When travel platform KKday raised the first part of its Series C in September 2020, the travel landscape was very different. Now, as KKday announces that it’s added $20 million to the round, bringing its total to $95 million, travel trends are changing, with more people going on domestic or international trips. The funding was led by Asia private equity firm TGVest Capital.

“We plan to use the new funding to double down on expanding our footprint in key markets including Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Asia,” founder and CEO Ming Chen told TechCrunch. “In addition, we are preparing for an influx of both domestic and international travelers as borders reopen.”

The startup says that in June 2022, its gross merchandise value exceeded pre-COVID levels, and it also lowered its user acquisition cost to one-third of the amount it spent before the pandemic. It’s making revenue and exceeding its revenue numbers from before COVID-19.

Part of the funds will be used for hiring across departments, including software engineers, research and development, business development and operations, and marketing. The capital will also be used to develop tech products for the online travel agencies (OTAs) and merchants who provide activities and services on KKday’s platform. KKday says its SaaS solution for merchants to manage bookings and inventory, called Rezio, is now used by 1,600 merchants around the world and reaches 2.7 million travelers.

Rezio works with online travel agencies like Viator to help their merchants expand. The service enables them to manage bookings across multiple channels, like Viator and Tripadvisor.

During the pandemic, KKday’s main growth driver was domestic travel in markets like Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asia. It recently acquired Activity Japan, a tour and activity online travel agency, and expects to see more business in Japan. KKday also anticipates more activity in markets like Korea and Singapore where international travel is resuming.

KKday is also planning to relaunch its own “curated experiences,” or local tours, as borders open. Chen said several trends he’s seen as travel restrictions lift include a surge in both domestic and international travel. There are also more “digital travelers,” or people who use online tools like KKday to plan their itineraries and save costs, and demand for curated tours like the ones KKday will offer.

“Since we last spoke and over the last 12 months, more markets have opened up and domestic travel has been a strong driver of our growth. While staycations remain popular, there was also a surging appetite for local domestic tours, activities and attractions,” Chen said. “We added 200,000 more experiences and activities across Asia-Pacific during COVID-19. In Japan alone, we added 35,000 new activities.”

In a prepared statement, TGVest Capital managing director Claire Lai said, ““Traveler demand is rebounding at a fast pace as borders reopen. Ming and his team’s relentless focus on innovation and providing long-term value to its ecosystem of travel operators, activity providers, and users has proven paramount in weathering the COVID-19 wave.”

Mental health startup Intellect’s ambitious goal is to be available across the Asia-Pacific, but ensure localized, culturally-competent care in each of the many markets it serves. Today it announced it has added $10 million to its war chest in a Series A extension led by Tiger Global, bringing the round’s total to $20 million. The first half of Series A was announced in January 2022.

Other investors in the extension round include new backers K3 Ventures, JAFCO Asia, Singtel Innov8 and PERSOL Holdings, with participation from returning investors Insignia Ventures Partners and HOF Capital.

Intellect describes this as “the largest venture round raised by any mental health company in Asia.” The capital brings Intellect’s total funding since the Y Combinator alum was founded in 2019 to $23 million, and will be used to launch commercially in more markets, expand its operations and build out its mental healthcare system.

Intellect’s coverage and self-guided programs are available in 15 languages. Though it has a consumer app, the company primarily takes a B2B2C model, with companies offering it as an employee benefit. Its clients include Merck, Philips, Foodpanda, Singtel, Shopee, Omnicom Media Group and abrdn. It currently serves 3 million users in more than 60 countries and has therapists and coaches based in 20 countries.

Founder and CEO Theodoric Chew told TechCrunch that it decided to raise an extension instead of moving onto a Series B because the company is in a strong position and making revenue. “With the current economic climate, we wanted to put it in a better position for the next two years and beyond, so we have a strong war chest and are not distracted.”

Intellect primarily sells to regional hubs with a lot of conglomerates and headquarters. For example, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia and New Zealand are all core markets. Currently, most of its clients are from Singapore, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

Intellect’s platform has two components. The first is the tech product, which includes its self-guided programs and app. The second is its clinical team of coaches, therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists.

Chew said the company works with professionals in each market to ensure culturally competent care.

