It’s no secret that the pandemic has spurred a dramatic increase in digital usage around the world. According to a report by Bain, 40 million people came online for the first time last year in Southeast Asia alone. 

As a result, heaps of data is being generated every day. While this presents a massive opportunity for businesses to drive more swift and informed decisions, it also increases their vulnerability to cyberattacks and compromised privacy.

A report by Imperva found that more data was stolen in just January 2021 than in all of 2017. 

This is alarming, especially as the business community’s reliance on data which is now being touted as the new currency, continues to increase.

It also means that to retain consumer trust and competitive edge in the long run, companies need to take significant steps to ensure that they collect, manage and safeguard data correctly. 

Develop a system of checks and balances

Many of us still remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, when the company used a loophole in Facebook’s API and created a third-party app to extract sensitive data of some 87 million users nonconsensually. 

Not only did this start a furore around privacy rights on social media, but it also taught businesses some important lessons. For instance, organisations dealing with large mines of data must ensure they have a system of checks and balances in place.

This is now starting to happen across the board as key industry players, including Google and Apple, are taking significant steps to prioritise user safety. 

Also read: Blockchain is the future of data privacy

At Meltwater, for instance, our team focuses on compliance to social media platforms’ use of rights policy, and we are extremely sensitive to GDPR.

We also have an advisory board, which includes industry veterans, to guide us on how the industry is evolving to ensure we’re always on top of things regarding the ethical use of data. 

Invest in security 

Singapore witnessed its largest-ever data breach in 2018 when personal details of 1.5 million patients from SingHealth’s specialist outpatient clinics were stolen because their IT agency lacked adequate awareness, resources, and training to respond correctly to the cyberattack.

As our world continues to become more digitally connected, IBM found that three in four organisations worry that remote work would make it more difficult for them to respond to potential data breaches.

Businesses need to invest in security software and infrastructure to protect their systems from such vulnerabilities. 

Be transparent with your customers

Last year, a McKinsey survey revealed that consumers’ trust in data collection and privacy practices varies across industries but is low overall. Given this, it’s not surprising that many want to restrict what they share with businesses. 

For businesses, the solution is to take a proactive approach rather than a reactive one. This includes explicitly informing and seeking consent for the data you’re collecting and always ensuring adherence to local and national laws concerning data collection and protection.

Finally, in the event of any data breach, be transparent with your customers and communicate how you intend to protect them moving forward. 

As we move towards a cookieless world, first-party data is becoming increasingly important for marketers. There’s no avoiding this in the digital era, as it will inherently become a part of every businesses’ core strategy.

The solution is for organisations to develop responsible practices and behaviour to ensure that data privacy continues to go hand-in-hand with profitability.

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Grab expands initiative to bring SMEs online

The crux: Grab Financial Group (GFG) has announced the expansion of its ‘Grow with Grab’ suite of products and features to empower small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across Southeast Asia.

With this, the financial arm of Southeast Asia’s tech unicorn aims to tap on the regional e-commerce market opportunity that is expected to reach US$172 billion in 2025.

As per a press note, this is in line with GFG’s move to be more merchant-centric in its offerings and support its merchants’ business growth across the region.

Expanding GrabMerchant Commerce

In May, Grab Financial Group launched webstore builder platform GrabMerchant Commerce to boost sales and reduce operational work and payment risks. Since the pilot programme’s launch in Singapore, over 500 merchants in the apparel, furniture, F&B and artisanal products categories have signed up. GFG says these firms averaged a 6x increase in sales from when they first started their online businesses, with 83 per cent of them activating GrabPay.

Also Read: Abu Dhabi wealth fund to inject US$400M into GoTo’s pre-IPO round

More than just a webstore builder, the GrabMerchant Commerce platform enables small businesses to scale by offering tailored support in areas such as marketing and brand development, as well as advanced operations such as automation, CRM, inventory, and logistics.

With the pilot programme’s success, GrabMerchant Commerce will be scaled up, with more opportunities for merchant-partners to generate sales. By October-end, selected GrabMerchant Commerce merchant-partners can be accessed via the ‘Shopping’ icon in the Grab app, exposing them to millions of Grab users across Southeast Asia.

GrabMerchant Commerce will be rolled out in Malaysia and the Philippines in 2022.

India’s ID verification startup IDfy raises US$11.5M

The crux: IDfy, India-based ID verification and onboarding solutions company, has raised an investment of INR 86 crore (US$11.5 million) in its Series D round of funding.

