Southeast Asia

Waste4Change is building a circular economy in Indonesia • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 14, 2022Posted in Asia, circular economy, environment, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, Startups, waste-management, Waste4ChangeNo Comments

Even the largest landfills in Indonesia are at (or nearing) capacity, and the government has set an ambitious target of 30% waste reduction by 2025. Waste4Change is one of the companies that wants to help by increasing rates of recycling and enabling better waste management. The startup, which currently manages more than 8,000 tons of waste very year, announced today that it has raised $5 million in Series A funding, co-led by AC Ventures and PT Barito Mitra Investama. Other participants in the round include Basra Corporation, Paloma Capital, PT Delapan Satu Investa, Living Lab Ventures, SMDV and Urban Gateway Fund. Founded in 2014, Waste4Change has seen a CAGR of 55.1% since 2017, and is present in 21 Indonesian cities, where its services are currently used by about 100 B2B clients and more than 3,500 households. Waste4Change was created by founder and CEO Mohamad Bijaksana Junerosano based on conversations between PT Greeneration Indonesia, an NGO, and waste management organization PT Bumi Lestari Bali (ecoBali) to form a company that reduces the amount of waste that ends up in landfills. Junerosano is an environmental engineer by training and spent 16 years working in the solid waste sector. Junerosano says that a major opportunity is created by Indonesia’s low recycling rates (about 11% to 12%), which means there is a lot of valuable recyclable material that is being left behind. “Waste reduction is a top priority, followed by material optimization and recycling which supports the concept of a truly circular economy,” he told ZebethMedia. Waste4Change will use its new funding on expansion and increasing its waste management capacity up to 100 tons per day over the next 18 months, with the target of reaching more than 2,000 tons per day over the next five years. Waste4Change’s team Junerosano said Waste4Change differentiates from traditional waste management solutions by providing an end-to-end solution, with a focus on sustainability and zero waste. Part of its strategy includes more digital integration for monitoring and recording the process of waste management and automating its material recovery facilities. “We see digital integration as a valuable tool to build a sustainable waste management ecosystem,” he said. “The goal is always to create harmony between the environment, the economy and the people.” Waste4Change’s digital integration strategy this year and next include improving its waste journey report and monitoring, which its customers receive after their trash is processed. To use Waste4Change, customers can ask for a pick-up team to collect their pre-sorted trash or drop it off themselves. The company currently has 108 employees and 141 waste management operators, with plans to add 52 more people to its team and work with 300 informal waste collectors and SMEs. Informal waste collectors include scavengers, waste banks, waste stalls and waste aggregators. For recycling business partners, including informal waste collectors, Waste4Change is building a platform to help them sell and buy solid waste with the company. The goal is increase the traceability and accuracy of the waste management process. It is also working on a program called Send Your Waste, where consumers can send waste to Waste4Change’s pick-up points. An app tells them what kinds of waste to send, where the nearest pick-up point is and what kind of reward they can receive. Junerosano says informal waste collectors tend to be selective about the materials they collect, picking out PET bottles, glass and cardboard. But this means less desirable materials like PP plastic, multilayer packaging and styrofoam are often left behind, polluting the environment. To combat that, Waste4Change has started a service called Waste Credit, that gives incentives for picking up certain materials, and also makes it easy for waste collectors to build this businesses. “Considering the crucial role of the informal sector in improving Indonesia’s recycling rate, we aim to build a waste recycling platform that will keep the system sustainable,” he said. “We are more than happy to bring it to life with a joint venture or joint operation with other industry stakeholders, including those in the informal sector and local Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (3R) temporary waste storage sites.” In a statement, AC Ventures founding partner Pandu Sjahrir said, “Waste4Change is a pioneer providing an end-to-end waste management solution. Sustainability is the team’s main focus, with a demonstrated commitment to building a better future for Indonesia. The company is proving that it has reached product-market fit and has the potential to scale across the nation.”