“That’s something we have thought very deeply about from day one,” he said. “Essentially, what makes sense for Intellect in each region. It’s about having a product that’s hyper-localized for each culture, each region and country as well. To give an example, when someone struggles in Thailand or in Hong Kong, it’s quite different from Singapore in terms of what stresses they have.”

Though Intellect is available in 15 languages, Chew emphasizes that its goal isn’t just to translate the same material.

“We work with providers in every market, clinicians, psychologists, a team, to make sure that we’re not just translating, but also have examples and scenarios for the local context, and that extends to its own network of providers as well,” he said. “So beyond the app the being localized in pretty much every country in APAC today, we have a whole network of local, native, on-the-ground professionals.”

When someone logs into Intellect for the first time, they are prompted by chat to speak with a provider. Chew said this is important because it results in the most user retainment. “The majority of people in Asia have never seen a professional therapist or coach, so this is a barrel of newness for them.”

The mental wellness tech space in Southeast Asia has grown rapidly over the past few years. A new examples include Meta-backed Ami, MindFi and Thoughtfull, plus a roster of startups focused on specific markets, like Ooca in Thailand or Naluri in Malaysia.

“It’s definitely great to see more and more players pushing and coming to this space,” said Chew. “For us, I think that means there is more awareness and push to expand the category. It’s a huge cultural shift and push that we’re building for. It’s not just going to be a zero sum game from the get-go.”

As for how Intellect differentiates, Chew said the main thing is aiming to be an end-to-end platform for mental health care, ranging from its self-guided programs to psychiatric care.

In a statement, Tiger Global partner Jay Chen said, “With its tech-empowered, end-to-end holistic approach, Intellect is poised to become a leader in offering access to mental healthcare across Asia. We are excited to partner with the Intellect team as it builds a flexible, responsive and modern system for a critical component of healthcare.”

Tech layoffs have hit almost every region in the world, and Southeast Asia is no exception, with companies like Sea, Crypto.com and JD.ID among those affected. In particular, fintech startups—BNPL, credit and lending, and inventory-holding businesses—are vulnerable, like in other parts of the world.

Glints, one of Southeast Asia’s largest jobs platforms with over 30,000 active job listings per month and 40,000 employers, recently issued a report that shows the situation may not be so dour (even though it probably doesn’t feel that way to someone who just got laid off). There still exists a tech talent crunch, even in Singapore, where most layoffs and hiring freezes have happened because it’s regional headquarters for many international businesses and a startup hub.

“It’s a correction in general. I think what we have seen is that there has been a lot of capital being pumped into the tech industry over the past two to three years in a major bull run. With that, we had a lot of companies that have also expanded rapidly,” said Glints co-founder and CEO Oswald Yeo told TechCrunch.

“Singapore companies seem to be responding the most quickly to the changes in the macroeconomic environment,” he added, “Which is not necessarily a bad thing, because for some of these changes, you want to move quickly,”

Teams that have been hit hardest include operations, financial and human resource departments, plus some sales and marketing teams.

A lot of new hiring will happen remotely, with companies turning to Vietnam and Indonesia, which have both seen less layoffs, for top tech talent. This is fueled in part by the willingness for a decentralized workforce created by the pandemic.

“Together with the cost saving measures because on the one hand, comfort in remote hiring has increased because of the pandemic,” Yeo said. “Then on the other end, there is this need to save costs. So from both a human capital angle and a financial capital angle, a lot of companies are now actually doing more remote hiring. On Glints, for example, we see remote job opportunities has grown by 10 times over the past year.”

In Malaysia, regional companies still hire cross-border, but local companies have shifted back to local hiring. Glints said they do not expect mid- to senior-compensation to drop from current levels, but junior talent compensation might be affected.

Another new trends is fixed-term, usually one year, contracts, that allow companies to better predict their financial outlook. “Employers are more cautious of committing themselves to permanent contracts with employers,” said Yeo.

“It’s not all doom and gloom in two ways, and there are still positives,” Yeo said. For example, he said there is still disproportionate demand for technology and product talent on Glints, with the ratio in job seekers’ favor.

Layoffs also give startups a chance to build their core teams.

