SEA funding roundup: VN’s Dat Bike raises US$5.3M, SG’s Finbots.AI nets US$3M

Jungle Ventures leads e-bike startup Dat Bike Series A

Dat Bike, a Vietnamese e-motorbike startup, has announced a US$5.3 million Series A funding led by Jungle Ventures with participation from existing investor Wavemaker Partners.

This brings the total fundraise by Dat Bike since inception to US$10 million.

Dat Bike intends to use the new money to invest in technology, scale production, expand to metro and tier-I cities across north, central and south Vietnam, and hire top talent.

Founded in 2019 by Son Nguyen, Dat Bike aims to drive the mass adoption of green transportation in Vietnam, and, in the near future in Southeast Asia. It wants to convert the 250 million gasoline motorbikes to electric.

Also Read: Dat Bike bags US$2.6M pre-Series A to bring more electric motorbikes to Vietnam

Dat Bike claims it has a competitive advantage in its performance against gasoline bikes. Its first line product Weaver (2019) offered 3x the performance (5kW versus 1.5kW) and 2x the range (100 km versus 50 km) of most e-motorbikes at the same price point.

In November 2021, Dat Bike launched its second model Weaver 200 (2021), which is double the range (200 km) and more powerful (6kW) compared to the Weaver. Further, charging time has been reduced to 1 hour for a 100 km charge and 2.5 hours for a full 200 km charge, compared to 6-8 hours for other electric bikes.

Since the launch of Weaver 200 (November 2021), the company says it has seen strong customer response, with revenue increasing 10x. The company has also opened a new store in Hanoi in April 2022 and will open one more in Danang soon, to meet the growing demand.

Accel Partners injects US$3M Series A into Finbots.ai

Singapore-based Finbots.AI, a company bringing innovation to banks and financial institutions, has raised a Series A funding of US$3 million from Accel Partners.

With this capital, Finbots.AI will look towards accelerating product enhancement, marketing and sales, and customer support. The firm is also looking to recruit senior talent and expand its team across its offices with the fresh funds raised.

Also Read: Ethics and AI: Is the technology only as good as the human behind it?

Finbots.AI was founded in 2017 by Sanjay Uppal (CEO) and Shripad Keni (CTO). Since its inception, the firm identified an opportunity to use AI-powered solutions to aid banks and financial institutions to overcome industry challenges. ZScore is a full-scale AI-driven credit scorecard system for lending institutions that spans the entire credit lifecycle. Equipped with an intuitive user interface and robust scorecard development capabilities, ZScore rapidly develops higher accuracy credit scorecards by using advanced Machine Learning (ML) algorithms that utilise historical traditional and alternate data to automatically build, validate, and deploy real-time, high-performing risk models.

With ZScore, financial institutions have better visibility over potential borrowers’ credit capacity which consequently and indirectly, lead to higher financial inclusion. The World Bank Group considers financial inclusion a key enabler to reduce extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity. According to the latest Global Findex database, 1.7 billion adults worldwide are unbanked, meaning they do not participate in any basic financial products or services.

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