Philippine-based cloud kitchen startup CloudEats announced that it has raised a US$5 million ‘oversubscribed’ Series A funding round led by Vulpes Investment Management of Singapore and Gobi Partners, particularly the Gobi-Core PH Fund.
Alibaba-backed BAce Capital, Intera Investments Limited, GMA Ventures, and angel investors also participated in this funding round.
Following the funding round, BAce Capital Founding Partner Benny Chen is set to join CloudEats’ board of directors.
The company has also established an outstanding international Advisory Board composed of the current and former CEO of Monde Nissin, McDonald’s and Starbucks in Europe.
It plans to use the new funding to support its regional expansion plan; CloudEats plans to launch in two new Southeast Asian (SEA) markets within the next 12 months.
“We are very excited to launch operations in Vietnam this November, and continue our aggressive expansion in the Philippines,” says CloudEats Co-Founder Iacopo Rovere.
The company also aims to develop new F&B brands to follow its own Burger Beast.
In the past year, cloud kitchen has been one of the most popular sectors in SEA, as the COVID-19 pandemic changes the behaviour of F&B customers in the region to become more reliant on food delivery services.
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Founder of Youadme, Zhi Ying Chai (centre) with her Cambodian colleagues
My journey in tech only began after graduating from Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design and Media. Fresh-faced and ambitious, I joined an agency to provide creative services to help businesses market and drive user engagement.
Despite running on the creative route, the company operated on the traditional model that many businesses were familiar with.
Besides, I also quickly observed that most of these businesses were not understanding the changing behaviours of consumers who are always well-connected online, and I wanted to help close this gap.
From arts to tech: A change in medium
While there were pragmatic reasons behind my decision to go into the tech scene, I quickly realised that tech was also an excellent platform for showcasing my creativity. I craved creation and engaging with my imagination to tell stories.
Tech was able to help me quickly find my audience and allowed me to resonate with them. A change in medium only affects how one’s skills are applied, and no matter the industry, there is an opportunity for creativity to be expressed.
In today’s world, expressing our creativity in varying magnitudes is key to improving our lives, and there is a lack of platforms for which creativity can be demonstrated and shared.
Trained in the arts and with the opportunities given to me in the technology scene, I was set on helping others tell their stories and bring people closer together with their communities.
Accessibility was important to me, as I felt that nobody should experience the kind of hurdles and bad experiences I did to achieve and express what they wanted. My team was aligned with me on this front, and we set out to create a platform to make this happen.
From Singapore to Cambodia: A new journey of learning
After some deliberation, the team onboard decided to venture out from Singapore into the region. We set our sights towards Cambodia, a market in which we have some experience with some clients.
Then, we had noticed that more Cambodians were turning to entrepreneurship, with many of them quick to jump onto the digitalisation trend, progressing perhaps even faster than Singapore. The youth were well-connected to different social media platforms and were putting out creative marketing ideas to promote their business.
We saw as an opportunity that different players in the market were openly willing to experiment with new technologies or new platforms.
Eventually, after much thought, I took off for Cambodia with a team from Singapore to better understand the market. It wasn’t easy at first, as I did not speak the local languages, and I could only converse in simple English.
I was also physically away from family and friends in a foreign land that not many women would subscribe to as the first choice for an overseas stint. As our company had just started, I had to go through some months without a salary too.
Adapting to the new environment proved to be a challenge for most of my team, as they eventually left and returned to Singapore, leaving me there with just one other member to manage the company.
The biggest challenge, however, was the working culture. Over there, the women I worked with within the tech scene were very active and often more than happy to speak out for themselves. They actively ensured that they were heard, which contrasted with my experiences in Singapore.
From my conversations, this respectable difference could be due to the multiple responsibilities that most women in Cambodia had to juggle, including raising their children and running the household by themselves without any extra help.
This has made them more outspoken about their wants and ideas. While their outspoken nature surprised me at first, I grew to find this determination to have your voice heard in a male-dominated industry as something we can all learn from.
