On January 16, venture capital (VC) firm 1337 Ventures announced the launch of its women-focused pre-accelerator programme, Alpha Startups for Women.

By participating in the programme, women-founded startups will have the opportunity to receive VC funding of up to MYR50,000 (US$10,500) for the top two teams. These startups will also receive mentoring sessions with seasoned female founders and MYR20,000 (US$4,200) in digital credits to amp up their infrastructure.

The four-week programme is open to women-led startups in the idea and MVP stage, particularly those based in Malaysia and Southeast Asia.

Held as a virtual and in-person session in Kuala Lumpur, the programme is available for free and will close its registration on February 19 and start on February 27.

In the Alpha Startups pre-accelerator programme, new and aspiring entrepreneurs will go through an intensive boot camp to learn about starting a business. Selected teams of entrepreneurs, developers and designers will get to work together to test and validate their scalable product or startup idea. There will also be daily deliverables and mentorship available.

Also Read: Manis Leting, Triphie win 1337 Ventures’s Alpha Startups pre-accelerator programme in MY

In an email interview with e27, 1337 Ventures said that the programme will provide the same materials as its usual accelerator programme, but this one will provide more opportunities for female founders to learn.

For 1337 Ventures, both men and women in the startup ecosystem face the same challenges. However, as investors, they believe in playing a role in promoting diversity and providing equal opportunity for all.

“We do see an increase of events and programmes in the direction of women empowerment. We are looking to provide everyone despite their gender, race, religion, and location, the same equal opportunity of accessibility to be able to learn the basic knowledge of starting a startup so they can take this and build their startup. We also have an online Pitch Tuesday session where we listen to all the pitches (with minimal filtering), so they all get equal opportunity to pitch to us as a local homegrown VC,” the firm said.

“This is our first time doing an all-exclusive women batch, and depending on the outcome, it might be a once-in-a-blue-moon thing. As all our other accelerators provide equal opportunity, we’re doing this batch mainly to encourage more female founders to join simultaneously; it is more exclusive for them.”

1337 Ventures recently hosted an online panel discussion featuring Nadia Ismadi (Co-Founder of Pod), Anabelle Co-Martinent (Co-Founder of La Juiceria Superfoods), and Parmeet Kaur (Founder of Joyed Consulting), with journalist and author Freda Liu as moderator.

Also Read: 1337 Ventures partners with Malaysia’s central bank to launch fintech accelerator programme

Liu revealed that according to the Department of Statistics in Malaysia, in 2016, 20 per cent of businesses in the country were owned by women, and the government aims to get more women in decision-making roles.

This is especially urgent considering only less than 18 per cent of funding in Southeast Asia are raised by women founders, according to DealStreetAsia.

In the panel discussion, the female founders spoke about how they were inspired by the impact that they could create by creating a business.

Ismade spoke about how her financial education platform allows users to learn how to save money and achieve their goals. “We could have built something simpler like an e-commerce platform, but it wouldn’t have an impact like we did,” she said.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a game-changer in mobile advertising, enabling advertisers to craft more relevant, targeted, and engaging ads. Leveraging AI allows for a refined approach to ad design, placement, and targeting, enhancing the overall impact of advertising campaigns.

AI’s multi-faceted benefits in advertising

AI’s power extends beyond creating superior ads; it reduces costs and boosts conversions. Industry reports from eMarketer reveal that AI has led to a 27 per cent decrease in customer acquisition costs. Furthermore, Epsilon’s research found that AI-driven Personalisation Images influenced 80 per cent of consumers to purchase. These findings underscore AI’s potential to enhance ad reach and efficacy.

Another significant advantage is AI’s ability to generate and optimise ad creatives based on audience preferences, behaviours, and emotions. It facilitates experimentation with various ad elements, such as copies, images, colours, and layouts, enabling advertisers to choose the best-performing ones. AI also determines mobile ads’ optimal placement and frequency, considering the ad’s content.

The future landscape and ethical considerations

The future of digital advertising is intertwined with AI and machine learning. Their adoption for creating personalised, engaging consumer ads will empower advertisers to optimise campaigns, measure ad performance, and analyse data for deeper insights. Social media and influencer marketing have also revolutionised consumer outreach, with user-generated content and social proof amplifying ad appeal and credibility.

Also Read: Evolution of advertising industry with the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT

Cutting-edge technologies like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), voice search, and interactive videos redefine ad experiences, offering immersive and memorable ways to showcase products and services. AI tools such as chatbots, voice assistants, and sentiment analysis enhance customer service and outreach in e-commerce. 

AI’s influence is also evident in growing sectors like travel, where specialised apps cater to diverse traveller segments by understanding their unique needs and preferences. This understanding allows for targeted promotions during off-seasons, ensuring a consistent business flow.

Mobile trends in 2023 significantly influenced consumer behaviour and advertiser strategy. Platforms like TikTok pioneered short-form video advertising, and mobile gaming and in-app ads experienced substantial growth. However, integrating shopping features within social media apps raised privacy concerns, necessitating advertisers to devise strategies to address these issues while ensuring user data safety.

