Tag: Asia

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After botched IPO, Asian streaming startup M17 gets a $35M lifeline from investors

Asian tech company M17, which operates a live-streaming platform and data app business, has confirmed that it has canceled its proposed U.S. public listing and raised private funding to keep its business alive.

The Taiwan-based company dramatically halted its NYSE listing last Friday despite pricing its IPO, and now it has clarified the situation. Well, sort of. In an announcement, the company said it had run into “settlement issues” related the listing which is why it was called off.

That’s fairly vague, but a little more color came from founder (and rapper) Jeffrey Huang, who lashed out at investment banks Citigroup and Deutsche Bank in a Facebook post (below), as noted by Bloomberg.

A spokesperson representing the company declined to comment further.

Rather than going public, M17 will remain private. The IPO was set to raise around $60 million — having been scaled down from an original target of $115 million — but now M17 has taken a $35 million injection from existing backers that include Infinity Venture Partners, Majuven, Convergence and Global Grand Capital.

The listing looked rocky from the start when M17 failed to hit that $115 million goal, while the shares were priced at $8, below the forecast range of $10-$12.

Investors weren’t taken by the business, it seems, which is primarily live-streaming services for registered artists in markets included Taiwan and Japan. It monetizes by selling virtual gifts to viewers who in turn give them to streaming artists. The company also operates dating services courtesy of M17’s merger deal with Singapore-based Paktor last year, but that accounts for under 10 percent of revenue.

TechCrunch Danny Crichton explained the situation last week when the IPO was halted, but M17’s surging revenue — which grew 3.2X year-on-year — was offset by significant losses — a negative $24.8 million in the first three months of this year — and stagnant active user growth. Alarmingly, the company had limited runway with just $31.4 million in cash and cash equivalents left on its books.

M17 had developed ways to monetize its user base more efficiently, but with some quirks. For example, its top 10 users represent 12 percent of all revenue on the platform — to the tune of $447,220 per user in the first three months of 2018 — while more broadly its top 500 users were responsible for the majority of total revenue. On the artist side, the top 100 streamers picked up over one-third of total income, too.

Finally, there may have been unease at the voting structure. Under a dual-class stock system, CEO Joseph Phua would maintain 56 percent of the voting rights with Class B shares voting at a 20:1 ratio against Class A shares.

The fresh cash injection will keep the business running a little longer, M17 will need to quickly figure out a Plan B to remain out of trouble.

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IP platform PatSnap picks up $38M from Sequoia and Xiaomi founder’s fund

PatSnap, a Euro-Asian company that offers a patent and R&D platform and services, has pulled in a $38 million Series D funding round led by existing investors Sequoia and Shunwei Capital, the investment firm founded by Xiaomi co-founder and CEO Lei Jun. Southeast Asia’s Qualgro also took part.

All three backed the company in 2016 when it led an undisclosed Series C round. While PatSnap didn’t give a figure for that previous round, it is saying this time around that it has raised over $100 million to date. Doing some quick via math via figures on Crunchbase suggests that the Series C was something in the region of $50 million.

PatSnap was founded in 2007 and it is based out of the UK and Singapore, with locations in China and the U.S.. The company started out as essentially a directory for IP, helping companies — and particularly enterprises — pull in data for R&D and product development purposes.

The company claims 8,000 clients worldwide, with the U.S. its largest market for revenue. PatSnap said that in China, its second-largest market and a major focus for the firm, it said it has more than 4,500 clients. In addition to its core service, it is focused on going beyond a data repository to offer services for enterprises that help manage internal product development and other R&D initiatives.

“Patent data let us kick down the door and earn respect, but now we’re looking at completely different products,” Ray Chohan, SVP of corporate strategy at PatSnap told TechCrunch in an interview. “We are working on new products for R&D with a long-term view of becoming the software stack for R&D teams.”

That’s exactly how this new capital will be put to work, Tiong said. Related to that, the company plans to open an office in Toronto, Canada, for development. Already, the company has 700 staff across a range of offices that include London (commercial), China (product), Singapore (machine learning) and LA (go to market).

Series D is a fairly advanced stage for a startup in Southeast Asia (and London) and exits are something that the tech industry is giving more thought to given the growth of the ecosystem, and events such as Sea’s U.S. listing last year. Despite that, Chohan — who founded the company’s London-based office — said that he’s not thinking too hard about the future for now.

“Our obsession is our employees, customers and building great products, if we can do that then the byproduct of a liquidity event will happen by itself,” he explained.

Chohan added that PatSnap is “well funded” and on course to become profitable over the next two to three years.

