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.”

The post How SEA-LION aims to bridge the cultural gap existing in popular AI tools appeared first on e27.

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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Companies around the world have been impacted by a chain of catastrophic market events over the past few years. From the COVID-19 pandemic to the US banking crisis, ‘black swan events’ have been thrust into the spotlight. Popularised by economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the term black swan events describes unpredictable one-off events with severe consequences.

One such example is the financial aftermath of the pandemic. Despite a lengthy three-year recovery period,  Asia’s growth is expected to decline to 4.2 per cent in 2024  — the lowest in the past two decades (apart from 2020).

With increasingly frequent macroeconomic shocks, companies must prepare for disruption to be part and parcel of everyday operations. Considering the high-interest rates and the slowdown of two of the world’s largest economies, China and the United States, 2024 may turn out to be another year of market turbulence.

It’s time for businesses to consider black swan events as something to be expected. In 2024, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises must consider how they can strengthen their business resilience and navigate the era of a poly-crisis world.

Building a borderless workforce

For companies to thrive and scale in this new era of business, companies and their leaders that shift away from traditional business models and embrace a global mindset will be better set to capitalise on future growth opportunities. According to recent survey findings, 66 per cent of leaders worldwide stated having employees in multiple countries is part of their business strategy, including 28 per cent who say it is central to that strategy.

Also Read: The growth of business messaging: How it’s improving business performance in Southeast Asia

In an increasingly volatile world, tapping into global talent pools is not only a way to increase diversity but also a survival strategy.  An ‘anywhere workforce’ means businesses can reduce over-reliance on a specific type of talent and have better access to the skill sets they need, regardless of location.

When employees are equipped with a broader range of skills and work across multiple locations, businesses are no longer confined to a specific market and become more resilient against frequent business disruptions.

The same survey also found that employees prefer to work in global teams — 93 per cent of Singaporean employees want to work for a global company, and 90 per cent believe that global companies offer more opportunities for their career growth.

Furthermore, it can help increase cost savings and revenue growth; APAC-based pharmaceutical company Amoy Diagnostics (AmoyDX) was able to achieve a revenue of US$13.8 million by the end of 2022 after expanding its talent pool internationally.

Regular scenario planning is imperative

Scenario planning is a strategic tool for businesses to analyse alternate future events and create flexible long-term plans. Against the backdrop of wildly unpredictable and more frequent black swan events, effective scenario planning is increasingly complicated and should be a regular exercise for businesses so they are well-equipped to mitigate risks from potential uncertainties.

Also Read: Financial literacy in Southeast Asia is set to match industry growth

Instead of relying on traditional scenario planning, leaders can turn towards leveraging artificial intelligence technologies as a viable solution to consider possible hypothetical scenarios, evaluate their potential impact on the business, and identify ‘fail-safe’ critical decisions that will spur the business’s growth trajectory.

Forming the right strategic partnerships

Staying ahead of the competition often means accelerating speed to market in today’s business landscape. Navigating and adhering to unique expansion and employment compliance laws and regulations in individual markets can be complicated and time-consuming. In fact, 32 per cent of leaders are deterred from recruiting and hiring in international job markets due to regulatory complexities.

Employment of Record (EOR) partners can support businesses in building global teams and streamline cumbersome and time-consuming processes when entering new international markets. This speeds up the compliance process, allowing businesses to remove entity requirements and overcome different employment regulations.

By tapping a strategic global growth partner with HR, compliance, and legal experts in the region, businesses can better tackle ongoing challenges and accelerate global growth strategies. Through a collaborative approach, businesses can focus more on scalability and expanding their workforce.

Charging full steam ahead

In a globally interconnected world, encountering another black swan event is not ‘if’ but ‘when’. Building a global workforce, prioritising contingency planning, and expanding strategic partnerships are all essential strategies to circumvent everyday business disruptions and build the resiliency needed for long-term success.

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In 2022, Artem Ventures closed the TIM Ventures fund from multinational insurance company FWD Group. Over its first year of deployment in 2023, the fund achieved key milestones, including curating and investing in 12 startups actively working on social impact and financial inclusion issues.

It also created and ran value creation programmes for startups and the wider ecosystem aimed at capacity building and sustainability development.

