The e-scooter sharing service said that it has expanded services in more station in Malaysia
Southeast Asian wide e-scooter service provider Neuron Mobility said that it has added more stations across Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Neuron scooters are now available in Kuala Lumpur’s city centre, including the areas of Masjid Jamek, Lot 10, KLCC, Bukit Nanas, and Berjaya Times Square.
The company does so in a bid to enable “efficient, reliable, and comfortable” short distance, alternative mobility in a form of urban transport in the densest part of Malaysia.
“Malaysia, and Southeast Asia as a whole, are working to reduce congestion and reliance on pollutive vehicles,” said Zachary Wang, CEO of Neuron Mobility. “We are proud to help cities integrate this new mode of sustainable mobility into their transport ecosystem.”
After a trial in Cyberjaya, the company felt confident to add more units in its fifth Southeast Asian city.
Neuron’a on-ground team currently stations themselves in the new locations to walk riders through the use of the mobile app, educate them on safety practices, and share local riding laws and regulations to ensure both rider and pedestrian safety
Neuron Mobility is the e-scooter operator that claims to have the largest shared e-scooter fleet in Southeast Asia.
Wang added that the expansion also marks the commitment the company has to ensure that its service would aid in urban transportation in the city with new technologies, partnerships, and education programs for public safety and proper parking of the scooters.
Just in recent months, Neuron Mobility has taken steps to scale across various markets with the upcoming launch of a commercial-grade e-scooter tailored for Southeast Asian infrastructure to serve the region’s most congested cities.
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The company focusses in developing a space debris removal service to secure long-term orbital sustainability with established entities in Singapore, Japan, and the United Kingdom
Astroscale Holdings Inc. (“Astroscale”), the company that provides space debris removal service for long-term orbital sustainability, announced the opening of its new office based in Denver, Colorado (“Astroscale U.S.”), adding a strategic United States base to its entities in Singapore, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
Along with the opening of a new office, Astroscale also secured an additional US$30 million in an extension of its Series D investment round. The investors in this round are INCJ, Ltd., Japan Co-Invest II Limited Partnership (Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Investment Co., Ltd.), Space aSTART 1 Limited Partnership (aSTART Co., Ltd.), Innovation Platform 1 Investment Limited Partnership (UTokyo Innovation Platform Co., Ltd.), and angel investor Joe Hirao.
The additional funding brings the total Series D amount to US$80 million and total capital raised to US$132 million.
“The United States has been active in addressing issues related to space traffic management and the mitigation of orbital debris. An office in the United States will allow us to work closely with policymakers and business leaders to devise a sustainable solution for this global issue,” said Nobu Okada, Founder, and CEO of Astroscale.
Astroscale U.S. will focus on business development and technology growth and will be led by Ron Lopez as Managing Director, bringing over 25 years of government and industry experience in the aerospace sector, including at the United States Air Force and The Boeing Company as well as leading the Defense & Space Asia Pacific sales team at Honeywell Aerospace.
The global management team is rounded out by Chris Blackerby, Group Chief Operating Officer, who formerly served at NASA for nearly fifteen years, including as the NASA Attaché for Asia; Ai Makino, Chief Financial and Administrative Officer that has experience leading financial and personnel teams at several global startups; and John Auburn, Chief Commercial Officer, an expert in the aerospace sector, especially within European space industry.
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Also, Coins.ph collaborates with Western Union for global remittance access in the country, and public transport startup TRON launches operation in Indonesia
Deemples, an app-based golfing startup, announced yesterday that it has raised US$105,000 funding, rounding up a total of US$270,000 funding it has received.
Deemples said it plans to use the funding solidify their position in their existing market across five Southeast Asian countries, including Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, The Philippines, and Brunei.
Furthermore, the company that was launched in 2017 as a platform to help golfers find golf buddies continues to fulfill its mission to make golf “more accessible and breaking the stereotype of elitism surrounding the sport”.
