Funding the Future: Navigating Emerging Sectors and Investment Opportunities

Echelon Philippines 2024 hosted a panel discussion titled ‘Funding the Future: Navigating Emerging Sectors and Investment Opportunities’, shedding light on the growth potential of emerging sectors and strategies for startups to secure funding. The session brought together key investment leaders to discuss opportunities and challenges in the Philippine market.

Moderated by Adriel Yong, Head of Investments at Ascend Network, the panel featured Joseph de Leon, Founding Member and Lead Investor at Manila Angel Investors Network; Franco Varona, Managing Partner at Foxmont Capital Partners; and Rishab Malik Partner at Jungle Ventures.

The discussion covered sectors like agritech, B2B SaaS, and healthcare, emphasising their alignment with venture capital (VC) trends in the Philippines. Leon highlighted his experience in mergers and angel investments, stressing the critical role of founder resilience.

Also Read: Echelon Philippines 2024: The funding landscape for Filipino startups

Varona shared Foxmont Capital’s focus on climate tech and agritech, noting the government’s supportive policies. He also predicted increased M&A activity with Japanese firms. Malik detailed Jungle Ventures’ approach to assessing founder-market fit and spotlighted a recent investment in blockchain-enabled remittance technology.

Panelists concurred on the immense potential of fintech, agritech, and climate tech, while also acknowledging the mental health challenges faced by founders. They emphasised the importance of robust founder-investor dynamics and adaptive strategies to attract funding in a competitive landscape.

The session underscored the Philippines as an emerging hub for innovation, backed by local and regional VC interest and an evolving entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Watch the session video above to learn more about these insights and the strategies shaping the future of entrepreneurship.

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Speak to bank leadership teams about the state of their current core technology stack, and you’ll likely find most of them agreeing that they’re struggling to keep up with the rapid shift to the digital-first and more seamless interactions that their customers and partners are expecting, along with the obvious realisation that replacing these technologies will be a complex process that won’t only involve significant risk, but also incur significant expense.

This is a real problem, as banks continue to invest money in maintaining the status quo while new regulations, rising digital expectations, and the shift towards open banking are pushing those same legacy systems to their limits.

Building on workarounds to tackle these changes has simply kicked the can (i.e., risk) down the road, making them harder and more expensive to overcome in the face of increasing digital transactions and rising customer expectations for more personalised interactions and connected offerings.

While banks in Southeast Asia still have some ways to go, there is progress in the right direction; findings from Publicis Sapient’s recent Global Banking Benchmark Study show that 37 per cent of bank leaders in Southeast Asia are aware that legacy technology is hindering their business transformation. Looking ahead, almost a third (29 per cent) of SEA bank leaders said their organisations are prioritising improving the customer experience as their main digital transformation goal.

Four steps to delivering core modernisation

Hesitance to upgrade legacy systems is understandable; it is all too easy for a CEO or CIO to lose their job by proposing a core system transformation and then failing to deliver it.

On the bright side, cloud technologies, coreless banking systems, and the surrounding ecosystem of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions have matured greatly in recent years. At the same time, taking an iterative approach toward core modernisation can significantly mitigate the risks of transformation.

How, then, should banks approach core modernisation? Here are four steps to consider, as well as pitfalls that can be avoided in the journey to delivering a modernisation program.

Also Read: Phishing threats: Protecting your online shopping and banking

Step one: Have a clear and aligned ambition from the top to the bottom

Everyone involved in the process must believe in and commit to the process, from the board and all the way down to the on-ground teams doing the actual work. Alignment must be made on a clear case for change, the critical challenges that modernisation is intended to address, the benefits which these modern capabilities can unlock, and ultimately, the return on investment.

The right leaders must be selected for the program, whether sourced internally or through new hires. These leaders must be provided with the appropriate funding, resources, and decision-making power. Just as important is having clear alignment on the roadmap and timeline for program delivery, as well as a framework for both oversight and accountability.