Open finance startup Ayoconnect’s APIs enable financial inclusion in Southeast Asia • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in Asia, Ayoconnect, financial inclusion, Fintech, Indonesia, open finance, Southeast Asia, StartupsNo Comments

Focused on Southeast Asia, Ayoconnect’s APIs make it faster for businesses to launch new financial services, instead of needing to build their own tech infrastructure. It is also licensed by Indonesia’s central bank, enabling it to offer more services. The open finance startup announced today it has closed a $13 million Series B extension round led by SIG Venture Capital, with participation from CE Innovation Capital and returning investor PayU, the payments and fintech business of Prosus. This brings its total raised to $43 million, including the oversubscribed first tranche of its Series B, which was led by Tiger Global and closed in January 2022. Founded in 2016, with a team of about 250 people, Ayoconnect is currently working toward more financial inclusion for Indonesian consumers and SMEs. It works with regulators and incumbent banks, and was recently awarded a Bank of Indonesia (BI) Payment Service Provider Category 1 license. Ayoconnect says it is the only open finance player in Indonesia to be licensed by the central bank. Ayoconnect’s new funding will be used for leadership hiring, and on its Ayoconnect’s product and technology, including new solutions for payments, data and banking and new APIs for account opening and card issuing. The startup recently launched automated recurring direct debit with seven of Indonesia’s largest banks (Mandiri, BRI, BNI, CIMB Niaga, Danamon, Bank Syariah Indonesia and Bank Neo Commerce). This allows Ayoconnect’s clients to use its direct debit API and get the ability to make recurring debits from customers’ savings accounts at multiple banks. Before starting Ayoconnect, founder and CEO Jakob Rost was a managing director at Lazada. After leaving Lazada, he spent several years living in Indonesia, where he saw how the country could benefit from more digital financial inclusion. For example, it is the fourth largest country in the world by population, but about half of people are unbanked, he said. It also has a complicated geography, resulting in a weak financial infrastructure, fragmentation and less standardization in the banking sector. Furthermore, Rost added, consumer-facing businesses in Indonesia don’t have the digital financial infrastructure to manage their own finances while serving customers. Ayoconnect raised again so soon after the initial close of its Series B because it was growing rapidly and also secured important strategic partnerships after receiving its BI license. Rost said the new capital will strengthen Ayoconnect’s balance sheet and prepare it for future growth over the next few years. The platform now serves 200 API customers, including large banks, financial institutions, tech unicorns and fintechs, and offers more than 4,000 embedded finance products. Its APIs are cover two categories: open banking APIs and payment services APIs, with the goal of building the most complete open finance stack in Southeast Asia. Some examples of financial services that Ayoconnect’s clients have launched include the aforementioned direct debit, embedded finance (it partnered with PT. Kereta Api Indonesia (KAI), the state-owned operator of railways in Indonesia) to launch new ticketing and productivity features in the KAI Access mobile app, which enables users to buy cellphone credits, internet data subscriptions and electricity tokens). It also partnered with Bank Syariah, Indonesia’s largest Islamic bank, to add new digital and mobile capabilities with the goal of greater financial inclusion and economic growth among its customers. Other Southeast Asian startups in the open finance space include Brick, Finverse, Brankas and Finantier as competitors? One way that Ayoconnect differentiate is by being the only licensed open finance platform in Indonesia, which enables it to offer solutions that aren’t available on the market yet. “While open banking and open finance are reasonably well-established in Europe and the US, the industry is still very young in Southeast Asia but is growing rapidly. In Indonesia, hundreds of millions are embracing new digital services while many more are still without access to basic financial services like bank accounts,” said Rost. “As such, there is huge potential for open finance in the region and a ton of opportunities for the sector to grow further. We’ve been really excited to see the activity in the space and to be playing a role in helping to move the ecosystem forward.” In a statement, SIG Venture Capital’s Akshay Bajaj said the Ayoconnect team “have been running high volume APIs for years and are incredibly well positioned to help customers launch compelling and profitable use cases quickly and securely. As a result of its expanding capabilities, Ayoconnect continues to experience strong and growing demand from banks and API clients. We love their vision and believe they have the potential to transform and enhance the future of payments in Southeast Asia.”

