As crypto proponents look to onboard a new generation of users, one of the major consumer onramps has been a host of consumer wallet apps with slick interfaces.
Today, Coinbase announced that it is bringing on the team from BRD — a crypto wallet startup that first launched its mobile wallet back in 2014. While the team is transitioning over to Coinbase, BRD’s co-founders say nothing will be changing for BRD users for the time being and that their wallets will continue to operate normally and that user “funds are safe and secure.”
The wallet startup was an early player in the mobile crypto wallet space that started as a place for users to store bitcoin, but grew to support a wide network of tokens and the ability to buy, sell and swap cryptocurrencies thanks to partnerships with exchanges. The startup claims to have more than 10 million users.
“The team brings deep expertise in self-custody for crypto wallets, which will help Wallet enable more people to safely and securely access the decentralized world of crypto,” a tweet from the Coinbase Wallet Twitter account reads.
BRD raised a hefty amount of venture capital funding, banking nearly $55 million in venture funding from firms like SBI Crypto Investment and East Ventures.
Coinbase and BRD did not reveal terms of the acquihire.
Co-founder Adam Traidman and Aaron Voisine note that they plan to build out a “migration path” for users to transfer their wallet contents to the Coinbase Wallet app but that it will be entirely optional for users.
Every year, tons of food ends up in landfills because of cosmetic issues (they won’t look nice in stores) or inefficiencies in the supply chain. Singapore-based TreeDots, which says it is the first food surplus marketplace in Asia, wants to help. The company is focused on creating a vertically integrated supply chain with a B2B marketplace and a social commerce feature for group buying by consumers. It is also developing its own cold-chain logistics infrastructure to help food reach end users more quickly. TreeDots announced today that it has raised an $11 million Series A led by Amasia and East Ventures, with participation from investors including Active Fund, Seeds Capital, author Nir Eyal and actress Fiona Xie.
The funding, which brings TreeDots’ total raised to $15 million, will be used to grow its operations in Malaysia, where it expanded last year, enter other markets and continue optimizing its logistics and supply chain business, called TreeLogs. The startup says its gross merchandise volume (GMV) has grown more than 4x year-over-year.
TreeDots was founded in 2017 as a surplus food marketplace for F&B businesses, before it expanded its business to include social commerce, too. About one-third of food produced in the world is never eaten. In Asia specifically, TreeDots’ team says this is usually because of inefficient supply chains or aesthetically “imperfect” foods. For example, a grocery chain might reject a chicken that is too big or has a broken bone. But F&B businesses like restaurants usually don’t care how their ingredients look, because they cook and plate food before it reaches the customer. TreeDots’ surplus food marketplace was originally created to sell food to F&B businesses at up to 90% cheaper than other suppliers.
In an email, TreeDots co-chief executive officer Tylor Jong explained that the company does not redistribute food from retailers. “Instead, we solve the food loss problem further upstream where you have food that is imperfect due to various cosmetic standards set by different groups of buyers (businesses, but ultimately driven by consumers) and food that is in surplus, as most countries want to ensure that all varieties are accessible and therefore keep more inventory than needed at every step of the supply chain.”
For suppliers, the benefits of selling food to TreeDots include earning incremental revenue and saving the money they would have spent to send surplus products to landfills. TreeDots also helps them digitize their operations through its app and onboard to TreeLogs. The logistics infrastructure was built using a combination of in-house and external services to fulfill demand from social commerce and business buyers, Jong said. It improves on traditional cold-chain logistics by “being tech-driven and striving for higher utilization, heavier delivery density and best practices,” he added.
In a statement about its investment in TreeDots, East Ventures managing partner Roderick Purwana said, “Food loss is already a trillion dollar problem, but what got us excited was the fact that suppliers started to use the system for all of their revenue, not just food loss products. If one of their trucks could make a delivery to a zone, TreeDots could make five deliveries on that same trip working across suppliers. The increased network density allows for decreased logistics costs and lower emissions.”