“We draw from our corporate venture fund and fund-of-funds backgrounds to invest in promising startups at a nimble pace while incorporating high standards of governance in overseeing our startups and operating our funds. Being cognizant of our corporate LPs’ interests allows us to invest with a view of marrying their financial and strategic objectives through startup investments,” Artem Ventures Managing Partner Low Zhen Hui says in an email interview with e27.

“We are also likely the only, or one of the only, VC firms that adopt International Private Equity and Venture Capital guidelines in valuing our investees according to their liquidation rights, financial performance, and market comparable movements.

Artem Ventures is a VC fund management company currently managing a fund in partnership with FWD Group that invests in early-stage fintech and insurtech companies.

Also Read: Malaysia gets US$10.2M fund TIM Ventures to invest in insurtech, Islamic fintech startups

In selecting a potential investment, the company looks at factors such as the startup’s ability to deploy or adopt a strategy to drive impact towards the environment, society, and governance. Artem Ventures has vetted more than 750 companies and helped its portfolio secure further funding, market access, mentors, and advisors.

The company’s principles and approach to its investee companies focus on enhancing their capacity and capabilities to ensure the business can be sustainable and founders can adapt to any business cycle quickly. In this interview, Low explains exciting insights about the Malaysian startup ecosystem and the opportunities that Artem Ventures aims to seize.

The following is an edited excerpt of the interview:

What insight about the Malaysian startup ecosystem can you share with us?

Malaysian founders embody entrepreneurship passion coupled with strong resilience. If you re-examine past investment trends, Malaysia has never received the same fervent attention that markets like Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam have at various times.

This meant that our ecosystem is largely funded by local investors while foreign capital passed us by, forcing our startups to make every Ringgit work harder to achieve their goals.

What challenges are faced by startups in Malaysia? And how do you support your portfolio companies in getting through it?

One of the challenges that Malaysian startups generally face is insufficient capital to scale outside the country.

Also Read: How climate tech companies in Asia measure the impact of their work

While Malaysia is a fantastic starter market for startups (high internet connectivity, strong awareness of digital platforms, diverse population, large talent pool, and good ecosystem support), startups that have primarily raised funds within Malaysia eventually run into a chicken-and-egg issue around the Series A or B stages: they need capital to scale across the region, but their growth plan or traction is not convincing enough for foreign investors to put money behind.

Aside from our network of investors outside Malaysia, we aim to solve this innate issue by helping our founders develop a growth plan focused on regional expansion to land an attractive exit eventually.

What will be the most important trend in Malaysia this year? How do you plan to tap into the opportunity it provides?

We are still eyeing the fintech space as issues such as financial inclusion remain largely unaddressed. Embedded fintech will be an important tool for companies with market access to underserved communities and robust data collection and analytics capabilities to assess thin-credit users better.

What major plan do you have for Malaysian startups in 2024?

We are working on our next fund to invest in more tech and also non-tech sectors. We aim to inject more growth capital into the market and extend hands-on capacity building to more startups within our ecosystem.

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Image Credit: Artem Ventures

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Singapore-based chronic disease management startup Mesh Bio has raised US$3.5 million in Series A financing led by East Ventures.

Elev8, Seed Capital, and other existing shareholders also co-invested.

The funding will allow Mesh Bio to offer its digital twin technologies to healthcare providers and scale the deployment of these solutions across Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, mainly Indonesia and the Philippines.

Also Read: Mesh Bio raises US$1.8M seed to help doctors predict diseases before they occur

Dr. Andrew Wu, Co-Founder and CEO of Mesh Bio, said: “Southeast Asia presents myriad unmet healthcare needs, and our focus is to address these gaps effectively.”

The high prevalence of chronic diseases, from diabetes to heart disease, in Southeast Asia has pushed more general practitioners who lack specialist training in endocrinology to manage patients with chronic diseases.

Founded in 2018 by Wu and Arsen Batagov (CTO), Mesh Bio delivers digital solutions to help healthcare providers with patient management. Its solutions offer patient data and predictive analytics that equip doctors with information and intelligence about their patients and the diseases they live with.

The company develops clinical decision support analytics and automation solutions for managing chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease. Its DARA Health Intelligence Platform enables data-driven care delivery, which improves patient engagement and health outcomes. It has been used by more than 120 medical centres across Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia for preventive health screening.