Pillow wants to make crypto saving and investing easy for new users • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in Asia, Crypto, cryptocurrency, Pillow, Singapore, Southeast Asia, StartupsNo Comments

Pillow aspires to be an all-in-one platform that helps even newbie users save, spend and invest in crypto currency. The Singapore-based startup announced it has raised $18 million in Series A financing co-led by Accel and Quona Capital, with participation from Elevation Capital and Jump Capital. The app currently has more than 75,000 users in over 60 countries. It supports 10 digital assets, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Axie Infinity and USD-backed stablecoins USDC and USDT, and plans to expand to over 50 assets in the coming months. Founded in 2021 by Arindam Roy, Rajath KM and Kartik Mishra, Pillow is focused on emerging markets like Africa and Southeast Asia. It founders say that since the beginning of the year, it has grown its user base by 300%, with assets under management growing 5x. It also recently expanded into Nigeria, Ghana and Vietnam, among other markets. Before founding Pillow, Roy and KM explored web3 while working at identity verification and AML software provider HyperVerge, while also holding jobs in the traditional finance industry. During this time, the two started a Discord server on the side to onboard people onto web3, which eventually grew to more than 15,000 people. “We saw a pattern of problems repeating,” the two told ZebethMedia. “People do not know how to pay gas fees, do not know how to bridge across various blockchains, people do not know what transaction they are approving and end up losing funds.”Around this time, the two met Mishra, who was head of business for Indian delivery startup Dunzo, and started talking about how to solve the onboarding problem at scale. “Eventually, we realized that the challenge is that crypto transactions today do not fit the mental model of how retail users perceive transactions. You would need a strong technical background to transact seamlessly in crypto,” they said. As a result, Pillow was born to make crypto usage understandable. To do this, the Pillow team has to tackle a couple big issues. The first is awareness, since the majority of people still think crypto is just buying and selling Bitcoin, without understanding other use cases. The second is complexity, since using crypto in its entirety means understanding gas fees, blockchain technology and bridging. “A person who just wants to transact is not going to scale this learning curve,” they said. Pillow solves these problems by simplifying crypto investments and transactions to one click, instant swaps and savings using single-click daily interest savings. It plans to do the same for other crypto services like payments. To use Pillow for the first time, people sign up using their email accounts, and then provide KYC information, such as live selfie photos and national identity cards. Afterward, they get a short lesson on the potential risks of investing in digital assets before choosing which ones they want to deposit or invest in. Before their initial investment, they are taken through another lesson about that asset’s potential risks. After that, they can deposit cryptocurrency from their own wallets or another crypto platform by making a transfer to the displayed crypto wallet address on Pillow. In some countries where Pillow has partnered with local, compliant on-ramp service providers, users can also buy crypto with their local fiat currency. Pillow supports deposits and withdrawals with fiat currency through local partnerships in Nigeria, the Philippines and Vietnam, with plans to add more across Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America with its new funding. The startup’s largest user base is in Nigeria, and it also has a major presences in India, Ghana and Vietnam, and growing user bases in Brazil, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. It focuses on retail investors, enabling them to start with investments as small as $5. Since Pillow’s users are from different geographies, its closest competitors also come from around the world. They include crypto exchange Luno in Africa, multi-asset exchange Pluang (another Accel investment) in Southeast Asia and global crypto savings app Nexo. Pillow’s founders says it differentiates with its goal of becoming a holistic home for digital asset-driven financial services that allows even first time crypto users users to earn, save, spend and invest from the same platform. Pillow is currently in growth phase and plans on introducing transaction fees as new products, including swaps and tokenized real world assets are introduced. It currently makes profits on returns generated on top of the 5% to 10.42% returns made accessible to users. Pillow keeps a small percentage of the spread generated, and another portion also goes into its yield reserves.