This determination was especially crucial to be seen and heard for a company in a new market. I also spent a lot of time learning and understanding from the locals, so I could better leverage the team’s strengths bundled with my creative knowledge to create a more effective platform for our community of users.
After many months of hard work, we finally launched YouAdMe, a social commerce platform to connect brands to loyal customers.
Tapping into the social media habits of the society, this platform also allows the customers to show their support for their favourite brands while also helping entrepreneurs and brands to receive the benefits of marketing from the customers’ content.
Our platform has become the bridge between brands and customers, allowing their creative voices to be heard and showcased.
The successful launch of YouAdMe was well-received by many. On the international stage, I embodied the same confidence I have learnt from the Cambodian ladies I worked with and pitched our solution on several professional platforms.
We won awards with the team’s hard work, including the 2018 ASEAN Pitch Fest Cambodia and the 2018 Singapore MAS ASEAN Top 10 Innovative Fintech.
Lesson brought back to Singapore
Today, I work remotely with my Cambodian team of 30 to assist 1,500 traditional businesses on our platform of 250,000 users.
Many of my team members are women who have to deal with the everyday stresses of life on top of their work. Despite these challenges, their contributions have been greatly significant and are always deeply appreciated.
If anything is key to my own growth so far, my constant travels between Singapore and Cambodia have opened my eyes to observe the people I’m designing the platform for.
YouAdMe aims to connect the businesses on our platform with their consumers directly, so it is vital to listen to the needs and wants of both ends. Within our team, local sentiments are expressed by our members, which we consider with mindful analysis and market research.
As Women in tech, we need to remember to make ourselves heard on our terms. It might be uncomfortable to assert yourself at first, as I was when I first started.
Yet, as the extraordinary ladies in my Cambodian team have taught me, the path to success requires stepping out of the comfort zone. To achieve the things you want and find your voice, you must listen and be comfortable with the discomfort of finding your voice in the industry.
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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$15 million in Series A financing.
White Star Capital and Alpha JWC co-led the round. Besides its current investors, Ninjavan co-founder Alvin Teo also joined the round.
This investment comes just five months after Una Brands secured US$40 million in its seed round from 500 Startups, Kingsway Capital, 468 Capital, Presight Capital and Global Founders Capital.
Una Brands will use the new capital to acquire e-commerce brands in Asia Pacific and further strengthen its technology and team. “With this raise, we will continue to invest in acquiring great brands, developing our multi-channel capabilities, expanding into our newly launched markets and supporting our brands’ growth,” founder and CEO Kiren Tanna said.
Una Brands was established in 2020 by Tanna, the former CEO of Rocket Internet Asia and founder of foodpanda and ZEN Rooms. Adrian Johnston, Kushal Patel, Tobias Heusch and Srinivasan Shridharan are the other co-founders of the startup.
Una Brands acquires brands selling across multiple e-commerce channels such as Shopify, Shopee, Lazada, Tokopedia, Amazon. The firm mainly primarily focuses on profitable independent brands with revenue between US$1 million and US$50 million.
Una claims it can complete the end-to-end transaction process in under six weeks with flexible deal structures.
Currently, Una employs 90 people across seven offices — Singapore, Australia, India, China, Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Jefrey Joe, the managing partner at Alpha JWC, added: “Digitally native brands in APAC is a secular trend growing at 4x the rate of those in the West. We believe Una Brands’s value proposition will resonate with brands across the region and further propel the growth of D2C in countries such as Indonesia.”
Brand aggregation is the new trend in Southeast Asia. In May this year, former Carousell and OVO executives launched the e-commerce brand aggregator Rainforest with a US$36M seed funding. In September, Rainforest bagged an oversubscribed US$20 million pre-Series A round led by Monk’s Hill Ventures.