Deemples allows users to find a golf partner to play with and enable them to organise games at preferred locations and time slots. “Golf was the one thing that made me look forward to every weekend. However, it was difficult to find people to play with as my schedule with golf friends didn’t always match. To solve this problem, I decided to build the Deemples Golf App that helps golfers find each other and get on a course for a round, regardless of when and where,” said Deemples Co-Founder and CEO David Wong.jw
Western Union partners with Coins.ph to bring better remittance access to the country [Eji Insight]
Philippine e-wallet provider Coins.ph, that’s recently acquired by Go-Jek, announces its partnership with Western Union to help opening up access for Filipinos to receive international and domestic money transfers directly from Western Union’s global network.
Coins.ph said it will integrate Western Union into its e-wallet app to allow users in the Philippines to receive and hold international money transfers initiated from Western Union’s digital network, and directly deposited into Coins.ph e-wallets.
“There are many overseas Filipino workers who send money back home regularly and are always looking for additional remittance options,” said Coins.ph co-founder and chief executive Ron Hose in the press statement. “By pairing Coins.ph’s payments technology with Western Union’s expansive global network, we are giving Filipinos a seamless choice to receive money digitally, on the go.”
Together with Moneygram, Western Union will provide support for around 10 million Filipinos working or residing overseas, as announced by the Philippines’ central bank,
TRON launches in Indonesia, provides on-demand public transport service [Deal Street Asia]
TRON, an on-demand public transportation provider, has announced its launch to the Go-Jek and Grab-dominated Indonesia.
The platform is operated by Teknologi Rancang Olah Nusantara in collaboration with global share mobility solutions provider Via. It allows users to request a 15 person shared van in real-time using its mobile app, which then will direct the passengers to a nearby virtual pickup point indicated in the application.
TRON said that its service is similar with public minivans, which used to be the intra-city transportation of choice for many Indonesians, before being slowly replaced by GOJEK and Grab.
The new service will begin with 150 vehicles in the city of Bekasi, on the outskirts of Jakarta.
TRON application will work in affiliation with Digiasia Bios, an Indonesian fintech player with three licensed services with its cashless payment service, KasPro as the payment option for TRON passengers.
Cambodia launches a government-funded business startup centre [Khmer Times]
Techo Startup Centre, a new startup incubation centre located in the Royal University of Phnom Penh, is the latest government initiative to support young entrepreneurs and aid government plans to transform Cambodia into a digital economy.
The facility was officially launched on Monday by Aun Pornmoniroth, Deputy Prime Minister, and Hangchuon Naron, the Minister of Education. It is said to be focussed on skills students need to succeed as tech entrepreneurs in the digital age and to foster the creation of new tech startups and SMEs through a clear support programme.
The centre was built with government funds and covers an area of 6,720 square metres.
“The new Techo Startup Centre is a place where students will be able to carry out internships, do research and have access to mentors. It will connect universities to the labour market and the private sector to prepare ahead of globalisation and the impact of Industrial Revolution 4.0,” said Minister Pornmoniroth.
Coca-Cola Amatil to invest in Indonesia’s startups [The Sydney Morning Herald]
Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) has showcased its interest in emerging startups in Indonesia and has said that it’s looking to invest in tech companies in the country before the spike it can have triggered by the recent signing of a free-trade deal.
The ASX-listed company based in Australia has launched its venture capital program Amatil X a year ago with US$10 million to invest in companies.
The company will launch a program in Jakarta to extend its search, working with a local startup accelerator to scout out potential investments.
“You’ve just got to look at the size of the population – and a very young population,” said CCA’s group director of partners and growth, Chris Sullivan.
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The startup life is mostly about adapting, improvising and overcoming the obstacles
I am the co-founder of Outside, a community tasking app that makes it easier for people to help each other with their daily inconveniences.
Our team is made up of students and fresh graduates who are passionate about tech and the sharing economy. We have previously attempted several business ideas together and ultimately got back together to build Outside.
This is how we failed, and then realised it gave us what we needed to succeed.
The beginning
I met my co-founder and friend, Dion, back at a social entrepreneurship program in secondary school. After graduation, we decided to try starting up businesses together.
Within a few years, we attempted six different ideas, ranging from tech-enabled crowdsourcing, sustainability, gaming, to even contract jobs and events.