Running a small to medium-sized business means a small staff needs to juggle a plethora of tasks, like bookkeeping, tax records and regulatory filings. Singaporean startup Lanturn streamlines their workload with a combination of corporate services and an internal platform that helps automate administrative work. Lanturn announced today that it has raised a $3 million seed round led by East Ventures and CoCoon Ignite Ventures.
Spun out from Zave, a Singaporean management app (and another startup in East Ventures’ portfolio), two years ago, Lanturn now has almost 400 clients. It focuses on startups and SMEs, acting as a “one-stop online corporate services” solution, and uses its internal tech platform to differentiate from other corporate service providers.
Lanturn’s services include helping companies incorporate in Singapore and handling visa applications for new hires. It is led by chief executive officer Velisarios Kattoulas.
Kattoulas told TechCrunch that Lanturn’s seed funding will be used for hiring and to develop its technology.
In a statement about the investment, East Ventures managing partner and co-founder Batara Eto said, “We are pleased to support solutions that enable agility and adaptability among businesses, especially in the wake of the pandemic, and Lanturn provides that by leveraging technology to streamline corporate services and empower businesses to make more informed data-driven decisions.”
Other participants in the round included individual investors Alex Turnbull; RVP Equity managing partner Saki Georgiadis; Meiyen Tan, the head of Oon & Bazul’s restructuring and insolvency practice; White & Case Asia-Pacific partner Chris Kelly; and Next Billion Ventures venture partner Tiang Foo Lim.
Lanturn’s clients range in size from very early-stage startups with only one person, to small and mid-sized asset managers, SMEs and tech firms that have more than 100 employees spread across several countries.
The COVID-19 pandemic meant there was less demand for Lanturn’s services this year than the company had expected, but on the other hand, “the pandemic has highlighted to clients that because Lanturn has its own cloud-based corporate services platform, we can serve them as well today as we could before the pandemic,” Kattoulas said. “That’s helped us maintain momentum, and it’s one reason we’ll grow more this year than almost any cloud-based or traditional corporate services firm.”
Running a small to medium-sized business means a small staff needs to juggle a plethora of tasks, like bookkeeping, tax records and regulatory filings. Singaporean startup Lanturn streamlines their workload with a combination of corporate services and an internal platform that helps automate administrative work. Lanturn announced today that it has raised a $3 million seed round led by East Ventures and CoCoon Ignite Ventures.
Spun out from Zave, a Singaporean management app (and another startup in East Ventures’ portfolio), two years ago, Lanturn now has almost 400 clients. It focuses on startups and SMEs, acting as a “one-stop online corporate services” solution, and uses its internal tech platform to differentiate from other corporate service providers.
Lanturn’s services include helping companies incorporate in Singapore and handling visa applications for new hires. It is led by chief executive officer Velisarios Kattoulas.
Kattoulas told TechCrunch that Lanturn’s seed funding will be used for hiring and to develop its technology.
In a statement about the investment, East Ventures managing partner and co-founder Batara Eto said, “We are pleased to support solutions that enable agility and adaptability among businesses, especially in the wake of the pandemic, and Lanturn provides that by leveraging technology to streamline corporate services and empower businesses to make more informed data-driven decisions.”
Other participants in the round included individual investors Alex Turnbull; RVP Equity managing partner Saki Georgiadis; Meiyen Tan, the head of Oon & Bazul’s restructuring and insolvency practice; White & Case Asia-Pacific partner Chris Kelly; and Next Billion Ventures venture partner Tiang Foo Lim.
Lanturn’s clients range in size from very early-stage startups with only one person, to small and mid-sized asset managers, SMEs and tech firms that have more than 100 employees spread across several countries.
The COVID-19 pandemic meant there was less demand for Lanturn’s services this year than the company had expected, but on the other hand, “the pandemic has highlighted to clients that because Lanturn has its own cloud-based corporate services platform, we can serve them as well today as we could before the pandemic,” Kattoulas said. “That’s helped us maintain momentum, and it’s one reason we’ll grow more this year than almost any cloud-based or traditional corporate services firm.”
While Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystems are still young compared to those in China or India, it has matured over the last five years. Unicorns like Grab, Gojek and Garena are continuing to grow, and more competitive startups are emerging in sectors like fintech, e-commerce and logistics. That leads to the question: Will consolidation start to pick up?
The consensus by investors interviewed by Extra Crunch is: Yes, but slowly at first. In the meantime, there are still roadblocks to mergers and acquisitions, including few buyers and the size of markets like Indonesia, which means startups there have a lot of room to grow on their own, even alongside competitors. But many Southeast Asian startup ecosystems are rapidly evolving, and consolidations may speed up in the next few years.
During a Disrupt session, East Ventures partner Melisa Irene spoke about consolidation as a strategy, especially when larger companies, like Grab, decide to expand into new services by acquiring smaller players. In an interview with Extra Crunch, Irene elaborated on the idea.
“Companies that want to get more value out of their customers by expanding into other services can do it internally by developing it, or do it externally by buying existing companies that have been operating in the same or adjacent sectors,” she said.
For many years, companies opted not to do that because of the cost, she added, but that mindset started to shift a few years ago.
Golden Gate Ventures partner Justin Hall said he has seen attitudes toward consolidation in Southeast Asia gradually shift since the investment firm was founded in 2011.
“I would say over the next two to three years, we’re definitely going to start seeing much more M&A occurring than versus the last eight to 10 years. It’s the confluence of different factors. One, I think corporate VC is starting to pour a little bit more money into the space. You have a lot of international tech companies, e.g., from China, or regional unicorns that are being much more acquisitive in their strategy,” Hall said.
He added that an often overlooked factor is that a lot of regional early-stage and institutional funds launched about a decade ago, building a foundation for Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystems. Many of these funds started out with a 10-year mandate and as a result, general partners may start examining how they can orchestrate sales, for example by talking to corporate acquirers, financiers or other sources of capital for an exit.
“A lot of activity that you’re starting to see right now is under the table. We have funds coming up on that 10-year mark, saying, ‘Let’s see where we can derive value within our portfolio, within specific companies that we can sell.’ That is going to start happening en masse over the next two years once we hit that 10-year mark for a lot of these funds.”
Melisa Irene‘s path to becoming a partner at one of Southeast Asia’s most esteemed venture capital firms is an unconventional one.
“I always consider myself to be quite lucky,” said Irene, who was promoted to be a partner at East Ventures in January 2019. At 25 years old, she was the Jakarta-based investment firm’s first female partner.
During TechCrunch Disrupt’s first online conference, I spoke to Irene about what she humbly described as a “lucky” career, her experience as a young, female investor, the rush of American and Chinese VC money into Southeast Asia, and what the COVID-19 pandemic means to East Ventures . A video recording of the conversation is at the bottom of the article.
Partner at 25
Irene admitted that timing played a big part in her ascension in the VC world. The development of Indonesia’s internet infrastructure came around relatively late — around 2010 — compared to more developed markets, but growth happened rapidly. In 2015, five years after East Ventures backed the Series A of Tokopedia, now an e-commerce leader in Southeast Asia, Irene joined the firm.
In those days, “I didn’t compete with a lot of investment bankers,” said Irene, who majored in accounting in university and began as an intern at East Ventures. “The capability that they looked for was how fast you can immerse in the ecosystem.”
Contrary to popular belief, the Southeast Asian investment ecosystem is “quite friendly” towards women. “People rejoice the promotion of female professionals in this industry. It’s not a rare circumstance to see females becoming a vice principal or principle in Southeast Asia,” the investor said.
The support goes beyond simply checking the gender-diversity box and reflects a real demand for more empathetic investors in the tech industry.
“Sometimes people like to talk as a business partner and sometimes as a friend. [Empathy] is something that can be seen as natural coming from females,” she added.
