“If you could, would you make the world a better place?”

When US startup Eat Just developed the first plant-based egg alternatives, it was nearly ten years ago. Until now, the company hasn’t achieved its profitability milestone. But last December, the first lab-grown chicken produced by Eat Just, which is now a unicorn valued at US$1.2 billion, has been given the green light to be sold in Singapore, following its plan for the last capital raising before an initial public offering.

“Companies like ours can help meet the increased demand for animal protein as our population climbs to 9.7 billion by 2050,” Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick said when the company earned the world-first regulatory approval of slaughter-free meat in Singapore.

Apart from the initial success of Eat Just this year, the shares of Beyond Meat Inc., a Los Angeles-based producer of plant-based meat substitutes founded in 2009, have also more than doubled.

Those are definitely not quick achievements, explaining how patient investors should be when investing in a typical “impact startup” – company that satisfies environmental, social, or governance (ESG) targets while pursuing a scalable financial return.

Also Read: Impact-tech investor ADB Ventures in talks to raise US$100M debt fund

“If you’re looking for an impact investor, it’s someone who understands either the domain [the industry] or understands the need for ‘patient capital’,” said Pratap Raju, founding partner of the Climate Collective Network based in India.

Keith Ippel, co-founder and CEO of Spring Activator, an impact accelerator located in Canada, listed cleantech, foodtech/agritech, medtech, edutech, and the industrial manufacturing industry in a circular economy as the best high-return impact investing domains.

“That’s the future. That’s where all the money is going to be made,” he said.

In Climate tech or Cleantech, venture capital firms’ investment has increased from US$418 million per annum in 2013 to US$16.3 billion in 2019, which is three times higher than the growth rate of investment into Artificial Intelligence over the same period, according to a new study conducted by PwC.

In the last few years, we have also seen a surge in impact innovations among big corporations, including Tesla, Nest, Amazon. Especially, global fashion brands such as H&M, Ralph Lauren, Lululemon Athletica are highly involved in sustainability startup financing. Those capitals serve as considerable funding for later-stage impact startups.

BlackRock, one of the world’s largest asset management firms, noted in its recent report that sustainable investing would be no longer a niche area but turning mainstream without compromising financial goals.

Also Read: A better way to make impact: Why we decided to start a social impact network

International investors are expecting that this millionaire opportunity would prevalently occur within developing countries.

“People in developing countries are very committed to improving their standard of living,” said Ippel, while underlining that these countries account for three-quarters of the world’s population. “They are more committed to growth than entrepreneurs in North America or Europe.”

As IDG Ventures, one of the first movers in the gaming ecosystem in Vietnam 15 years ago, reaped a bonanza with its early-stage investment in gaming unicorn VNG, foreign investors could apply it to the nascent impact startup ecosystems in developing countries.

“This is the right time for investors to explore this risk-return trade-off because it [impact startup ecosystem] will change in five to ten years,” stated Raju.

Although Raju expressed his concerns over the lack of connection with broader funding sources for this field in the region, several recent events have shown positive signs.

In December 2020, UOB Venture Management, a wholly-owned subsidiary of United Overseas Bank Limited (UOB), announced that it had completed the first closing of its Asia impact fund at more than US$60 million.

One month earlier, APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC) Indonesia has teamed up with venture capital firm Mandiri Capital to establish a fund to invest in startups with social impacts.

Currently, impact startups in these countries have increasingly contributed to addressing the world’s most pressing challenges, such as pollution, climate change, poverty, gender inequality, and health shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s not one is better than the other. It’s finding the right capital that matches that mission,” Raju said.

An Do, principal at Patamar Capital, a venture capital firm (VC) with over ten years of experience investing in Asia’s mass market, said at Techfest Vietnam 2020 that the VC firm assesses three sustainability aspects when investing in an impact startup, which are measurable impact, scalable impact, and long-term impact.

Also Read: ‘Global demand for plant-based meat products will be driven mostly by flexitarians: Next Gen COO Andre Menezes

“The most successful ones seem to be those that can combine both technologies and social impacts, which make them much more ready for growth and attract more investment opportunities,” added Lan Phan, Head of Exploration at UNDP Accelerator Lab.

This combination could be in line with the advancements of breakthrough technologies listed by the World Economic Forum, including AI, CRISPR gene editing, quantum computing, 5G networking, Blockchain, Robotics, Virtual Reality, and Ubiquitous storage.

Alán Aspuru-Guzik, professor of chemistry and computer science at the University of Toronto and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Vector Institute, said that the connections between these revolutionary technologies and the world’s issues would form “a matrix” of future impact solutions.

