Day: July 6, 2026

Malaysia-based venture capital firm Vynn Capital has made a strategic investment in etaily, the Philippines-born commerce and retail infrastructure platform, as the company doubles down on Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia to build a regional operating layer for consumer brands selling across Southeast Asia.

The size of the investment was not disclosed.

Also Read: Ayala Ventures, Foxmont Capital join etaily’s US$1.6M seed round

The deal comes months after etaily raised a late-2025 financing round led by Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation’s Asia Rising Fund. It also adds a Malaysian investor to a cap table that already includes Pavilion Capital, Ayala Corporation, the Gokongwei Group, the Cheng family behind Landmark, the Po family behind Century Pacific Food Corporation, Magsaysay family investors, Kaya Founders, Japan’s SBI ICCP Fund, and Foxmont Capital.

Founded in 2020, etaily helps consumer brands run and scale online and omnichannel operations across Southeast Asia. Its platform covers marketplace management, direct-to-consumer commerce, social commerce, livestreaming, retail media, customer experience, fulfilment coordination, data analytics, and offline retail enablement.

The company works with more than 100 brands, including L’Oréal, Levi’s, Skechers, Fila, Vans, Columbia, and The North Face.

Malaysia becomes a bigger piece of etaily’s regional plan

For etaily, the Vynn Capital investment is less about entering Malaysia and more about making the market a core pillar of its Southeast Asian cluster strategy. Over the past year, the company has expanded local operations, hired dedicated teams and secured regional commerce mandates for global brands through partnerships, including Gulf Marketing Group, one of the Middle East’s largest retail operators.

The company is building what it describes as a multi-country cluster across the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, allowing brands to enter and manage multiple Southeast Asian markets through a single operating framework. Several enterprise brands, including Vans, The North Face, Columbia, and Timberland, have used etaily’s multi-country operations.

“Malaysia is becoming an increasingly important pillar within our Southeast Asia cluster strategy,” said Alexander Friedhoff, founder and CEO of etaily. “Having a partner like Vynn Capital is highly strategic for us given their deep understanding of logistics, operational infrastructure, and regional scaling dynamics.”

Vynn Capital, founded in 2018, invests across mobility, fintech, commerce, supply chain, property technology, food and consumer technology, and business enablement platforms. The firm is led by Victor Chua, Tunku Ali Redhauddin ibni Tuanku Muhriz and Darren Chua, and has built a regional network across Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand.

Also Read: The long and winding road to e-commerce profitability

For etaily, that network could matter as much as capital. Commerce enablement in Southeast Asia is not only a software problem. It involves country-specific marketplace rules, fulfilment partners, warehouse operations, tax structures, retail relationships, creator networks and last-mile delivery constraints.

Why commerce infrastructure is attracting capital

Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market is large, but fragmented. According to the e-Conomy SEA 2024 report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company, the region’s e-commerce gross merchandise value reached about US$159 billion in 2024, making it the largest component of Southeast Asia’s digital economy.

But growth has become more complex. Brands are no longer selling through one or two marketplace storefronts. They are juggling Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, brand.com sites, livestreaming, affiliate creators, retail media campaigns and offline retail partners. Consumer acquisition costs have risen, discount-led growth has become harder to sustain, and marketplaces are pushing brands to spend more on ads, content and fulfilment efficiency.

This is where companies such as etaily come in. Rather than acting only as an agency or marketplace operator, etaily is positioning itself as infrastructure for brands that want regional expansion without building full local teams in every market.

Its “online-first, offline-to-follow” model starts with digital channels and expands into physical retail once demand, data and category fit are validated. This approach is increasingly relevant in Southeast Asia, where online discovery and offline purchase still overlap heavily, particularly in beauty, fashion, footwear and consumer goods.

The rise of TikTok Shop has also changed the playbook. Social commerce is no longer a side channel in markets such as Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia. Brands now need content production, creator management, livestream operations and campaign analytics alongside traditional marketplace execution.

etaily said the fresh capital will support AI-enabled commerce operations, retail media capabilities, fulfilment integration, social commerce expansion and cross-border brand growth initiatives.

A crowded but expanding field

etaily is not alone in chasing this opportunity. Southeast Asia has produced several commerce enablement and brand operating platforms over the past decade.

Thailand-founded aCommerce has long served enterprise brands across e-commerce operations, fulfilment and performance marketing. Intrepid, another player, operates in six markets in Southeast Asia and works with major brands on marketplace and digital commerce execution. Singapore-linked Synagie built a regional e-commerce enablement business before being acquired. AnyMind Group, while broader in scope, has also expanded across creator commerce, D2C support, logistics and brand growth services.