Step two: Mobilise the program

This step is conceptually a simple one: Without the right preparation, modernisation programs cannot succeed, as this step is where you begin shaping what that desired operating model for a coreless bank should look like.

This starts by bringing on board the right combination of business, functional, and technology capabilities while ensuring that the right level of governance, as well as risk and compliance, is set up. The product roadmap must be clearly defined, confirming timelines for the launches and the technical proof points along the way to achieving the target state.

Designing the coreless architecture must be aligned with best-practice principles, while any vendors brought on board to make up any critical components must be properly assessed. Cloud infrastructure requirements must be confirmed as well.

During the mobilisation process, caution must be taken to avoid simply reproducing the functionality of the legacy core versus embracing the possibilities that coreless architecture brings.

Step three: Proving the platform through the first release

Critical to modernisation efforts is the need to quickly get to market; this helps to build belief in the new capabilities while enabling learning and continuous iteration through real-world experience, which can help improve subsequent releases. Failure to launch is usually the result of a combination of incorrect delivery models, missing go-live requirements, or taking on too much too soon.

Step four: Modernise progressively

Once your first release is out the door and the platform is given a chance to prove itself to key internal stakeholders as well as customers, it is then time to accelerate the transition from legacy onto the new modernised platform through the next series of iterative releases. By sequencing the migration appropriately in tranches, risk and disruption for customers can be minimised.

Also Read: How to harness open banking for greater consumer and fintech empowerment

Focus on where the new capabilities can drive the most value for your customers and colleagues, prioritising new features based on value, speed, and quality metrics. At the same time, do not be afraid to drive continued exploration of new and differentiated approaches to enhance and expand the new coreless model, with which competitors will struggle to compete.

Modernisation for resiliency

Banks that cannot take steps to solve their core banking conundrum are doomed to fail; merely processing banking transactions will not be enough for them to compete.

The opportunity to modernise the core of your bank might be daunting, but banks can position themselves for success with the right modernisation roadmap, as well as the right partners who have experience in creating modern coreless architectures that can enable a more efficient banking model to drive growth by launching new product revenue streams, to build digital experiences that their customers are demanding, and to enhance operational efficiencies, in order to increase resiliency for the future.

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This article was first published on September 26, 2023

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Venture studios and venture building are activities that have now existed for several decades with a proven record of success. In contrast, corporate venture building has historically faced scepticism in venture capital circles. It is often seen as a step removed from the agility of independent startups. The criticism is often around how corporate ventures lack the agility and risk tolerance of independent startups. They are perceived to be weighed down by internal bureaucracy and often misaligned with entrepreneurial incentives.

Furthermore, there is a perception that corporates struggle to attract seasoned entrepreneurial talent. Such talent may shy away from ventures perceived as too constrained by corporate priorities. They may also dislike organisations that are too focused on incremental gains rather than breakthrough innovation. Another challenge is balancing the short-term demands of meeting corporate financial targets with the long-term strategic nature of a venture capital investment.

However, in recent years more and more corporates have entered the venture building space, and that perception is changing. Among them is IMI, a publicly traded company in the United Kingdom with deep engineering roots. It has identified venture building as a critical lever for future growth in fast-evolving sectors and emerging technologies. IMI established the IMI Venture Studio in 2023 with an approach based on three powerful pillars. First, market-driven validation, second, world-class entrepreneurial talent, and third, leveraging the corporate advantage.

Also read: Futureproofing the energy and industrial sector in Asia with IMI’s Venture Studio

Market-driven validation 

The first pillar, market-driven validation, ensures that every venture IMI pursues is grounded in market reality. When new ventures are built without proper market validation, they can be misaligned with customer needs. They may also face challenges in gaining commercial traction. Insufficient validation can result in ventures that burn through resources. They chase assumptions rather than solve customer problems, leading to wasted capital, lost time, and missed opportunities. 