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Today, I am going down the rabbit hole on Bitcoin and Ethereum. When I am excited about a new space, I try to follow Feynman’s technique for learning anything:
In a nutshell, Richard Feynman observed how people mask a lack of understanding with complexity and jargon. In turn, if you can explain anything to a kid, you must have an excellent knowledge of that topic. So always strive to strip down needless complexity.
This and the following few essays are my attempt to simplify what I have learned about Web3 so far, starting with Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Nothing illustrates a complex concept better than an analogy. So here you go, my favourite one.
In prison, there are no currencies. No one has access to money of any kind. But a prison, although small, is still a society. And society needs to trade goods and services.
Maybe someone is a barber. This person will cut people’s hair but wants something in return. Something that he can use to later go to his cellmate and give him in return for the book that he wants from him.
The cellmate also needs something in return for the book to use for getting himself another book.
How do you do this without money?
Well, they use cigarettes as a currency. A haircut is worth 20 packs. A chance to play basketball is worth 10 packs. A book is worth five packs and so on. There is a problem. There are not enough cigarettes inside the prison in each person’s hands to be able to do all the transactions.
But everyone knows that once a week a new supply comes in. So instead of getting the packs from each other, they start “owing” each other some packs of cigarettes.
Joey gets a haircut and he owes the barber 20 packs. The barber gets a book and owes John 5 packs. Once the new shipment comes in, everyone will settle their debts.
But how do we keep track of all this?
Well, everyone will have to carry a notebook with them. Whenever two people make a transaction, they both write it down in their books. Luke writes “I owe Johnny two packs” and Johnny writes “Luke owes me two packs”. This way we know who owes what to whom.
But we all write everything in the same format. One transaction after another. So it becomes a long chain of transactions. If I know how many cigarettes I had at any point and go through the transactions after it, I can figure out how many cigarettes I will have.
Last problem: how do we know what people wrote in their books are correct and no one is faking transactions? I can go steal someone’s book and write a fake transaction in it.
Well, to overcome this we assign the wisest most trustworthy person in the prison as a witness. Whenever two people are making a transaction, he has to witness it and sign both books with his own signature. This way, we know that each transaction is witnessed by our trusted person and actually happened.
Cigarettes are bitcoin. Notebooks are ledgers. The agreed-upon text format in the notebooks is blockchain. The wise persons are bitcoin miners.
Most people, who are not crypto fanatics, have some vague idea of what Bitcoin is. But a few people realise how in just 12 years, the cryptocurrency has become the best investment of all time as it has reached ~3,000,000x appreciation.
You can think of Bitcoin as a decentralised currency. Meaning it was not issued by a central bank like any other medium of exchange. Instead, it was issued by a computer program.
“The world ultimately will have a single currency, the internet will have a single currency. I personally believe that it will be Bitcoin.”– Jack Dorsey, Founder of Twitter and Square
Not too long ago, China, the world’s second-largest economy and the most populous country declared all cryptocurrencies illegal. Yet, today’s price of one Bitcoin is ~US$61,095 (as of October 17, 2021). Proving that it’s hard to devalue it by governments.
In simpler terms, it’s akin to gold. It leverages the scarce nature of gold, but it adds an element of digital transferability.
Every currency or store of value shares similar attributes. It must be scarce, portable, fungible, divisible, durable, and broadly accepted to be considered useful.
Bitcoin scores high on all that:
Scarcity – the supply of Bitcoin is only 21 million coins.
“There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins. That property of saying there’s only going to be 21 million is guaranteed by the blockchain. It is not guaranteed by the creators of Bitcoin. It’s not guaranteed by the developers of Bitcoin, by Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s guaranteed by the very network architecture. That never existed before.”– Chris Dixon – The Potential of Blockchain Technology
Portability – Bitcoin is a lot more portable than gold. It can be transferred digitally around the globe in seconds. Therefore, it’s cheaper to store and transfer. Not to mention, it’s instantly verifiable, whereas gold can require a slow and manual process.
Source: Michael B. Rihani
Fungibility – similar to any other currency, any two Bitcoins are interchangeable.