Then there are technology-led players such as Anchanto, which provides SaaS for warehouse and order management, and marketplace-native tools that help sellers optimise listings, inventory and advertising. At the channel level, Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop are also deepening their own brand services, advertising products and fulfilment offerings.

This means etaily’s challenge is not just expansion, but differentiation. The company’s pitch rests on combining operational execution with data, AI, retail media, creator commerce, and offline retail enablement under one regional structure. If it can make that model work across Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines, it could become more than an outsourced e-commerce operator.

Philippines roots, regional ambitions

The investment also underlines a broader shift: more venture-backed companies from the Philippines are attempting to scale into Southeast Asia, rather than remaining domestic plays. etaily’s rise has been recognised by the Financial Times, which ranked it as the third-fastest-growing company in Asia Pacific in 2025 and the fastest-growing company in the Philippines.

Also Read: SEA e-commerce surges to US$185B as video commerce becomes the new growth engine

That ranking gives etaily momentum, but regional expansion will test whether its Philippine success can be replicated in more competitive and operationally demanding markets. Malaysia offers a useful bridge: it is digitally mature, connected to Singapore, influenced by regional retail groups and increasingly important for cross-border brand strategies.

Indonesia, however, will likely be the bigger prize and the harder test. It is Southeast Asia’s largest digital economy, but also one of the most complex, with intense marketplace competition, regulatory shifts around social commerce and highly localised consumer behaviour.

For Vynn Capital, the bet fits its focus on companies that modernise traditional industries through technology and operational infrastructure. For etaily, the investment gives it a stronger Malaysian anchor at a time when global brands are looking for fewer partners that can manage more markets, channels and customer journeys.

The next phase will show whether commerce enablement in Southeast Asia consolidates around a few regional infrastructure players — or remains a market of country specialists, agencies, logistics providers and marketplace-native operators stitched together by brands themselves.

The post etaily lands Vynn Capital investment to deepen Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia push appeared first on e27.

OMOWAY, a China-born intelligent mobility startup building smart electric motorcycles, has completed consecutive Series A and Series A+ financing rounds as it begins global deliveries of its flagship OMO-X model, starting with Indonesia.

The company said the Series A+ round was led by Lochpine Capital, an industrial investment fund backed by battery giant CATL. Its Series A round was led by Monolith, with CICC Capital and existing backer ZhenFund also participating.

OMOWAY did not disclose the exact amount raised, saying only that the two rounds brought in “tens of millions of US dollars”.

Also Read: Revolutionising urban commutes: Southeast Asia’s prominent electric two-wheeler startups

Other investors in the company include Hongshan, RocketsCapital, the corporate venture capital arm of XPeng, and Hui Capital, an industrial fund founded by a BYD co-founder.

Founded in July 2024, OMOWAY is positioning itself at the intersection of electric two-wheelers, robotics and connected mobility. Its first product, OMO-X, is marketed as a mass-produced self-balancing smart motorcycle built on the company’s proprietary OMO-ROBOT architecture.

The company has picked Indonesia as its first delivery market, a logical but highly competitive launchpad. Indonesia is one of the world’s largest motorcycle markets, with more than 120 million motorcycles on its roads, and two-wheelers remain the backbone of daily commuting, informal commerce and last-mile logistics across the archipelago.

Indonesia first, Southeast Asia next

OMOWAY said it began the first global customer deliveries of OMO-X in June, with Indonesia receiving the initial batch. The startup claims OMO-X became the top electric motorcycle brand in Indonesia by order volume during its launch month, although it did not disclose the number of units ordered or delivered.

The company has also set up dozens of dealer locations across Jakarta, Bandung, Surabaya, other parts of Java and Bali. After Indonesia, OMOWAY plans to expand deliveries to Thailand, Singapore, Europe and other markets.

The Southeast Asian angle is central to OMOWAY’s expansion story. Unlike Europe or the US, where electric cars dominate the electrification narrative, Southeast Asia’s transition is more likely to be led by motorcycles. In Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines, two-wheelers are not niche vehicles; they are mass-market mobility infrastructure.

Indonesia has set ambitious goals to accelerate electric vehicle adoption, including targets for millions of electric motorcycles on the road by the end of the decade. Yet adoption has remained slower than policymakers hoped, held back by pricing, battery concerns, charging access, resale uncertainty and consumer loyalty to established petrol brands such as Honda and Yamaha.