Lead investors: TransUnion and Blume Ventures.

Plans: IDfy plans to use this funding to strengthen its product offerings and expand the business and operations.

Also Read: Vida attracts funding to provide digital signatures, identity authentication services to Indonesian MSMEs

More about IDfy: Run by Mumbai-based Baldor Technologies, IDfy builds technology products and solutions that accurately authenticate entities. This helps businesses prevent fraud and engage with verified entities with the least amount of friction.

During the last six months, IDfy claims to have helped companies in Southeast Asia and the Middle East onboard verified merchants and customers in sectors such as payments, e-commerce, and mobility.

IDfy says it has performed more than 70 million verifications for 500-plus clients.

Zilliqa names Ben Livshits as new CEO

The crux: Blockchain platform Zilliqa has appointed software tech industry leader Dr. Ben Livshits as its new CEO, effective 11 October 2021.

In this role, Dr. Livshits will be driving Zilliqa’s global strategy, growing its footprint within the crypto space and increasing the market penetration from East to West, as new markets across the world establish themselves as crypto-friendly economies.

He also plans to establish initiatives that expand the capabilities of blockchains to new areas of finance, such as the DeFi sector, digital content creation and distribution, and new ways to connect Zilliqa to real-world applications such as high-value NFTs.

Also Read: Zilliqa launches US$5M fund to back startups building on its blockchain platform

Who is Livshits?: Throughout his career, Dr. Livshits has spent over two decades at tech giants such as Microsoft and Netscape. Before joining Zilliqa, Dr. Livshits served as Chief Scientist at Brave, the company behind the Brave browser. He built and led the company’s research division from the ground up, leading a multidisciplinary team across the globe to help create the world’s first practical privacy-preserving ad targeting and delivery system as well as a number of other technologies based on cryptography and machine learning.

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SAMO Holding, the company behind Vietnam’s financial comparison platform thebank.vn, has secured US$5 million in a Series A round led by UOB Venture Management, the investment arm of Singapore’s United Overseas Bank (UOB).

The development was first reported by Deal Street Asia.

SAMO, which also owns financial advisors platform momi.vn and insurance distribution firm TheBank Assurance, plans to use the latest fundings to expand its business in the country. 

The firm will also broaden its agent network and offer more extensive financial products covering loans, wealth management, insurance and loans.

e27 has contacted SAMO for more details. We will update this piece as and when we hear from the company.  

SAMO was established in 2014 by CEO Dat Thanh Nguyen. Its first product thebank.vn is a free financial advisor website that compares insurance, credit cards, loans, and savings options for consumers. 

The company said that thebank.vn processes more than 1.316 financial products, from house and car loans to travel and health insurance packages. 

It also claims to have clocked more than 2.6 million visits per month and more than 3.1 million advisor requests.

SAMO previously raised an undisclosed sum in pre-Series A funding led by Japan’s CyberAgent and South Korea’s NCore Ventures.

Since 2019, UOB has actively rolled out its fintech accelerator programmes The FinLab, in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. 

In Vietnam, the UOB fund has supported more than US$2 billion in investment into the country and created 17,000 jobs, as noted on the firm’s website.

Vietnam Fintech Report 2020 reported that Vietnam’s fintech startups recorded a 173 per cent growth rate within three years. Payments, P2P lending, blockchain, wealth management and POS services are the five most thriving fintech sectors.

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Also read: SAMO Holding

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Indonesia’s most prominent tech group GoTo Group is set to receive US$400 million from a wholly-owned subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) in its pre-IPO round.

It will be the first principal investment by ADIA subsidiary Private Equities Department (PED) into a technology business in Southeast Asia and its largest investment in the archipelago to date.

ADIA will be the lead investor in this round and joins a global list of prominent GoTo investors, including Alibaba Group, Astra International, Facebook, Global Digital Niaga, Google, KKR, Sequoia India, and PayPal, SoftBank Vision Fund, Telkomsel, Temasek, Tencent and Warburg Pincus.

Also Read: Gojek, Tokopedia confirm merger with the launch of GoTo Group

In August, Reuters reported citing sources that GoTo was set to close an up to US$2 billion pre-IPO funding round in a few weeks. Various reports suggested GoTo plans to list in Indonesia by the end of 2021 before proceeding with a US listing with a potential valuation of $40 billion.

