Singapore-headquartered SaaS platform Boost Capital has secured US$2.5 million in a seed funding round from Village Global, Iterative Ventures, Hustle Fund, Epic Angels, Xcel Next, Insitor, and other prominent angel investors.

The firm will use the funds for market expansion, enlarging its product team, and initiating partnerships with new banks.

Founded in 2018 by Gordon Peters and Lucinda Revell, Boost Capital provides a platform that enables financial institutions to digitally onboard applicants for loans, savings, credit cards, and insurance quickly.

It utilises technology to bridge the gap between the informal channels, such as chat, preferred by emerging market customers, and the stringent requirements that financial service providers enforce for assessing the risk and return of each newly onboarded customer.

Also Read: Is fintech in SEA changing its focus for further development?

Utilising chat channels like Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and WhatsApp, the company’s technology provides services, including collateralised and uncollateralised loans, to clients with salary or business income, without requiring an app download.

Already in use by multi-market banks and e-wallets, Boost Capital claims that its technology has facilitated the digital application process for over one million loan and savings applicants.

Boost Capital was one of the ten finalists in the Top100 startup category at e27‘s Echelon Asia Summit this year.

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In the ever-evolving world of business, economic downturns are an inevitable part of the cycle. When bear markets cast shadows over traditional funding avenues, entrepreneurs and startups find themselves navigating through challenging waters.

However, amidst the uncertainties, a shining beacon of hope emerges — accelerators. These programs, designed to foster growth and provide support to early-stage companies, have increasingly become a strategic choice for startups in bear markets.

The bear market landscape: Challenges and opportunities

Bear markets are notorious for their dampening effect on investor sentiments, leading to reduced funding availability and heightened risk aversion. During these periods of economic decline, traditional financing channels such as venture capital may become scarce, making it challenging for startups to secure the much-needed capital to fuel their growth.

This shift in the funding landscape presents a unique set of challenges for early-stage companies looking to scale their operations.

However, with every challenge comes an opportunity. Bear markets provide fertile ground for innovation and disruption. As economic conditions change, consumer behaviours and market demands also evolve, creating new opportunities for startups to address emerging needs.

Techstars has shown that it can thrive in both upswing and downturn markets, recently announcing a US$150 million raise, further adding to the 3,500-strong portfolio. In such an environment, accelerators step in as an attractive option for entrepreneurs seeking mentorship, funding, and networking opportunities to propel their ventures forward.

Also Read: Acing in hackathons: What every tech enthusiast needs to consider

Accelerators: A catalyst for growth

Accelerators are programs that offer a structured and intensive approach to nurturing startups with the aim of accelerating their growth and success. Typically, these programs span several weeks to a few months, during which selected startups receive mentorship, access to resources, and funding in exchange for equity.

An estimated 4.5 per cent of companies going through Y Combinator have reached unicorn status. The accelerator experience is designed to provide entrepreneurs with the tools and guidance they need to build and scale their businesses successfully.

In bear markets, accelerators play an instrumental role in bolstering startups against the headwinds of economic uncertainty. By providing a structured support system, accelerators help entrepreneurs navigate through the storm and identify new avenues for growth.

The mentorship and expertise offered by seasoned industry professionals guide startups in making strategic decisions, adapting to changing market conditions, and capitalising on emerging opportunities.

Embracing innovation and adaptation

Bear markets are an ideal breeding ground for innovation. With traditional market dynamics disrupted, startups are forced to think outside the box, explore new solutions, and adapt their business models to thrive in changing environments.

Accelerators facilitate this process by encouraging startups to question the status quo, experiment with new ideas, and iterate rapidly.

Moreover, accelerators often foster a collaborative environment for new technology shifts, such as AI and Web3, bringing together startups from diverse industries and backgrounds. This diverse community of entrepreneurs fosters cross-pollination of ideas, allowing startups to learn from one another and gain fresh perspectives.

In a bear market landscape where uncertainty prevails, this collaborative spirit can lead to the creation of novel solutions and groundbreaking innovations.

Mitigating risk and building resilience

Startups in bear markets face heightened risks, as market dynamics can be volatile and unpredictable. Accelerators help mitigate these risks by providing startups with the tools to identify and address potential challenges.

Through mentorship and guidance, entrepreneurs can make informed decisions and develop robust strategies to weather the storm.

Also Read: The GEAR: A new accelerator programme for early-stage startups in the built environment sector

Furthermore, accelerators often offer access to a broad network of industry experts, investors, and potential partners. This is especially critical for underserved founders. This network provides startups with valuable opportunities to forge meaningful relationships and secure new business opportunities, even amidst challenging market conditions.

By building a strong support system, accelerators empower startups to become more resilient and adaptable, enabling them to navigate through the ups and downs of bear markets.

Paving the way for sustainable growth

Beyond the immediate benefits of mentorship and funding, accelerators play a crucial role in positioning startups for long-term success. By instilling a culture of innovation and providing startups with the necessary tools and knowledge, accelerators equip entrepreneurs to build strong foundations for their businesses. 