Also Read: The real opportunity in ASEAN’s EV market lies in regional coordination

This is the gap OMOWAY is trying to enter: a market where the need is obvious, but where electric motorcycle makers still have to prove that they can offer not just lower running costs, but also reliability, service coverage and a better riding experience.

A crowded electric motorcycle field

OMOWAY is arriving in Indonesia at a time when the electric two-wheeler market is becoming increasingly crowded.

Local and regional players include Alva, backed by Indonesia’s Indika Energy; Polytron, which has pushed battery leasing models; Smoot, which has worked with battery-swapping infrastructure; and Gesits, one of Indonesia’s early domestic electric motorcycle brands. Singapore-headquartered ION Mobility is also targeting Indonesia with its M1-S electric scooter and has raised capital from investors including TVS Motor.

Beyond startups, Japanese incumbents remain the most formidable competitors. Honda and Yamaha have spent decades building dense dealership, financing and servicing networks across Southeast Asia. Their petrol motorcycles dominate roads from Jakarta to Ho Chi Minh City, and any meaningful shift to electric two-wheelers will require consumers to trust new brands on after-sales service, battery durability and spare parts availability.

China’s electric two-wheeler ecosystem is another competitive force. Chinese manufacturers have scale, supply-chain advantages and battery access, but they have also faced the challenge of adapting products to Southeast Asia’s road conditions, pricing expectations and regulatory requirements.

OMOWAY is attempting to differentiate through intelligence rather than price alone. The OMO-X comes with a digital key, a large smart navigation display and remote vehicle control. A higher-end Balance version adds low-speed balance assistance using the company’s self-balancing technology.

That feature is meant to address one of the oldest problems in motorcycling: instability at low speeds. In dense urban environments such as Jakarta, Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City, where riders frequently crawl through traffic, stop suddenly or carry passengers and cargo, low-speed control can be more than a novelty. If the technology works reliably at scale, it could appeal to newer riders, delivery workers and urban commuters who want the convenience of a motorcycle without some of the intimidation that comes with handling one.

From motorcycle to wheeled robot

OMOWAY’s broader pitch goes beyond electric motorcycles. The company describes itself as a wheeled robotics company, not simply a vehicle manufacturer.

Its OMO-ROBOT architecture is designed as a closed-loop system integrating perception, decision-making, execution and information transmission. In practical terms, the company wants to turn two-wheelers into “two-wheeled robots” capable of sensing, computing and responding to riding conditions.

OMOWAY said it has also developed Mobility One, a fully self-developed wheeled robot platform, with a prototype expected to be unveiled later this year. The company sees potential applications beyond personal mobility, including logistics and public services.

That ambition mirrors a broader shift in mobility investing. Investors are increasingly looking beyond hardware margins and asking whether vehicle startups can build software-led platforms, recurring service revenue, fleet management tools or robotics capabilities. This is especially relevant in Southeast Asia, where last-mile delivery, ride-hailing and urban logistics remain large markets but are under pressure to reduce costs and emissions.

Still, execution will matter more than positioning. Building smart electric motorcycles at scale is difficult. So is maintaining dealer networks across fragmented island geographies such as Indonesia. The company will need to show that OMO-X can survive heat, humidity, rough roads, flooding, heavy usage and inconsistent charging access.

The road ahead

OMOWAY’s fresh funding gives it capital and strategic backing at a time when the electric two-wheeler market is shifting from early pilots to commercial competition. CATL-linked capital could also prove useful as battery supply, safety and cost remain key factors in the sector.

But Indonesia will be a demanding first test. Consumers in the market are value-conscious, petrol motorcycles are affordable and widely serviced, and electric alternatives still need stronger financing, charging and battery-swapping ecosystems to reach mass adoption.

For Southeast Asia, however, the stakes are significant. If electric two-wheelers can reach price parity, improve safety and integrate smarter software, they could play a major role in reducing urban emissions and fuel dependence across the region.

Also Read: Dat Bike teams up with Japan’s FCC in US$22M Series B round

OMOWAY’s first deliveries in Indonesia mark the beginning of that test. The company now has to prove that its “smart motorcycle” thesis is not just a technology story, but a commercially viable mobility business in one of the world’s toughest and most important two-wheeler markets.

The post BYD co-founder-backed OMOWAY bags funding to join Southeast Asia’s electric motorcycle race appeared first on e27.

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I’ve spent over a decade placing IT professionals across Vietnam’s tech landscape. I thought I’d seen every version of a talent war. Then healthtech arrived at scale, and it’s different.

The shortage isn’t in general developers. It’s at a very specific intersection: someone who can build robust software and understand why a clinician’s workflow looks the way it does. That profile is rarer than most hiring managers realise.