Durability – a lot more durable than paper money and do not degrade over time.
Broad acceptability – while it has not reached the acceptability of gold and US$ levels, Bitcoin has made impressive progress. That’s especially true in markets that are less stable politically.
Crypto adoption is dominated by emerging, frontier, and politically unstable markets.
“[Bitcoin] may not seem as compelling to some individuals who believe they live in stable monetary and financial settings, or under a government that respects property rights and the rule of law – but it becomes starkly relevant in their absence.” — Nic Carter, Bitcoin Net Zero
No one knows what the future will bring. Bitcoin is up against gold and traditional mediums of exchange. Regular currencies have centuries of proven track records.
Yet, looking at the loyalty of its community alongside the underlying innovation, it’s undeniable that Bitcoin offers an improvement over gold and fiat.
Ethereum
Imagine Bitcoin as a valuable and defensible citadel that has proven to be a great place to store your gold in. Everyone races to store their gold in that impregnable castle because no one has ever successfully attacked it.
Ethereum is the city around that citadel. In fact, you can think of it as a network of cities that trade with each other using Ether (ETH). Then gas fees are paid to miners to ensure each transaction takes place as per the desired outcome.
Ethereum is the streets, land, buildings, pipes, electricity infrastructure, and everything else you need to have in order to build on. So now you can go to Ethereum and build your real estate or whatever else that’s important to you.
Ethereum is the second most valuable cryptocurrency in the world. Today, the market cap of Ethereum is about US$420 billion.
Whereas bitcoin is a combination of currency, a store of value, and a medium of exchange, Ethereum is a lot more. You can think of it as a vast distributed computer that exists around the world. Entirely decentralised.
Ethereum is so many things at once, all of which feed off of each other. Ethereum, the blockchain, is a world computer, the backbone of a decentralised internet (web3), and the settlement layer for web3. Its cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH), is a bunch of things, too:
Internet money.
Ownership of the Ethereum network.
The most commonly-used token in the Great Online Game.
Yield-generating.
A Store of Value (SoV).
A bet on more on-chain activity, or the web3 future.
Developers can build applications on top of Ethereum using smart contracts. It is similar to how Excel works. In an Excel sheet, we can add a variety of formulas that are linked with one another.
Smart contracts work similarly. Each contract can be linked to another one. In the process, creating opportunities to solve complex problems.
A popular analogy for smart contracts is vending machines. You insert money into a vending machine, and it delivers something back to you. In the same way, if you pay a fee to the smart contract, the smart contract will execute an action. The fees are paid in Ether (ETH), often referred to as “gas” fees.
Another simple example is designing a smart contract to reward your family on their birthdays. Imagine developing a tool that pays each member of your family US$100 on their birthdays.
Then, add the birth dates for each family member, assign the reward (e.g., US$100/person), and the contract will handle the rest. Thus, annually on their birthdays, everyone in your family will receive US$100 without your intervention.
Currently, there are around 117M ETH. Like with everything else, the price is governed by supply and demand. More transactions and usage equals higher demand and thus higher costs. In simpler terms, that’s how a transaction on Ethereum looks like:
You send your friend John 1 ETH
You pay gas fees for that transaction. Let’s say .01 ETH
Your account balance goes down by 1.01 ETH. Your friend John’s account balance goes up by 1 ETH.
A distributed network of random miners on Ethereum gets compensated with 0.1 ETH to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic problems and thus facilitate the transaction.
“Owning ETH is like owning shares on the internet. Demand for ETH will go up with increased Web3 adoption, while upcoming changes will decrease the supply of ETH and let more value accrue to holders. It’s like a tech stock, a bond, a ticket to Web3, and money, rolled into one”, says Packy McCormick.
Lately, Ethereum has been in the epicentre of a lot of exciting innovations. Concepts like DeFi, DAOs, NFTs, Social Tokens have become all the hype around the world. Ethereum and other similar platforms are enabling people to cooperate like never before.
