Day: October 11, 2023

Ejen2u, a startup providing a reseller digital ecosystem in Malaysia, has secured an undisclosed sum in a pre-Series A funding round led by Gobi Partners through the Gobi Dana Impak Ventures fund.

Also Read: Gobi believes strong fundamentals will drive growth in innovation in Pakistan

Artem Ventures also participated.

Ejen2u will use the funds to expand its product catalogue to cater to various segments of the direct-to-consumer industry, including dropshipping, online storefronts, and setting up fulfilment services.

Founded by Sheikh Ezaiddin, Imran Hadi, and Taufiq Zakir, Ejen2u helps micro, small and medium enterprises — including brand owners, stockists, agents, and drop-shippers — increase their business. Its offerings include a cloud-based reseller management platform, reseller education platform, reseller-based venture builder, and several fintech solutions.

Also Read: Malaysian recommerce startup CompAsia rakes in Series A funding led by Gobi Partners

It has three primary offerings:

• EjenGO, a SaaS solution, empowers SMEs and brand owners to amass over 500 clients and achieve a gross merchandise value of US$125 million.
• EjenVenture caters to large enterprises and brands to help them build their own reseller distribution channel.
• Women Empowerment Entrepreneurship Programme (WeMap) aims to upskill women entrepreneurs with over 100 topics. Launched in 2022, they have served 249 clients and educated over 15,000 participants on over 100 topics, such as marketing strategy, video and photo editing, sales, and business management.

Currently, Ejen2u’s platform serves over 340,000 resellers across Malaysia, including 600 women leaders since its 2019 inception. Nearly 85 per cent of Ejen2U’s users are women looking to generate additional income while staying home to care for their children.

Also Read: Khazanah-backed Gobi Dana Impak Ventures invests in Care Concierge

“While our EjenGo platform serves as an initial attraction for our clients, our true differentiator lies in our holistic approach beyond technology. This includes our comprehensive soft skills workshops and the impactful WeMap programme for women who represent 85 per centof our users. We firmly believe that the core strength of any brand resides in its human capital. By relieving our clients of burdensome bookkeeping tasks, we empower their agents and resellers to represent the brand more effectively, leading to enhanced sales and overall brand growth,” Ejen2u Founder and CEO Sheikh Ezaiddin said.

—

Image Credit: Ejen2u.

The post Gobi Partners leads pre-Series A round of Malaysian reseller digital ecosystem Ejen2u appeared first on e27.

In an industry where lives are at stake and privacy is paramount, ensuring seamless, effective patient experiences has been no small undertaking. Patient expectations, growing demand for digital healthcare services, staff shortage, and a plethora of evolving challenges continue to put pressure on healthcare organisations across Singapore and the region. Unsurprisingly, Mordor Intelligence expects the Asia Pacific (APAC) healthcare IT market to register a CAGR of 8.5 per cent between 2023 and 2028.

While Singapore’s Smart Health Initiatives look toward adopting emerging technologies to vastly improve patient experiences, data breaches underscore the importance of cybersecurity in healthcare, where legacy network security infrastructures can have serious implications for both the healthcare organisation and the patient.

As the industry continues to push towards digital-first healthcare services, a modernised network will be critical in empowering healthcare organisations to digitally transform in a secure manner, all the while positively reimagining the patient experience.

Protecting healthcare networks from edge to cloud

Network surface areas have expanded rapidly, and so, too, has the potential for cyberattacks. In response, healthcare organisations have begun to adopt a micro-segmentation strategy that aligns with implementing an edge-to-cloud Zero Trust security model.

By utilising software-defined authentication and authorisation controls and policies that ensure users receive only the necessary network privileges, edge-to-cloud Zero Trust security models pose several advantages, such as the ability to dynamically segment devices and users through contextual considerations versus just device type.

As a result, healthcare IT teams can provide a differentiated level of access regardless of whether the device belongs to staff, the facilities department (think IoT and building automation), visitors, or patients — enabling all users to connect their devices to the network seamlessly.

Also Read: The state of cybersecurity in 2023: How APAC organisations can stay ahead of the curve

A comprehensive Zero Trust network security model should also perform ongoing security checks, as continuous monitoring helps identify abnormal behaviour as needed and enables remediation in the case of a cyberattack on critical healthcare data.

For environments that offer access from anywhere, healthcare organisations should also consider security controls that can be applied to devices no matter where they connect. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architectures and Security Service Edge (SSE) capability offer the flexibility to choose integrated solutions using a multi-vendor approach or, ideally, embrace a Unified SASE approach from a single vendor. This way, new medical devices or assets can be easily integrated and managed across the healthcare organisation, thereby augmenting efficiency across patient touchpoints.

