Southeast Asia is home to over 1,700 startups with at least one female co-founder. As many as 657 women-led startups have received investments so far, of which 14.3 per cent have progressed to the Series A stage and 1.8 per cent to Series C or beyond.
Singapore dominates the female-led startup landscape in this part of the world, with US$3 billion in funding raised across 380 rounds to date. Jakarta secured US$935.9 million through 106 rounds, while Cyberjaya’s female-founded ventures received US$86.3 million across ten rounds.
In 2023, female-led startups in Southeast Asia raised US$480.8 million in 2023. Despite a temporary downturn in funding observed last year, the overall trend shows a noteworthy achievement, with women-led startups capturing 7 per cent of the total tech funding in SEA.
Startup data research platform Tracxn has compiled the list of the ten highest-funded female-led startups in the region. Below are the profiles of these startups and the amount raised so far.
Advance Intelligence Group
Total investment raised: US$700 million
Female co-founder: Tongtong Li (Chief HR Officer)
Founded in 2016, Singapore-headquartered Advance Intelligence Group provides an ecosystem of AI-powered, credit-enabled financial products and services that include buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) platform Atome; Indonesian lending platform Kredit Pintar; SaaS provider of enterprise digital identity, compliance and risk management solutions ADVANCE.AI; and omnichannel e-commerce merchant services platform Ginee.
The company claims to be serving over 500 enterprise clients, 235,000 merchants and 40 million individual consumers. Since its inception, it has disbursed over US$4 billion in loans.
Xendit
Total investment raised: US$538 million
Female co-founder: Tessa Wijaya (COO)
Xendit is a payments infrastructure unicorn in Indonesia. The firm enables businesses to accept payments, disburse payroll, and run marketplaces on an easy integration platform. Businesses can accept payments from direct debit, virtual accounts, credit and debit cards, eWallets, retail outlets, and online instalments.
Xendit serves more than 6,000 customers, including Samsung Indonesia, GrabPay, Ninja Van Philippines, Qoala, Unicef Indonesia, Cashalo and Shopback.
Patsnap
Total investment raised: US$351.6 million
Female co-founder: Guan Dian (CMO)
Patnnap provides R&D intelligence and IP intelligence platforms for brands and enterprises. It began in 2007 as a patents analytics startup in Singapore and later set up a base in China through the NUS Suzhou Research Institute (NUSRI) and BLOCK71 by NUS Enterprise (the entrepreneurial arm of NUS).
Its flagship R&D Intelligence and IP Intelligence platforms use machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and other artificial intelligence technology.
Also Read: Funding into SEA’s female-led startups falls 42% to US$480.8M in 2023: Tracxn
Innovation teams at companies, brands, universities and research institutions use these platforms to get access to market, technology and competitive intelligence as well as patent insights needed to take their products from ideation to commercialisation.
ShopBack
Total investment raised: US$305 million
Female co-founder: Shanru Lai
ShopBack, founded in 2014, runs a shopping and rewards platform across Asia Pacific. It offers shopping deals, rewards and payment methods at the users’ fingertips. The group claims it serves over 35 million shoppers across ten markets and powers over US$3.5 billion in annual sales for over 10,000 online and in-store merchant partners.
In 2022, it launched ShopBack Pay and PayLater.
Investree
Total funding raised: US$254 million
Female co-founder: Amalia Safitri (Chief Risk Officer)
Investree is a fintech lending platform. Founded in 2015 in Jakarta, it provides digital financial solutions to largely underbanked MSMEs that previously faced difficulties securing loans without collateral from traditional financial institutions. It provides four products: invoice financing, working capital term loan, buyer financing, and microproductive loan for ultra-micro entrepreneurs.
As of October 2023, Investree Indonesia claims to have recorded a total loan disbursement of US$916.30 million in productive loans.
Sociolla
Total funding raised: US$220 million
Female co-founder: Chrisanti Indiana (CMO)
Started in 2015, Social Bella is an integrated beauty-tech company. It focuses on developing “a scalable and sustainable” online and offline ecosystem for beauty and personal care.
Over the past few years, Social Bella has evolved from being e-commerce to a beauty ecosystem with three business units — commerce (Sociolla), media (SO.CO and Beauty Journal), and Brand Development (offers end-to-end distributor service for beauty and personal care brands).
YouTrip
Total funding raised: US$106 million
Female co-founder: Caecilia Chu (CEO)
YouTrip is a Singapore-based fintech company providing multicurrency wallets. Licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, YouTrip offers services such as payments, foreign exchange, remittances and cards. Its multi-currency mobile wallet with a prepaid Mastercard lets users shop online and offline worldwide with zero FX fees. Users can use the wallet in over 150 countries and withdraw cash from overseas ATMs (only available for Singapore app users).
Astro
Total funding raised: US$92 million
Female co-founders: Jessica Stephanie Jap, Marcella Moniaga, and Sherlyn G: co-founders
Started in 2021, Astro is an on-demand quick e-commerce platform for groceries and other daily essentials in Indonesia. It delivers groceries and essentials such as snacks, drinks, milk and bread to customers within 15 minutes of placing the order. The firm offers 1,500-plus SKUs at competitive prices available 24×7 on its app.
Since the launch, Astro has established over 15 hubs across Jakarta and aims to expand this network to cater to millions of Indonesians.
Aerodyne Group
Total funding raised: US$86 million
Female co-founder: Azita Azizan
Established in 2014, Aerodyne is a DT3 (drone-tech, data-tech and digital transformation) company. It uses AI as an enabler for large-scale data operations, analytics and process optimisation. Its flagship precision agriculture solution is powered by in-house developed AI capabilities, with more than 300,000 secured effective hectarages for major industry players in Malaysia.
Also Read: Buy from her: Elevating women’s entrepreneurship
The group employs over 1,000 drone professionals in the UAS (unmanned aerial vehicle) services sector. It claims to have managed more than 560,000 infrastructure assets with 458,058 flight operations and surveyed over 380,000 km of power infrastructure across 35 countries.
Pinhome
Total funding raised: US$76 million
Female co-founder: Dayu Dara Permata
Pinhome is a property transaction platform in Indonesia. Its O2O property brokerage platform tackles the fragmented real estate market in the archipelago. The company works with banks, property developers, and other service providers. It leverages its algorithm and wealth of property data to enable seamless discovery, transactions, and post-transaction services for property buyers and sellers in the country.
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