Hamad Shahwan Al Dhaheri, Executive Director of the Private Equities Department at ADIA, said: “This investment in GoTo is aligned with a number of our key investment themes, including the growth of the digital economy in the fast-growing markets of Southeast Asia. We see strong potential in the region, particularly in Indonesia, where the vibrant economic backdrop encourages ADIA to deepen its presence.”

Also Read: 5 lessons from GoTo and Traveloka on building the future of fintech in SEA

GoTo was formed through the merger of Gojek and Tokopedia in May. It is the largest digital ecosystem in Indonesia, whose services span on-demand transport, e-commerce, food and grocery delivery, logistics and fulfilment, and financial services.

The group claims it generated over 1.8 billion transactions in 2020, with a total group gross transaction value of over US$22 billion.

Established in 1976, ADIA is a globally diversified investment institution that prudently invests funds on behalf of the government of Abu Dhabi through a strategy focused on long-term value creation. ADIA has invested in private equity since 1989 and has built a significant internal team of specialists with experience across asset products, geographies and sectors.

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Suppose you see the words “Southeast Asia” in connection with e-commerce. In that case, you probably think of Singapore’s savvy online shoppers or the Filipino e-commerce boom that’s making Manila one of the world’s digital hubs.

And for sure, these markets are exciting, essential and will continue to attract investment for a long time to come. But one country is often left off the list of the region’s digital powerhouses: Indonesia.

And that omission is likely to prove an expensive one for companies who do not capture the opportunities this rapidly expanding market has to offer.

Indonesia’s e-commerce is a growing market

In 2020 alone, Indonesia’s digital economy grew by 11 per cent to a value of US$44 billion. And the digital economy already contributes four per cent to their national GDP. This will come as no surprise to seasoned observers of Indonesia’s digital economy, and particularly its payment sector, which is both thriving and innovative.

In May 2021, ride-hailing and payments giant Gojek and marketplace Tokopedia, Indonesia’s two most prominent startups, merged to form settlements and e-commerce giant GoTo.

With more than 100 million active users, the new group is opening up Indonesian and Southeast Asian e-commerce to new users, demographics and markets.

Also Read: Europe is still in the shadow from an Asian startup point of view: Ubisoft’s Catherine Seys

Indonesia’s preferred ways to pay

It would be a mistake to believe that GoTo, or its payments arm GoPay, are the only kids on the block.  There are almost 150 million Indonesians with internet connections.

This massive online population uses e-wallets and a wide range of bank-transfer apps (contributing to almost 30 per cent of online transactions) and a range of other local payment methods (seven per cent). Indonesians even use cash in around 13 per cent of online purchases.

One of the modern Indonesian payment methods is the local bank transfer app Jenius, with 3.3 million active users, up from 1.6 million just two years ago.

Similarly, Indonesian e-wallet LinkAja recorded a 65 per cent increase in the rate of new-user sign-ups in 2020. During that time, it quadrupled its transaction volumes and grew its revenue by 250 per cent.

Even the Indonesian credit card market has a local twist. Used in just 34 per cent of online transactions, cards are mainly issued by global giants such as Visa and Mastercard.

But the cards used in 13 per cent of transactions are issued by local schemes. This is a substantial chunk of the market which merchants entering the Indonesian e-commerce sector would miss if they only supported the standard payment methods for developed markets.

So, what should merchants, and the service providers who support them, do to prepare themselves for a successful entry into Indonesia’s booming e-commerce and online payments markets? The key is, as ever, localisation.

Also Read: Capturing the next frontier opportunities in the Indonesian e-commerce landscape

Traversing a dynamic e-commerce landscape

The most apparent way merchants and others entering the Indonesian market need to adapt is by optimising mobile.

According to the International Telecoms Union (ITU), just four per cent of Indonesians have a fixed-broadband subscription, while 89 per cent have a mobile-broadband subscription.

And almost 100 per cent of the adult population has a smartphone, while just 19 per cent has a tablet computer.

Language is also an essential aspect of localisation for Indonesians. Over 90 per cent of the population speak and read Indonesian. The most commonly spoken language is Javanese, spoken by almost a third of the country’s inhabitants.

It may be worth noting that the English Proficiency Index, which ranks countries by the proportion of their citizens who speak and read fluent English, puts Indonesia at 74 out of 100.

Probably the most critical requirement, however, is to localise payment methods. Only 29 per cent of all online transactions in Indonesia are paid using globally recognised credit cards. And even this may be an overestimate.

With smartphones now ubiquitous and the uptake of e-wallets, bank-transfer apps and other local payment methods (LPMs) surging, the Indonesian payment market seems set to diversify rapidly.

