The Singapore remittance startup strikes partnership with the Thai Banking Group Kasikornbank

Digital remittance company based in Singapore InstaRem has partnered with Thailand’s Kasikornbank, joined in on the initiative to strengthen the company’s influence in the institutional payments space.

The agreement would see the Singapore startup facilitates cross-border payments for the bank’s clients in select markets, as reported by FiNews Asia.

“With InstaRem, KBank clients will be able to have faster turnarounds, while providing certainty on delivery times and payout amounts,” said Prajit Nanu, co-founder, and CEO of InstaRem.

Kasikornbank is Thailand’s second-largest bank in the country in terms of total assets, which currently is at US$96.9 billion.

InstaRem announced the close of its US$41-million Series C funding round back in March. The company claimed that it has since been using the funding to support growth and expansion to new markets, including opening a regional headquarters in Latin America and expanding its teams in London and Seattle.

Also Read: WeWork lands in Bangkok, Thailand marking Southeast Asia expansion

InstaRem already has a presence in 40+ countries in Asia-Pacific, North America, and Europe with its service that allows low-cost cross-border payments to 55+ countries.
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Asia is a promising market for major tech companies, but there are factors that they often forget to count in

In May, chat and messaging API and SDK developer SendBird announced that they have raised an additional US$50 million to their US$52 million Series B funding round –bringing the total number to US$102 million.

The number was mind-blowing as it was bigger than what giants such as Uber, Zoom, and Lyft raised in their respective Series B funding round.

However, the average joes and janes might not be familiar with the company’s identity. But once their leading clients such as Go-Jek and Carousell were mentioned, it would be easy to recognise the works that they have done.

“We want to empower our businesses and customers by not getting them distracted by chat building and maintenance … We take care of the entire back to front technology,” SendBird APAC Sales Manager Yeji Yoon explained to e27 Editor Kevin McSpadden on the second day of Echelon Asia Summit 2019 at Singapore Expo, Friday, May 24.

Messaging services itself tend to scale really fast, especially when it is included in a platform that handles millions of users on a regular basis. How does SendBird maintain consistency as it scales rapidly?

Also Read: 15 more companies will join us as exhibitors for Echelon Asia Summit 2019

“We invest in chat technology. We have invested hundreds of million in chat technology, and now we have another millions to invest in it. Today, for example, we process over a billion messages a month in 12,000 apps,” the manager explained.

“Scalability is actually what we specialise in,” she stressed.

SendBird has its root in both America and Asia. While their headquarter is located in San Mateo, California, their APAC headquarter is located in Seoul.

With a total of five offices in the continent, SendBird sees Asia as a promising market.

“Asia is part of our DNA and it is a huge market. Especially since we have empowered so many innovative unicorns out there,” Yeji Yoon said.

Also Read: 2019: A hell of a year for marketers with chat and voice bots

“If you look at GDP growth, population growth, and mobile penetration adoption, it is natural to say that all these huge apps are going to come out of Asia, and that it makes sense to have a SaaS company that targets the Asian market,” she continued.

However, entering Asia is not without its own challenges. Major tech companies such as Uber had tried to tackle the market before, yet somehow unable to navigate the cultural differences between the regions.

This is why SendBird puts a strong emphasis on diversity.

“One of our core values is global citizenship. We were born out of Asia and we are optimised in Asia as much as we optimised globally,” Yeji Yoon explained.

“We embrace diversity and we try to be as local as possible by providing local support. We also build up a culture and investing in it to continuously serve all of our customers,” she added.

Also Read: Inspired by the lack of reproductive health awareness in Myanmar, Myhealthcare allows patients to chat with doctors

In choosing a potential partner or client, SendBird considers how its services can add value for the company’s works itself.

“We do not want to be just another call centre,” she concluded.

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The Chinese venture capital firm claimed that they manage a total of US$ 1 billion in assets

Chinese venture capital firm ZWC Ventures announced that it has closed its first fund for Southeast Asia and China at US$ 150 million, as reported by KrAsia.