“This is where I think your new deep tech startup will lie,” he added.

“The future return opportunity is far higher in impact than in regular investments,” Ippel stressed. “Who wouldn’t want to make the world a better place for themselves and for their kids?”

If any investor said yes and want those opportunities, Ippel said that we could congratulate him or her. “You are already an impact investor!”

“Whatever your return target is, that can be achieved while making the world a better place.”

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. This season we are seeking op-eds, analysis and articles on food tech and sustainability. Share your opinion and earn a byline by submitting a post.

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Social Bella, an Indonesian beauty-tech company, has raised approximately US$56 million (IDR 818 billion) in a round led by L Catterton.

This round also marks the US-based PE firm’s maiden investment in Indonesia.

Indies Capital, along with existing investors East Ventures and Jungle Ventures, also participated.

Social Bella intends to use the newly raised capital for product innovation and continued expansion across Southeast Asia.

Launched in 2015, Social Bella has evolved from being a beauty e-commerce brand to a complete ecosystem that seeks to unlock the archipelago’s growing beauty and personal care market.

The startup claims to have created several business units and currently owns six physical stores across Indonesia. One of its major goals is to empower consumers to use local brands.

Also Read: Social Bella expands its beauty e-commerce biz into Vietnam on the back of its recent US$58M funding

Last year, it expanded its B2C business Sociolla to Vietnam. As of now, it has expanded to 21 omnichannel stores in nine cities in Indonesia and one in Vietnam.

“Social Bella has uniquely addressed the Indonesian consumers’ growing needs for beauty and personal care products by pioneering an innovative omnichannel delivery format in Indonesia,” said Pandu Sjahrir, Managing Partner at Indies Capital.

“Over the past year during the pandemic, we have seen the company grow tremendously. The team was able to drive the company with high velocity during heavy rain. Social Bella has the appealing proposition, in fact, that it owns a content, community, commerce and retail for a beauty-tech company,” added Willson Cuaca, co-founder of East Ventures.

“Last year was a challenging year for many due to the pandemic. But despite various adversities, we are extremely proud of our team for striving for the best omnichannel services to our customers. The new partnerships and investment will boost our capability to continue delivering the best-in-class technology innovations and great products for our customers in Indonesia, Vietnam, and beyond,” shared Christopher Madiam, co-founder of Social Bella.

Social Bella is also backed by many renowned investors, including Singapore-headquartered Temasek and Pavilion Capital.

The company is also part of e27’s special Luminaries list and is one of the few companies that managed to expand their business amidst the pandemic.

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My philosophy when it comes to building up engineering teams in Southeast Asia can be summed up in two words: intentionality and pragmatism. Five years ago when I first began scaling up the engineering team in this region, I had only the vaguest ideas of the frequently irreversible decisions that lay ahead of me.

Some of the painful results from these misguided decisions include my Indonesia engineering team quitting one after the other due to disengagement, simmering tensions and frustrations due to inter-country teams’ language barriers and persistent underperformance in remote teams left to fester over quarters.

I had some abstract ideals about the perfect team I wanted to build. But at the end of the day, I am at a company with a budget, hiring against a tight timeline in a constrained talent market with a thin history.

There are realities to contend with, many of which are unique to the fragmented and multi-cultural context that is Southeast Asia. If I could hop on a Zoom call with that eager hiring manager from five years ago, here’s where I would focus his precious and soon-to-be-frayed attention.

Reid Hoffman famously quipped that building a startup is akin to assembling an airplane in mid-flight. While flying by the seat of your pants is frequently the optimal strategy for finding product-market fit, designing and building a high-performing engineering organisation takes a great deal more intentionality.

Here are a couple of things I learned in building an engineering team in Southeast Asia.

Also Read: Glints snags US$22.5M Series C to expand full-stack career platform

Work out the nature and scope of engineering

Critically, the time to scale the team is after you have found product-market fit, which is also the time to plan out a longer-term product roadmap. Armed with this product roadmap, walk up the dependency graph to chart out the corresponding engineering roadmap, from which you can work backwards to figure out the engineering bandwidth and skill set required. This is necessarily a blunt operation, but the broad strokes alone will give you much-needed clarity downstream in the hiring.

A word of advice here is to be clear-eyed about the actual engineering bandwidth and skill set needed. While many startups pride themselves on proprietary, cutting-edge technology, don’t underestimate the long shadow of relatively ho-hum infrastructural and product engineering that trails behind these core asset developments. Plan for the manpower accordingly.