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Samsung launches new fund for early-stage AI investments

Samsung is diving deeper into artificial intelligence after it announced a new fund focused on AI technologies and startups.

The Korean firm’s ‘Samsung NEXT Q Fund’ is targeted at seed and Series A deals for startups that are “solving AI problems, as well as those using AI to solve computer science problems.” In particular, the announcement revealing the new fund mentioned areas that include learning in simulation, scene understanding, problem learning programs and human computer interaction.

The fund itself doesn’t have a dedicated kitty, it instead invests from Samsung’s $150 million U.S. Next Fund, which was announced last year and is focused on early-stage companies in emerging tech verticals.

The Q fund has already cut checks, though. To date it has backed a number of companies, one of which is Covariant.AI — a startup that teaches skills to robots.

“For the past ten years, we’ve watched software eat the world. Now, it’s AI’s turn to eat software. We’re launching Q Fund to support the next generation of AI startups who look to scratch beyond the surface of what we know today,” said Samsung NEXT Ventures’ Vincent Tang in a statement.

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Truecaller makes first acquisition to build out payment and financial services in India

Sweden’s Truecaller started out life as a service that screens calls and messages to weed out spammers. In recent times the company has switched its focus to India, its largest market based on users, adding services that include payments to make it more useful. Now Truecaller is putting even more weight behind its India push after it announced its first acquisition, mobile payment service Chillr.

The vision is to go deeper into mobile payments and associated services to turn Truecaller into a utility that goes beyond just handling messages and calls, particularly payments — a space that WhatsApp is preparing to enter in India.

Truecaller doesn’t have WhatsApp -like scale — few companies can match 200 million active users in Indua, but it did recently disclose that it has 100 million daily active users worldwide, while India is its largest country with 150 million registered users.

Truecaller has raised over $90 million from investors to date, according to Crunchbase. TechCrunch reported in 2015 that it was in talks to raise $100 million at a valuation of around $1 billion, but a deal never happened. Truecaller has instead raised capital from Swedish investment firm Zenith. Chillr, which offer payment services between over 50 banks, had raised $7.5 million from the likes of Blume Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

Truecaller isn’t disclosing how much it has paid for the deal, but it said that Chillr’s entire team of 45 people will move over and the Chillr service will be phased out. In addition, Chillr CEO Sony Joy will become vice president of Truecaller Pay, running that India-based payment business which will inherit Chillr’s core features.

“We’ve acquired a company that is known for innovation and leading this space in terms of building a fantastic product,” Truecaller co-founder and CSO Nami Zarringhalam told TechCrunch in an interview.

Zarringhalam said the Truecaller team met with Chillr as part of an effort to reach out to partners to build out an ecosystem of third-party services, but quickly realized there was potential to come together.

“We realized we shared synergies in thought processes for caring for the customer and user experience,” he added, explaining that Joy and his Chillr team will “take over the vision of execution of Truecaller Pay.”

Truecaller added payments in India last year

Joy told TechCrunch that he envisages developing Truecaller Pay into one of India’s top three payment apps over the next two years.

Already, the service supports peer-to-peer payments following a partnership with ICICI Bank, but there are plans to layer on additional services from third parties. That could include integrations to provide services such as loans, financing, micro-insurance and more.

Joy pointed out that India’s banking push has seen many people in the country sign up for at least one account, so now the challenge is not necessarily getting banked but instead getting access to the right services. Thanks to gathering information through payments and other customer data, Truecaller could, with permission from users, share data with financial services companies to give users access to services that wouldn’t be able to access otherwise.

“Most citizens have a bank account (in each household), now being underserved is more to do with access to other services,” he explained.

Joy added that Truecaller is aiming to layer in value-added services over its SMS capabilities, digging into the fact that SMS remains a key communication and information channel in India. For example, helping users pay for items confirmed via SMS, or pay for an order which is tracked via SMS.

The development of the service in India has made it look from the outside that the company is splitting into two, a product localized for India and another for the rest of the world. However, Zarringhalam said that the company plans to replicate its approach — payments and more — in other markets.

“It could be based on acquisitions or partners, time will tell,” he said. “But our plan is to develop this for all markers where our market penetration is high and the market dynamics are right.”

Truecaller has raised over $90 million from investors to date, according to Crunchbase. TechCrunch reported in 2015 that it was in talks to raise $100 million at a valuation of around $1 billion, but a deal never happened. Truecaller has instead raised capital from Swedish investment firm Zenith.

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Sea seeks $400M raise to develop its e-commerce and payment businesses

Southeast Asia-based internet firm Sea is raising $400 million through the sale of notes in what would be its first fundraising activity since it went public via in an October 2017 IPO that raised over $1 billion.