The open, trustless, and permissionless internet finally has strong use cases. Cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin have shown us the potential behind Web3, and we are just getting started.
Unfortunately, current solutions are still slow and expensive. That was an intentional design; both Bitcoin and Ethereum are meant to be slow because of security reasons. Yet, the activity in Web3 is attracting the smartest people from all walks of life.
Strong financial incentives and incredible talent are usually a recipe for overcoming any obstacle. So I am sure that we will be able to have secure yet fast and affordable solutions in the near future. That’s why I am pretty excited about what’s coming next.
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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic
Vietnamese startup eJOY, which develops cross-platform apps to support English learners, has secured a “hundreds-of-thousand-dollars” seed financing round led by ThinkZone Ventures, a local early-stage venture capital firm.
BK Fund, founded by alumni of the Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST), also joined.
eJOY will use the capital to improve the product for intermediate-level English learners and expand to the beginner-level learner group. A portion of the funds will be used to test the same method of learning with other languages.
Besides the capital investment, ThinkZone Ventures will support eJOY in the development process through a network of experienced experts and partners. The total size of support packages is said to amount to more than US$150,000.
Leveraging BKFund’s university network, eJOY also intends to broaden its user base to college students across the country.
Founded in 2017 by CEO Diep Bui, eJOY creates a tech product that lets users actively learn English while watching videos on YouTube, Netflix, Coursera, and other platforms.
The tool serves as a plug-in to web browsers and allows learners to look up, collect and understand the context of new words while consuming video (with subtitles) or article content on the go.
The company boasts it has clocked more than one million users worldwide and 300,000 weekly active users. Non-Vietnamese learners account for 30 per cent of its user base.
According to a survey by Q&Me, 37 per cent of Vietnamese respondents spend an average of one to three hours learning a foreign language, with English being the most popular option (86 per cent).
The pandemic has boosted the Vietnamese edutech industry, which has seen a slew of startups raise capital in 2021. They included educational services provider Equest (US$100 million investment from KKR), AI-powered language app Elsa (US$15 million Series B led by Vietnam Investments Group), Educa Corporation (US$2 million Series A from Alibaba-backed eWTP), Marathon Education (US$1.5 million in seed funding), and CoderSchool (US$2.6 million pre-Series A led by Monk’s Hill Ventures).
By the end of 2023, the Vietnamese e-learning market is expected to be worth over US$3 billion, according to Ken Research.
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(L-R) TurtleTree co-founders Fengru Lin and Max Rye
TurtleTree, which produces cell-based milk, has raised US$30 million in the first tranche of its Series A funding from a group of investors, led by existing investor and Finnish growth-stage VC firm Verso Capital.
Having just launched its Sacramento R&D facility in September, TurtleTree will now use the new capital to continue expanding its portfolio of sustainable, better-for-you food items.
It will also set aside funds for technology development and talent acquisition, enabling the firm to grow its world-class R&D team.
Together, these initiatives will help TurtleTree scale up its research and production of the highly functional ingredients in human milk, which offer proven benefits for immune system function, gut health, and cognitive development. One example of these ingredients is lactoferrin, a bioactive protein slated for launch as TurtleTree’s first commercial product.
“The funding received has truly opened up a new world of possibility. We can now set our sights on turning ambitions into reality. We will start with our US-based expansion plans and then move on to the development and manufacture of our first consumer-ready products,” TurtleTree’s chief strategy officer Max Rye said.
This will ultimately bring scalable solutions to the cell-based food industry, ensuring people everywhere will have access to the nourishing nutrients of mammalian milk in a uniquely sustainable and affordable way.
Founded in 2019, TurtleTree uses its proprietary technology to produce whole milk in clean production facilities from mammary cells. Moving forward, the company will expand into a global biotechnology platform with a vision for transforming performance nutrition, food systems, and cellular agriculture.
To date, TurtleTree has raised over US$40 million.