Split teams by communication lines

If you plan to scale the team past eight people, you will almost certainly need to split them up into sub-teams. The best way to do this is to group members with the most frequent and complex communications into the same teams. Frequently, you will find the most natural seams between teams to be product scopes.

At this point, you also have to decide if you are going for a fully remote or a multiple-hub hiring strategy. Both have its pros and cons, the important thing is you decide, and provision supporting processes and tools. If it is a hub strategy, then ideally each team is colocated for more spontaneous and high-bandwidth communications. If it is remote, then think through language requirements and market context.

Map out the regional talent market

Though relatively young as a whole, the Southeast Asia engineering talent market differs in skillset concentration, culture and size. It is crucial that you get a sense of both the top-down view and anecdotal, on-the-ground reviews of the different talent market.

When I was sussing out both the Vietnam and Indonesia engineering pool, it was incredibly eye-opening to speak to other engineering leaders who have built substantial teams over a multi-year period over there.

It gave me a pulse of the difficulty of hiring for different skill sets, and what candidates respond to. Quantitatively, I would also research on LinkedIn where the bigger companies are building their engineering hubs, including the tech stack, functional roles and seniority levels of each hub. The output of this research and the organisational design is that I can map out the most suitable region to build out each team.

Also Read: Glints snags US$22.5M Series C to expand ‘full-stack’ career platform

Start by hiring the leader

If you realise that you can hire a full engineering team in just 1 country, you are in luck. In fact, there will be so much less complex that you should try to optimise for this arrangement if possible.

Practically, due to talent scarcity, required market context or simply cost, most engineering leaders will have to hire across at least 2 markets.

If that is your case, learn from the two painful lessons that I picked up the hard way. First, always hire from the top down, which means starting with the engineering leader.

There is frequently a huge pressure to hire individual contributors who can immediately add to product development bandwidth. Resist that temptation. I made that mistake by hiring a small team of engineers in Indonesia without a manager. In between managing the Singapore team and hiring in Indonesia, I was stretched too thin to properly manage that Indonesia team, which is crucial in the early stages of team formation.

Almost immediately, problems cropped up. The team was frequently unsure of the full product context, resulting in delays. They were also apprehensive about how to adapt to the backdrop of Singaporean workplace culture in the bigger team.

Eventually, they became increasingly disconnected from the company they were so excited to join in the first place, disillusioned that they were unable to make many meaningful contributions.

Investing the necessary time to hire the right engineering leader would have gone a long way to avoiding that outcome. Not only would they share the immense workload of bootstrapping a team, they would also help you solidify the desired cultural foundation through further hiring and personal influence.

Secondly, when building out a new engineering hub, that should be your sole focus, which almost always means you would need to be stationed there physically (after the pandemic, of course). It is already a tough sell for a candidate to join a company they have never heard of, much less a foreign one where they hadn’t even shaken your hands in person. Make that sell easier by sharing your plans for the team while looking them in the eye.

Also Read: The 4 principles of hiring an omnipotent founding team for your startup

Much as Zoom and Google Meet are great products, nothing beats face-to-face rapport when it comes to trust-building. The same goes for onboarding the first few hires. Spending a prolonged amount of time in person with your critical first hires will set the cultural tone for a long time to come.

Eventually, of course, once you are confident of the hiring bar and management capabilities of your first engineering lead, you can increasingly peel yourself off for other priorities.

Even with the best-laid plans and the benefit of hindsight, building up an engineering team, especially as a startup in Southeast Asia, will never be easy. There are times when it feels like a grind and other times when it seems like there are no good options. At the end of the day, what you need is a clear-eyed appreciation of the realities on the ground, and the very real trade-offs you have to make.

My only hope is that you make these trade-offs consciously, and not bumble through them as I did five years ago.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. This season we are seeking op-eds, analysis and articles on food tech and sustainability. Share your opinion and earn a byline by submitting a post.

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Few¢ents, a Singaporean fintech-for-media startup, announced today that it has raised US$1.6 million in a seed funding round.

Backers of the round include M Venture Partners, Hustle Fund, and angel investors including Koh Boon Hwee (ex-chairman of DBS Bank), Kenneth Bishop (ex-Managing Director, Southeast Asia, Facebook), Jeremy Butteriss (Partnerships, Stripe), Shiv
Choudhury (Partner, the Boston Consulting Group), Francesco Alberti (former APAC Regional Sales Director, Bloomberg Media Distribution), Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng (President, Summit Media), Prantik Mazumdar (Managing Director, Dentsu), Saurabh Mittal (founder, Mission Holdings) and Nitesh Kripalani (Country Head, Amazon Video India).

