Despite the lingering challenges of the tech industry, Southeast Asian startups are forging ahead with remarkable resilience, as evidenced by the recent influx of funding. From fintech to e-commerce enablers, these ventures are attracting investments to fuel their growth and innovation.
Below are the list and profiles of startups that announced investments this week:
ProCredit
Country: The Philippines
Funding: US$4.1 million
Round: Pre-seed
Investors: Menardo Jimenez Family Office, M Venture Partners, Cento Ventures, Gobi-Core Philippine Fund, and angels
ProCredit is a tech-enabled SME lender in the Philippines started by a founding team that has held senior lending roles at Citigroup, Standard Chartered, ANZ, and the Asian Development Bank. The startup employs credit-first client engagements, a rules-based underwriting and portfolio management architecture, and flexible product offerings incorporating risk-based pricing. It claims to reduce operating costs and expenses while improving customer experience.
1Long
Country: Vietnam
Funding: US$500K
Round: Pre-seed
Investors: Iterative, Monk’s Hill Ventures, R2VP, Orionis Capital
1Long is a wealth management platform. Founded by a team of former investment banking and Y Combinator-backed veterans, 1Long enables individuals to start with as little as 10,000 VND (approximately less than US$1).
It offers two principal savings products, 1Safe and 1Term, designed for flexible savings with annual returns of up to 6.6 per cent and the possibility of earning rewards up to 9 per cent for long-term deposits. The platform allows daily transfers and withdrawals without fees, thus removing barriers to accessing funds.
The new capital will be channelled into technology development, partnerships with asset managers and financial institutions, and strategic team expansion.
K-LINK
Country: Singapore
Funding: Undisclosed
Round: Not specified
Investors: Indelible Ventures, A2D Ventures, Accelerating Asia, angels
K-LINK provides a unified contact centre platform. It aims to simplify enterprises’ customer service operations with its single, omnichannel contact centre platform, eliminating the need for complex telecom infrastructure and costly hardware. Organisations can manage their telephony, social media channels, SMS, email, video calls, tickets, and CRM in one dashboard.
Also Read: Unified contact centre platform K-LINK nets funding for SEA expansion
The capital will fuel K-LINK’s expansion in Southeast Asia.
Refy
Country: Singapore
Funding: US$525K
Round: Pre-seed
Investor: Wavemaker Impact
Refy is an AI-powered green asset fintech financier in Southeast Asia. Refy aims to de-risk smaller green assets for investors by offering asset-based financing solutions. By prioritising decarbonisation, Refy aims to eliminate barriers to project deployment stemming from issues related to bankability.
Refy sees a significant opportunity to increase the bankability of these smaller green assets by supporting high-potential green asset project developers in two main ways:
1- by providing innovative and flexible financing solutions to developers tailored to the nature and risk of the assets,
2- by offering an AI-enabled technology platform that streamlines due diligence and project evaluation processes.
This funding will allow Refy to execute secured pilot projects, develop its technical platform, and assemble a specialised team with experience in green assets and industrial projects.
Komerce
Country: Indonesia
Funding: Undisclosed
Round: Not specified
Investors: Achmad Zaky, 500 Global
Komerce is an e-commerce enabler for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) in Indonesia. Founded in 2020 by Darmawan, Syaefullah Syeif (COO), and Satriyo Budi Utomo (CTO), Komerce offers remote team development, shipping aggregators, e-fulfilment, omnichannel SaaS, and customer relationship management. Headquartered in Purbalingga, Central Java, the startup serves SMEs looking to start and expand their e-commerce business, especially those facing operational efficiency challenges.
Also Read: Achmad Zaky, 500 Global invest in Indonesian e-commerce enabler Komerce
The funding will allow Komerce to accelerate product development and customer acquisition.
ZOLO
Country: Singapore
Funding: US$25K
Round: pre-seed
Investors: Protégé Ventures
ZOLO is an AI-powered B2B software company started by two alums from two Singapore universities. Founded in 2023, ZOLO is designed to simplify orders, payments and deliveries for food suppliers.
In response to the growing trend of restaurants utilising messaging apps like WhatsApp for B2B orders with food suppliers, ZOLO first starts with addressing the challenges posed by text-based orders for food suppliers, which are time-consuming and error-prone (e.g., spelling mistakes, language variations, incorrect interpretation of acronyms). The solution integrates WhatsApp order details, transforming unstructured text messages into structured purchase orders and incorporating them into back-office enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The three-layer AI technology helps suppliers reduce errors, save time, and minimise cost and wastage associated with inefficiencies of manual order processing.
With the solution, suppliers can easily automate and streamline their orders from WhatsApp to ERP in seconds.
Silence Laboratories
Country: Singapore
Funding: US$4.1 million
Round: Not specified
Investors: Pi Ventures, Kira Studio, angels
Silence Laboratories is a cybersecurity startup focusing on Web3 technologies. Founded in 2021 by Dr Jay Prakash, Dr Andrei Bytes, and Dr Tony Quek, Silence Laboratories focuses on privacy-enhancing technologies through a fusion of cryptography and security engineering for enterprises. It aims to create a global infrastructure that enables privacy-compliant collaboration and exchange, eliminating single points of failure.
The fresh funds will be used to scale the company’s tech and business teams and enrich the company’s R&D pipeline.
BuildBear Labs
Country: Singapore
Funding: US$1.9 million
Round: Not specified
Investors: Superscrypt, Tribe Capital, 1kx, Iterative, Plug-N-Play, angels
BuildBear Labs is an innovator in Web3 development tools. Founded by Dipesh Sukhani and Emmanuel Antony, BuildBear Labs is building an automated and continuous testing engine (ACTE) inspired by tools like BrowserStack that goes beyond standard testing to address the unique complexities of the Web3 landscape.
The capital will be used to accelerate the development of BuildBear Labs’s flagship platform.
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