The market isn’t optional anymore

Vietnam’s digital health market is projected to reach US$815 million in 2026, growing to US$9.5 billion by 2034. But the more important story isn’t market size; it’s regulatory necessity.

Under Decision 749/QĐ-TTg, all healthcare facilities were mandated to implement EHR by 2025–2026. As of early 2026, approximately 1,210 of 1,650 hospitals have announced EMR implementations. The 2025 Decree on Health Data Management raised the bar further, requiring HL7/FHIR compliance, data encryption, audit logging, and digital signatures. The government has committed VND 30,000 billion (~US$1.26 billion) to back it.

This is compliance-driven demand. It doesn’t wait for organisations to be ready.

FDI is moving in lockstep: roughly 160 foreign projects in healthcare and pharmaceuticals with nearly US$1.8 billion in registered capital as of mid-2024. Every new foreign-backed healthtech venture needs the same thing, skilled IT professionals who can operate in a high-compliance, clinically-adjacent environment.

Four layers, four different hiring profiles

The mistake I see most often: treating “healthtech hiring” as one problem.

• Infrastructure (HIS/EHR): The most urgent layer. Compliance-aware engineers with HL7/FHIR fluency. Most non-negotiable demand, least glamorous work. FPT and VNPT dominate domestically, but international vendors are entering fast.
• Clinical AI: AI/ML Engineers with medical imaging experience (DICOM, radiology pipelines). Globally scarce — Vietnam is no exception.
• Telehealth and consumer: Product-minded mobile and backend engineers. Closest to fintech talent in profile, and therefore most contested.
• Healthcare commerce: High-transaction backend, supply chain architecture. BuyMed (US$51.5M Series B) has defined this layer’s standard.

Hiring “a backend developer for our healthtech project” without knowing which layer you’re building for is a mistake that shows up three months into onboarding.

Also Read: Vietnam isn’t just inviting private capital in. It is structurally dependent on it

The real gap

Vietnam produces 50,000–60,000 IT graduates per year across 153+ universities. The pipeline isn’t the problem. Average IT compensation has climbed ~35 per cent year-over-year, with senior developers commanding 50–70 per cent more than two years ago, signs of fierce competition, not scarcity of raw talent.

The problem is the intersection. Engineers with genuine clinical workflow understanding, HL7/FHIR experience, and compliance-aware development instincts are a small fraction of the market. According to the ITviec IT Salary and Recruitment Report 2025–2026, demand for digital transformation talent is surging across all sectors — healthtech is competing for the same pool as fintech, e-commerce, and enterprise SaaS, all at once.

In our pipeline, roles like Healthcare IT PM, medical imaging AI Engineer, or Health Data Security Specialist routinely take two to three months to fill through standard processes. Organisations that haven’t invested in employer branding for healthtech will lose candidates at the offer stage, consistently.

Speed is the strategy

The organisations winning right now have one thing in common: they treat hiring as a product problem, not an HR process.

EHR mandates, funding milestones, and product launches don’t accommodate 90-day recruitment cycles. The practical moves that work:

• Pre-built talent pipelines over job postings, the difference between a seven-day shortlist and a 70-day search is whether the candidate relationship already exists
• Staff augmentation to align headcount with project phases, not lock in fixed overhead at the wrong moment
• EOR structures for Singapore, Japanese, and Australian companies building Vietnam teams — bypassing the three-to six-month entity setup before a single hire is made

One overlooked angle: interoperability engineers. Vietnam’s EHR adoption numbers look strong, but hospitals are still storing data in incompatible formats, a problem the Vietnam Medical Informatics Association has flagged publicly. Engineers with HL7 FHIR integration experience and legacy system API skills are disproportionately valuable right now, before the next regulatory tightening cycle.

Also Read: Vietnam’s biggest PE bet of 2025 was not on tech. It was on what 100M people eat every day

The window is open (for now)

The regulatory mandate is real. The FDI is deployed. The government’s commitment is sustained. What’s uncertain is which organisations build the right teams before the talent market tightens further.

The ones that win won’t necessarily have the largest budgets. They’ll be the ones who understood early: in a compliance-driven, deadline-pressured market, hiring speed is a competitive advantage, and they structured their strategy accordingly.

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The post Vietnam’s healthtech boom has a talent problem nobody is talking about appeared first on e27.

I’ve lived across Southeast Asia long enough to know what the heat feels like in five different cities.

Jakarta. Ho Chi Minh City. Singapore. Kuala Lumpur. Manila.

They all feel different. But they’re all on the same clock.