However, the investor cautioned that “the number of [female] decision-makers definitely needs to improve,” though she foresees the local ecosystem “is supportive of that.”
SEA gold rush
In recent years tech giants from both the U.S. and China have been clamoring to get into Southeast Asia, a region home to about 670 million people and a fledgling internet market. They often begin by financing local upstarts, which, beholden to the investment, will provide directional advice to their foreign corporate investors.
When offered big checks, startups must stay level-headed and think what’s best for them, Irene advised. “The thing is everyone has money. Companies need to decide which side to be on, what companies they want on board, and what companies are able to give them strategic advice.”
It’s not uncommon to see investors and founders clash over priorities. Some investors want a quick exit, while the entrepreneurial mentality is to build a business in the long run. “That’s why alignment is important,” asserted the investor.
The future of tech in SEA
As unicorns and “super apps” like Grab and Gojek emerge in Southeast Asia, concerns that incumbents can kill off competition grow. East Ventures has a unique insight into the region’s competitive dynamics as an early-stage investor that has seen some of its startups like Tokopedia and Traveloa grow into behemoths.
Irene believed as Southeast Asia’s internet ecosystem matures, there are actually a lot of opportunities for startups in “upcoming sectors.”
“If you look at the unicorns, you see a lot of younger and smaller companies supporting them,” she said. The point is that giants can’t accomplish everything by themselves, and some of the more niche functions can best be tackled by smaller players with specialized focuses.
On the other hand, the investor believed consolidation is possible — and should happen — in areas that can benefit from scale and network effects.
“People think of Indonesia as one country. We are not. We are the largest archipelago, which means there are very different infrastructures within different provinces. For example, it’s expensive to set up a bank branch in a small island… That means a lot of things need to come into a collective effort and one big ecosystem to offer the consumers with different kinds of offerings.”
Lastly, there’s the inevitable question of COVID-19. Like many investors, Irene saw a silver lining during the dark times.
“Before COVID, it was very difficult to assess the quality of companies. They all had a lot of money and the infrastructure was actually good… Now we suddenly can tell who makes good decisions, who makes it at what speed, and what is the outcome of those decisions. The way entrepreneurs respond to COVID can tell us a lot about their enterprises.”
Antler is a ‘company builder’ which emerged a couple of years ago, running startup generator programs and investing from an early-stage, bringing together a heady mix of technologists, product builders, and operators together with its own technology stack.
Now, plenty of ‘company builders’ have come and gone. It’s a bit like Apocalypse Now: everyone goes in thinking they will come up with the major formula to spit out startups at a prodigious rate and they come out screaming “The Horror! The Horror!”
But Antler appears to have been on an interesting run. It’s so far made more than 120 investments across a wide range of companies, with several going on to raise later-stage funding from the likes of Sequoia, Golden Gate Ventures, East Ventures, Venturra Capital and the Hustle Fund.
Since its launch in Singapore two years ago, Antler now has a presence across New York, London, Singapore, Sydney, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Nairobi and Oslo.
Today, it’s announcing that it’s attracted investment from British investment management company Schroders, investment house FinTech Collective and Ferd, the vehicle used by Johan H. Andresen, the Norwegian industrialist and investor.
This latest investment takes the capital raised by Antler over the past six months to more than $75 million.
These investors join an existing group that includes Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Canica International and Credit Saison, the third-largest credit card issuer in Japan. The idea here is that these investors get exposure to early-stage companies as they are built.
As with most company builders and accelerators, Antler only takes 1-1.5% of the applicants
Its portfolio includes Sampingan, an on-demand workforce in Indonesia; Xailient, a computer vision technology; Airalo, a global e-sims marketplace and Fusedbone, which enables medical centers to produce bespoke, non-metal implants on-site.
Magnus Grimeland, Antler co-founder and CEO said: “With our support, our founders start refining their ideas and building new and innovative businesses. What is equally important is the deep relationship our founders build with their peers, our advisors and backers. Having accomplished investors like Schroders, Ferd and FinTech Collective on board means we can provide a more valuable network for our startups as they grow their businesses.”