Also Read: WhiteCoat closes a tranche of Series B round, poised to break even in Singapore

This new investment comes three months after the startup received approval from Singapore’s Health Sciences Authority (HSA) to market its HealthVector Diabetes as a Software Medical Device (SaMD). A chronic disease management solution, HealthVector Diabetes is currently used in an implementation pilot at Singapore General Hospital (SGH), Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH), and selected polyclinics for potential clinical adoption.

Mesh Bio previously raised a US$1.8 million seed funding round in October 2021.

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Southeast Asia’s total food delivery spend on platforms grew a modest 5 per cent year-on-year to reach US$17.1B in 2023, mirroring the growth rate observed in 2022, according to a Momentum Works report.

The growth was driven primarily by the region’s smallest food delivery market, Vietnam (+US$300 million or 27 per cent y-o-y), followed by Malaysia (+US$200 million or 9 per cent y-o-y).

Also Read: How a great back-end tech helped GrabFood capture half of SEA’s food delivery pie despite being a latecomer

Thailand and Indonesia registered low single-digit growth, while Singapore’s topline remained flat, according to the ‘Food Delivery Platforms in Southeast Asia” report, which offers in-depth insights into the region’s six core food delivery markets.

With continuous pressure to achieve sustainable profitability, most incumbents have continued to rein in food delivery subsidies and adopt differentiated strategies to compete. As of the end of 2023, Grab is estimated to account for 55 per cent or US$9.4 billion of the region’s food delivery GMV, a 6.8 per cent increase from the year before.

Foodpanda and Gojek are estimated to contribute 15.8 per cent (US$2.7 billion) and 10.5 per cent (US$1.8 billion) of the region’s GMV, a 12.9 per cent and 10 per cent y-o-y decline, respectively.

Shopee and Lineman showed notable growth and are estimated to contribute 8.8 per cent (US$1.5 billion) and 8.1 per cent (US$1.4 billion), respectively, to the region’s GMV.

Key highlights

Premium F&B brands face challenges despite regional spending on F&B recovering: F&B spending in Southeast Asia finally recovered to surpass pre-pandemic levels (US$125.2 billion in 2023 versus US$115.7 billion in 2019). However, many premium brands (notably in Singapore) found the year tougher than 2022, with many resorting to cost-cutting measures amidst macro uncertainties and inflation, which may have heightened price sensitivity among middle-class diners.

Entry of Chinese F&B brands en masse intensifies competition: 2023 saw an acceleration of Chinese F&B brands’ entry and expansion into Southeast Asia. This trend is exemplified by Luckin Coffee’s 30 stores in Singapore and Mixue’s close to 4,000 outlets across Southeast Asia; however, brands in multiple categories and sizes have also established a presence in the region. They have brought their know-how in in-store operations, marketing, user operations and franchise management. Expect more in 2024.

Major players have achieved some sort of profitability: Most major platforms have either achieved or are on track to attain adjusted EBITDA breakeven, with some targeting to achieve positive free cash flow in 2024. But as the Meituan and Uber experiences have shown, profitability might not be a constant state — platforms need to balance growth with sustained profitability constantly.

Also Read: How Ridge aims to introduce AI tech to small businesses in the F&B sector

Food delivery players continue to diverge in strategy, leveraging ads for revenue expansion: Major food delivery players have continued leveraging advertising products to lock in more merchant investments. Platforms are expanding their advertising product portfolios to cater to the distinct needs of various brands, including large F&B chains, small F&B merchants, and FMCG brands.

Room for growth in user base and operational optimisation in the region: Southeast Asia’s leading player, Grab, only has 5 per cent of the region’s population of 600 million as monthly transacting customers. Amid a flat sector topline, untapped populations in major cities, expansion into smaller towns, and catering to tourists present further growth opportunities for food delivery platforms. Platforms can and should also continuously optimise operations to reduce costs and grow their bottom line.

“With robust F&B consumption, low food delivery penetration and ongoing consolidation, there is much room for growth for food delivery platforms in the region. While focusing on their core capabilities, leading players also need to keep an eye on potential market changes and emerging challengers,” said Jianggan Li, CEO and Founder of Momentum Works.

Singapore-based Momentum Works provides insights into the digital ecosystem in emerging markets through research, consultancy, community engagement, and venture building.