The company said that it will use the fresh funds for product enhancement and global expansion.

Launched last year, Few¢ents helps digital publishers monetise premium content such as articles, video, and podcasts, through a pay-per-content service that sits on the publishers’ sites. It accepts 50 currencies from around the world, allowing publishers to monetise their global audience reach.

Also Read: The news wars: Will tech giants soon be coughing up big bucks for media content?

Rich data insights also help publishers optimise price and invest in stories that resonate most with their audience.

As of now, Few¢ents is working with a variety of publishers and media platforms across Asia and Europe, including India’s Sakal and Dainik Jagran, Indonesia’s tech news platform DailySocial, and digital publishing solutions provider Quintype.

The company has also integrated with the global video streaming solution Dailymotion and entered a business development partnership with media consultancy Jnomics Media to expand into European markets.

“Few¢ents provides incremental revenue to publishers. Our pay-per-content solution gives them a complementary monetization avenue, in addition to advertisements and subscriptions. Ultimately, this helps publishers refocus efforts on producing high-quality content, move away from a culture of just maximising page views, and supporting the media and creator industry at large,” shared Dushyant Khare, co-founder of Few¢ents.

“Few¢ents offers an exciting promise of transforming revenue generation for the digital media industry globally. It provides users the ability to micro-pay for valuable content while giving publishers a much-needed incremental revenue stream. All this is backed by strong technology combining fintech and mediatech with machine learning-based analytics,” said Joachim Ackermann, Director at M Venture Partners.

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One of the silver linings that has emerged from the pandemic is that it has thrown into focus the fashion industry’s environmental impact as brands and consumers have been forced to pause and reflect. Retailers cancelling millions of dollars of orders from factories and suppliers highlighted again how problematic the fast fashion industry had become.

Consumers that were once driven by an insatiable appetite for the latest trend, realised they did not need as many clothes and became more conscious of their purchasing decisions. This uncertain time has brought slow fashion back to the forefront and has sparked a new debate around Fast vs. Slow. It is time we all took a step back to really understand what these two terms mean and how we as consumers decide to respond to them. 

Fast fashion is the frenemy we find hard to shake. Seemingly innocent, persuasively it wins us over again and again with instant perks often too hard to refuse. Affordability and accessibility are at the core of the fast fashion industry, making its appeal to the masses an almost impossible case to argue against in this consumer-charged environment.

However, the issues that come with fast fashion are almost invisible but could fundamentally change the way we value an item of clothing when we hit the shops. 

Popular high street brands can now produce weekly collections which are vast when compared to the four seasonal collections of traditional fashion houses. The amount manufactured at an incredibly fast pace is only possible with some fairly aggressive factors at play which include unethical methods and techniques for producing materials, utilising workers far beyond the standard and ultimately safety, quality and efficiency of the garment.

The Sustainable Apparel Coalition estimates that designers control upwards of 80 per cent of a product’s environmental impact, and that it lies in the first steps of development. It is tough to work backwards when you are working towards a more sustainable product.

Also Read: Pixibo raises US$1.4M to help fashion e-tailers reduce product return rates

Instead, it has to be stitched into the garment from the very beginning- highlighting the enormous challenge ahead for the big fashion companies to make the necessary changes in their already established supply chains.

It seems most people buy in large amounts because of an attractive price point and quicker accessibility to emerging trends. Unfortunately, these items are often used only a handful of times, and in children’s wear, the turnover of clothing can be even higher. A growing child’s wardrobe is sizeable with a constant need to renew and restock for the next growth spurt.

Sadly, after a short time- whether children or adults sizing- many of these poorly made items are quickly discarded. We tend to place less value and care on cheaper imitations, as we rarely plan to preserve them due to a lack of quality making them unlikely to hold up beyond their intended wearability.

Slow fashion essentially means to slow down the process of design and production with awareness and responsibility leading to a more sustainable outcome. Sustainability is one of the most significant talking points of recent years. It’s a term that encompasses many things: environmental impacts, social justice, supporting artisanal crafts, businesses supporting developing economies and more. It is broad in definition but can be relevant to so many different industries.

For example, The Slow Food Movement, founded in 1986, Italy – an interesting parallel example of the link between pleasure and product, incorporating awareness and responsibility (food in this case). The movement defended the biodiversity in our food supply by challenging a standardisation of taste.