Peter Harrison, Group CEO of Schroders, who will also be joining Antler’s advisory board, said: “We are in a period of unprecedented change. The visibility on venture capital activity and innovation that Antler provides is therefore leading-edge.”
Antler says more than 40% of its portfolio companies have a female co-founder and 78% of these have a female CEO.
Recently reelected, Indonesian President Joko Widodo announceda desire to move the nation’s capital from Jakarta to the East Kalimantan region, citing environmental concerns, the most exigent of these being the fact that Jakarta is literally sinking due to the uncontrolled extraction of groundwater. Widodo said he wished to separate Indonesia’s government from its business and economic hub in Jakarta.
However, what would a move from Jakarta do to Indonesia’s burgeoning startup economy?
Shifting administrative governmental hubs
According to Widodo, studies have determined that the best site for the proposed new capital is between North Penajam Paser and Kutai Kertanegara, both located in East Kalimantan. The basis of this selection is due to studies highlighting the region’s relative protection from natural disasters, especially when compared to other regions. This would definitely be a benefit for the governmental heart of Indonesia, ensuring continuous administrative functions in a disaster-prone region. Other governments have separated administrative centers from their economic hubs with varying degrees of success, with some examples being Brazil’s creation of Brasília, as well as Korea’s projected move from Seoul to Sejong.
What is most interesting to note from prior examples is that these newer branched-out cities are non-surprisingly, heavily government-centric. In Brasília, roles tied to the government make up nearly 40% of all jobs, while in Sejong, a lack of facilities like public transit and commercial mall space cause many to commute into Sejong for government work, instead of permanently settling in the area. Given the semi-undeveloped nature of East Kalimantan, these anecdotes are quite troubling if the government is actually moving to North Penajam Paser or Kutai Kertanegara.
These facts raise the question of economic impacts of such governmental moves. In fact, one may even opine that while these moves do allow for governmental growth, ultimately, they may hurt the country economically due to a divestment between both government and economic hubs. In this specific instance, it is most important to analyze the impact of such a move on Indonesia’s startup economy, as the nation is one the world’s leaders in startup growth.
Indonesia’s startup economy
Indonesia has emerged as a startup hub within Southeast Asia in recent years, with its population of over 260 million marking it as the world’s fourth-most populous country. Additionally, Indonesia’s mobile-first population has enabled the full embrace of the internet era, with 95% of all internet users in Indonesia connected to the web via a mobile device.
Similarly, startup growth has boomed in the island archipelago, with several Indonesian-based unicorns disrupting local, regional, and global economies. Softbank-backed ecommerce giant Tokopedia is currently in talks for a pre-IPO funding round, while emerging super-app Gojek controls significant portions of the ride-sharing industry in Asia, simultaneously expanding into separate industries to include digital payments, food delivery, and even video-streaming. Additionally, online travel portal Traveloka (in which Expedia has a minority stake) has recently entered the financial services space, furthering its impact within Asia. These specific examples of high-growth startups demonstrate a population hungry for innovation, further driving the developing startup economy.
Julo, a peer-to-peer lending platform in Indonesia, said on Wednesday it has extended its $5 million Series A raise to $15 million as it looks to scale its business in the key Southeast Asian market.
The $10 million Series A2 round for the Jakarta-headquartered startup was led by Quona Capital, with Skystar, East Ventures, Provident, Gobi Partners, and Convergence participating in it. The two-year-old startup, which has raised about $16 million to date, is now closing the round, Adrianus Hitijahubessy, co-founder and CEO of Julo, told TechCrunch in an interview.
Through its eponymous Android app, Julo provides loans of about $300 to users at aggressively competitive rate of 3-5% per month — one of its key differentiating factors. Julo has managed to keep its interest rate low because its credit scoring system is more efficient than those of its rivals, claimed Hitijahubessy, who has amassed more than a decade of experience in credit scoring system using alternative data from his previous stints.