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X marks Echelon. Join us at Singapore EXPO on May 15-16 for the 10th edition of Asia’s leading tech and startup conference. Enjoy 2 days of building connections with potential investors, partners, and customers, exploring innovation, and sharing insights with 8,000+ key decision-makers of Asia’s tech ecosystem. Get your tickets here.

Want more from your Echelon experience? Be an Echelon X sponsor or exhibitor. Send enquiry here.

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Today, Zora Health announced the launch of its integrated fertility care and financing platform in Singapore, with S$1 million (US$740,000) in funding.

With initial backing from venture capital firm Antler, this funding round includes the participation of angel investors such as Cheryl Goh (Founding CMO of Grab), Prajit Nanu (CEO of Nium), Alan Jiang (CEO of Beam), and Lisa Enckell (Venture Partner, Antler), along with Asa Liden (former COO of Pitch.com).

In a press statement, Zora Health said that 55 per cent of its investor lineup consists of women.

“The fertility treatment landscape is daunting to the women and couples seeking fertility care due to the multitude of service options and providers, complicated regulations and confusing pricing structures. Zora Health’s integrated approach addresses these issues head-on, simplifying the process for patients, healthcare providers and corporations in a fragmented market,” said Anna Haotanto, Founder & CEO of Zora Health.

Zora Health provides a comprehensive ecosystem that integrates virtual and in-person consultations, medical concierge services, fertility education workshops for corporations and fertility financing. The platform’s initial service offerings include egg freezing, in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), fertility testing and consultation services.

Also Read: How Singapore became a leading femtech startup hub in SEA

At a later stage, it also offers fertility financing.

One of its offerings includes programmes tailored for corporate clients seeking to cultivate fertility-friendly work environments and facilitate meaningful fertility discussions.

“Research has demonstrated that addressing fertility concerns can result in a 77 per cent increase in employee retention, with 89 per cent reporting improvements in their mental well-being. Zora Health aims to help employers attract and retain top talent, boost employee productivity, and enhance employee well-being through the implementation of these corporate initiatives,” Zora Health said.

Infertility is an escalating issue, affecting an estimated one in six people, as many as 48 million couples and 186 million individuals worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation.

The company said that it already has a waitlist of more than 180 patients and partnerships with more than 50 clinics in 16 cities in eight countries globally.

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Image Credit: Zora Health

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Singapore-based Silicon Box enables chiplet architecture, allowing chip designers freedom from the constraints of a single, monolithic chip for processing. By leveraging multiple smaller chips interconnected in a single package, chip designers can create the equivalent of a system-on-a-chip (SoC) in a package.

The company recently raised US$200 million in Series B funding from BRV Capital, Event Horizon Capital, Maverick Capital, and others, intending to reshape the semiconductor landscape. The capital will primarily go into expanding production in its US$2-billion packaging factory in Singapore.

In this interview with e27, Michael Han, Silicon Box’s Head of Business, discusses the impact of capital injection on factory expansion and the opportunities and challenges of the company.

Edited excerpts:

How will this substantial capital injection contribute to Silicon Box’s growth and development plans, especially in expanding your advanced packaging factory in Singapore?

Silicon Box brings effective chiplet integration capabilities through our Singapore factory.

Initial Capex to date focused on building the foundry, hiring, and building the first production lines. Now that we have proven the concept and capability with early customers, this capacity is already fully allocated in 2024, which requires us to expedite the build-out of additional packaging capacity in Singapore to support incoming demand. The Series B funding will enable us to meet and exceed our initial plans for capacity build-out in 2024.

Silicon Box focuses on chiplet architecture to overcome scalability limitations in current semiconductor chips. Could you elaborate on how chiplet integration enhances performance, reduces device sizes, and improves reliability, and how it addresses the challenges faced by conventional packaging approaches?

Silicon Box’s advanced packaging capabilities are not limited to chiplets. It brings the most advanced interconnection necessary for chiplets, at scale, through large format manufacturing.

This allows us to replace legacy packaging solutions such as wafer level fan out and quad fan-out no lead (QFN) to support the deployment of advanced applications that are fully reliant on chiplet architecture but also to bring better performance at low power consumption and cost, to applications such as mobile, automotive, data centres, IoT, RF power amplifiers.