Supporting the need for consumer transparency and protecting cultural identities tied to food to try to preserve its unique qualities because no one wanted standardised food and no one wants standardised fashion. Faster and more is not always better.

Also read: 6 fashion startups that actually deliver value

Slow fashion comes under the umbrella of sustainability which has a lot of value in our lives today. With the media showing us more and more the effects we are having on the planet, we have the opportunity to make positive change.

Slow fashion requires that design, development and production meet today’s needs by improving manufacturing and social impact without sacrificing fashion and style (pleasure and product with awareness and responsibility).

It doesn’t have to mean because a brand is sustainable that it won’t be fashionable. In fact, sustainability in terms of slow fashion means great design: creativity, quality, longevity, craftsmanship and fair wages, all adding to a lower carbon footprint without compromise- which is something all of us can get behind.

Shopping thoughtfully, investing in items that will outlast our children’s wear-and-tear can not only be financially beneficial but makes for a more stylish wardrobe for your little one too, bonus!

The pieces we end up keeping in our children’s wardrobes’, that we mend or have our kids wear on repeat until we finally gift them to a friend (or hand them down), are the pieces that we value the most, and for the most part are unique investment pieces made to endure a few children. 

The fashion resale market is exploding. According to the Thredup 2020 Resale Report, the preloved market is expected to grow five times over the next five years while traditional retail is set to shrink. Secondhand has finally come to the forefront as a chosen option amongst conscientious consumers looking to keep items in circulation.

We can have an impact on the industry by voting with our purchase and as global consumers, we would be more inspired and incentivised to do so armed with the facts. 

Let’s hope this conscious awakening continues to grow throughout the whole fashion industry creating a greener, more sustainable future. Brands are finally accepting accountability for their actions and have started the process of transformation and with consumers having more say in what they consume and how it is made, this could be the key to long-lasting change.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. This season we are seeking op-eds, analysis and articles on food tech and sustainability. Share your opinion and earn a byline by submitting a post.

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community or like the e27 Facebook page

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Last week, we featured our most active investors to recognise their use and responses on Connect Requests from Startups. Here’s a fresh new batch of e27 Connect Active Investors to connect with today:

Altara Ventures 
Investment: USD 1M – USD 5M, Pre-Series A / Bridge, Series A, Series B

Straight from Altara Ventures: Altara Ventures is a technology venture capital firm headquartered in Singapore and investing across Southeast Asia.

Brinc
Investment: USD 0 – USD 100K, Angel / Pre Seed, Seed, Pre-Series A / Bridge, Series A

Straight from Brinc: Brinc is a venture capital and accelerator firm that empowers game-changers to help solve some of the world’s biggest challenges. More game-changers will make a positive impact on the world if they are given the right backing. And that’s what we’re here for.

Kakao Ventures
Investment: Not specified, Seed, Pre-Series A / Bridge, Series A, Series B

Straight from Kakao Ventures: Kakao Ventures wants to become a co-pilot, a strong partner for startups, and help advance the future required by the world. It is the intrinsic organizational vision and philosophy that we need to put into practice more than anyone else in aggressively moving toward a better future. 

Kinesys Group 
Investment: Not specified, Angel / Pre Seed, Seed, Pre-Series A / Bridge, Series A

Straight from Kinesys Group: Kinesys Group is a Jakarta-based investment group focused on Asia. We provide funding and strategic support to early-stage tech startups with a mission to advance human intelligence. We partner with family offices and institutions around the world.

Genesia Ventures
Investment: USD 100K – USD 1M, Angel / Pre Seed, Seed, Series A

Straight from Genesia Ventures: Genesia Ventures is a venture capital firm dedicated to seed and early stage investments in innovative digital startups in Asia. We engage with all stakeholders in creating new industries, and act as a hub, bringing talent, information, and technology to all our partners to create a platform that drives the next generation of sustainable industry.

The Connect feature is exclusively available for Pro members. If you want to start connecting with these investors, get a Pro trial account now!

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Una Brands, a Singapore-based startup providing a “fast and fair way” for e-commerce business owners (vendors) to sell their companies, has raised US$40 million in a seed round of equity and debt financing.

Investors include 500 Startups, Kingsway Capital, 468 Capital, Presight Capital and Global Founders Capital.

Maximilian Bittner, the CEO of Vestiaire Collective, and Khailee Ng, Managing Partner at 500 Startups, also participated in the round.

With the fresh funding, Una intends to buy and scale e-commerce brands based in the Asia Pacific region. It will focus on acquiring brands with strong independent branding that have annual revenue between US$300,000 and US$20 million.