After testing out multiple concepts, we finally arrived at the idea of creating a platform that would make it easier for people to help each other. And thus, Outside was born.
Like most people who lack the ability to build an app themselves, we resorted to outsourcing. However, the experience was not the best.
The constant check-ins with the outsourced developers were very time consuming and the development process took three months longer than what was planned.
Worst of all, the app did not perform as expected.
The six months of designing and gathering feedback led to more functions, and a much bigger price tag. The constant unexpected delays and changes were slowly diminishing our savings.
Soon, we realised that we had to raise more money or drop the app.
As 20 year-olds, this was the toughest decision that we had to make. We considered borrowing money and even tried to apply for bank loans (the banks obviously rejected).
Ultimately, with rising tensions and tighter finances, we had no choice but to let go of the app.
Levelling up
However, soon after, Dion and I felt that it was possible to pick up programming by ourselves to save the app.
The journey was not at all smooth.
While learning and building the app, we hit roadblocks such as learning a framework that couldn’t support the required functions and had difficulty seeking help. We failed to hit our targets and the release for the private beta was pushed back for nearly three whole months.
While rushing for the private beta release, we were constantly in the office till the last public commute. This routine of pushing ourselves only resulted in burning out and increased tensions within the team.
After realising the detrimental effects of our working style, we agreed on building a proper work schedule and system to better manage our work process. Then, with everything in place, we managed to launch our private beta in December 2018.
While we also initially intended for our public beta to launch in December, we received several crucial feedback and noted problems from our private beta testers. This led to us making the decision of doing a controlled scale test instead.
Doing so allowed us to focus on understanding our current testers and helped us in better-adding value to the app.
After fixing up issues and restructuring the app we successfully (and proudly) launched the public beta of Outside in February 2019.
Jin, Nic and Dion (from left to right) representing Outside at Unicon Arena 2019
At this point, we were very lucky and thankful that we were given the opportunity to both open our first booth and pitch for the finals at Unicon Arena 2019. We came in as the runner up within 48 hours of our launch too so yay!
The lessons learnt
1. Skills can be picked up
Don’t look at outsourcing as your only option to build the business, there is a huge existing pool of free resources to pick up the basics; Codecademy for programming and Google Digital Garage for digital marketing and many others as long as you try to search for it.
As always, Google and Youtube are your best friends. There are also countless of tutorial videos and guides available for app development and most things startup related.
I was actually able to attend all the Blitzscaling classes in Standford thanks to Greylock’s Youtube channel.
2. Set KPIs as a team
In order to make things move faster, I ended up setting strict deadlines for the team which only led to ineffectiveness and burnouts instead.
Try to understand the difficulties and make changes to the plans where necessary, allowing the team to suggest their own deliverables will make also help them feel more responsible for their work (Its good to read up on OKRs).
3. Less planning, more “Adapt. Improvise. Overcome”-ing
You’ve probably seen this in the context of a Bear Grylls meme but it’s true, the startup life is mostly about adapting, improvising and (hopefully) overcoming the obstacle as it comes.
There should be a limit on the “In the future/next time” talks and more focus on the “now”. You could be really excited about the future and lose sight of what needs to be done for you to get there.
It’s always good to give some future talk to boost the team morale, but make sure to stay in the present and don’t plan ahead if you are not done deciding on the next few actionable steps.
4. Don’t be afraid
Lastly, do NOT be afraid to reach out and ask for help.
When I was starting out, I was really reluctant to ask for help because I was afraid of them doubting my ability as a startup founder. Although it took me quite some time to get out of my comfort zone, I’ve learnt so much from getting people’s input and sharing of experience.
You should still research and read up on whatever you can before you ask for help. It’s wasteful to take up people’s time to explain things you can read about online when you can learn much more from their practical experiences.
What’s next
Although we have already launched our public beta, we are still very much at the start of our journey. We recently onboarded new members and are currently preparing for our demo day in mid-April.
We are also currently getting more beta testers so that we can collect more feedback to improve on the product. There are also several pretty interesting functions coming down the pipeline that we are very excited to share.
We hope everything works out for the best, and even then, to stay grounded, appreciate failure and never give up! All the best to all the startups out there.