“There are lots of players in this market. Not just Indonesia, but globally. But it comes down to who actually knows what they are doing. The bar is becoming higher and it is increasingly becoming difficult for digital lending companies to just launch an app and charge high interest rate,” he said.
Julo works with banks and individuals to finance loans to customers. It says it has disbursed about $50 million to date.
Hitijahubessy said Julo will use the fresh capital to expand the team and enhance its credit score system. The startup intends to focus on growing its business in Indonesia itself.
In a statement, Ganesh Rengaswamy, co-founder and partner of Quona Capital, said, “a significant majority of JULO’s loans are used for productive purposes that can enhance the economic well-being of families and small businesses — driving financial inclusion in Indonesia, which is a cornerstone of Quona’s focus.”
Digital lending is becoming an increasingly crowded space in South Asian markets. In India, for instance, a growing number of digital mobile wallets including Paytm and MobiKwik have recently started to offer credits to customers.
Waresix, one of a handful of startups aiming to modernize logistics in Indonesia — the world’s fourth most populous country — has pulled in $14.5 million to grow its 18-month-old business.
This new investment, Waresix’s Series A, is led by EV Growth — the growth-stage fund co-run by East Ventures — with participation from SMDV — the investment arm of Indonesia corporation Sinar Mas — and Singapore’s Jungle Ventures . The startup previously raised $1.6 million last year from East Ventures, SMDV and Monk’s Hill Ventures. It closed a seed round in early 2018.
Waresix is aiming to digitize logistics, the business of moving goods from A to B, which it believes is worth a total of $240 billion in Indonesia.
A large part of that is down to the country’s geography. The archipelago officially has over 17,000, but there are five main ones. That necessitates a lot of challenges for logistics, which are said to account for 25-30 percent of GDP — a figure that is typically below five percent in Western markets — while Indonesia barely scraped the top 50 rankings in World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index.
But, as Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the key market for digital growth in the region, that makes this an attractive problem to solve… or, rather, attractive industry to modernize.
Like others in its space worldwide — which include Chinese unicorn Manbang and BlackBuck in Indonesia — Waresix is focused on optimizing logistics by making the process more transparent for clients and more efficient for haulage companies and truckers. That includes removing the chain of ‘middle man’ brokers, who add costs and reduce transparency, and provide a one-stop solution for transportation by land or sea, as well as cold storage and general cargo handling.
As of today, Waresix claims a fleet of more than 20,000 trucks and over 200 warehouses partners across Indonesia. The company said it plans to use this new capital to expand that coverage further. In particular, that’ll include additional land transport options and additional warehouse capacity in tier-two cities and more remote areas. That’s a push that founders Andree Susanto (CEO), Edwin Wibowo (CFO), and Filbert Hansel (CTO) — who met at UC Berkley in the U.S. — believe fits with Indonesia’s own $400 billion commitment to improve national infrastructure and transport.
Waresix trucks
It is also consistent with East Ventures, the long-standing early-stage VC, which has backed a pack of young companies aiming to inject internet smarts into traditional industries in Indonesia. Some of that portfolio includes Warung Pintar, which develops smart street vendor kiosks, Kedai Sayur, which is digitizing street vendors, and Fore Coffee, which draws inspiration from China’s digital-first brand Luckin Coffee, which recently listed in the U.S.
But the company is far from alone in going after the logistics opportunity in Indonesia. Its rivals include Kargo, which was started by a former Uber Asia exec and is backed by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick’s 10100 fund among others, and Ritase.
Ritase, which claims to be profitable, closed an $8.5 million Series A this week. It said it has 7,500 trucks and, on the client side, some 500 SMEs and a smattering of well-known global brands. Kargo has kept its metrics quiet, but it is a later arrival on the scene. The startup only came out of stealth in March of this year when it announced a $7.6 million funding round.