The learnings and experiences gained during the accelerator journey serve as a stepping stone for startups to achieve sustainable growth. The Open Campus Accelerator, a bold initiative by Animoca and NewCampus, represents a new generation of accelerators looking to back great companies in downturn markets. 

The relationships formed within the accelerator ecosystem, including connections with mentors, investors, and fellow entrepreneurs, continue to yield dividends long after the program concludes. In this way, accelerators offer startups not just a lifeline in challenging times but a path towards a thriving future.

In bear markets, the journey of startups can be riddled with uncertainties and obstacles. However, with the right support and guidance, these challenges can be transformed into opportunities for growth and success.

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Kopi Kenangan is now a popular brand in Indonesia.

What started in 2017 in Indonesia with a single product is now a unicorn with multiple products, including ready-to-drink (RTD) beverages, sweet bread, cookies, and fried chicken.

The F&B retail unicorn struggled to scale the business during the COVID-19 pandemic and had to shelve its geographic expansion plans. But it made some great moves to navigate the crisis, including opening grab-n-go stores at petrol stations. The company is now present in two more countries, Malaysia and Singapore and is eyeing more markets with US$333 million in its coffers raised from the likes of B Capital Group, Horizons Ventures, Kunlun, and Falcon Edge Capital.

e27 spoke with Rahmat Budiardjo, CFO of Kenangan Brands, to learn how the company’s strategies around packaging helped it manoeuvre the pandemic crisis to make it a strong brand.

Edited excerpts:

How hard was it for Kopi Kenangan to establish the brand? What unique strategy did you adopt to make it a well-recognised brand?

There are mainly two strategies.

I- We utilise cheeky lines and branding themed love, ex-boyfriend/girlfriend and lingering feelings with them. This caught on with the consumers, who found it engaging, interesting, and relatable, enabling us to attract new consumers.

Also Read: Kopi Kenangan joins unicorn club following a US$96M Series C fundraise

II- Excellent product taste, positioning and pricing:
1) we are one of the first movers of coffee milk with gula aren
2) we used the same full-sized coffee machines as Starbucks
3) we use premium brand ingredients, e.g., Greenfields for fresh milk and Monin for syrups (same as Starbucks)
4) affordable pricing: around half of what Starbucks would cost for a similar cup of coffee.

How many products does Kenangan currently have? Does the company plan to add more F&B products in the future?

We have a few brands now at our company:

i. Kopi Kenangan: Our original brand, with mostly a grab-and-go store concept with a smaller store footprint but delivering the highest quality cup of coffee at a very affordable price.

ii. Cerita Roti (bread) & Kenangan Manis (Cookies): delicious selection of ready-to-eat old-fashioned bread with locally inspired flavours and modern soft cookies with modern and internationally inspired tastes.

iii. Chigo x Flip: fried chicken (boneless, wings, and bone-in) served with rice and/or fries topped with sambal; an existing up-and-coming yet famous brand known for selling high-quality burgers that we acquired; later merged with Chigo into Chigo x Flip.

iv. Kopi Kenangan Hanya Untukmu: our latest expansion towards the ready-to-drink market, packaged in PET bottles and sold in modern trade & general trade nationwide in Indonesia.

What roles does the packaging plan play in a product’s wide acceptance? What was the thought process behind the design?

For RTD (Kopi Kenangan Hanya Untukmu), the bottle’s packaging plays a vital role in attracting consumers to look at and eventually buy our product from the shelf. We design our packaging with broken white background to stand out above all other products, mainly dominated by chocolaty colours. We believe that once consumers try our product, they will continue buying it.

As for the Kopi Kenangan brand, our packaging also plays a vital role in continuously building brand equity. Every cup sold contains our brand identity and style, further reinforcing our brand in the consumers’ minds.

Opening grab-n-go outlets at petrol stations during the pandemic was a terrific idea. How well did the new strategy work for the company during lockdowns? Do you continue to sell via petrol stations?

During the pandemic, we focused on opening stores in petrol stations, which resulted in an increase in petrol stores’ composition to 20 per cent of our total store portfolio (vs 6 per cent in 2019). The strategy went well during the pandemic:

i. Store productivity for gas station format was higher compared to pre-pandemic level by around 30-40 per cent,

ii. During the pandemic, petrol stations outlets generated 80-100 per cent higher productivity compared to other formats in malls and offices,

iii. Due to its light CAPEX investment, it generated a much shorter payback period.

Do you have plans to introduce more technologies like AI to enhance the customer experience and overall efficiency?

We need to embrace AI as we grow. While we don’t have set our eyes on what will be the best implementation, we are in the early stage of exploring the use of AI for picking locations for new store openings.

What are your long-term plans?

Kenangan Brands have a long-term plan to be one of the largest coffee retailers in the world. When the time comes, we want to expand in Southeast Asia and other regions.

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Image credit: Kopi Kenangan.

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CHOYS, a SaaS insurtech platform for corporate employees in Southeast Asia, has closed a US$1.1 million seed funding round with investors, including Wing Vasiksiri, Foremast, Antler, and Fintech Nation Fund. 

The company will use the money for its go-to-market strategy across Southeast Asia and to bolster its product development initiatives.