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Outside is currently in Cohort 1 of The Start, a pre-accelerator program by StartupX and Temasek and Cohort 2 of Found8’s Elevate.SG. Keep an eye out for them here.
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In this conversation, the Warung Pintar CEO reveals how the company plans to revolutionise the supply chain of FMCG products
Warung Pintar CEO Agung Bezharie Hadinegoro
Get insights from Agung Bezharie Hadinegoro and more at Echelon Asia Summit 2019. Happening on May 23-24 at the Singapore Expo. Tickets are now available at US$10 each!
In the past one year, Indonesian new retail startup Warung Pintar has made several exciting milestones.
But for CEO and Co-Founder Agung Bezharie Hadinegoro, there are two most important milestones that they have achieved: The number of mom-and- pop shops or warung that they have managed to help (which has reached beyond 1,300 shops) and the significant increase of their monthly income (which has gone beyond 41 per cent with 22 per cent of them experiencing at least 10 per cent growth each month).
“[Through these milestones] we were able to validate that offline transactions are in dire need of ‘online touch’, especially seeing how much efficiency has been brought by the Warung Pintar platform. Plugging into our software turns out out to be really helpful for their business process,” he says in an interview with e27.
Launched in January 2018, Warung Pintar aims to help warungs –an essential part of the daily lives of Indonesians– embrace the digital era by enabling them to perform online transactions and digitising their bookkeeping, warehousing, distribution, and cash register process.
However, the company’s five-year vision goes beyond enabling cashless payments on warung. In addition to help these small businesses becoming more efficient, they also aim to help the FMCG industry generate and track data.
Hadinegoro explains how the FMCG industry has a “very big market” in Indonesia with almost 70 billion items moving in the supply chain.
However, 70 per cent of distribution of these goods are still being done through traditional marketplaces or sellers. This has made it impossible for businesses to track its data, as well as measure inefficiencies and losses.
“We always talk about how to use Big Data, but the main problem here is how to generate the data first. There is very little data generated at the supply chain and retailers; you can never bring in efficiency with that as the data is neither big nor clean enough to know what is happening,” he elaborates.
“There are still many people who trade in the same way as 50 years ago. This is what we try to revolutionise. We might change the way we do things through disruption, but through a revolution, we aim to come up with something entirely new,” the CEO adds.
Getting them to stay
When asked about the challenges that the company faced in acquiring its users, Hadinegoro said that instead of acquiring users, the greatest challenges actually lie in maintaining them.
“You can ask all tech companies, their problem would be the same. You can get 100 merchants on board each month, but how many of them are actively using the platform?” he says.
“So the question is how you can make them stay … [User] acquisition is all about spending money but keeping them is all about how good your product is,” he continues.
Hadinegoro points out that Warung Pintar’s target audiences are not the usual early adopters of tech companies’ services. The problem is not that they are unwilling to do it; the problem is that the products are not designed for them.
“Smartphones may not be made for ojek drivers, but Go-Jek and Grab are made for them. So it’s all about building a human-centered design,” he concludes.
In addition to that, the company also puts emphasis on hiring quality talents for their product team.
Staying inspired
Hadinegoro is one of those startup founders who actually began his entrepreneurship journey by working in a venture capital firm.
Warung Pintar started out as a side project at East Ventures, but external investors then began to convey their interest in the project.
Hadinegoro’s involvement in the project was fueled by his passion in helping small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In his work, he claims to be inspired by the achievements that his grandmother has made.
A paediatrician and an academic, his grandmother works in developing vaccines and has advised the government in public health-related matters.
“She could have made a lot of money but her country needs her money more … I learned that infant mortality rate, from the time she began working as a doctor, has decreased dramatically, thanks to the hard work of her and her colleagues,” Hadinegoro says.
“In measuring the value of what we do, we need to go beyond using ‘happiness’ as a reason. Ironically, many tech blogs on Medium seem to focus on that. What we need isn’t happiness; what we need is usefulness,” he continues.
“Because you can be happy and useless at the same time. But when you’re useful, you will feel happy,” he closes.