In 2024, advertisers are expected to embrace immersive and cohesive ad formats, creating a holistic advertising experience. The shift towards a more automated, data-centric, and integrated advertising experience is anticipated.

AI’s primary advantage is its ability to minimise human intervention and manual work, leading to faster, more accurate results and substantial cost savings. Marketing companies even utilise AI-powered dashboards for real-time analytics and reporting, providing timely insights on campaign performance and enabling informed decision-making.

Regarding data privacy, companies must ensure ethical data usage, transparency in AI usage, and allow consumers to opt out of data collection systems. Data should be anonymised or aggregated to prevent individual identification. 

While traditional advertising methods retain relevance for specific demographics, the trend is unmistakably toward more targeted, data-driven advertising, promising more precise and accurate marketing.

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BlokID, a next-generation developer of privacy protection solutions for the digital advertising industry, has completed its US$1.25 million seed round of financing led by Ascend Vietnam Ventures and AppWorks.

The Vietnamese startup will use the capital to accelerate product development, focus on user acquisition, and initiate market expansion, with an outlook to launch by Q2 2024.

The company plans to roll out Google Analytics plug-ins and Financial Identity features to empower users further and safeguard their information.

Also Read: Bitcoin and Ethereum simplified for a five-year-old

Founded in July 2023, BlokID leverages blockchain technology to bring an independent, immutable source of truth to digital advertising. Using BlokID, advertisers can verify ads, conduct attribution audits, and guarantee privacy with bonded privacy insurance through one-click campaigns integrated with Google, Facebook, DV360, Xander, and The Trade Desk.

BlokID solves three key problems:

Ad attribution: allowing clients to verify attribution of ad conversion and detect variances against data reported,

Privacy insurance: utilising blockchain timestamping to notify clients of any third-party access of information immediately,

GA4 transparency: moving to GA4 away from Universal Analytics to offer event transparency to all Google Analytics users for free.

Following major privacy violations and litigation cases in recent years, brands understand the severity and the high costs of data breaches as major threats to business reputation and user loyalty, requiring them to allocate a significant portion of their budget to brand safety.

Also Read: Expert speak (Part I): The biggest disruption in blockchains and cryptocurrencies is yet to come

BlokID prevents breaches from occurring and sends immediate notifications to clients of any third-party access to their information, providing control and security to help brands and agencies build and maintain trust with their customers.

“In an era where digital advertising faces unprecedented challenges, BlokID aims to be a beacon of hope. They are not just solving complex problems of ad attribution but are also navigating the intricate landscape of privacy regulations,” said Binh Tran, General Partner, AVV.

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Singapore-based impact investor Silverstrand Capital has invested in a funding round of California-based water technology company Porifera.

The money will be used to accelerate its growth into new sub-sectors within the food & beverage category.

With its membrane processing equipment, Porifera enables beverage and ingredient manufacturers to remove water efficiently and retain all the components of their products to create high-value concentrates with a smaller environmental footprint. Porifera also helps customers efficiently reuse water in their industrial processes.

Also Read: Singapore’s Silverstrand invests US$10M in Carbon Growth Partners’s fund II

Porifera claims it has delivered significant distribution and warehousing savings for top global F&B companies through commercial pilots with reduced environmental impact. Its technologies can potentially reduce over 2 million MT of CO2e in the orange juice segment alone. The technology is also used to concentrate beer, coffee, tea, juice, world-class wine, and many other beverages and ingredients.

“Today, an excessive volume of water is transported thousands of miles away from its source,” said Kelvin Chiu, Founder and Principal of Silverstrand Capital. “Shipping fruits from drought-prone regions to make juice in areas where water is plentiful, for example, is not only ecologically damaging for already stressed water basins – it also results in huge greenhouse gas emissions from transportation and refrigeration. Porifera’s unique technology addresses these issues, and is aligned with our mission to protect nature.”

Also Read: How Meals In Minutes tackles food waste with ready-to-cook meal kits

“Our customers come in as skeptics and leave as converts after tasting the samples we produce,” said Olgica Bakajin, Porifera’s Founder and CEO. “They are surprised that a beer reconstituted from 6x concentrate, tastes just like the brand we start from, even after being stored for more than 12 months, or when 65 Brix watermelon concentrate looks, smells and tastes like freshly cut watermelon.”

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Despite its popularity and increasingly widespread use, there is a problem of cultural gap that can be found in today’s most popular AI tools, such as ChatGPT. Since 40 per cent of the existing models in the market today are produced by US-based companies, they are more aligned to Western culture, creating a distance for users in markets such as Southeast Asia (SEA).

AI Singapore aims to tackle this challenge through SEA-LION, its first open-sourced SEA Large Language Model (LLM) that is catered specifically for regional use cases, industries, languages, and contexts.

According to the organisation’s statement, unlike many current models, SEA-LION will confer users the benefits of the ability to understand nuances in native languages and demonstrate greater awareness of cultural context specific to the region.

“This lowers the bar for adoption by governments, enterprises, and academia while effectively expanding the SEA languages and cultural representation in the mainstream LLMs, which are currently dominated by models predominantly trained on a corpus of English data from the western, developed world.”