Reimagining network operations with intelligence

With the right infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) can assist IT teams by reducing time spent on manual tasks, streamlining troubleshooting, and unlocking a slew of opportunities for optimisation.

AI networking features not only help healthcare organisations understand their networks’ performance but also proactively identify issues. AI-powered profiling of endpoints even provides an accurate view of the types and number of devices connected to healthcare networks — empowering a holistic overview of the edge.

By minimising guesswork associated with older management solutions and infrastructure, real-time insights and alerts enable IT teams to put together better security profiles. Healthcare practitioners can also focus on more important strategic tasks and ensure an optimal environment for critical high-performance clinical applications.

Advancing healthcare modernisation with Wi-Fi

Alongside an increased attack surface and a lack of resources and skills to properly secure medical equipment, guest wireless devices, and more from cyberattacks, healthcare organisations face significant vulnerabilities that put sensitive patient data at risk. Above all, these vulnerabilities put patient safety at stake.

Also Read: Network services are going the SaaS way. Here’s why

Fortunately, new Wi-Fi standards have consistently offered connectivity futureproofing for older and newer devices without any negative effects. Wi-Fi 6E standards, for instance, allow older devices to remain connected to the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network but put high-performance endpoints — such as laptops and mobile devices — on the “workhorse” 5GHz Wi-Fi network. With the newest Wi-Fi 6E capable devices connected to the 6GHz Wi-Fi network, this division of radio frequency bandwidth facilitates less radio interference and ensures seamless performance in the long term.

As Singapore forges ahead with its Smart Health Initiatives to develop increasingly digital-first healthcare solutions that proactively meet the needs of an ageing population, the industry will no doubt move towards featuring easy-to-use IoT devices more broadly.

In this endeavour, the significance of a robustly secured IoT infrastructure cannot be overstated. The incorporation of IoT necessitates an extra layer of caution, given its potential impact on patient well-being, where even the slightest disruption to connectivity can have catastrophic consequences.

—

Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community, or like the e27 Facebook page

Image credit: Canva

The post How network security came to be the lifeline to patient safety and trust appeared first on e27.

Wego, an online travel marketplace in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), recently snapped up Travelstop, a business travel and expense management company.

With this acquisition, Wego aims to enter business travel and expense management. The deal will also empower Travelstop to tap into Wego’s regional network and provide enhanced services to its customers.

e27 spoke to Wego CEO and Co-Founder Ross Veitch to learn more about the deal, the post-COVID-19 trends in the travel sector in Southeast Asia and the Travel, and more.

Excerpts:

Can you share insights into how the travel industry has evolved in the MENA region post-COVID-19 and how Wego plans to adapt to these changes?

The MENA region has rebounded strongly and relatively quickly from the COVID-19 shutdown. The Gulf is experiencing a mini-boom from high oil prices. Consumers travel at record levels despite airfares being significantly higher than pre-covid levels.

Also Read: Wego acquires Travelstop to expand into business travel

During the pandemic period, Wego doubled down on product development. We started COVID-19 with our marketplace business but exited it with both marketplace and online travel agency (OTA) businesses. This allows consumers to book directly with Wego and enables us to help our users throughout the entire travel journey end-to-end.

With the acquisition of Travelstop, what trends in business travel and expense management do you foresee becoming more prominent in the post-COVID travel landscape?

Business travellers of today, particularly the younger generations, prefer to book their own travel and make their own choices rather than being forced to have a corporate travel agent do it for them. This generation has grown up with simple-to-use mobile apps and websites and expects the same for their business travel.

Travelstop has been designed to address the needs of this group while overlaying all the special deals, rules, approvals, reporting and duty of care requirements that businesses need.

How does Wego plan to leverage technology and innovation to meet the changing demands of travellers in a post-pandemic world?

From day one, Wego has been focused on solving problems in the travel sector by applying technology. Advances in AI are going to transform all industries. Within the travel industry, Wego will be at the forefront of figuring out how to innovate with the fantastic new toolkit we have at our disposal.

Please discuss some of the unique challenges that Wego might encounter while navigating the MENA market in the context of this new venture.

A challenge but also a massive opportunity is that most business travel in the MENA region is still self-managed or outsourced to an old-school travel agency. This is particularly the case with SMEs. We see an obvious opportunity to migrate these self-managed business travel bookers into Travelstop and then to sign up more travellers or departments within the same company.

How do you plan to address regulatory and cultural differences when offering business travel services in various countries within the MENA region?

Like Southeast Asia, the Middle East is a collection of separate countries, each with its own characteristics, consumer behaviours, regulatory requirements, etc.