Jason Jiang, who’s among ZWC’s largest limited partners (LPs), is the founder and chairman of Focus Media, which is one of China’s largest private media and advertising companies. ZWC’s other LPs include corporates, fund of funds, family offices, and high net worth individuals in mainland China and Hong Kong.

ZWC Ventures plans to invest in early to late-stage startups in the e-commerce, social commerce, fintech, and AI sectors. The amount of investment to be made will have an average size of US$500,000 to US$10 million for early-stage investments and US$10 million to US$60 million for growth-stage investments.

It plans to add another US$300 million into the region in the next three years, which will be a part of the US$500 million second fund ZWC wants to start putting together in Q3 this year.

So far, ZWC Ventures said it has directed a total of US$100 million to five investments in the region so far, including Singapore-based online tuition startup Tenopy and Indonesian media company Target Media Indonesia. The firm also confirmed that it invested in an unnamed Indonesian e-commerce platform and is currently examining potential investments in an Indonesian logistics first-mile provider and Singapore-based AI startup.

Also Read: InstaRem joins Thai bank to launch multi-currency payment feature

In an official statement, co-founder and partner of ZWC Ventures Terrance Lok said that the firm is also interested in sub-sectors, including those that enable e-commerce, like first-mile fulfillment logistics and supply chain fintech.

The firm has a partnership with a venture builder arm, Zynergy, who allocates US$500,000 to US$1 million initial seed funding for each selected startup which will have access to Zynergy’s network of entrepreneurs and investors in China. The firm plans to work with at least five Southeast Asian startups through Zynergy program this year.
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The localised initiative will have the dated public transportation bajaj to be boosted with the latest technology as a support to the government’s Langit Biru program

Grab has announced the launch of GrabBajay in Jakarta, teaming up with the Jakarta Transportation Agency. GrabBajay will offer the iconic transport as a new safe and comfortable option for travelling through roads that are difficult to reach with four-wheeled vehicles.

Tri Sukma Anreianno, Head of Public Affairs Grab Indonesia said, “As a technology company whose vision is to answer local transportation challenges, we’re thankful for the opportunity given by the Jakarta Transportation Agency to support their program in offering different options of transportation with GrabBajay.”

GrabBajay presence also seeks to support the government’s initiative to resolve the environmental pollution problem that is caused by motor vehicles through Langit Biru program. It aims to reduce air pollution from motor vehicles, which is why the registered bajay for GrabBajay is an eco-friendly gas-fueled vehicle.

All GrabBajay driver partners have passed the KIR (roadworthiness test) with a valid operating license, and passengers can access the bajay’s license plate number on the app.

GrabBajay’s benefits for driver partners and customers include the two-persons accommodation and with spare rooms to carry things.

Also Read: ZWC Ventures to pour US$150M fund to Southeast Asia and China

GrabBajay fleets are integrated into the Grab app and will allow customers to find GrabBajay on the road. Now users can access GrabBajay by tapping the “GrabBike” icon on the Grab app main screen.

GrabBajay service is currently available at five main points spread across Central Jakarta, including Jakarta Kota Station, ITC Mangga Dua, Mangga Besar Station, Sawah Besar Station, and Pasar Baru with a rate of IDR3000 (US$0.21) per kilometer.

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Image Credit: Grab

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Both Singapore-based CutQ and Malaysia-based FoodTime’s leadership team and product solution have been integrated into Fave’s platform

Mobile payments and rewards platform Fave announced that it has acquired two table and takeaway ordering solutions. The startups are CutQ in Singapore and FoodTime in Malaysia for an undisclosed fee.

With the acquisition, both companies will see its leadership team and product fully integrated into Fave’s regional platform.

The company announced the acquisition at Echelon Asia Summit 2019.

Fave said that the acquisitions will provide the company with a localised foothold to increase its market share in Singapore and Malaysia. The company also hopes it will help its position as a loyalty food and beverage system provider for merchants and their customers in Southeast Asia.