“For companies who are in good position and can afford it, it’s actually a great time to strengthen the bench, shape the management bench and the leadership bench with top management talent because there’s now a little bit less competition for talent.”

Venture capital fund Headline has been investing in tech startups since – get this – 1999, which might tempt headline writers, perhaps unfairly, to apply the word ‘dinosaur’, if the fund hadn’t continued to remain so active since then. Suffice it to say, it’s been plenty busy since that ‘cretaceous era’, with 11 $1Bn+ IPOs and exits in the past 2 years, and investments in such unicorns as Bumble, Sonos, and Farfetch, to name just three.

The headline for this story might well be a whopping-sounding $968M / €950M, but in fact, the numbers are a little more conventional when you look at how that cash is being deployed.

The Seed investment teams for Headline invest ‘autonomously’ across three separate funds spread across four regions: Europe, the US, Latin America, and Asia.

The three distinct early-stage funds split up like this: Headline’s US management team, headquartered in San Francisco, CA, have closed “Headline US
VII”, a $408M North America-focused fund.

At the same time, the Headline Brazilian management team has closed “Headline Brazil III”, a R$915M Latin America-focused fund based out of Sao Paulo.

Lastly, Headline’s EU management team, headquartered in Berlin, Germany, has raised “Headline EU VII”, a €320M pan-Europe-focused fund.

But when their portfolio companies require that extra power at the growth stage, those separate funds then band together, as well as using – it claims – “a single Headline culture, technology, and investment philosophy.”

The firm says it uses an in-house built AI sourcing system, dubbed EVA, which filters its pipeline of deals, plus an in-house business analytics platform, dubbed ATHENA. Then again, all VCs have these kinds of platforms these days, so this is nothing special.

Now, that European fund figure is much more ‘par for the course’ in terms of funds these days, and it’s notable that the Latin America-focused fund is a great deal larger, possibly indicating the significant opportunity that exists in that region.

In a statement, Mathias Schilling, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Headline US, said: “Despite the recent market shifts, we continue to aggressively pursue the next wave of world-changing innovation. I’ve witnessed my fair share of market downturns over the past 20 years, and through these times, we’ve continued to seek out and cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit with a focus on the long-term. We believe Headline is uniquely positioned with our teams on the ground and a measured, methodical approach to investment that relies on our homegrown technology.”

Christian Leybold, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Headline EU added: “Our early-stage focus enables us to closely work alongside the best and brightest entrepreneurs with a leader mindset to nurture their growth and accelerate market adoption. We have built a strong multi-local portfolio of European up-and-comers by following a guiding principle, ‘work as a team and with great people,’ and we will continue to follow this North Star with our latest fund.”

The Headline funds will invest from $1.5M to up to $15M into startups starting from the early stage.

Other unicorns inside the Headline portfolio include GoPuff, Sorare, Raisin DS, Swile, and Staffbase, as well as an early-stage portfolio of over 200 investments.

According to the World Bank, Indonesia produces 4.8 million tons of plastic waste each year that is “mismanaged”—meaning it ends up uncollected, chucked into dumpsites or leaked from improperly managed landfills. Octopus wants to reduce that number with a platform that makes it easier to collect back waste products from consumers and recycle it into raw materials that brands can reuse. The Jakarta-based startup announced today it has raised an oversubscribed round of $5 million led by Openspace and SOSV.

Octopus was founded last year by Mohammad Ichsan, Hamish Daud, Niko Adi Nugroho, Rizki Mardian and Dimas Ario, who have known each other for over a decade.

After recently launching in Jakarta, it will use its new funding for “aggressive expansion,” including five sorting facilities and 1,700 checkpoints in four cities: Jakarta, Bandung, Bali and Makassar, with the aim of handling 380 tonnes of waste, ranging from plastics to electronic appliances, each month.

Ichsan said one reason he founded Octopus was because he returned to his parents’ house in Makassar for a holiday, and found that a landfill 30 kilometers away emitted an unbearable stench, especially considering that he had a newborn daughter.

“I wondered what kind of world she’s going to live in,” he told TechCrunch. “Apparently this problem is not happening in certain cities, but also in other cities in Southeast Asia so I started to explore more of the business by doing manual waste trading and trying to solve the problem one step at a time, starting with reducing recyclable waste that ends up in landfills by doing manual waste trading.”