Also Read: The 27 Indonesian startups that have taken the ecosystem to next level this year

To win in such a fast-evolving environment, merchants and payment service providers (PSPs) must work with a partner that understands local payment culture, preferences and e-commerce conditions.

That’s where PPRO can help. Our local payments infrastructure gives PSPs fast, compliant and seamless access to Southeast Asian local payment methods. All in one place.

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San-Francisco-based global e-signature platform DocuSign announced the launch of DocuSign Ventures which is set to invest in startups that aim to innovate the agreement process, including startups in the Southeast Asia region.

DocuSign Ventures are looking to invest and partner with startups that are working to build solutions in the following areas:

– Agreement process automation and workflows
– AI and smart contract technology
– Identity verification and management
– Digital payment platforms
– Legal and compliance automation technologies
– Vertical solutions in areas such as mortgage and lending

Describing itself as a stage-agnostic investor, DocuSign Ventures said that it targets early stage companies that have achieved early signs of product-market fit or Series A to C stage companies.

It does not typically lead funding rounds and look to co-invest alongside other credible and qualified investors.

Also Read: Legal tech platform INTELLLEX raises US$2.1M funding round led by Quest Ventures

The firm is also “flexible” in its check sizes with no stated maximums or minimums with typical deals that are up to 10 per cent of a round size.

“Agreements are fundamental to everything, traversing how we conduct business and defining the important life commitments we make and depend upon. Despite their essential nature, the agreement process today is still largely manual, static, and rooted in paper,” said Eric Darwin, Head of Corporate Development at DocuSign.

“More and more businesses are recognising the power and urgency of digitising their agreement processes in order to meet the new ‘anywhere expectations’ of their customers, partners, and employees. DocuSign Ventures is excited to partner with the disruptors who are propelling smarter, simpler and frankly better ways of executing and fulfilling agreements,” he continued.

DocuSign Ventures will give its portfolio companies access to its knowledge and experience in the space as well opportunity to develop closer partnerships with the DocuSign Agreement Cloud platform and work with DocuSign’s broader ecosystem of customers, developers and partners.

It has invested in BlackBoiler, DataGrail, Pactum, Snapdocs, and a recent investment in The LegalTech Fund.

e27 has reached out to DocuSign Ventures to find out more details of their plans with Southeast Asian startups.

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Doyobi, a Singapore-based provider of STEM teaching resources and teacher professional development to school, has bagged a US$2.8 million pre-Series A funding round led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. 

Tres Monos Capital, Novus Paradigm Capital, and XA Network also joined. 

Carousell CEO Quek Siu Rui, Glints co-founders Oswald Yeo and Seah Ying Cong, and Head of Grab Financial Group Reuben Lai, also co-invested in the round.

Doyobi intends to use the money to build new cohort-based courses focused on upskilling teachers. It will also develop new resources to help teachers effectively deliver STEM and 21st-century skills, including creative and critical thinking, in the classroom.

The capital will also be allocated to expand ‘Instructors As Humans’ — an online community for teachers to seek peer support and professional development chances.

Doyobi also plans to launch the STEM School Leader Fellowship. It aims to assist school leaders, such as principals and department heads, learn how to effectively apply STEM principles in the classroom and develop students’ skillsets and attitudes necessary for more career choices as inventors, entrepreneurs, and changemakers.

Also read: Edutech is surging, but here are the 3 issues it is facing

Founded in 2020, Doyobi is a spin-off from Singapore’s coding school Saturday Kids. 

CEO and co-founder John Tan witnessed a gap between what is taught in schools and what children need to know to be prepared for future employment.

“Curiosity, imagination and empathy are just as important as literacy and numeracy skills. We believe teachers are integral to transforming the classroom experience,” he said.

Therefore, Doyobi enables teachers and school administrators to integrate STEM and 21st century-related classes in a fun and engaging way with guided courses that include videos, quizzes, and projects.

Since its inception, the startup claims to have onboarded nearly 2,000 instructors in over ten countries to use Doyobi’s virtual learning environment.

It counts Leap Surabaya, Codercademy, and private schools, such as HighScope Indonesia, Mutiara Harapan Islamic School, and Stella Gracia School, among its partners. 

While Indonesia and the Philippines are Doyobi’s biggest markets, African educational institutions are also adopting the Doyobi curriculum, said the company.

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Novatti Group, an ASX-listed Australian fintech company, announced today it has acquired Malaysian digital payments firm ATX Fintech Holding.