From cosplay to pyrotechnics, Garena World 2019 really had it all
Over the weekend, the publicly-listed Sea Group hosted its annual Garena World event in Bangkok. For people relatively new to the eSports industry (I count myself in this group), it was an eye-opening experience.
With nearly 300,000 people in attendance, the scale was unlike anything in the tech space and the enthusiasm of the audience was palpable. Furthermore, because of who it attracted, it was fairly common to see people playing games on their phones while they were watching the professionals.
A core takeaway from the event was the undeniable importance of mobile phones as the most important channel for games. New games are clearly designed to be played on mobile first, and then other “consoles” are the secondary consideration.
“The trend is heavily on the mobile phone. It’s everything. We think, if you develop the game, it has to be mobile. If [gamers] have it on PC, they will have another on mobile,” said Nok Maneerut Anulomsombut.
Garena World 2019 was something to behold, so let’s have a look!
The scale
As mentioned above, the scale of the venue upon walking into BITEC was jaw-dropping. Thousands of people thronged a gigantic space and many of the games were watched by people willingly sitting on the floor.
The scene that greeted me entering the facility
A picturesque statue right in the middle
People were willingly sitting on the floor to catch a glimpse of the matches
The Arena of Valor stadium was a sight to behold
Gamers battle for glory in League of Legends
Kids playing on the sidelines of the event was a fairly common sight
It was also a fantastic opportunity to sell gear
While there were not a lot of demo opportunities, the few around were pretty epic.
The stages were so complicated they required their own broadcast teams.
The cosplay
While definitely not the majority, there were a decent amount of people who attended the event dressed in cosplay. They were not paid by Garena and only a few of them seemed have been representing individual companies. The rest appeared to be hardcore fans who just wanted to take the opportunity to show off their styles to a large amount of people.
Just slightly less effort than I put into my daily outfit
Do you want to fight him or get lost in his eyes?
A look that would strike fear into the heart of any man
She looks delicate, but we all know they are the most powerful characters
While there were certainly photo shoots, this kind of picture was far more common.
A seriously next level costume
The champions
Free Fire, the game developed by Garena, hosted its global championship during the event. It is a Battle Royale game that harkens to Fortnite or Apex Legends. The competition featured teams from as far away a Brazil and Colombia.
The winning team was EVOS Capital out of Indonesia.
Evos Capital celebrates their Free Fire championship
The company also is reportedly set to take over the Philippines operations of the online classifieds giant OLX Group
Carousell, the Singaporean P2P e-commerce site, has raised US$42 million from OLX Group, as first reported by Tech In Asia.
OLX Group is owned by Naspers, one of the world’s leading technology investment firms whose big win is being one of the first investors into a young Tencent.
Furthermore, DealStreetAsia is reporting that Carousell has acquired the the Philippines operations of OLX Group, presumably part of the deal.
If we add up the investments on e27 data, the new investment brings Carousell’s total funding to date to around US$170 million. Its most recent round was a US$85 million in May 2018 after a US$35 million deal in August 2016.
The investment makes OLX Group the third largest stakeholder in Carousell — now owning 11.5 per cent of the company. Rakuten (who just invested in Shopback) owns 29.6 per cent of the company and Sequoia India owns 15.1 percent.
Tech In Asia reported the story based on company filings, which they report value the company at US$365 million.
e27 has reached out to Carousell for comment and clarity about specifics of the deal.
Carousell and Naspers have been dancing with each other for awhile now, with TechCrunch reporting plans of investment about 10 months ago. According to that article, the investment in Carousell is the core strategic move for Naspers in Southeast Asia. Naspers is based out of South Africa.
TechCrunch also reports that the deal was agreed upon awhile ago but was delayed because of Naspers’ IPO in Europe.
OLX Group is a bit of a throwback to the marketplace companies that first help build the startup ecosystem in this part of the world. The company is essentially a conglomerate of various marketplaces in emerging economies (it has operations in countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India). The company is headquartered in The Netherlands.
Assuming the DealStreetAsia report is true, an acquisition of the Philippines OLX operations is logical for Carousell. It would allow the company to scale quickly without having to search for unfamiliar properties in the country.