“As the cost to operate restaurants increases and business owners face challenges to hire staff and increase productivity, we wanted to provide Table Ordering and Take Away pre-ordering solutions which will reduce these hurdles,” said Joel Neoh, Founder of Fave Group.

Neoh highlighted that the technology the two companies have developed will be introduced as its next value-added service for the company’s merchants and users.

Founded in 2013 by entrepreneurs, Kevin Tan and Laura Chong-Tan, CutQ is a Singaporean food takeaway app that enables its users to skip queues and have their food ready for pickup. FoodTime is a mobile food ordering and delivery app founded by Ahmad Daleen in 2017.

Also Read: Indonesian “1000 Startups” initiative being renewed by the government

Merchants that have signed up on Fave’s table ordering solution include brands such as Gelare, Paulaner Brauhaus, Saboten, and Tingkat Peranakan in Singapore and Naughty Nuri’s, LOCO TTDI, and Murni in Malaysia.

This quarter, Fave noted that Favepay transactions crossed the six million mark with the app downloaded over four million times. More than US$6 million worth of cashback has been issued to Singaporeans and Malaysians.

In 2018, Fave raised US$20 million in Series B funding led by investors Sequoia Capital, Venturra Capital, and SIG Asia investment. Fave’s focus will be to increase its market share through continued partnerships, expansion of new services, and broader and deeper efforts in merchant acquisition.
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Image Credit: Fave

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The country also has a culture around corporate venture capital that is particularly active compared regional neighbors

Thailand is the second largest economy in Southeast Asia. It boasts 70 million people, a gigantic tourism industry and a world famous cuisine.

Unfortunately, it cannot claim to have produced a tech unicorn.

According to the e27 2018 Southeast Asia Startup Ecosystem Report, the most notable Thai investment from 2018 was an investment into Eatigo by TripAdvisor. The deal is rumoured to be about US$10 million.

So what can the country do to boost these numbers?

Also Read: How to approach startups from a radically different perspective

For Tarit Nimmanwudipong the Head of Commercial at True Digital Park, he wanted to focus on building an offline community. True Digital Park is a gigantic tech university set to open in the heart of Bangkok in the coming months.

At Echelon Asia Summit 2019, Nimmanwudipong elaborated to Thaddeus Koh, a co-founder of e27.

“People like you (Koh) and me usually meet at this kind of event (Echelon), which is great, but it’s only once or twice a year, which is not quite healthy. We build TDP, to put people under one roof. I can meet you every day and still have time to go back and work on my stuff. I think that is very important,” he said.

Portions of the park will be free to the public and True Digital Park wants to integrate events that will bring in people who don’t work there to try and build and ecosystem connected to the park.

This also includes residential buildings in the general area and Nimmanwudipong said True Digital Park is flirting with a plan that allows people to live and work in the campus.

Besides bringing together the tech community, Thailand has a couple of fairly specific traits that may help produce the next unicorn.

One of them is an active corporate engagement with the startup ecosystem. For years, some of the most notable accelerators and investments have come from telcos, banks and real estate conglomerates. While this happens across Southeast Asia, it is particularly prevalent in Thailand.

Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) is a very real part of the country’s startup ecosystem.

Another sign that corporates play an important role is the status of fintech as the most successful sector in Thailand. Banks have spearheaded the CVC culture in Thailand, which naturally means the put money into fintechs.

This creates a feedback loop whereby Thai people see fintech companies breaking into the market and associate the growth with the startup scene as a whole.

“Fintech startups are the first that the mass people of Thailand realize that startups are coming. Then other kinds of startups come a bit later,” said Nimmanwudipong.

Also Read: Singapore startup H3 Dynamics wins Echelon Asia Summit 2019

When asked by Koh which startup he thinks has growth potential to help lead the ecosystem.

He pointed to Eko, a mobile chatting app for companies.