In a presentation at the National University of Singapore on January 24, Dr Leslie Teo, Senior Director of AI Products at AI Singapore, explained that the project does not intend to compete with the big producers of AI tools such as OpenAI. “Instead, we want to complement the existing tools,” he stressed.

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

At its beginning in November 2023, the SEA-LION project initially focused on the developer side, but then it began receiving business queries. This led to the project to create a public infrastructure that is necessary in the AI space.

SEA-LION works through a partnership of different institutions, where each contributes to the data and metrics required to develop the technology. SEA LION works with non-copyrighted (“kosher”) materials in putting together data.

“The data used for pre-training the model was primarily sourced from the internet, specifically the CommonCrawl Dataset, which is publicly available. This data is downloaded, cleaned, and pre-processed for use in pre-training SEA-LION. The proportion of various SEA languages in the pre-training dataset was also adjusted to reflect the distribution of languages more accurately in our region,” the project stated.

In a demo that e27 witnessed, SEA-LION was placed side-by-side with popular LLMs such as OpenAI, Llama, and SEA LLM. All the tools were given the same questions in regional languages such as Bahasa Indonesia and Thai to answer, and the differences are interesting to see.

Of all the LLMs, SEALION, SEA LLM and OpenAI were the ones who were able to generate answers in Bahasa Indonesia and Thai.

SEA LION and OpenAI tended to give straightforward answers that were tailored for the chatbox. While OpenAI was slower in generating its answer, it was able to have a better understanding of context. In terms of accuracy, these two LLMs were also the most accurate.

Also Read: AI in mobile advertising: Transforming relevance, efficiency, and immersive experiences

What is next for SEA LION

When it comes to its practical, day-to-day use, SEA-LION aims to help enterprises in SEA incorporate AI into their workflows. For example, it can be used to enable customer service chatbots that have the capacity to capture local nuances in SEA languages, enhance fraud detection on online marketplaces in SEA, and enable more accurate translation and summarisation of information in regional languages.

In his presentation, Dr Teo also mentioned a use case where SEA-LION is used to help with legal advice.

For the development of SEA-LION, AI Singapore collaborated with companies such as Amazon Web Services and Google Research. It also partnered with communities such as SEACrowd to build a diverse data corpus in native languages.

The model is set to be piloted by enterprise users such as NCS and Tokopedia. Additionally, SEA-LION has garnered interest from regional government-linked entities such as KORIKA in Indonesia, which is pioneering the use of SEA-LION for various applications.

SEA-LION is publicly accessible on platforms such as Huggingface and Github. In the near future, it will also be available on AWS Jumpstart and Bedrock, as well as Google’s Model Garden. The model is free, encouraging research and commercial use to stimulate innovation and applications across various industries, languages, and contexts.

Also Read: In the age of AI, which human skills increasingly stand out?

SEA-LION initially prioritises commonly used languages in SEA, including Bahasa Indonesia, Malay, Thai, and Vietnamese, with plans to expand its coverage to other Southeast Asian languages such as Burmese and Lao in the future.

In an interview with e27, Dr Teo highlighted that despite its commercial use cases, SEA LION was not built as a commercial project. Instead, the project aims to build a public infrastructure.

“If we are successful, then we will see commercial things happening … Hopefully, because of that, we will be able to keep investing in the data and metrics because language changes–everything has to be continuously updated.”

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Indonesian digital ecosystem giant GoTo Group has announced the completion of its merger with TikTok Indonesia, the e-commerce arm of the global entertainment platform TikTok.

Tokopedia and TikTok Shop Indonesia’s businesses are now officially combined under Tokopedia, jointly owned by GoTo and TikTok as strategic partners in Indonesia, with TikTok holding a controlling stake.

As part of the deal, TikTok will invest over US$1.5 billion in the enlarged entity over time to provide future funding the business requires without additional dilution to GoTo. The group benefits from the growth of the enlarged entity. It remains an ecosystem partner to Tokopedia through its digital financial services via GoTo Financial and on-demand services via Gojek.

Also Read: The evolution and regulation of social commerce in Indonesia: The TikTok Shop ban

In addition, GoTo Group claims to have achieved positive adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter while exceeding the top end of its full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance range.

GoTo Group CEO Patrick Walujo said: “Having reached positive adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter of 2023, we can now look forward to accelerating our progress, driven in part by supportive ecosystem partners. As our profitability and cash flow continue to improve, we will optimize our capital usage in line with a newly developed capital allocation plan, which may include a share buyback initiative, subject to regulatory and shareholder approval.”

GoTo also receives an ongoing revenue stream in the form of an e-commerce service fee from Tokopedia commensurate with its scale and growth.

TikTok and Tokopedia have initiated an MSME empowerment programme through the #MelokalDenganBatik campaign, involving hundreds of local batik entrepreneurs in Solo and Yogyakarta. This initiative aims to support small businesses by providing them with production support technology, including advanced production tools, insights on trends and inventory management.

These initiatives are part of a broader strategy to transform Indonesia’s e-commerce sector, creating millions of new job opportunities over the next five years, particularly in the MSME sector.

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