From an investment perspective, OLX is a natural fit for Carousell as it gives the Singapore startup a partnership with the world’s largest classified’s business.
Carousell operates in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan.
The Myanmar-based IT services provider said that the funding it receives is of a six-digit sum
The Myanmar-based IT services provider MM Digital shares that it has raised a six-digit dollar investment from Singapore-based Seed Myanmar Ventures Limited and investment holding company, Theta Capital Group, as reported by Deal Street Asia.
The funding will be focussed on growing its business. Founder and CEO Aung Pyae Phyo said: “MM Digital plans to use this funding to build the necessary operational infrastructure and recruit more talent.”
Established in 2017, MM Digital Solutions’ services include design, IT consultancy, iOS app, and web-app development. The company said that it builds both customised digital solutions and SaaS platforms for sectors such as consumer lending and hospital booking.
Before investing in MM Digital, Seed Myanmar’s portfolios include investment in delivery service platform, Marathon Myanmar Co Ltd., fitness passes provider Flexible Pass, freelancer platform Chate Sat, MM Tutors, search engine Bindez, and logistics startup Kargo.
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Real estate is one of the largest and most valuable asset classes in the Asia Pacific
According to JLL, a property brokerage and consultancy, the total value of investable global commercial real estate is estimated to reach US$65 trillion by the year 2020, with the Asia Pacific (APAC) accounting for over 30 per cent of it.
The value of APAC real estate is expected to grow strongly alongside increasing urbanisation across the region. However, despite being a key driver of economic value creation in APAC, the real estate industry is still relatively slow in terms of technology adoption.
This is in contrast to the current disruptive trends of technology seen in multiple industries in the region, including finance, fashion, food and transport.
The value chain in real estate is complex and exhibits a high amount of information asymmetry. The industry involves multiple participants, the organisation of disparate information and highly administrative tasks.
Technology is particularly good at resolving such complexities through better data aggregation, identification of critical tasks, and organisation of workflows and processes. The convergence of technology and real estate is called proptech.
There is a significant opportunity for proptech startups in APAC given the thriving real estate market. Investors, as well as entrepreneurs, need to recognise how proptech can bring significant value addition to the APAC real estate industry.
How will proptech startups add value to the real estate industry?
1. Enabling information transparency and transactions
One of the key issues with real estate is information asymmetry, which has resulted in the role of property agencies, brokers and valuation agents seeking large ‘economic rents’ and working very often via word of mouth and using offline channels.
As marketplaces improve and innovate to deliver enhanced information transparency, the buying-selling and leasing-tenancy of real estate will move towards an enhanced online model where entire real estate transactions can be completed online.
We see commercial platforms such as GorillaSpace, a flexi-space tech brokerage, changing the way commercial spaces are leased by allowing landlords to flexibly provide small workspaces on a short-term lease to long term spaces for full-fledged tenants, all enabled online.
Hyper agency models such as Propzy, a hybrid real estate brokerage in Vietnam, not only provides property sales listings but also value add services on property due diligence as part of the online platform’s enhanced offering.
These proptech businesses are leveraging technology to automate paper workflows, provide transparent information to customers and facilitate better customer experience when shopping for a property, be it for personal accommodation or commercial workspaces.
2. Driving operating performance of real estate
As asset owners look towards improving operating performance and financial returns of their properties, proptech players focused on energy and environmental solutions, tenancy engagement and building management are key to creating long-term value uplift of a property.
Companies such as BBP, an energy efficiency management company based in Singapore, provide large scale monitoring solutions with cloud-based remote management of energy usage to lower overall utility costs for commercial properties.
This creates significant cost savings for property owners, translating to a better bottom line and potential uplift in property valuation. Asset management tech players such as Yardi provide solutions around data presentation and business analytics, allowing portfolio owners to have an overview of their entire property portfolio performance.
3. Shortening processing timelines and improving efficiency
Proptech can help eliminate challenges in areas of brokerage, mortgage financing, labour organisation and property management.
By using technology to process information, run operational workflows and assign tasks, real estate companies would have enhanced operational efficiencies with a reduced amount of labour directed to administrative tasks. This will not only reduce costs but will help create better workforce flexibility.