“The reason I like it, is thinking about the potential of expansion. It can be in any industry. We are trying to connect people. Different industries have unique characteristics but they all want to communicate.” 

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Photo by Zach Inglis on Unsplash

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Ecomobi, which offers a social selling platform, has won the second prize

Singapore-based H3 Dynamics, which offers a digital platform that fully automates and simplifies the use of security and industrial asset inspection drone operations, has been announced the winner of Echelon Asia Summit 2019.

Ecomobi, another Singapore company which provides a social selling platform, has won the second prize.

Both the winners will receive S$50,000 each in grants from Enterprise SG.

H3 Dynamics has also been awarded with the “Unicorn” chalice made by SIEGE. The startup will also be fast-tracked to the SLINGSHOT. Powered by Startup SG, SLINGSHOT is a startup competition launched by Enterprise Singapore in 2017.

SLINGSHOT will provide H3 Dynamics an opportunity to pitch in front of Southeast Asia’s dynamic tech ecosystem and win additional prizes. The event will take place from 11-13 November 2019.

Other TOP100 finalists were earlier awarded with mini chalices by e27 CEO Mohan Belani.

Founded in 2013, H3 Dynamics is a digital platform that fully automates and simplifies the use of security and industrial asset inspection drone operations, enabled by cutting-edge AI, robotics and energy storage technologies.

Ecomobi seeks to help e-commerce companies direct sales towards social networks. Its algorithm allows social influencers to monetise their traffic via access to e-commerce inventories and connect with brands instantaneously, optimising both cost-per-acquisition and revenue.

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The cross-border QR payments would link Singapore and Hong Kong through apps

Singapore’s Liquid Group has expanded its cross-border QR payment partnerships to Hong Kong through a collaboration with Joint Electronic Teller Services Limited (JETCO), which operates one of the largest bank consortiums in Asia.

The partnership will see the adoption of cross-border QR payments by enabling the QR payment apps of both Liquid Group and JETCO’s partner banks to be used in both markets.

Moreover, the initiative will also enhance the payment journey for travellers across Hong Kong and Singapore, providing a payment option with participating merchants in Hong Kong, and likewise, without having to hold physical foreign currencies.

Liquid Group will also work with JETCO to provide additional value-added services to help member banks in delivering innovative services to their customers. The platform will also enable merchants in both Hong Kong and Singapore to launch multiple marketing campaigns with participating payment apps without the need for additional cashier training or verification during checkout.

“We are excited to be moving at pace to advance cross-border QR payments, for which the travellers segment is a key driver. We will continue to partner with various e-wallets and expand the network across the region to enable cross-border payment transactions and facilitate large-scale adoption of QR payment apps,” said Jeremy Tan, Founder, and CEO of Liquid Group.

Also Read: Travel accommodation Luxstay secures funding from GS Shop & Bon Angels

“Our common goal is to enlarge the mobile payments ecosystem as a whole, accelerating the ‘cashless’ transition of these two societies and yielding benefits to everyone,” said Angus Choi, CEO of JETCO.
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The initiative is updated with the agenda to bring entrepreneurship programs to five more cities

The IT ministry of Indonesia and several ecosystem stakeholders in the country’s digital sector has reportedly launched the “1001 Digital Startup Movement”, as reported by KrAsia.

The “1001 Digital Startup Movement” is a continuation of the “1000 Startups” program that was initiated in 2016. It was a coordinated effort by multiple public and private sector stakeholders to boost entrepreneurship across the country.

In its first installment, the program was conducted in ten major cities; Jakarta, Bandung, Surabaya, Yogyakarta, Semarang, Malang, Medan, Bali, Makassar, and Pontianak, having participants underwent meet-ups, workshops, hackathons, to boot camps and incubation programs.

For three and a half years of its implementation, the program hasn’t successfully given birth to 1,000 startups. It says that only 525 digital startups with promising business were formed as a result.