Novatti will acquire all of the issued share capital of ATX for a minimum consideration of approximately A$8.4 million up to A$9.9 million (US$6.2-7.4 million ).

The agreement is pending due diligence and regulatory approvals. The two companies expect to close the deal by the end of next month.

Novatti, whose solutions include issuing, acquiring, processing, and billing, has been a partner of ATX since 2015.

As per a statement, the acquisition offers an opportunity for Novatti to use its ecosystem and resources to scale the existing ATX business in Malaysia, introduce new services, such as billing, and further expand across Southeast Asia.

Also Read: 5 lessons from GoTo and Traveloka on building the future of fintech in SEA

In addition, there is potential to add other value-added products to ATX’s customer base.

The deal also presents strategic value for Novatti on several fronts, including access to an established network of 30,000+ payments touchpoints across Malaysia, providing an on-the-ground presence in Southeast Asia for further expansion (including leveraging Novatti’s partnerships with other fintech leaders, such as Ripple); and access to ATX’s leadership team and its existing innovative solutions and technology, including its e-wallets.

This announcement follows Novatti’s closing of A$10.5 million (US$7.8 million) Series A round.

Founded in 2011 by Sashie Kumar and Kelly Koh, ATX provides traditional retail stores and kiosks with digital payment services, such as third-party bill and product payments.

ATX owns and operates several B2B and B2C brands — PayHub (B2B payments aggregator), GoPay (B2C digital wallet), MyPOSPay (B2B2C platform for traditional retailers), and RuncitHero (B2B2C online marketplace for grocers).

In FY21, ATX claims to have generated normalised annual revenue of A$3 (US$2.2) million.

Also Read: 21 Southeast Asian startups that help banks gain ground in fintech competition

Novatti MD Peter Cook said: “The acquisition will not only provide Novatti with a strong business in Malaysia but also provides a platform to continue our expansion in Southeast Asia, where we see increasing growth in digital payments. This growing demand has already supported some of Novatti’s other recent activities in the region, including the expansion of our partnership with Ripple into Thailand, after launching in the Philippines earlier this year.”

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In the cybersecurity industry, there is an arms race. Cybersecurity services providers and products are increasing their efforts in detecting new attacks (called zero-day vulnerability exploitations).

At the same time, cybercriminals are finding unheard ways to exploit networks. So far, ransomware gangs are winning – now is the time to invent or re-think if the current detection-only methodology is working.

In an arms race, the end result is that damages or threats are getting more destructive. First-generation ransomware only encrypts files.

Now, the latest ransomware attack uses inventive methods to maximize their threats. The attackers would extract a large quantity of sensitive information from victims before encrypting data, and then threaten to release or sell the stolen information, exerting greater pressure and urgency on the victims to pay the ransom.

Lockfile evades detection

AI and ML are used to detect abnormal behaviour in the network or PCs. But ransomware developers are not sitting ducks. Recently, there is new ransomware called Lockfile, using an innovative file encryption technique to evade detection.

It does not continuously encrypt files, it encrypts 16 bytes of data in a file and then skips 16 bytes. This saves time and is also harder to detect by cybersecurity tools. The data file is damaged (or taken hostage ) nevertheless. LockFile is just one example of this cat and mouse game, never-ending!!

“The use of blacklisting as a form of cybersecurity protection is common, but it requires ­security ­personnel to keep a permanent eye out for any ­malware they want to block from an agency’s IT ­environment. That can be a daunting prospect.” said Erin Brereton from fedtechmagazine.

Also Read: Explore cutting-edge cybersecurity tech at SINCON 2021

One method able to end this arms race is URL whitelisting. IT managers can isolate their network using whitelisting and only allow a list of trusted or pre-approved domains for users to access. These whitelists should only include well known, vetted and trustworthy websites, like banks or government websites.

Since ransomware is not hosted on these websites, it is impossible for ransomware to download or upload data as each network connection to malicious websites is blocked by default.

Whitelisting websites has its disadvantages and it is why it is not popular. Firstly, it reduces productivity – users are not able to access new websites or anything outside the whitelist. Secondly, maintaining the whitelist is resource-intensive with a complicated risk assessment process to approve new websites and add the domain name into the whitelist.

The inversion of whitelisting is blacklisting, which most of the security vendors are offering. They constantly collect logs, netflow or file hashes and then send alerts, threat intelligence or Indicator of compromise (IOCs).