The Singapore-based company, formerly known as Garena, said that the senior note offering will put toward general costs and business expansion. Long-time investor Tencent is expected to buy up $50 million of the notes on offer, and the offering itself could be extended by a further $60 million.

Sea’s IPO was a landmark for Southeast Asia, where startup exits are few and far between, but the company hasn’t exactly set Wall Street on fire since making its public bow. Its share price is $16.40 at the time of writing, having debuted at $15. It has risen thanks to gains over the past month following its most recent earnings but initially the company spent a lot of time priced under $15.

Sea share price, via Yahoo Finance

So what got investors excited? In short, signs of growth.

Revenue for Q1 jumped 81 percent year-on-year as its Shopee e-commerce service doubled its GMV and the firm’s AirPay payment unit quadrupled its transaction volume, but ultimately the business remains unprofitable. Losses jumped from $73 million to $216 million and Sea’s cost of revenue more than doubled, indicating that it is still chasing growth for its businesses.

While AirPay and Shopee, which competes with the likes of Alibaba-owned Lazada for the attention of Southeast Asia’s 600 million consumers, are growing, the same can’t be said of Sea’s main business. It rose to prominence selling games via its Garena service, with Tencent a particular ally here, but that business is seeing new user growth flatten and and revenue gains slow.

It makes sense that Sea is playing up its digital business since the big opportunity in Southeast Asia is e-commerce, as evidenced by Alibaba’s recent double-down on Lazada — which it first bought a majority stake in for $1 billion in 2016. Alibaba invested $1 billion more in 2017 and then a further $2 billion in March to increase its ownership. It also installed a number of its own executives in a bid to help Lazada grow its business and the overall e-commerce industry in Southeast Asia, too.

A much-cited report co-authored by Google forecasts that e-commerce in Southeast Asia will surpass $88 billion by 2025. That’s up from an estimated $10.9 billion in 2017.

Sea said previously that it expects Shopee to reach $8.2-$8.7 billion in GMV in 2018, a increase that’s potentially as high as 112 percent year-on-year. That’s up on its previous guidance of $7.5-$8 billion but, since it is GMV, it doesn’t translate to direct revenue for the company itself. Sea had previously boosted Shopee by allowing a high burn rate to fund merchant and buyer promotions. It only began to monetize the service last year.

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Southeast Asia’s Grab lands $1B from Toyota at a $10B valuation

Grab, the ride-hailing firm that acquired Uber’s Southeast Asia business earlier this year, is raising a new round of funding and it just announced that it will be led by Toyota, which is committing $1 billion in capital. The deal values Grab at $10 billion, a source close to the company told TechCrunch.

In return for its capital, Toyota will also get a board seat and the opportunity to place an executive within Grab’s team. Grab said it plans to work with its new investor “to create a more efficient transport network that will ease traffic congestion in Southeast Asia’s megacities” and help its drivers increase their income. In particular, that will involve close collaboration with the Toyota Mobility Service Platform (MSPF), which is working on areas such as user-based insurance, new types of financial packages and predictive car maintenance.

“Going forward, together with Grab, we will develop services that are more attractive, safe and secure for our customers in Southeast Asia,” said Toyota executive vice president Shigeki Tomoyama in a statement.

Toyota put money into Grab via its Next Technology Fund last year, but this time around the capital comes directly from the parent company. Hyundai is another automotive firm that has backed Grab.

The new round follows a $2.5 billion investment that was jointly led by SoftBank and China’s Didi, two long-time investors put an initial $2 billion up for the round last year. That round quietly closed at the start of 2018, Grab has confirmed but so far it hasn’t said who put up the additional money.

The company’s valuation had been $6 billion but, unsurprisingly since the Uber deal, it has jumped by a further $4 billion based on Toyota’s investment.

Grab now claims over 100 million downloads of its app across eight countries in Asia, including Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and more. The firm said its annual revenue run rate has now surpassed $1 billion, although it declined to provide profit or loss numbers.

While it did remove Uber from the region by acquiring its business — although the deal didn’t go as smoothly as had planned — that exit prompted new entrants to jump into the region with Indonesia’s Go-Jek, in particular, looking like the key foe. Go-Jek, which is valued at some $4.5 billion, recently announced plans to expand to four new markets having itself raised a significant $1.5 billion round.

Aside from competition, Singapore-based Grab has kept its busy in recent years expanding its services from point-to-point taxis and private car hailing to include mobile payments, food delivery and dock-less bicycles. Earlier this month it officially unveiled Grab Ventures, a unit focused on helping building out an ecosystem through investment and mentoring.

