Gobi Partners, MDEC launch SuperSeed II Championship, to invest up to US$3.5M each in winners

Gobi Partners has partnered with the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) to launch a pitching competition, called SuperSeed II Championship, for startups affected by COVID-19.

The winning companies will get the opportunity to secure equity investment from from Malaysia SuperSeed Fund II, a fund jointly announced last year by Gobi, MAVCAP, and Sunway, as well as be a potential MDEC grant recipient.

Additional prizes include the chance to attend an entrepreneurship programme organised by Alibaba Business School and the iLabs Accelerator Program by Sunway Group.

Also Read: MDEC partners 9 Digital Transformation Lab for tech enabling support

The SuperSeed II Championship’s participants must be companies incorporated in Malaysia or have Malaysian founders or shareholders. They can be companies that have substantial operations in the country or have concrete plans to expand their business into the market.

The key verticals that will be considered are retail and enterprise (AI, B2B, B2C, Big Data, e-commerce, and logistics), fintech (crowdfunding, insurtech, mobile payments, P2P lending, and robo-advisors), smart cities and circular economy (construction solutions, e-hailing, environment solutions, IoT, mobility solutions, and public transport solutions), and Taqwatech (companies providing products and services to Muslim consumers and communities).

The deadline for entries is 12 am, June 16, 2020.

The preliminary round is scheduled to take place at the end of June, while the qualifying rounds and final round is set to be held in July and August.

Interested startups can register here.

Openspace Ventures, MDI Ventures, AC Ventures to #SupportStartups during SEA ground-up movement

Openspace Ventures, MDI Ventures, and AC Ventures have launched a national initiative harnessing consumer and business spending in an effort to uplift the Southeast Asian startup ecosystem during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This initiative followed the initial success of Singapore’s #SupportStartups initiative that was launched by Openspace Ventures, 500 Startups, and Cocoon Capital.

The offers will be featured on a combined website (id.supportstartups.com), leveraging the strength of the ecosystem to drive traffic to startups.

The 30 businesses currently listed on the website include B2C and B2B outfits across multiple sectors including fashion, F&B, logistics, e-commerce, enterprise SaaS, co-working space, and digital wealth management.

To each eligible startup registered in the programme, Amazon Web Services is offering US$5,000 in promotional credits.

In Indonesia, the initiative is led by MDI Ventures with the launch of a number of initiatives such as weekly webinars and IndonesiaBergerak.com, with the purpose of spreading information on the outbreak and insight on how businesses can operate in current times.

Interested startups with businesses in Indonesia are encouraged to submit their promotions via the website here.

Malaysian data labelling startup Supahands launches The Supahands Opus Infrastructure

Supahands, a Machine Learning- and Artificial Intelligence-based data labelling startup, has announced the launch of its Opus Infrastructure (OI).

Also Read: Human-powered training data provider Supahands raises Series A funding

The OI offers a fully-managed customer experience for a wide variety of data labelling needs, such as image annotation, sentiment tagging, and data transcription.

Featuring Supahands’s proprietary technology, the OI enables organisations to boost operational agility and engage in end-to-end managed service that produces quality training data for Machine ML and AI at scale, with customisable technology and project-specific workflows.

CEO and Co-founder Mark Koh said that with the demand for AI solutions steadily on the rise, Supahands’s OI supports the technological automation landscape by providing an agile and flexible solution for data labelling workflows.

Singapore fintech Aleta Planet welcomes new hires, focussing on business growth

Singapore-based fintech Aleta Planet has made two senior hires to support business growth as clients ramp up digitalisation efforts.

Jesline Teo will join on June 1, 2020, as Managing Director, Group Finance, while Laurens Lim will come on board as Director, Group Finance, on May 18, 2020.

Teo spent more than 20 years with PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services before joining Aleta Planet. She has led more than 200 merger and acquisition projects with a total value of over US$20 billion, including in- and out-bound as well as cross-border deals.

Lim was Vice President and Team Head of Retail Reconciliation and Investigation at United Overseas Bank prior to joining Aleta Planet. He has been with UOB for the last 17 years, leading investigations and liaising with authorities on matters related to retail and card payments.

Aleta Planet operates from its offices in Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Australia and Dubai, and plans to expand to five new markets within the next two years.
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Photo by Mohd Jon Ramlan on Unsplash

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