Also Read: Silicon Box bags US$200M to expand production in its US$2B semiconductor factory in Singapore

Chiplet architecture in and of itself, especially as offered by a pure-play packaging specialist such as Silicon Box, allows the semiconductor industry at large to overcome the huge technical and cost implications being faced by traditional manufacturing paradigms based on Moore’s Law (miniaturising system-on-chip/SoC) at the foundry level.

Chiplets allow chip designers to design systems more flexibly using modular components at the most efficient cost and effective performance for that functionality. This will enable huge cost and design cycle efficiencies for these customers.

Chiplets seem to facilitate collaboration between foundries and chip designers. How does Silicon Box envision fostering collaboration within the semiconductor industry, and what benefits does this bring to developing cutting-edge applications?

Chiplets facilitate the integration of various chip types, including chips produced using different process technologies and those sourced from different foundries. Combining diverse technologies in a single package brings improved system-level capabilities, performance, design flexibility and cost benefits. The interconnection method itself also enables system designs to run at high energy efficiency with more advanced performance and reliability.

Chiplets being true to its heterogeneous concept means that you can integrate chips from any technology node and various foundries. As a packaging specialist, Silicon Box can enable this mix-and-match approach more effectively, as proprietary data and IP from the foundries can be maintained through the packaging process.

In the future, foundries can focus on competitive advantages at the chiplet level, focusing on improving modular performance rather than miniaturizing entire systems at the foundry level, which meets its limits regarding scale and performance improvement.

How do Silicon Box’s solutions impact the semiconductor industry’s scalability issues, and what benefits can consumers expect in terms of pricing, device performance, and reliability due to your innovations?

Chiplets can be developed independently and optimised for specific functions. Different chiplets can be mixed and matched and tailored for specific applications. This flexibility in chip design reduces time-to-market and allows for efficient use of resources.

Chiplets and how they are packaged are just one of the many components and factors that go into manufacturing a device. For example, our chiplets and packaging method have reduced thermal output, meaning less power is required to cool the device, which translates to lower energy use. And we bring this benefit to front-end manufacturers.

Also Read: Semiconductor manufacturing nations set for growth as AI takes center stage: Alpha Intelligence Capital CEO

The concept of chiplets is already well accepted across the industry, and the current bottleneck is in advanced packaging capability and capacity. We address this bottleneck in capacity, capability, and stakeholder concerns, allowing the whole ecosystem to align on new goals that will empower the semiconductor industry.

Silicon Box aims to bring scalable solutions globally. What is your strategy for global expansion, and are there specific regions or markets where you see a particularly high demand for your advanced semiconductor packaging services?

In addition to bringing the Singapore factory to full capacity, in light of the current shortage and high demand from the front end, we currently see strong solicitation from various governments to explore replicating our Singapore foundry in various locations.

Since our technology can also empower a broader range of applications with a strong concentration in various regions (automotive in the US/China/Europe and mobile in the US and Asia), there is renewed excitement regarding how chiplets may by various companies and support the industrial agenda and semiconductor aspirations for diverse geopolitical blocs.

Silicon Box aims to cater to next-gen large language models, generative AI, automotive, data centres and mobile computing. Could you share insights into the specific applications and industries where you foresee your technologies’ most significant impact and adoption?

Silicon Box is well poised to solve the unique challenge for chiplets, which are essential to power emergent technologies. Our team of experts with over 30 years of experience, a critical ecosystem of partners, and proprietary interconnection technology will shorten the design cycle of chiplets, lower new device costs, reduce power consumption and enable faster-time-to-market for industry partners involved in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), data centres, electric vehicles (EVs), mobile, and wearables.

Also Read: How Infineon aims to build better semiconductors with the help of Singapore startups

For AI, large language models and automotive applications such as autonomous driving, our solution is necessary rather than optional. Our solutions will allow these technologies to develop sustainably from an investment, R&D and power efficiency standpoint.

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X marks Echelon. Join us at Singapore EXPO on May 15-16 for the 10th edition of Asia’s leading tech and startup conference. Enjoy 2 days of building connections with potential investors, partners, and customers, exploring innovation, and sharing insights with 8,000+ key decision-makers of Asia’s tech ecosystem. Get your tickets here.

Want more from your Echelon experience? Be an Echelon X sponsor or exhibitor. Send enquiry here.

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