Founded by Sharon Li and Vanessa Chen, CHOYS aims to make work life more meaningful and humanised. To achieve this, it empowers organisations with well-being tools and a platform to make a “bigger impact” through better understanding of and connecting with their people. The firm uses data analytics to create customised employee benefit experiences. 

Also Read: We’ll start to see more solo-GP VCs emerge in SEA: Wing Vasiksiri of WV Fund II

Lead investor Vasiksiri said: “As CHOYS onboard more companies and employees, their ability to track healthy behaviour through qualitative and quantitative means will increase, improving their well-being scoring mechanism.”

Rufus Sorsa, Associate Partner at Antler, said, “Recognising the undeniable link between employee wellbeing and company prosperity, CHOYS offers a comprehensive suite of innovative solutions designed to nurture the relationships between modern workforce and organisations.”

CHOYS’s partners include Glints, Hook Coffee, Singlife, WhiteCoat, and Classpass.

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Image Credit: CHOYS 

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As generative AI becomes more popular, various industries begin to explore different use cases for the technology including e-commerce—an area where it has many potentials.

For e-commerce and digital solutions provider Intrepid, one example of how it leverages AI includes individualised product recommendations feature in chat, based on a consumer’s personal inputs, according to CEO Jasper Knoben.

“Other examples include optimising written content on marketplaces based on search queries, and generating very appealing key visuals like campaign banners or product images at scale. In general, it is an amazing productivity driver if harnessed properly,” he writes in an email interview to e27.

“You could argue that the personalised homepage content and product recommendations that you encounter on e-commerce marketplace apps is also a form of AI, as it is powered by algorithms that take large quantities of data into account, like your demographics, your previous browsing and shopping history and many other factors.”

Examples of brands that have utilised this greatly include beauty brands which offers features to enable instant, personalised and professional skin analyses and matching product recommendations without the customer having to visit a physical store.

There are certainly many untapped opportunities here.

Also Read: How Transparently.AI uses Artificial Intelligence to detect accounting manipulation, fraud

“The more data an AI model has at its disposal and the more advanced the model, the more sophisticated it’s outputs can be. We have only scratched the surface of how far AI can go, which is an exciting and a bit scary prospect at the same time,” Knoben says.

“With the anticipated advances in AI, could an e-commerce marketplace run semi-autonomously in a few decades from now? With AI powering marketing, demand forecasting, inventory planning, pricing, content optimisation and personalisation of content and recommendations? How will the role and contribution of humans evolve? The changes will be profound and much wider than most people consider today, but what that future will look like exactly and how quickly the advances will be remains to be seen.”

How we are using AI today

In the SEA e-commerce industry, there are are already various case studies on how AI is being implemented for optimisation and personalisation by leading e-commerce platforms.

Knoben sees that some markets are ahead from the rest in this matter.

“For new innovations in e-commerce, Thailand and Singapore are typically leading markets. Thailand because of the size of the e-commerce market and the curious nature of shoppers who love new innovations, and Singapore because it is a small but advanced market with sophisticated shoppers and therefore also a good testbed for innovations before expanding across SEA.”

Also Read: These Artificial Intelligence startups are proving to be industry game-changers

But this does not mean that AI implementation in SEA is not without challenges. According to Knoben, there are three main barriers of entry for brands in SEA to implement AI in their e-commerce front:

Data quality and availability
“AI models require large quantities of high-quality data to train effectively. Brands need to ensure that they have access to reliable and relevant data sources. Data cleaning, integration, and management can be complex and time-consuming tasks,” the CEO says.

Infrastructure and scalability
“AI implementations require robust infrastructure and scalable systems to handle the computational demands of training and deploying AI models.” 

Talent and expertise
“Building and maintaining an AI team of AI specialists, data scientists, and machine learning engineers with the right talent and expertise can be a significant challenge, and expensive.”

Knoben also predicts that in five to 10 years from now, every global brand will have an in-house AI team.

“It is crucial that they know how to leverage AI as it will be a significant driver of efficiency, consumer experience and commercial performance in the future,” he says.

Also Read: RevComm’s MiiTel, Cloud IP phone powered by artificial intelligence, is changing how businesses engage customers

“The question is what is the most efficient set up to harness AI, where – like in e-commerce – I think a hybrid approach will thrive of having in-house experts that interface with the brands wider organisation and drive adoption and brand-specific innovations to maintain a competitive edge, while working with external partners to develop tailored models for specific use cases (like specific markets or platforms) as these players will have the scale to build the required expertise for each use case across many brands, and therefore should be able to leverage those economies of scale to offer more advanced capabilities at competitive costs.”

While the first wave of AI is still “very much” focused on generative AI, automation, and efficiency, Knoben believes that mass personalisation in marketing and e-commerce across the entire funnel to improve recommendations, user experience, and commercial performance will be the next frontier.

“Brands will want to have their own bespoke AI models, and agencies will increasingly shift from designing and executing campaigns, to developing the AI models that do this for brands. Whatever activities are performed by people at brands, enablers or agencies today to enable e-commerce, people will be developing and training AI models to do those activities for them in the future.,” he closes.

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Image Credit: Intrepid

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