Around that time, Ischan met co-founder Daud, who had the same concerns and had been doing research about ocean waste.

Octopus also points to Indonesian government regulations about waste collective referred to as 3R, or “reuse, reduce, and recycle,” that are meant to reduce the amount of plastic ocean debris in the ocean by 70%. The government has reinforced these goals with initiatives like waste banks, enforcement of recycling goals for brands and producers, and a fee on plastic bags for consumers.

Octopus says that as of 2025, the Indonesian government will have spent $5.1 billion on creating a circular economy for more brands. It claims to be “the first platform to offer an end-to- end recyclable waste management logistics platform.”

The company says that over the past six months, it has grown by over 400%, with users at both ends of the supply chain. This includes 150,000 monthly users and more than 60,000 pelestari, or independent waste collectors. It claims that more than 12,000 pelestari have been able to open a bank account since joining Octopus. On the other end of the supply chain, Octopus serves more than 20 brands, including global FMCG companies who use Octopus to help meet their ESG compliance. One of its goals is to reach 100,000 pelestari by 2024.

Octopus offers two main kinds of service, said Ischan. The first one is selling post-consumer materials to the recycling industry and the second is data collection reporting for FMCG brands. For example, it help Softex Indonesia collect used diapers from consumers with proper handling standard-operating-procedures from pelestari, who operate as gig workers.

For pelestari who don’t own a mobile phone to access Octopus’ app, Ischan said the company is working with social welfare bureaus to provide phones as part of local city government programs to solve unemployment in their areas.

In a prepared statement, Openspace founding partner Shane Chesson said, “Octopus is leading the way in using technology to create a step change in the size of the circular economy in Indonesia. Participants at all stages of this supply chain are incentivized to make this happen and most importantly, environmental imperatives need us to get this right.”

Creating and grading tests is one of the most time-consuming tasks teachers need to deal with. In Vietnam, a startup called Azota wants to help with an online software platform that not only helps educators develop and proctor tests, but also automatically grades them using information from Vietnamese teaching materials. The company announced today it has raised $2.4 million in pre-Series A funding led by GGV Capital, with participation from Nextrans and returning investor Do Ventures. 

Founded last year, Azota now counts 700,000 teachers and 10 million students in primary, secondary and high schools among its users. It says that during peak test periods, it serves over six million users each month, or about 30% of the total number of teachers and students in Vietnam. It claims it can cut down the grading process from two hours when done manually to just two minutes. 

Azota’s creation came amidst the pandemic in 2021. Before co-founding the startup, Au Nguyen, its CEO, worked for Viettel, one of the largest telecoms in Vietnam. He led an educational unit on school management solutions, but realized that educators had many pain points that his team could not solve. As a result, he decided to team up with his friends, Dai Nguyen and Hung Le, to create Azota. 

“As the team sees it, there are two major scopes of work for teachers: teaching and assigning and grading tests,” they told TechCrunch in an email. “During the COVID times, teaching had to go online, and there were numerous tools to support this change such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Team, etc. But when it comes to online assigning and grading, there were few tools available, which made the process very labor-intensive and time-consuming.” 

Azota built an optical character recognition app to automatically recognize Q&A’s from test images taken from teachers’ phones. It shuffles those questions and answers to create hundreds of modified test combinations. Since the OCR was built using Vietnamese teaching materials, the team said it can recognize Vietnamese tests with a 99% accuracy rate. 

Azota’s founders are also working on a more advanced question bank features that will allow teachers to pick and chose from its inventory to create exams from scratch. 

The startup is used by educators across the nation, with about 22% coming from the major cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and the rest distributed equally among all provinces in Vietnam, they added. 

The team identifies two main groups of competitors. The first are big corporations that provide learning management software (LMS) to schools, but they say it’s still a fragmented market in Vietnam with different companies dominating different regions.

The second are startups that provide tools for teachers, but Azota’s founders say the teaching tool segment is still early and Azota differentiates by using a product-led growth model, solving teachers’ main challenges as they grow, especially for assigning and grading, instead of trying to address every issue that comes up. 