Grab Ventures is not a VC arm, but it does plan to make 8-10 investments over the next two years while it will also open an accelerator program for “growth-stage” startups — although that doesn’t include equity investments for cash. The division will also focus on incubating new business ideas, which include its recently launched Grab Cycles product which aggregates on-demand bikes from a range of companies.

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Vietnam’s new cyber security law draws concern for restricting free speech

Big tech firms including Google, Facebook and Twitter have expressed major concern after Vietnam’s government passed a law that promises to introduce tighter restrictions on free speech online.

The new regulation passed this week strengthens the government’s position on censoring the internet, drawing Amnesty International to decry that it leaves “no safe place for people to speak freely” in Vietnam. Asia Internet Coalition (AIC) — a group that represents Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Line and others — furthered cautioned that it would harm the development of the country’s digital economy.

Among the broad points, the new cyber security law forbids internet users from organizing with, or training, others for anti-state purposes, spreading false information, and undermining the nation state’s achievements or solidarity, according to reports.

“This decision has potentially devastating consequences for freedom of expression in Vietnam. In the country’s deeply repressive climate, the online space was a relative refuge where people could go to share ideas and opinions with less fear of censure by the authorities,” Amnesty International added in a statement.

Internet censorship isn’t new to Vietnam, but the law increases the state’s potential to act. Concern is already high following a string of arrests over the past year which has seen bloggers jailed for discussing environmental issues, politics and more online.

Beyond limiting free speech, the cyber law also applies pressure to foreign internet companies who will now be required to operate a local office and store user information on Vietnamese soil. Currently, in the case of Google and Facebook, data on Vietnam-based users is stored overseas in locations such as Singapore and Hong Kong.

Google and Facebook both declined to comment, but they are part of the AIC which did make a statement condemning the new law.

“The provisions for data localization, controls on content that affect free speech, and local office requirements will undoubtedly hinder the nation’s fourth Industrial Revolution ambitions to achieve GDP and job growth,” AIC wrote in a statement.

“Unfortunately, these provisions will result in severe limitations on Vietnam’s digital economy, dampening the foreign investment climate and hurting opportunities for local businesses and SMEs to flourish inside and beyond Vietnam,” the organization added.

The people of Vietnam have also voiced their discontent at the new law. Bloomberg reports that demonstrations took place on Sunday ahead of the voting.

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Valve is bringing an official version of Steam to China

Valve is officially bringing its Steam game platform to China as it aims to take a chunk of the world’s largest market of gamers.

Valve said it will work with local partner Perfect World, which it previously collaborated on to release major games Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Shanghai-based Perfect World will control local promotional, the selection of games and distribution. There’s no confirmed date for when the Steam China service will go live.

The move makes perfect sense. For one thing, Valve has a vast opportunity to tap into. China’s games market is booming, with Newzoo forecasting that it represented $32.5 billion in 2017, ahead of the U.S., Japan, Germany and the UK. PC gaming has always been the base for revenue, but mobile is growing fast with Tencent — one of the largest gaming firms on the planet — recently reporting that its mobile revenue has overtaken that of PC.

But, as with all things China, access is uncertain. Parts of Valve’s service were blocked in China last December, although the ability to guy games remained intact. It isn’t clear why the partial blockage occurred — China frequently upgrades its firewall technology which can trigger changes — but working with a local partner is a more reliable approach than going solo. That said, Perfect World will have to manage the inevitable government censorship demands.

Despite having no official presence in China, more than one-quarter of Steam users have the language set to Basic Chinese, second only to English, according to a user survey. Whilst that also accounts for the Chinese diaspora, it is a sign that Steam already has significant traction among China’s gamers.

There’s plenty of competition in this space, so Valve won’t simply waltz into dominance. Tencent has its own Steam-like platform while NetEase has partnered with big U.S. gaming companies like Bungie and Blizzard.

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Naspers is in talks to invest in Southeast Asia’s Carousell

Naspers, the South Africa-based firm that famously backed Chinese giant Tencent in its infancy, is in talks to invest in Singapore-based startup Carousell, according to two sources with knowledge of discussions.

Carousell offers a mobile app that combines listings with peer-to-peer selling across Southeast Asia, Taiwan and Hong Kong. That makes it well-aligned with Naspers’ portfolio, which features some of the world’s largest classifieds services including OLX, which covers 45 countries, Letgo in the U.S. and Avito in Russia.

TechCrunch understands that Naspers is pursuing a deal with Carousell with a view to making it the firm’s key play in Southeast Asia and other parts of the APAC region.