Company security teams convert these alerts or threats intel into firewall rules or web filtering rules. It is a never-ending game and only effective if your company has a team of cybersecurity professionals. Collecting logs and user activities without violating privacy laws is also challenging!

“At first blush, this (whitelisting) seems to make security a snap: you don’t have to worry about new malicious code emerging as a threat to your infrastructure because the only things your machines can access are things you already know are safe.” by Josh Fruhlinger, journalist from CSO Online.

Augmented whitelisting

Traditional whitelisting is not user-friendly. Hence, we propose a new augmented whitelisting, which allows users to access unknown or not yet approved websites in a walled garden.

With AP Lens augmented whitelisting, pre-approved or well-known websites are allowed and users access it directly. For example, the top 100K websites in users’ countries. When accessing a new website outside of this 100K domain, users are forwarded to an AP Lens virtual browser session.

Also Read: Practical tips to protect your business from cyber attacks

The virtual browser is delivered to the end-user instantly without any software install and in the same Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Edge. The website is opened automatically inside AP Lens with full user interactions.

In this new setup, the user’s freedom is not restricted and there is no blocking of information flow. The new website is fully operational inside a remote sandbox totally segregated from the company network.

The organisation should develop a web domain whitelist for each HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure domain and Secure Socket Layer domain.

Augmented Whitelisting means you enforce 100 per cent network protection without sacrificing users’ freedom or productivity. The walled garden by AP Lens is the key to augmented whitelisting. Users are using the internet inside a sandbox hosted in a cloud-based system.

Any attack or exploitation is totally separated from the company network. The uniqueness of AP Lens is that users can access the Internet instantly without IT support manually updating the whitelist which solves the major drawback when implementing whitelisting — a time-consuming process to update the URL whitelists.

With AP Lens,  productivity and cybersecurity are balanced, by combining whitelisting and cloud-based remote secure browsers.

Agentless and supports four popular browsers (Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Edge) on smartphone/desktop, AP Lens is a distributed cloud system that offers both low latency and also robust cloud infrastructure. Each AP Lens session is disposable which means that any attack or downloaded code is not stored or affecting the next session.

Also Read: What is web 3.0 and why should you care?

In 2021, we are facing an increasing level of targeted cyberattacks, at the same time cybersecurity industry is short-handed. It is time to adjust our cyber defence strategy with a new paradigm.

Do not overly rely on resource-intensive cyber threats detection and blocklist. Lockdown the network and let users access the internet in a walled garden offers simple and balanced web access protection.

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Geniebook, a Singapore-headquartered edutech startup, has secured US$16.6 million in a Series A financing round co-led by East Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Individuals, who participated in the round, include Dunce Capital’s John Danner, Unacademy’s Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini, Snapdeal’s Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal and other senior executives from Southeast Asia’s unicorns such as Grab, Shopee, and Gojek. 

With the new investment, Geniebook intends to scale its current global personnel of 350 people with strategic hires in curriculum, engineering, product, and growth teams.

The funds will also be used to innovate existing products, including AI-personalised worksheets GenieSmart, live online classes GenieClass, and real-time teacher chat GenieAsk. 

Also read: Edutech is surging, but here are the 3 issues it is facing

Launched in 2017 by Neo Zhizhong and Alicia Cheong, Geniebook employs AI and machine learning to assist students in improving their academic performance through personalised experiences on its platform.

“More than ever today, with online pedagogy becoming essential, we must greatly enhance the digital experience to accelerate students’ learning,” said CEO Zhizhong. 

Geniebook supports the home-based learning gains through self-directed and social learning methods.

As per a press statement, Geniebook has achieved a 2,000 per cent growth rate since the beginning of 2019, with more than 150,000 users in Southeast Asia. Its revenue in Vietnam has increased 3x since its expansion into the country earlier this year.

So far, Geniebook has made inroads into Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia, besides Singapore.

The startup claims it maintains profitability and positive cash flow thanks to a solid financial year in 2020.

“As we enter the second year of the pandemic, when schools and students have to seek online arrangements, edutech companies are playing an important role and have accelerated their delivery of solutions to users,” said Roderick Purwana, managing partner at East Ventures.

Before this round, GenieBook received US$1.1 million in pre-Series A round led by Apricot Capital, a Singapore-based diversified multi-asset private investment company. 

Global edutech revenues are anticipated to reach US$40.9 billion (S$56.3 billion) by 2022, with the Asia Pacific region accounting for more than half of worldwide market demand, reports Research and Markets.

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Also read: Geniebook

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