IMI overcomes this by starting with a rigorous validation process. This filters out concepts that will not gain traction with paying customers early on. In this last year alone, the company vetted over 50 business ideas, selecting only one to advance to the venture building phase. In this phase, they work with expert partners through EDB’s Corporate Venture Launchpad programme. These industry leaders have the best practices in the venture building space and a track record of bringing successful ventures to the market.  

Coupled with this, they conduct in-depth analyses of market trends and perform comprehensive competitor benchmarking. They also gather valuable customer feedback through targeted outreach. Finally, they run pilot tests with potential customers to thoroughly validate market demand and ensure a strong problem-market fit. This disciplined approach gives IMI’s ventures solid foundations from which to build upon. 

World-class talent 

Investors know the impact of experienced entrepreneurs, and IMI makes this a priority. Research shows that second-time founders are twice as likely to deliver a successful exit compared to first-time founders, and it is easy to see why. These founders bring a playbook of tools that has been battle-hardened in their previous entrepreneurial experience. They bring in a network of established investors and mentors that can guide them and potentially become venture backers. They know how to attract top talent to the organization. But maybe most important, they understand the urgency of hitting critical milestones early. As a result, they maximise runway and accelerate toward both commercial and investment goals. 

Why would these highly-qualified founders choose to build with IMI and run corporate-backed ventures? The answer is compelling: to ensure founders have the best possible chance of success, IMI provides dedicated resources tailored to their needs. This includes access to those same expert venture builders who guide the process. This enables Founders to benefit from a rigorous three-month sprint designed to validate their ideas. As a result, they develop a viable business model and go-to-market plan. During this sprint, critical startup assumptions such as customer pain points, willingness to pay, product prototyping, and financial modelling are thoroughly tested. By the end of this phase, founders are equipped with a clear and actionable roadmap to turn their ideas into scalable businesses. 

IMI also offers seed capital commitment, starting them with rigorously validated ideas, and a mission that aligns with a greater impact than mere financial returns: IMI’s commitment of breakthrough engineering for a better world. Most critically, the venture starts its growth journey alongside a strong strategic partner from day one. This strategic partner is capable of offering market access and expertise. 

Leveraging the corporate advantage 

Corporate venture studios like IMI provide a springboard for founders, significantly increasing their chances of success in competitive markets. The company’s ventures have the opportunity to leverage IMI’s corporate advantage. They do this by tapping into IMI’s extensive availability of industry veterans and engineers with deep domain expertise. These experts have access to hundreds of customers across global markets, industries and applications through IMI’s long-established market reputation. 

Moreover, IMI’s Venture Studio team offers a set of tools that strengthen the venture’s potential. This includes sourcing top co-founders through a curated pipeline of interdisciplinary talent. This year alone, they vetted over 500 potential candidates, building a powerful roster of talent ready to lead ventures.  

IMI also delivers a best-in-class governance foundation. This includes legal structures, such as founder agreements and employee incentivization plans. This gives IMI-backed ventures a distinct edge over similar early-stage startups. Finally, their extensive network of partners and investors allows ventures to spend more time on rapid scaling. As a result, they spend  less time fundraising. 

Equipped with these powerful tools, the venture is strategically positioned for accelerated commercial growth and expedited fundraising. This is unsurprising, given that venture studio-backed startups achieve exits 33% faster than their independent counterparts. 

Also read: As the demand for energy soars, climate tech is here to save the day

Working with IMI Venture Studio  

IMI Venture Studio is passionate about fostering innovation and building ventures that shape the future of the energy and industrial sectors. If you are interested in partnering with IMI Venture Studio and its ventures, whether through collaboration, investment or in building new ventures together —we invite you to join us in this journey.  

To explore partnership opportunities, reach out to the IMI Venture Studio team at general@imiventures.com. Let’s build new ventures for a better world together.