Singapore-based staffing platform Workmate acquired by Persol Asia Pacific • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Asia, hr, human resources, Persol Asia Pacific, Persol Holding, Singapore, Southeast Asia, staffing, Startups, WorkmateNo Comments

Workmate, a Singapore-based on-demand staffing platform, has been acquired by Persol Asia Pacific, one of the region’s largest HR service providers. Workmate focuses on frontline and essential workers, and the acquisition will allow it to expand its HR solutions throughout the Asia Pacific. Workmate currently operates in Thailand and Indonesia and is expanding operations into Singapore this month. Persol Asia Pacific is part of Persol Holdings, which is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It is one of the largest human resources companies in Japan and has invested in HR tech companies including Glint. Workmate’s Thailand team Workmate was founded in 2016 to help businesses find frontline staff, while ensuring that workers get consistent employment. About 120,000 frontline workers and more than 800 companies are currently on its platform. The company defines frontline staff as essential workers, typically in low- to mid-skilled work, who provide essential services to the public. Sectors include logistics and warehousing, manufacturing, food and beverage, retail and back office roles like admin and customer service. Workmate provides companies with a pre-vetted pool of workers for both short- and long-term work and uses proprietary AI-scoring algorithms to improve matching quality and attendance rates, worker retention and productivity. The algorithms take into account data points like work experience, location and skills, and combines that with first-hand behavioral data and worker history on Workmate’s platform, like attendance and supervisor ratings. Workmate will retain its own branding after the acquisition and will run independently with Persol Asia Pacific as its parent company.

Thai beauty platform Konvy raises Series A for international expansion • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Asia, beauty, eCommerce, Konvy, Southeast Asia, Startups, ThailandNo Comments

Founded 10 years ago, Konvy is now Thailand’s top beauty e-commerce platform. It plans to accelerate its omnichannel and international distribution with a new Series A of $10 million from Insignia Ventures Partners. Konvy was launched in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur QingGui Huang, who previously managed fashion e-commerce platforms in China. It now works with more than 1,000 brands, representing SKUs of more than 20,000. Its brand portfolio includes L’Oréal, Shiseido, Sulwhasoo, Eucerin and La Roche-Posay. “Konvy had the advantage of starting in Thailand when there were no really significant e-commerce players there at the time,” Huang told ZebethMedia. “We’ve since leveraged our first mover advantage in Thailand to become a leading e-commerce player in the market.” Konvy founders Leon Huang, Pornsuda Vangvidhayakul and QingHui Huang Konvy’s goal is to help local and international beauty brands take advantage of two major trends. The first is that health and beauty purchases are a priority spending category for Thai consumers and the second is that Thailand sees high rates of e-commerce purchases and social media usage, meaning that young people in Thailand spend an average of about two hours and 55 minutes on social media each day. Huang said he confirmed his assumptions about Thai spending on beauty products through conversations with brands, and that drove his desire to start Konvy. “This opportunity of health and beauty being a priority spending category for Thai consumers is a function of both demand and supply circumstances favoring this consumer behavior over the past decades,” he said. “On the supply side, Thailand has been a manufacturing hub for a lot of international brands for more than 40 years. This has spawned as well a thriving local industry. On the demand side, we see that Thai consumers are plugged into this mindset of ‘upgrades’ when it comes to health and beauty, that is to say, it’s not just about accessing such products but actually looking for the best products and high willingness to spend on the latest trends.” Konvy taps into the high rate of social media usage by developing a feedback loop, where engagements on its partner brands’ not only helps Konvy’s existing portfolio, but also helps more brands in the future. For example, as more Gen Z consumers bought products they saw on TikTok during the pandemic, Konvy made itself more present on that channel. In a statement, Insignia Ventures Partners founding managing partner Yinglan Tan said, “While there may be stronger competitors from horizontal marketplaces in the future, we believe Konvy is best positioned to be the market leader in the online beauty segment given its long-standing brand equity, brand-centric and community-led approach.”