In an official statement, the ministry’s official Lis Sutjiati said that this time, “1001 Startups” will focus on expanding the scale of coverage and improving the quality of its startup development activities. It will revise the program curriculum to focus more on incubation activity.

Also Read: Liquid Group partners JETCO, facilitates cross-border QR payments

The program will also expand to five new cities, namely Batam, Lombok, Padang, Balikpapan, and  Manado. It will target to have 5000 startups in the next five years.

The Indonesian government is doing its part to give its startup’s ecosystem a leg up. In April, IT minister Rudiantara inaugurated the NextICorn Foundation that aims to provide opportunities for more mature startups to get access to growth capital and technology and marketing support. With it, the minister targets to have at least 20 new unicorns in Indonesia by 2025.

Right now, the country counts four tech companies valued at over US$ 1 billion now,
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According to Kudo Co-Founder Agung Nugroho, the acquisition process by Grab was “coincidental”

In 2017, Indonesian O2O e-commerce platform Kudo made headlines when it was acquired by Southeast Asian ride-hailing giant Grab to strengthen its foray into the fintech sector.

On the first day of Echelon Asia Summit 2019 at Singapore Expo on Thursday, May 23, Kudo Co-Founder Agung Nugroho revealed that the acquisition process can be considered “coincidental.”

Three years after founding the company in 2014, Kudo sent its engineers to Singapore to learn from bigger startups such as Grab.

Due to a miscommunication, the team of engineers ended up meeting Grab’s corporate finance team instead.

“We [ended up] pitching about Kudo without any intention to raise any fund,” Nugroho said in a fireside chat with Business Times Deputy News Editor Kenneth Lim.

“Grab saw a good value in Kudo, and Kudo realised that in order to grow across Southeast Asia, the best thing is to be part of the winning horse,” he continued.

Also Read: Agung Nugroho on Kudo’s latest innovation, and keeping tabs on financial inclusion for all

Is there any difference in the way Nugroho run the company following the acquisition? More importantly, how does he feel about being an employee again after years of being an entrepreneur?

“To me, being an entrepreneur is not a title. It’s a mindset. Even when I was working at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), I was already quite entrepreneurial,” he answered.

“Grab is a big company and I do not see myself as an employee,” he continued.

Nugroho stressed that Kudo operates as an independent subsidiary with enough freedom to grow and innovate within their own corridor.

A strong support system

 

Nugroho’s enterpreneurial journey itself began when he was studying for an MBA programme in the US. His study was sponsored by his former employer BCG; despite the privilege, he felt reluctant about returning to work in the company again.

“Seeing all the cool, tech things in Silicon Valley, we felt like doing something,” he said.

Also Read: Former Kudo exec Sukan Makmuri joins P2P lending startup UangTeman as CTO, COO

Together with co-founder Albert Lucius, he developed a concept of using individual, offline agents to facilitate underserved communities in using digital services.

By the time, the co-founders promised that if by the time they had to return to Indonesia they had not secure any investment, then they are going to let go of the idea.

“No investors in the US were familiar with the model that we were trying to implement,” Nugroho explained.

Five days before their flight to Indonesia, the co-founders attended a dinner party where they met East Ventures Co-Founder & Managing Partner Willson Cuaca. Even after the restaurant was closed, they had a conversation that ended with the firm investing in the idea.

Nugroho then decided not to return to BCG –which led to him being indebted with the company.

“When you are a founder of a company, you need to have a good support system. By the time, my wife was a very good support system. She told me, ‘Agung, the debt [that you acquired from your former employer] is very big. But believe that you worth more than that. You can have bigger impact, beyond this IDR2 billion (US$138,000) loan,’” he said.

Also Read: Grab opens R&D centre in Indonesia, reveals more details about Kudo partnership

“It gave me the confidence I needed to start the company. Thank God, three years down the road, I can finally pay back that loan … I learned that becoming an entrepreneur is a life choice. It requires full support from those around you,” the co-founder stressed.

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