In December 2020, TurtleTree closed a US$6.2 million in an oversubscribed pre-Series A round from investors such as Green Monday Ventures, Eat Beyond Global, KBW Ventures, and Verso. A few months prior, it raised pre-seed funding round from investors such as KBW Ventures, Lever VC and K2 Global.
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Multiplier, a Singapore-based startup aiming to simplify international employment, has secured US$13.2 million in a Sequoia India-led Series A financing round.
Individuals, including Deepinder Goyal (Zomato) and Amrish Rau (Pine Labs), along with existing investors, also co-invested.
The new round follows a US$$4 million investment round led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge programme in July.
Multiplier will use the new capital to boost its full-stack platform and expand globally. A portion of the proceeds will also be deployed to scale up its payroll and benefits solutions for businesses.
Multiplier was established in 2020 by Amritpal Singh, Sagar Khatri, and Vamsi Krishna. It is a global employment platform that helps companies employ, onboard and pay their global talent compliantly. Multiplier provides automated HR workflow, compliance and payroll all rolled into one integrated platform.
As per a press statement, the company has doubled its customer base since it came out of Surge, and revenues grew 3x.
Multiplier co-founder Sagar Khatri said: “Talent is everywhere, and our vision is to enable companies to hire the best person for the job, regardless of their location. We have grown exponentially since the launch, which is testament to the demand from companies—both large and small—for a simplified, international employment solution.”
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Singapore-headquartered accelerator-cum-VC-fund Accelerating Asia announced the first batch of investments from its US$20-million Fund II launched in September.
This is also the fifth cohort of pre-Series A startups joining the fund’s flagship 100-day accelerator programme.
The nine startups are:
Chat Genie (Philippines): An online B2B platform providing integrated online payment and automated delivery services to businesses on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Viber, GCash, PayMaya, and other super apps.
Dana Fintech (Bangladesh): A fintech startup that enables banks, financial institutions and fintech firms to offer digital lending and buy now pay later (BNPL) facilities to underbanked SMEs and individuals through its unique credit scoring engine, digital underwriting, and API platforms.
Ellegra (Malaysia): An online personal styling service for women.
Giftpack.ai (US): An AI-powered corporate gifting platform that digitalises companies’ relationships with customers through analyses of recipients’ social media, cultural background, and digital footprint to customise gift options at scale.
Mayani (Philippines): An agri-e-commerce platform that empowers smallholder farmers by providing them broader access to market, while minimising food loss through a digitised agri value chain.
Sohopathi (Bangladesh): An online social platform for P2P learning that enables learning and teaching simultaneously.
Supply Line (Bangladesh): A digital B2B procurement and invoice financing solution to connect local retailers with lenders and distributors through a single platform.
VIFO (Vietnam): A single SaaS platform unifying insurers, agencies, customers, and customer services to make insurance easier for everyone.
Z-Waka (Myanmar): A SaaS platform that enables doctors in developing countries to efficiently manage clinics, collaborate with other healthcare professionals and pharmaceutical companies in order to provide affordable high-quality healthcare.
As per a press release, 80 per cent of Cohort 5 startups address at least one of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, such as gender equality, responsible consumption and production, and industry, innovation and infrastructure. In addition, 50 per cent are co-founded by female leaders.
Launched in September 2021, Accelerating Asia’s Fund II aims to bridge the gap between seed and pre-Series A investments for startups with untapped potential that are six to 18 months away from institutional funding.
The fund claims that the nine startups have increased their recurring revenue by over 40 per cent to an average of US$20,000 per month after one month of joining the programme.
Founded in 2019, Accelerating Asia has invested up to US$250,000 each in over 40 startups spanning across ten countries in Southeast and South Asia.
Accelerating Asia has also joined “Pledge 1%”, a global movement to inspire, educate, and empower every company to be a force for good. The new cohort represents the fund’s commitment to accelerating startups with scalable technology solutions and business models that combine purpose with profit.
