corporation.

In 2020, Biogenes received a seed investment from Antler, a global venture firm, making Biogenes their first investment in Malaysia.

The firm is progressing towards production upscaling with an approved National Technology and Innovation Sandbox project grant worth RM5.5 million (US$1.3 million). Of this, RM3.3 million will be provided by the MTDC.

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