In a prepared statement, GGV Capital global managing partner Jixun Foo said, “Using technology to empower teachers to teach better, Azota makes great education accessible to millions of students. They can unleash the true potential of teachers to groom the next generation of Vietnamese youth.”

In Indonesia, many logistics providers still use old-fashioned systems to track their operations and fleets, including pen-and-paper ledgers. McEasy wants to change that. The startup, which develops software-as-a-service solutions for the logistics and supply chain industry, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding led by East Ventures.

The startup was founded in 2017 by Raymond Sutjiono and Hendrik Ekowaluyo, and now serves more than 200 clients, including Cleo Pure Water, KMDI Logistics, MGM Bosco Logistics, Rosalia Indah and the Tanto Intim Line.

Its software and smart tracker, called Vehicle Smart Management System, has been adopted by users like passenger buses, freight forwarding services and refrigerated vehicles used to transport pharmaceuticals, meat, seafood, dairy and frozen foods. Other products include Mobility Software-as-a-Service to digitize vehicles for real-time tracking, solutions for improving business efficiency and an open API ecosystem.

The new capital will be used on developing products for SMEs and establishing a stronger foothold in Indonesia’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. McEasy says it has grown more than 12x in the past 18 months.

Sutjiono told TechCrunch that he met and became best friends with Ekowaluyo while both were studying mechanical engineering at Purdue University. The two then worked at Ford in structural engineering. Sutjiona said Ekowaluyo is an expert in structural design and program management in cars, while he focuses more on engine electronics, system control and data handling.

After returning to Indonesia, the two started McEasy to produce hybrid motorcycles. But after researching the market, they realized that the market was shifting to digital instead of hybrid bikes, so they came up with a smart tracker for motorcycles. But because the trackers were cost-prohibitive, they decided to do another shift to B2B logistics and automotive.

“B2B logistics players were still using the conventional method, and we wanted to make a digital solution to improve the business process,” said Sutjiono. “The logistics sector was chosen because of its promising potential and growth during the pandemic. Indonesia has more than 22.5 million units of passenger vehicles and more than 5 million units of freight cars.

The founders say that more than 85% of businesses in the transportation and supply chain sectors still use paper ledgers for their operations, including managing drivers, expenses, fuel consumption and route efficiency. To convince people to move from their legacy systems to McEasy, it offers a free trials and is growing its operations through word of mouth.”

In a prepared statement, East Ventures co-founder Willson Cuaca said, “McEasy has managed to accelerate positively in this post-pandemic environment. They combine the best of both worlds – logistics and technology – to elevate their offerings, strengthen their national footprints, and maintain profitability levels.”

Live in India, Singapore-based MarketWolf has plans to introduce stock trading to first-time investors in more markets. The platform announced today it has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Singaporean venture capital firm Jungle Ventures and Mumbai-based Dream Capital. Returning investors 9Unicorns, iSeed, Crescent and Riverwalk also participated.

This brings MarketWolf’s total raised to $17.4 million since it was founded in 2017 (it launched in India in 2020). The new funding will be used to build product suite and on hiring for its product, marketing and engineering teams.

MarketWolf wants to making trading accessible to first-timers with low minimum investment amounts and a risk management system, as well as modules for practicing and learning about investing. They can invest in options, futures, ETFs and stocks, starting at $5. Most of its users are in the 18 to 35 year old age bracket.

MarketWolf’s risk-management features include setting mandatory risk and reward levels, listing only liquid instruments, preventing selling of options to avoid unlimited risk and its practice and learn module.

Founded by Vishesh Dingra and Thomas Joseph, MarketWolf says it has seen over 1.5 million app downloads in India over the last 18 months and that its number of trading accounts and retail active clients have grown 10x year-over-year. It was listed among the top 15 brokers in terms of trades by India’s National Stock Exchange (NSE) in 2021.

Before co-founding MarketWolf, Dingra worked at Merrill Lynch and Barclays Capital, building quantitative models and strategies for algorithmic trading in capital markets.

He told TechCrunch that he and Joseph wanted to launch an investment app because “we saw that existing products were focused on investing for long-term only, and short-term trading was overlooked. Thomas and I have worked at trading desks in Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, etc. and understood that there could be an easier, more engaging and risk-managed way of trading made available to people globally.”