Discussions are at a relatively early stage so it isn’t clear what percentage of the company that Naspers is seeking to acquire, although it would be a minority investment that values the Carousell business at over $500 million. The deal could be a first step towards Naspers acquiring a controlling interest in the business further down the line, one source said.

Carousell declined to respond when asked for comment.

“It is our company’s policy to neither acknowledge nor deny our involvement in any merger, acquisition or divestiture activity, nor to comment on market rumors,” Naspers told TechCrunch in a statement.

Timing of the discussions is notable since Carousell announced a $85 million investment round in May. (TechCrunch broke news of the round the previous October.) That deal — the startup’s Series C — took it to $126 million from investors to date and added big names to the Carousell cap table. EDBI, the corporate investment arm of Singapore’s Economic Development Board, and Singapore’s DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, took part in the Series C, which also included existing backers Rakuten Ventures, the VC linked to Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, Golden Gate Ventures, Sequoia India and 500 Startups.

Earlier this month, Carousell CEO and co-founder Siu Rui Quek told Bloomberg that the company had turned down acquisition offers in the past.

Carousell is highly-regarded in Singapore for being one of the first home-grown startups to show promise — its three founding members each graduated the National University of Singapore, NUS.

Aside from raising significant investor capital, it has scaled regionally it is battle against larger and better-funded e-commerce rivals Alibaba -owned Lazada and Shopee, a business from NYSE-listed Sea. In May, Quek told TechCrunch that Carousell has helped sell over 50 million items between users and it currently has over 144 million listings.

Naspers, meanwhile, has upped its focus on Southeast Asia in recent times, although its sole deal is a $5 million investment in crypto startup Coins.ph.

The firm remains best known for its Tencent deal, which is legendary in investment circles. Back in 2001, it bought 46.5 percent of Tencent for $32 million. Over time that was diluted to 33 percent, but it grew significantly in size as Tencent’s business took off, going on to become Asia’s first $500 billion company last November. Naspers resisted the urge to sell until March 2018 when it parted with two percent of the firm in exchange for around $9.8 billion.

Another of Nasper’s big wins this year was Flipkart’s sale to Walmart which earned it $2.2 billion in returns.

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Automated dev platform CircleCI expands to Japan, first office outside US

CircleCI is on something of a tear. The company’s continuous integration and deployment build platform is used by hundreds of thousands of developers around the world to create their own software. It has also received $59 million in venture capital funding, including a $31 million Series C earlier this year.

As it looks to continue growing, the company is expanding its global footprint. It has opened its first international office outside of its SF headquarters, in Tokyo, Japan. As part of the opening, CircleCI is intending to eventually build an office of 4-5 employees and create partnerships with local companies.

The company has experience in the geography, with several remote workers stationed there. It’s also the third largest market for the company, after the United States and the United Kingdom, where it works with local companies like CyberAgent and DeNA.

“We are really excited about Japan, excited about global,” CEO Jim Rose explained. “Japan has been a market that has had its own momentum, and it has had speed that has picked up over the years.” Rose joined CircleCI as COO in 2014 through the company’s acquisition of Distiller, and became CEO in 2015.

CircleCI has had a bottoms-up sales model, where developers can install Circle on their infrastructure anywhere around the world. The company’s message has been heard widely, with roughly 35-40 percent of the company’s gross revenues coming from global customers, according to Rose.

However, CircleCI’s product is not just click-and-install. It’s also a whole new way of managing software in a cloud-native environment, which means that developers and managers are increasingly needing to work together to migrate legacy codebases from old models to cloud and Git-native ones. “What we have seen over the last six quarters is that that practice is starting to embed itself in large enterprise,” Rose said.

However, that education, training and cultural change has been tougher in non-English speaking markets like Japan. Rose says that once a company gets beyond the first step of installing a system like Circle, “there is another step of socializing the product inside of those companies,” and “those efforts require local knowledge.” The hope is that a dedicated, localized team designed to bridge that gap will help CircleCI cement its products in developers’ workflows.

While the U.K. is the second-largest market for the company, the company chose Japan to launch international expansion since its English language resources have proven adequate so far, and complications from Brexit make strategic planning in Europe more complicated.

“There are a lot of moving parts around Brexit and GDPR and whether you can approach them as a single market or multiple. At the very least, you have to approach the U.K. as its own market separate from the EU,” Rose explained. CircleCI is still determining the right way to set up its international expansion in Europe to encompass successful markets for the company like Germany, France and the Nordic countries.

Rose sees the company eventually increasing the share of global revenues to 50 percent. Japan then is just the start of intensifying global expansion for the company.