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This article is sponsored by IMI

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Featured Image Credit: IMI

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When I first began experiencing hair loss as a university student, I found myself frustrated with the lack of accessible, effective solutions for precise scalp analysis and personalised hair care. That personal struggle became the spark that led to the creation of Lushair Scalp Explorer, an AI-powered device that I hope will transform the way people care for their hair and scalp.

My journey started while I was still a student at Zhejiang University in China. Together with two classmates, I began working on an ambitious idea: developing a device that could offer highly accurate diagnostics and tailored recommendations for scalp health. Our academic backgrounds in biology, AI, and engineering came together perfectly for this project, but translating that knowledge into a working device was anything but simple.

After graduating, I moved to Singapore and launched Genpulse, the company behind Lushair. With the support of the Graduate Research Innovation Programme by NUS Enterprise, my team and I embarked on a two-year development process that was as challenging as it was rewarding.

One of our biggest hurdles was sourcing the right data to train our AI algorithms; a diverse set of scalp images was essential for accuracy. Partnering with Hangzhou First People’s Hospital and over 200 salons in China, we gathered more than 22,000 scalp images, which allowed us to fine-tune our technology to deliver results that align with clinical standards.

Also Read: How mental health startup Intellect’s founder catalysed his personal battle with anxiety

In April 2024, we launched Lushair Scalp Explorer in Singapore, and the response has been beyond our expectations. Within two months, we broke into the Asia-Pacific market, received orders from the United States, and achieved over US$10,000 in revenue.

Priced at US$129, the device is available online, allowing users to access a professional-grade scalp analysis experience from the comfort of home. Lushair analyses 16 different metrics in just four seconds, providing insights into follicle density, white hair ratio, damage state, and more.

But my vision for Genpulse extends beyond hair care. We’re now developing diagnostic tools and treatments for other skin conditions, including acne and eczema, with plans to expand into the North American market. I’m inspired by the idea that advanced diagnostics should be accessible to everyone, empowering individuals to take control of their skin health with tailored solutions.

This journey hasn’t been easy, but it’s taught me the power of perseverance and resilience. I often think of Elon Musk’s words, “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour.” Despite the obstacles, I am committed to bringing Lushair to as many people as possible, inspiring other young innovators along the way.

With Lushair, I want to change the way people approach hair and skin care, making it accessible, personalised, and backed by science. This is just the beginning of what I hope will be a transformative journey for beauty and health care worldwide.

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I discussed the perils of implementing a Lift and Shift approach in a recent article about “Cloud Value Realisation (CVR)”. Increasing cloud infrastructure costs due to monolithic applications being unable to leverage cloud-native scaling is one of the biggest challenges technology executives face.

FinOps has been posited as a white knight to solve this problem and has resulted in a myth that implementing FinOps automatically reduces cloud infrastructure costs.

This article breaks this myth and makes a case for leveraging FinOps to understand cloud spending and how to profit by deriving business value from cloud investments instead of focusing on reducing costs.

Implementing FinOps may increase cloud infrastructure costs, but it provides tremendous benefits such as revenue growth, understanding where investment dollars are spent, and matching investments to direct business outcomes.

Problem statement

Technology executives are facing the following three big challenges in managing cloud costs:

• Lack of governance: Having no link between cloud infrastructure and business outcomes creates a challenge to justifying cloud investments.
• Overspending: Technical resources spin up infrastructure which is difficult to track because hyper-scalers have thousands of SKUs with constant changes in pricing models.
• No single pane of glass: Technology executives find it very difficult to budget, forecast, monitor, and control consumption because it is a big challenge to create a single dashboard by consolidating information from different hyper-scalers. This problem is exacerbated because each hyper-scaler has variable pricing models, there is no standardisation of billing models, and tagging/ allocating costs internally implies the need to navigate through internal organisational dynamics.

FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organisations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.