The startup is among a number of investment apps based in Southeast Asia that have raised funding–and are continuing to raise). Just over the past month, wealth management platform PINA, Indonesian crypo trading app Pintu and Vietnam’s Anfin, also for first-time investors, have all raised venture capital.

Dingra said MarketWolf differentiates from other investment apps with its gamified interface (many of its users come from mobile gaming communities) and a trading-first approach.

“Most brokerages in the market are investment-first products, whereas MarketWolf is a trading-first product creating its own new market segment—people who can trade well in all market conditions, bullish, bearish, flat or volatile,” he said.

In a prepared statement, Jungle Ventures principal Arpit Beri said, “Retail participation in the stock market in India continues to remain abysmally low at ~3-5% and we believe that MarketWolf has the right product, as well as the right team and expertise to break-through this market.”

Indonesia’s construction industry is large and growing quickly, but a lot of supply procurement is still done the old-fashioned way, through phone calls and text messages. Juragan Material wants to make things easier with a B2B marketplace for building materials from curated suppliers.

The company announced today it has raised $4 million in seed funding led by Go-Ventures, with participation from Susquehanna International Group (SIG).

The new capital will be used for hiring, increasing Juragan Materials’ market share and technological enhancements.

Founded in 2021, the company’s marketplace currently has more than 9,000 products and over 180 brands, including structural, architectural, mechanical and electrical products. It is meant for use by contractors and project owners, and helps them source materials more quickly.

Before launching Juragan Materials, Tito Putra, CEO and co-founder, was a managing director of a building contractor firm.

All the startup’s other founders also have experience working in the construction industry. Chief operating officer Graceila Putri was a product associate at Amazon and worked on growth for a building contractor firm. Chief marketing officer Ricky Fernando previously worked in marketing and relations as Mortindo, a mortar producer, and chief procurement officer Meichael Surja was an architect and contractor on residential products for more than 15 years.

Putra said it often took days for him to source a single item, including time spent checking with multiple vendors for pricing and availability.

He also dealt with deliveries that could not be tracked and arrived late and offline payment and invoicing processes that were long and frustrating. This resulted in high working capital costs and potential losses because of overstocks and over- or under-supply.

Juragan Materials was created to simplify the last leg of the supply chain for the construction industry.

“We recognized that construction is a huge market that is still very conventional and untapped by technology, resulting in a lot of inefficiencies happening in the industry,” Putra said.

Juragan Materials new capital will be used to improve its platform and launch more features, scale-up its customer and vendor acquisitions and enhance its supporting infrastructure, particularly financing and logistics, Putra added.

Indonesian wealth management app PINA’s founding team

While many of Indonesia’s investment apps are focused on hooking first-time investors with low fees and starting deposits, PINA is targeting the middle-to-upper classes with wealth management services. The app announced today that it has raised $3 million in seed funding from AC Ventures, Vibe.VC and Y Combinator, with participation from XA Network.

The company was founded in 2021 by Daniel van Leeuwen, the former country marketing head of Grab Indonesia. He is joined by technical co-founder Fajar Kuntoro, who was previously head of tech and engineering at Indonesian digital agency Mirum, Christian Hermawan, founder of Trust Securities and Hendry Chou, previously product design lead at edtech startup Zenius.

Van Leeuwen told TechCrunch that PINA was created because of the founders’ own challenges with personal finance. As a result, they wanted to make sure that all Indonesians have access to financial advice, not just people who are able to afford the fees and minimums charged by personal wealth advisors.

He said that Indonesian’s middle- and upper-class now includes 52 million people, and PINA was created to give them access to investment services without high minimums and fees as they invest for goals including buying a home, retirement and their children’s education.

“Our firsthand experience working with private financial service providers made us realize that change would never come from existing providers,” Van Leeuwen said. “Chou, Fajar and I worked at [Indonesian conglomerate] Mirum where we consulted large financial service brands on how to digitize and transform their businesses. It opened our eyes to the problems and opportunities in making wealth management accessible but also frustrating when we saw our clients’ inability to bring viable products to market due to their dated infrastructure and business models.”