For example, Property Flow, a Thailand-based real estate software startup, provides real estate developers and agents with toolkits on a SASS basis to equip these players to focus on sales outcomes.
RealEstateDoc, a Singapore-based asset management solutions provider for the retail sector, have cloud-based technology suites that reduce the amount of headcount required to asset and tenant manage casual retail spaces, automating payments and lease agreements.
How proptech in Asia differs from the rest of the world
As seen in the past in other industries like e-commerce, fintech and ride-hailing, there is a reason for the existence of Asia-centric models.
This will be no different for proptech players that may adopt from successful models already being built in the US and Europe and localize these models for local distribution.
Language, cultural business practices, level of technology adoption and specific government regulations drive the need for tailor-made adoption across APAC markets.
How investors can help boost the industry
Venture capitalist firms that have the real estate domain expertise are in a prime position to help Proptech startups scale their technology and business aggressively in the region. With an underdeveloped market and large potential upside, an investor can provide significant value in terms of expertise and funding to build up the proptech industry.
We see a synergy between ourselves and real estate companies as we act as a filter to identify high potential startups. We invest and help grow these startups to an appropriate stage for distribution into large corporates.
And, being early in the cycle means we are in pole position to help develop the proptech ecosystem across Asia.
APAC is already a thriving market for real estate and continues to show a strong appetite for new technology advancements. The proptech industry is likely to be in the spotlight in the next year as more eyes turn towards the growing real estate market and its strong potential for growth.
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About Cento Ventures
Cento Ventures’ Proptech fund looks to invest in high potential startups across APAC to deliver products or solutions tailored for the APAC real estate sector. Cento Ventures takes a disciplined approach in selecting portfolio companies with a goal of developing regional winners. The investment team combines real estate domain expertise with regional VC experience to ensure a holistic approach to investment selection.
Cento Ventures is a Southeast Asian venture firm that focuses on identifying and making investments in growth markets based on data-driven reasoning and industry expertise from a multi-disciplinary team. With a pro-founder philosophy, we stay committed to helping our portfolio reach its true potential throughout the entire investment life cycle.
The company said it plans to use the funding to drive international expansion, among other plans
Women-targeted social content marketing company based in Singapore Clozette has announced that it receives US$10 million Series C funding from a public-private fund that belongs to Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Cool Japan Fund.
Cool Japan Fund provides risk capital for businesses that wants to integrate the “Cool Japan” concept into its business.
Clozette said that it will use the funding to scale the company’s proprietary data-driven content and analytics platform, drive international expansion starting with Thailand, and develop an interactive Cool Japan Ecosystem that brings Japanese culture to a new generation of consumers.
“We believe in our vision of authentic content marketing. Content is king – consumers today are blocking ads but consuming content at unprecedented rates on their platform of choice. In the same breath, they demand more authenticity, interactivity, and mobility in their experience. Marketers must embrace this pivotal shift in media consumption behaviours in order to keep up with generational shifts in perception,” said Roger Yuen, CEO of Clozette.
Clozette was founded in 2010 and at that time is said to be the pioneer of storytelling combined with editorial authority as a category on its own. It has a curated user-generated content that is managed by a team of over 90 employees operating in Southeast Asia and Japan.
Clozette’s brand content incorporates original work created by more than 3,500 creators and talents boasting a collective social reach that the company said has exceeded 600 million.
In the past, the company has worked with the likes of Estee Lauder, Shiseido, Zalora, Charles & Keith, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, and Omnicom Media Group.
The company highlighted that its growth in the past year was attributed to its subsidiary in Indonesia, that managed to drive 200 per cent growth making the Series C funding timely.
“The DNA of the Clozette dovetails with Cool Japan Fund’s mission to promote Japanese fashion, beauty, food, travel, and lifestyle to consumers around the globe. Part of the investment will go towards the creation of a multi-lingual Cool Japan Ecosystem that enables the discovery of actionable and shoppable “cool” content about Japan, leveraging the company’s unique storytelling capabilities and network of talents to attract a new generation of fans of Japanese culture in the region and beyond,” said Yuji Kato, COO and CIO of Cool Japan Fund.