Also Read: Exploring the rise of finance-as-a-service in APAC

The most important goal of FinOps is to bring accountability to cloud spending by providing information to business and engineering teams for making investment trade-offs between time to market, quality, and costs.

Steps to implement FinOps

Based on discussions with numerous C-level executives, I recommend that organisations start with the following three steps to implement FinOps:

Step 1: Create and empower a core team

A cross-functional team comprised of business leaders, finance team members, IT/engineering team, and FinOps practitioners must lead the way to derive business value from cloud investments. This cross-functional group is responsible for calculating cloud costs, tagging cloud resources, monitoring where cloud investments are focused, mapping investments to business outcomes, and, most importantly, breaking down silos to get a unified perspective.

Step 2: Shift the mindset of business and technology teams

During a lift & shift exercise, IT teams may focus on the speed of delivery and leveraging cloud computing but ignore cost-related matters, such as the impact a product enhancement or modification might have on cloud investment. Similarly, business teams may not be keen to understand the cost of implementing new functionality because they want a faster time to market.

Mindsets must be shifted for business, IT, and finance teams to design and develop software with costs in mind and tie these costs to business objectives. The cross-functional team must be able to justify the business benefits of adding a new product feature when compared to additional cloud infrastructure costs needed to implement the functionality.

The team can then properly make the necessary trade-off decisions ensuring business value is created daily.

Step 3: Create a framework to understand cloud investments

The cross-functional FinOps team must create a framework to understand cloud infrastructure spending and determine whether cloud resources are being used cost-effectively to derive business value. FinOps presents a big data challenge because there is a huge amount of data to reconcile across multiple hyper-scalers.

Each hyper-scaler creates a unique line-item charge every second a cloud service runs, resulting in a bill with more than a million line items. The core team must dive into these large data sets, reconcile them, and understand cloud costs and business benefits. The results of this framework should be shared as regular reports which are easy to understand by business, technology, and finance teams to make the right decisions.

How FinOps enables “money-making” instead of focusing on “cost savings”

FinOps provides organisations with tools and data to leverage the cloud for increasing business value via a real-time account of which cloud investments are delivering the biggest business results.

It also highlights areas that can do a better job of optimising cloud resources, such as shutting down idle resources or infrastructure not yielding forecasted revenue growth/profits. Cloud consumption then becomes more efficient and creates a mindset that extra consumption is tied to revenue generation, adding more customers, or increasing customer satisfaction.

Also Read: Bridging the gender gap and boosting women entrepreneurship with embedded finance

FinOps also democratise information and gives power to the team working at the ground level to make decisions about whether provisioned resources are producing sufficient business value and adjust those resources for an immediate financial impact.

Teams can measure the impact of that spending and take corrective actions such as improving time to market, adding new functionalities with existing resources, or leveraging hyper-scaler innovation to build new products.

Call to action

Create a centralised team to drive FinOps

The FinOps core team must be cross-functional, consisting of leaders from finance, business, and IT to drive best practices through the creation of easy-to-use reports that map cloud investment to any business value created.

They also focus on rate optimisations through commitment-based/ enterprise discounts and by shutting down idle resources that are not delivering business value.

Drive decisions by the business value of the cloud

A FinOps practice maximises the impact of cloud investments on business outcomes. This may result in spending more to drive innovation by leveraging hyper-scalers. It is critical to deliberately decide on increasing cloud spending instead of allowing spending to creep up slowly with an engineering team that may create more cloud resources that do not deliver business value.

FinOps reports providing enough data to make informed decisions on how to optimise cloud spending for various business priorities.

Create a framework providing timely and accessible FinOps reports

Today, cloud vendors provide cost data on a real-time basis using per-second compute resource billing. Business and engineering teams need self-serve access to cloud usage reports to understand the impact of infrastructure decisions.

This leads to an “ownership mindset” where everyone is accountable for deriving business value from cloud spending.

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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

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This article was first published on June 12, 2023

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