Also Read: In SEA, Millennial Muslims in Indonesia are more confident about using AI for travel: HHWT

Wego has been operating in the Middle East for over a decade; indeed, we are now dual-headquartered between Dubai and Singapore. Our early years in SEA were great training for the challenges of the MENA region.

Travelstop has a presence in Southeast Asia. Could you elaborate on the maturity of the business travel and expense management space in this region and how Travelstop’s existing operations fit into Wego’s strategy?

The MENA and APAC regions are relatively under-penetrated in managed business travel and expense management, so they are wide open and ready to be disrupted.

Given the presence of established players in the business travel sector, what competitive advantages does Wego believe it has in Southeast Asia?

We’ve been designing, building and operating websites and apps for nearly 20 years now and will bring everything we’ve learned in the B2C trenches to the challenge of making it surprisingly quick and easy to get your work travel bookings and expense management done.

Also Read: Use Triphie to get highly customised itineraries for your next trip to Malaysia

Can you provide insights into the integration plan for Travelstop within Wego and how this will enhance the overall user experience for business travellers?

We’ll have more to announce about this shortly, but many synergies are obvious, for example, sharing suppliers across Wego and Travelstop.

—

Image Credit: Wego

The post ‘Our early SEA years were a great training for the challenges of MENA’: Wego CEO appeared first on e27.

Southeast Asian VC firm East Ventures and Seoul-based SV Investment have launched a new US$100 million fund

The East Ventures South Korea fund aims to open the investment corridor between the Southeast Asian and Korean venture ecosystems, including capital investment, knowledge transfer, and network sharing.

Also Read: 

The fund will invest in companies across biotech, healthcare, future mobility, green technology, and media & content.

“This fund represents a powerful synergy between East Ventures’s deep expertise in the Indonesian and Southeast Asia startup ecosystem and SV Investment’s rich experience in the South Korean market. Together, we aim to unlock the immense potential of the Southeast Asia-South Korea corridor, nurturing and accelerating the growth of startups within the region,” said Roderick Purwana, Managing Partner at East Ventures.

The partnership between Indonesia and Korea holds immense promise for collaboration in the tech industry and startup ecosystem. Indonesia offers a burgeoning market and a pool of young, tech-savvy talent, while Korea boasts a track record of technological excellence and global reach.

Also Read: Here’s why startups should consider South Korea for business expansion

By joining forces, Indonesia and Korea can catalyse the growth of startups, enhance technological capabilities, and tap into the vast opportunities within Southeast Asia and beyond.

The East Ventures South Korea fund will be managed collaboratively by leading VCs from both countries. It aims to facilitate Korean tech startups and companies in attracting foreign capital, promoting overseas venture company IPOs, and exchanging valuable expertise and know-how between the ecosystem.

David Junghun Bang, Managing Partner at SV Investment, said: “This collaboration will open up a gate for both Korean and Southeast Asian tech startups who have been pushing hard to scale up in the global market and represent our commitment to support them continuously.”

Also Read: 

Founded in 2009 in Indonesia, East Ventures has invested in over 300 seed and growth-stage tech companies, recorded strong financial returns, and created positive social and environmental impacts. Its portfolio companies include Tokopedia, Traveloka, Waresix, Xendit, Sociolla, and ShopBack.

—

The post East Ventures, SV Investment launch US$100M fund to bridge SEA, Korea startup ecosystems appeared first on e27.

Malaysia-based coworking and flexible space provider WORQ has closed an undisclosed amount in a pre-Series B funding round from global asset management firm Phillip Capital.

Investors in this round include the Leong family office of property developer Mah Sing Group.

The funding raised will be used for space expansion. As per a statement, WORQ is currently on track to double its space under management by the end of 2023 and aims to triple that space to 450,000 sqft by 2025.

Also Read: There is an opportunity in every winter: Stephanie Ping of WorQ

Founded in 2017, WORQ aims to make real estate more accessible by offering office spaces designed like Google’s, making real estate available to users through a space-as-a-service approach.

In 2023, the company claims to have achieved an 80 per cent revenue growth while maintaining mid-teen net profit margins. The firm said the demand for flexible office space is on the rise, with growing interest not only from its traditional clients like tech startups and SMEs but also from global companies expanding into the region.

“We have built a network of one-stop business centres that serve as vital infrastructure for foreign and local business formation in Malaysia,” said CEO Stephanie Ping.

Ping also sees this as a pivotal element in the job creation cycle, fostering upskilling and knowledge transfer to support Malaysia’s long-term sustainable development through high-income job opportunities.

—

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.

The post WORQ closes pre-Series B round to expand co-working spaces in Malaysia appeared first on e27.