PINA is among several Indonesian investment apps that have recently raised venture capital. A few examples include Pluang, GoTrade, Bibit, Ajaib, Pintu and Pluang.

Van Leeuwen said current solutions are great for first-time and new investors by charging low minimums, but PINA differentiates with its focus on integrating planning, money management and planning in one platform. “By bringing everything together in one platform, we aim to provide an experience they could never replicate with a human advisor or with a finance folder on their phone full of point solution apps,” he said.

Using PINA’s money management tools and advisors is free, and they monetize by charging when customers make an investment through the platform. Features include automatically-managed portfolios, and investing that needs more involvement from users. PINA also has customized financial advice, automated money management and investing tools in its apps.To use PINA, users link all their financial accounts to the app, and set their savings and investment goals.

PINA’s automatic diversified portfolios work by first determining a user’s investment goals, time horizon, risk tolerance and priorities. Then it invests in a portfolio of low-cost mutual funds. Van Leeuwen said its software automatically rebalances investments, selling ones that rise above users’ target allocation and buying more of ones that fall below it. This is done when users fund their portfolios or when portfolio drift reaches 5%.

As for its wealth management features, Van Leeuwen said PINA “aims to bridge the so-called ‘advice gap’” by providing financial advice that is both affordable and personalized. By linking their financial accounts, including their bank accounts, e-wallets, state pension and investment accounts, users are able to see their net worth, monthly cash flow and how their budget has fluctuated over the past few months. The app also allows them to book a slot with a certified financial advisors.

PINA plans to use its funding on user acquisition and by building out its advisory and investment features and complementary services like access to career coaching and exclusive member events.

In a prepped statement, AC Ventures founder and managing partner Adrian Li said, “The rising adoption of non-cash transactions along with the increase in mass affluent individuals in Indonesia has enabled new billion-dollar opportunities to emerge for wealth management platforms that offer a full stack of services including money management and investing. The team at PINA brings in-depth knowledge and connection with the financial services industry—making PINA one of the most promising companies in the field.”

Mapan’s team, with CEO Ardelia Apti in the front

In Indonesia, arisans are traditionally rotating savings and credit associations (RSCA) that let groups of people, primarily women, save and borrow money together. Mapan digitized that concept, and turned it into a service where users, also mostly women, can use it to pay for goods and services. The company announced today it has raised a Series A of $15 million. The round was co-led by Patamar Capital and PT Astra Digital Internasional, a subsidiary of conglomerate PT Astra International Tbk (also known as Astra International).

The round included participation from BRI Ventures, SMDV, Blibli, Prasetia Dwidharma, Flourish Ventures and 500 Global.

Mapan says it helps people get access to financial services in a country where 51% of adults are unbanked, or don’t have access to a bank account. Mapan is currently available in Java, Bali, Sumatera, Nusa Tenggara and Sulawesi, with plans to expand into the rest of Indonesia. It currently claims more than three million members.

The new capital will be used to expand Mapan’s product range and partner with more suppliers for its marketplace of goods for resellers. It also wants to make Mapan Arisan available to 10 million households in Indonesia by 2026.

Mapan, which means “steady” in Bahasa Indonesian, was founded in 2009. The company recently appointed Ardelia Apti as its CEO. Before working at Mapan, Apti spent five years at Gojek as part of its GoTo Group, where she helped build Swadaya, its benefits program for Gojek drivers, and also led GoPay’s offline payments. Before that, she was country director for AI company Element, Inc. and a McKinsey consultant.

At 13 years old, the startup is one of the first of a growing and diverse number of tech companies targeted toward Indonesians and SMEs that find it difficult to access traditional financial services. A few of the others TechCrunch has covered include earned-wage access startup GajiGesa; Super, a social commerce startup for rural areas; Jeff, which is building alternative scoring and other fintech products for Southeast Asia; SME working capital platform KoinWorks; and InfraDigital to digitize cash tuition payments for schools.

Apti told TechCrunch that Mapan’s founding team saw that “many existing commerce, income and financial solutions are not in favor of low-income communities. They require more effort and costs to be able to get the goods they want in a way that is affordable to them. Likewise, there are ways to earn income, many of which require time, capital and expertise that are difficult to access for this target market, especially women.”