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Filipino social entertainment platform Kumu has secured an undisclosed amount in a Series C financing round.
Global growth equity firm General Atlantic led the latest round, joined by returning investors Openspace Ventures and SIG.
It brings Kumu’s total funding to over US$100 million.
As per a press note, this deal marks General Atlantic’s first investment in the Philippines.
“Kumu is rapidly emerging as a leading digital content community and social platform in the Philippines and the global Filipino diaspora,” said Sandeep Naik, Managing Director and Head (India & Southeast Asia) at General Atlantic.
“We believe an immense digital opportunity exists in the Philippines, a market that is hungry for content and ripe for disruption. Kumu’s innovative live-streaming offerings pave the way for its continued growth as a broader online media platform,” he added.
Established in 2018 as a live streaming app, Kumu claims it has since amassed a base of over 10 million registered users across over 55 countries. It generates revenues from virtual gifting, advertising, and e-commerce, which allow content creators to convert engagement into income.
Kumu provides premium content and has co-produced the last two seasons of the hit TV show Pinoy Big Brother.
The company has also teamed up with the top-grossing Filipino film director Cathy Garcia-Molina to produce a movie. It enables Kumu users to earn a spot as a co-star or as part of the film’s soundtrack.
It claims to have seen early signals of product-market fit beyond the Philippines, with tractions coming from non-Filipinos in the US and Europe.
Kumu wants to be the “Disneyland of social media”, enforcing authenticity, positivity, and safety through its community-driven content moderation system.
“We are less than one per cent of the way to our goal,” said Roland Ros, Kumu’s founder and CEO. “Billions of dollars are being spent on internet infrastructure, and you have a market of over 100 million people with a median age that is GenZ and millennial, with affordable, 4G-capable smartphones. That together is a perfect playground for us to build a social platform at a global scale that is founded upon deep engagement and positivity.”
“The first generation of social media was defined by passive engagement, where the platform wins through advertising, but all except the top 1 per cent of creators struggle to earn a living,” said Rexy Dorado, president and co-founder of Kumu. “We are early movers in this movement towards a genuine creator economy where anyone can earn a sustainable income from just a hundred true fans each.”
Earlier this year, the company announced a Series B funding round co-led by SIG. It was preceded by a Series A led by Openspace Ventures.
Kumu believes that the Philippines is at a tipping point: structural and behavioural changes have led to the internet and social media penetration increasing by almost 10 per cent yearly. The Philippines is often termed as the world’s social media capital as Filipinos spend at least 10 hours of their days online and dedicate at least four of those to social media alone.
“At Kumu, we seek to acquire a larger share of users’ mindshare and make even a couple of those hours spent online as delightful as possible for content creators and consumers alike,” says Dana De La Vega, Kumu’s VP of Strategic Management.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic loss of human life worldwide and presents an unprecedented challenge to public health, food systems, and the work environment.
Economic and social disruptions caused by the pandemic have been devastating– with tens of millions at risk of falling into extreme poverty.
The number of undernourished people could increase by up to 132 million by the end of the year from an estimated 690 million.
Asked to consider what life will be like in 2025 in the wake of the outbreak and other crises in 2020, a group of 915 innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded similarly in a research conducted by the Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagine the Internet Center.
These individuals are made up of those in technology, communications, and social change.
Their broad and nearly universal view is that people’s relationship with technology will deepen as more significant segments of the population come to better rely on digital connections for work, education, health care, daily commercial transactions, and essential social interactions. Several of them described this as a “tele-everything” world.
The question is how tech will help with controlling COVID-19 and with the world returning to normal or rather the “new normal”?
The pandemic accelerated 10 key technology trends, including digital payments, telehealth, and robotics. These advancements could help reduce the spread of the coronavirus and help businesses stay open.
Below, we list trends that can help build a resilient society in handling future pandemics and their effects on our lives, whether work, trade, learning, or entertaining ourselves.