I’m not a climate scientist. I’m not a fund manager with a climate mandate. I’m someone who has spent over a decade moving across this region, watching capital flow, watching ventures rise and fold, watching ecosystems get built and ignored. I write about impact capital every week. But this week I want to write about something more personal.

I don’t have kids. My relationship with the future works differently from most people my age. It runs through two dogs, a meditation practice, and a stubborn, quiet belief that this region doesn’t have to end the way the projections currently suggest.

That’s why I keep watching climate when the room has moved on.

And right now the room has very much moved on.

The AI gravity problem

Every founder pitch I see has an AI angle. Every fund narrative has pivoted to include intelligence, automation, and agents. I get it. The returns are real. The narrative is loud. The FOMO is louder.

But here’s what’s getting drowned out.

Jakarta is sinking. Literally. Parts of North Jakarta have already dropped several metres, and the projection hasn’t changed. Ho Chi Minh City floods regularly now in ways it didn’t a decade ago. Manila’s coastal communities are being quietly relocated. Bangkok is dealing with saltwater intrusion. Singapore, the most climate-prepared city in the region, is spending billions on sea walls and still isn’t sure it’s enough.

This isn’t future risk. This is the current reality.

And yet. According to Tracxn data tracking SEA climate tech, funding in 2026 so far has recorded only four rounds totalling roughly US$17 million. That’s down nearly 60 per cent from the same period last year. Meanwhile, global AI funding crossed US$100 billion in the first half of 2025 alone.

The attention gap is real. And it’s widening.

Also Read: Funded: I keep a notebook by my bed with one question about SEA climate

The observer’s dilemma

I sit at the edge of the climate ecosystem. Not fully inside it. More like someone with their nose pressed against the glass, taking notes.

What I see from out here is a gap between urgency and attention. The urgency is accelerating. The attention is fragile and easily stolen by whatever narrative is loudest that quarter.

In 2021, it was crypto. In 2023, it was generative AI. In 2025, it was agents. Climate was supposed to have its moment in between. It did, briefly. Then the room moved again.

The venture building in climate didn’t move. They’re still here. Rice decarbonisation tackling one of SEA’s largest methane sources. Seaweed biostimulants are replacing chemical fertilisers across smallholder farms. Biochar carbon removal. Agrifood waste converted to sustainable fuels. Decentralised solar reaching communities the grid forgot. These aren’t concepts. They’re operating companies with revenue, with farmers, with real emissions reductions happening right now.

They just don’t trend.

The handful of funds that stayed committed to this space know this. SEEDS Capital, Entrepreneur First, East Ventures, SGInnovate and 100×100 formerly Wavemaker Impact, which just rebranded after spinning out as an independent fund manager with a fresh US$100 million mandate to build 50 climate companies across SEA and India, have done the unglamorous work of showing up round after round. Between them, they represent what conviction actually looks like in a space that doesn’t reward impatience.

Everyone else mostly came once.

What the future generation inherits

I think about this a lot. Not in a guilt-ridden way. More practical.

The cities I’ve lived in across this region are places people love. Street food at midnight. Communities that take care of each other. Chaos that somehow works. There is a version of 2040 where all of that is still here, adapted, resilient, figuring it out.

And there is another version.

Also Read: Investing in impact: High-growth tech for climate and community

The IPCC estimates that without significant intervention, Southeast Asia faces GDP losses of up to 11 per cent by 2100 due to climate impacts. The Asian Development Bank puts the region’s climate adaptation financing gap at over US$100 billion annually. Indonesia’s JETP commitment alone sits at US$21.6 billion. Vietnam’s at US$15.5 billion. The money being talked about is enormous.

The money actually reaching climate ventures at the early stage is not.

The capital deployed in the next five years will have more influence over which version of 2040 shows up than most people in the venture ecosystem currently acknowledge. That’s not an activist talking. That’s just what the data says when you read it without the AI hype in the background.

The ask isn’t to stop building AI

It’s to hold both.

The founders building climate ventures in SEA right now don’t need sympathy. They need capital that stays. They need fund managers who treat climate the same way they treat AI – as a structural bet on where the world is going, not a checkbox on an LP deck.

900 backers have put money into climate tech in SEA, according to recent data. You can count the ones who kept showing up on one hand.

The next generation doesn’t get to choose the cities they inherit. But the people reading this do get to choose where they put their attention and their capital right now.

I’m watching. Still at the window. But watching closely.

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The post Funded: AI is having its moment, climate is having a crisis. SEA can’t afford to confuse the two appeared first on e27.