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Venture investors turn to AI to find deals; Investment firms such as SignalFire and EQT Ventures are not just investing in tech companies, but are in their own way tech companies — housing their own proprietary AI platforms to analyse and vet investment opportunities; AI uses for firms stretch beyond just investing and it can come handy in sourcing, diligence, placing the investment as well. More here
US$1.65B over next 5 years to go towards grooming Singapore’s future researchers and scientists; The money will go towards funding about 4,700 postgraduate scholarships, as well as 1,000 new traineeships and jobs; These include 175 apprenticeship positions in AI Singapore and 30 traineeships in local deep-tech and software development startups under SGInnovate’s Summation programme. More here
UOB’s VC firm completes the first close of its Asia impact fund at US$60M; Its final close is expected to be completed next year, with a target of US$100M to be raised in total; The new fund will make US$1-15M into companies in agri, education, healthcare, logistics in SEA and China. More here
DBS to launch digital exchange as demand for virtual currencies soar; It will use blockchain to provide a platform for fundraising through asset tokenisation and secondary trading of digital assets; The move comes as institutional investors pumped US$429M into cryptocurrency funds and products for the week ended Dec 7. More here
Singapore’s fintech funding rebounded to US$278M in Q2, report finds; It was US$68M in Q1; Over 40% of SEA’s fintech firms are based in Singapore; The number of fintech firms in the city-state has increased 10x, growing to over 1,000 companies in 2020 from 100 firms just 5 years ago. More here
How did Indonesian startups fair in 2020?; Despite the ongoing crisis, tech startups managed to secure US$1.9B by Q3 2020; There were 52 funding rounds; Fintech with 8 transactions dominated the list, followed by edtech (6), SaaS (6), retail (5) and logistics and e-commerce (4). More here
Vietnam’s real-time consumer data analytics startup Palexy picks US$1M; Investors are Access Ventures, Do Ventures; Palexy plans to expand to SEA, Asia, Middle East in 2021; Palexy empowers retailers to optimise their customer in-store experience and operational efficiency using AI and Computer Vision. More here
David Gowdey of Jungle Ventures: Why we will see an IPO from SEA in the next 12-18 months; There’s a group of unicorns in SEA that have reached the tipping point in terms of their size, scale and maturity of the business; Some of them should start to think about going public. More here
Decacorn Capital invests in Chinese fintech e-commerce firm Qupital; This comes off the back of a US$15M Series A round in 2019; Singapore-based Decacorn primarily invests in cybersecurity, AI and Big Data; Its most recent investments included GridIO, BioCatch and Sixgill. More here
SolarHome extends its Series A with US$2M led by TRIREC and Insitor Impact Asia Fund; The startup brings pay-as-you-go solar solutions into off-grid households in SEA; It claims it is close to being EBITDA breakeven. More here
Singapore ushers ASEAN into new digital banking era; SEA is expected to enter a new era of finance, with digital banks transforming a region that now excludes many people and businesses from financial services; China is likely to take an intense interest in SEA’s digital banks. More here
FinAccel names Akshay Garg new group CEO, Umang Rustagi CEO of Kredivo; The firm said these changes reflect a streamlining of the group structure to better serve its vision of serving 10M customers by 2025; Under the new structure, Kredivo, which operates under the MFC license, and KrediFazz, which operates under the P2P license, will have different focus areas. More here
BillEase ties up with e-commerce platforms for BNPL services; Merchants can now integrate with BillEase and activate Pay Later, Pay in Installments and Pay with Down Payment, which will provide customers with flexibility in payments; Unlike traditional payment methods like credit cards, BillEase is a digital native platform. More here
GIC leads US$100M Series C for Chinese SaaS startup Huice; SoftBank, Legend Capital, GL Ventures also participated; The firm plans to use the new funds to improve its ERP product and hire talent; Huice claims that it serves 670K customers and has over 3,500 employees across the country. More here
Airbnb can teach Asia’s startups the power of being liked; What Airbnb shows us is how a company can build up goodwill starting from home; Some key lessons are ‘pay CEOs last’, ‘build goodwill during downtime’, ‘do not chase growth at all costs’; Likability confers protection, and helps it all the way to raising the financial capital it needs. More here
How investors are adapting to effective due diligence practices in the new normal; Futuristic investors and fund managers see an opportunity in revitalising investment due-diligence processes and infusing technology to weed out the inefficiencies; Platforms such as Dropbox and Google Drive find more user reliability instead of tracking documents on emails. More here
Legaltech on blockchain is set to be the next hot investment sector. Here’s why; AI and ML are bringing significant efficiency improvements to legaltech; Very smart algorithms will be a major growth driver for both established and startup legaltechs going forward; With an AI bot, a lawyer can review a contract in 20-90% less time. More here
ESG announces inaugural SEA innovation challenge at SWITCH; It gives regional companies an opportunity to work on gaps in the media, retail, consumer tech, fintech, proptech, agritech; For the programme, ESG has tapped 5 companies — Central Group, Emtek Group, Hong Leong Holdings, Sunway Group, and VNG Cloud. More here
Vietnam’s equity market attract capital via funds; As of Sept., the total number of funds operating on the market was 52, including 33 open funds, two closed funds, 10 member funds, six ETFs and one real estate fund; The total net asset value managed by the funds is US$1.9B. More here
SEA’s newest impact investor is Japan’s Credit Saison; It will start with roughly US$9.6M to finance companies lending to low-income borrowers and microenterprises; Vietnamese and Indonesian companies are likely to be among the first to receive backing through this initiative, which will go through its Singapore investment subsidiary Saison Capital. More here
US$5.2B national digital infra plan (Jendela) poised to give Malaysia greater digital connectivity; It would lay the foundation for comprehensive and high-quality broadband coverage as well as prepare the country for the transition towards 5G technology; He said Jendela has two phases, where Phase 1 is executed from 2020 to 2022 and Phase 2 from 2022-2025. More here
Rise of digitalisation in the water industry; Leveraging on the potentials of digital tech will enable water management firms to improve the efficiency, profitability and resilience of water treatment plants; They can also capture and derive insights from realtime data and analytics to predict outcomes or crises to allow for timely intervention before critical issues escalate. More here
What SEA’s investment landscape will look like post-COVID; The crisis has birthed new trends, catalysed growth in some sectors and pended others, sending investors back to the drawing board; Five trends that are likely to see strong interest are health-tech, fintech adoption, logistics, travel, proliferation of super apps. More here
The future of healthcare is personalised and contactless; The need to reduce contact between people in hospitals and other healthcare institutions is quickly becoming obvious; The work in those is at an early stage but shows promising results. More here
3 considerations for the future of AI; AI learns to make decisions based on data, which can include biased human decisions or social inequalities; With the help of deep learning, AI is now able to predict new ways to synthesise molecules and even predict future crimes; As the use of AI accelerates, it magnifies the ability to use personal information in ways that will violate data privacy. More here
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Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
The post Ecosystem Roundup: UOB’s VC firm makes 1st close of its impact fund at US$60M; Indonesian startups raise US$1.9B by Q3 2020 appeared first on e27.
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