Working remotely
As more companies have employees working from home, technology has been integrated for a seamless experience.
Remote work is enabled by virtual private networks (VPNs), voice over internet protocols (VoIP), virtual meetings, cloud technology, work collaboration tools, and even facial recognition technologies that enable a person to appear before a virtual background to preserve the privacy of the home.
In addition to preventing the spread of viruses, remote work also saves commuting time and provides greater flexibility.
Distance learning
As of mid-April 2020, 191 countries announced or implemented school or university closures, impacting 1.57 billion students worldwide. Many educational institutions started offering courses online to ensure education was not disrupted by quarantine and lockdown measures.
The technology involved in distant learning is similar to that used for remote work, including virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing, and artificial-intelligence-enabled robot teachers. Note that even before COVID-19, there was already high growth and adoption in education technology.
Global edutech investments were US$18.66 billion in 2019, while the overall market for online education is projected to reach US$350 billion by 2025.
Since the pandemic started, there has been a significant surge in usage for language apps, virtual tutoring, video conferencing tools, and online learning software.
More than a hundred education technology and service companies worldwide have attracted venture capital, raising upwards of US$1.9 billion in funding rounds as of April 23, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data.
The US accounted for the bulk of global venture capital poured into the edutech market, accounting for US$875.7 million, followed by the Asia Pacific region at US$528.3 million. Meanwhile, Europe and Emerging Markets respectively pulled in US$342.3 million and US$178.9 million each.
5G and Information and Communications Technology (ICT)
At the heart of the technology mentioned above trends is; a stable, high-speed, and affordable internet. The adoption of 5G will increase the cost of compatible devices and the cost of data plans.
Addressing these issues to ensure inclusive access to the internet will continue to be a challenge as the 5G network expands globally.
An example of the application of 5G technology is its use in the remote control of heavy machinery due to its low latency.
In Wuhan, during the COVID-19 crisis, 5G-enabled robots checked patient temperatures, delivered drugs, guided routes, and cleaned and disinfected rooms.
The robots were designed to help treat patients and reduce the risk of human exposure to coronavirus by minimising person-to-person contact.
The COVID-19 pandemic created disruptions to the global supply chain. Factories were shut down because of distancing and quarantine orders. Heavy reliance on paper-based records and a lack of visibility on data highlighted how existing supply chains were vulnerable to any adverse shocks.
Core technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – such as Big Data, cloud computing, Internet-of-Things (“IoT”) and blockchain – are the basis for a more resilient supply chain management system for the future by enhancing data accuracy encouraging data sharing.
Telehealth/ Healthtech
Here are four health-tech trends that are expected to boom post-COVID-19:
(i) Predictive analysis in healthcare
An example of this is the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers COVID-19 mortality risk calculator. The team developed it to estimate the potential of severe outcomes for individuals and to inform of vaccine rollouts.
(ii) IoMT
Connected Medical Devices that support proactive healthcare. Applications have ranged from connected wearables that report critical patient data to the deployment of “smart beds” in hospital settings to improve patient comfort.
(iii) New cybersecurity concerns increase cloud adoption in healthcare
In other words, simply deploying the scope and scale of cloud resources necessary to support tech-driven healthcare initiatives is not enough by itself. IT staff from healthtech companies must be prepared to address common challenges such as distributed denial of service attacks and ransomware, along with more targeted threat vectors such as COVID-19 vaccination scams.
(iv) Patient-focused emphasis
The future of telehealth will have to deliver the best of both worlds where the needle moves towards a more patient-focused healthcare delivery experience. This means combining low-tech solutions such as standard blood pressure cuffs with video tutorials, allowing patients to self-report vital data.
Such solutions will be essential for healthcare organisations serving distributed and disparate populations without access to unlimited smartphone data or high-speed broadband internet.
It will be safe to say that integrating technology into different businesses going beyond the five verticals stated above will be essential in controlling COVID and helping the world adapt to the “new normal”.
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