Una Brands was founded in 2020 by Kiren Tanna, the former CEO of Rocket Internet Asia and founder of foodpanda and ZEN Rooms. His co-founders are Adrian Johnston, Kushal Patel, Tobias Heusch and Srinivasan Shridharan.

Also Read: Just Buy Live raises US$20M to connect Indian retailers with brands online

Una Brands buys businesses with a long-term competitive advantage and strong brands and grows them in new markets and on new platforms. It is platform-agnostic and acquires businesses across leading e-commerce platforms, including Amazon, Lazada, Shopee and Shopify.

The company claims it is capable completing the end-to-end transaction process in under five weeks and offers flexible structures to take into account the personal objectives of the seller.

Tanna sees enormous potential for growth in the region. “We estimate that there are more than 10 million third-party sellers on regional platforms across APAC. The COVID-19 lockdown created a huge surge in e-commerce demand, with a peak demand increase of over 100 per cent in many cases. The lockdown encouraged many people to try shopping online for the first time and has created a behavioural shift in consumer habits.”

He added that Una Brands can help progress companies to the next level: “When we speak to sellers, they often say to us that the thing they really enjoy is growing a business from the ground up, creating a brand, and growing a following. When a business gets beyond a certain size, the business owners find that they do not have the time to do what they love as they get bogged down in the operational process. They also often do not have the capital or expertise to take the brand to where they want to go. By partnering with our company, brands can turbocharge their growth into new markets and channels.”

Una has already closed acquisition deals with several businesses in the region.

“Ultimately, with this new round of investment, we want to scale our business very rapidly in the region. We aim to become the biggest online retailer in APAC,” concluded Tanna.

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POPS Worldwide, a Vietnamese digital entertainment company, said today it is planning to raise US$50 million in Series D by the end of 2021.

The funds to be raised will be used for expansion across Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, in addition to deepening its footprint in Indonesia.

Launched in 2007, POPS helps global brands localise their content for Southeast Asian viewers.

For instance, the company brings in premium content from popular anime series like Naruto, Pokemon and Doraemon to children aged nine to 12 years old, generation Z and millennials.

Its services include creating subtitles and dubbing in local languages, helping brands and creators connect and engage with their audiences effectively and in a more authentic manner.

Beyond that, it also offers a variety of content verticals — such as POPS Music, POPS Kids, POPS Comic and POPS e-sports — targeting various niche audiences.

Since its inception, POPS has established a foothold in key markets like Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia, thus becoming one of the largest players in the region’s digital entertainment industry.

Also Read: Digital entertainment startup POPS Worldwide snags US$30M in funding, launching its free premium content apps

The company’s clientele includes global brands like Warner Media, NBCUniversal, Discovery, TV Asahi, The Pokemon Company, and Toei Animation.

POPS Worldwide will also be opening an office in Japan focusing on partnerships and acquisitions, looking beyond Southeast Asia and towards Asia for more business opportunities.

Esther Nguyen, founder of POPS Worldwide, shared, “The company was born out of my initial vision to build a Spotify for Vietnam. But now, it has grown bigger than what Spotify signifies, it is now Southeast Asia’s top choice for all things digital — including music, entertainment, edutainment, comics, and animes.”

“As a digital-first entertainment company, we are always on the lookout for ways to innovate and reinvent ourselves as the digital world is ever-changing. Riding on our successful momentum in Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia, we hope to continue to provide scalability to global brands and creators, giving them unparalleled access to a diverse audience and a fast-growing digital ecosystem in Southeast Asia,” she added.

So far, the company has raised US$37 million in funding, including a US$30 million Series C fundraise led by Eastbridge Partners and Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund.

As the pandemic-induced lockdowns still continue in many parts of the world, consumption and the need for digital content for entertainment has increased significantly.

According to the report titled ‘COVID-19: A Game Changer For Media And Purchasing’, in-home media — particularly those providing entertainment — have seen the largest increases in consumption globally.

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Meet Jason Todd, who has started multiple multi-million dollar companies and coached dozens of entrepreneurs.

Today, we talk about his journey and why you should love your own:

• How his family dealt with arguments
• How he learned to understand other people
• How he learned to sell
• How he started his first company
• The most important lesson he’s learned
• The hardest lesson he’s learned
• And more!

If you don’t see the player above, click on the link below to listen directly!

Acast

Apple

Spotify

Stitcher

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This article was first published on We Live To Build.

Image Credit: Michal Czyz on Unsplash

 

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