Official Record
Deal focus: Southeast Asia’s four-trick credit pony
Advance Intelligence Group has used its core risk assessment technology to expand into lending and e-commerce transaction finance and services. Membership of Southeast Asia’s unicorn club is its reward
Deal focus: Investors flock to SaaS specialist Ones
China’s Ones aspires to become Atlassian rather than Slack, catering to software developers working on complicated projects. Effective localization is partly responsible for a surge in VC investment
Deal focus: Vision Fund bets on service robots
COVID-19 crippled demand for restaurant service robots, so China’s Keenon Robotics pivoted towards hospitals. It has $200 million in Series D funding to target new application scenarios
Fund focus: Lever leverages spiking food tech appetite
The debut fund from Hong Kong’s Lever VC has tapped an infection point in global demand for food innovation. A mix of motivators for entering this space makes the hype feel less like a bubble
Deal focus: Deeproute founder jumps at second chance
Deeproute.ai has risen from the ashes of China-based autonomous driving specialist Roadstar.ai, backed by some of the same investors. Now Alibaba Group has given the company its endorsement
Fund focus: AGIC sticks to cross-border growth thesis
Having found its sweet spot bridging the middle markets of Asia and Europe, AGIC Capital plans to stay there – although Fund II will move earlier to capture technology hardware post-commercialization
Deal focus: ShopUp champions the iron triangle
As a first mover in Bangladesh’s B2B e-commerce space, ShopUp moved quickly into services, logistics, and finance. This inadvertent super app now has $75 million in Series B funding to show for its efforts
Deal focus: Affinity capitalizes on enforced divestment
Delivery Hero was instructed to offload Yogiyo as a condition of buying Woowa Brothers. Affinity, Permira, and GS Retail made the most of a $685 million opportunity to enter Korea’s food delivery space
Deal focus: Vision Fund throws its weight behind Opay
An introduction from SoftBank Ventures Asia prompted Vision Fund 2 to lead a $400 million Series C for Nigeria-based Opay, creating Africa’s newest technology unicorn in the process
Deal focus: India’s AppsForBharat inspires VC devotees
AppsForBharat aims to be the first mobile player to create a product that sticks in the hard-to-monetize spirituality services space. Sequoia Capital India and Matrix Partners India are among the faithful
Deal focus: Ekuaibao’s PaaS plus SaaS proposition
China-based reimbursement platform Ekuaibao has ambitions to lead the digital transformation of corporate finance. Early investor Future Capital continues to re-up as the story unfolds
Deal focus: Singapore's Doctor Anywhere raises $65m Series C
Doctor Anywhere’s omnichannel approach to digitizing Southeast Asian healthcare is luring investors with eyes on the pandemic’s most logical trend. Preserving a first-mover advantage is the challenge
Deal focus: EmergeVest turns to Lucy for financial inclusion
EmergeVest has made a seed investment in Lucy, a Singapore-based neobank that focuses on home-based micro-entrepreneurs and Southeast Asia’s legions of foreign domestic workers
Start-up profiles: Digital banking, embedded finance, crypto banking
The Philippines’ Tonik breaks ground in neo-banking; India’s YAP finds new ways to connect banks with their customers; Singapore’s Matrixport scales fast with decentralized finance
Start-up profiles: Infrastructure, insurance, data, payments
Singapore’s Fireblocks tokenizes traditional banks; India’s PolicyBazaar mulls the future of insurance; China’s Rong360 diversifies through data; Cambodia’s Clik targets a payments frontier
Start-up profiles: Transfers, risk, marketplaces
Singapore’s Thunes rethinks remittances for an enterprise clientele; China’s IceKredit brings data privacy to credit scoring; India’s OfBusiness gravitates towards a healthy loans segment
Deal focus: GA backs VNLife’s two-pronged fintech play
VNLife is not alone in trying to build value-added services onto a payment platform in Vietnam, but it is unusual in being able to rely on a profitable B2B digital banking business while figuring out monetization
Deal focus: Warburg Pincus returns to ESR
The sale of ARA Asset Management to ESR will create a real estate behemoth primed to go big on e-commerce-driven logistics and data centers – and allow Warburg Pincus to reunite with the platform it seeded
Deal focus: ShareChat makes hay in TikTok’s absence
The Indian social networking platform has seen its valuation grow more than fourfold in the past year, helped in no small part by the rise of short video offering Moj as an alternative to TikTok
Deal focus: Chiratae sees 43x return on gaming start-up
India’s Chiratae Ventures has realized its largest-ever exit in terms of multiple with a zero-to-one leap of faith for local gaming studio PlaySimple
Deal focus: MyGlamm leverages brand awareness
The Indian direct-to-consumer beauty brand claims to stand out from the competition thanks to broad product coverage and a content-driven customer acquisition engine. Its Series C investors appear to agree
Deal focus: Go1 adds layers to booming HR services niche
Australia’s Go1 gains traction with a B2B approach to a rapidly expanding human resources and workforce management software industry. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 is among the believers
Deal focus: IMM sees structural change in home decor
Having agreed to provide a succession solution to the founder of Korean furniture retailer and interior designer Hanssem, IMM Private Equity wants to harness growth through demographics and differentiation
Deal focus: Neiwai realizes value offline
Vertex Ventures China was adamant that Neiwai should expand offline on leading a Series B for the lingerie brand in 2017. Four years and two rounds later, the strategy is paying off