When it was founded, Mapan was known was RUMA and enabled warungs, or small neighborhood stores, in rural areas to become bill and phone credit sellers. Apti said the company pivoted to focus on Mapan Arisan, launching the app in 2015 because it saw how many arisans were used by its target audience, and wanted to digitize the concept.

The company’s also introduced other products, including a bills payment features called Mapan Pulsa, and Mapan Mart, a platform where resellers can select consumer products from Mapan’s marketplace or buy for themselves.

Mapan Arisan groups have to have at least five members, and are used for goods and services, including kitchenware, electronics and furniture worth about 200,000 IDR (or about $13.48 USD) to 3 million IDR (about $200 USD), instead of cash. Apti said that “based on our research, social fintech with such a purpose is more needed by the low income community” and gives them the motivation to complete an arisan process.

Leaders of Mapan Arisan groups, called Mitra Usaha Mapan, or MUM, use its app to determine the shuffle dates of Arisans, or when each member gets their goods or services. Apti said that the winner of each raffle is decided through an algorithm to ensure fairness.

MUMs also get benefits including cashback commissions based on the total transactions or group value at the end of the Arisan and a loyalty program that can redeemed into a variety of benefits, including e-wallet credits, gold bars, motorcycles, different types of savings and house down payments. They also help Mapan grow by upselling its members to the company’s other services. Apti said that since 2009, the company has had 250,000 MUMs.

Mapan monetizes through the difference between its selling prices and purchase price from its supplier. Apti said that providing large-scale access to mid- to low-income communities in a cost-efficient way compared to their traditional channels means Mapan is able to offer better prices.

In a prepared statement, Patamar Capital partner Dondi Hananto said, “The concept of Arisan has been core to Indonesian culture for many years, and by digitizing it, Mapan brought scalability to the age-old practice.”

Rider is on a mission to provide online shoppers in Pakistan with “Amazon-like” next-day deliveries. The Karachi-based company announced it has raised $3.1 million in new funding from Y Combinatior, along with new investors i2i, Flexport, Soma Capital and Rebel Fund. Returning investors included GFC, Fatima Gobi and TPL E-ventures, along with Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi. This brings RIder’s total raised to $5.4 million since September 2021.

Founded in 2019 by former UPS Pakistan executive Salman Allana, Rider is building a network of sorting hubs, delivery centers and a digitized fleet. The platform enables sellers to offer next-day delivery with route optimization, live tracking and scheduling for buyers. The company claims that since their pre-seed investment round in September 2021, monthly revenues have grown 110% and they have doubled their customer base to 650 online sellers. So far, Rider has delivered 3 million parcels across 60 cities in Pakistan. It currently runs a network of 16 hubs that cover 60 cities across Pakistan, which Allana said accounts for about 60% of e-commerce demand in the country.

Allana told TechCrunch that growing up in Karachi and spending his early career in sub-Saharan Africa meant he was used to poor supply chains and logistics services. “If you ordered something online, you accepted the huge risk it might never show up,” he said. When he moved to London to study for his MBA, he became “obsessed” with Amazon delivery. “How could an order I placed at midnight be at my doorstep the next morning? I believed there was a clear and large opportunity to bring this service quality to online sellers in Pakistan and eradicate ‘parcel anxiety’ for all online buyers in Pakistan—including myself.”

After earning his MBA, Allana started working for UPS Pakistan as head of strategy and business development. He saw for himself the challenges logistics incumbents face, including lost orders, buyers who are reluctant to order online again and, for online sellers, headaches like manual cash-on-delivery, reconciliation and slow payback, which created working capital challenges, especially for Pakistan’s one million SMEs that rely on Instagram and Facebook to reach buyers.

“I learnt that the traditional delivery payers were not set up or equipped to service the online retail trend, and that change from the inside would be slow and costly,” Allana said. “The COVID pandemic saw a huge and irreversible shift to online shopping across Pakistan. Only a built-for-purpose, dynamic, growth-focused startup could capture this opportunity on time.”

Logistics is a notoriously cash-burning sector. Allana said that the network of delivery centers Rider is building isn’t what you would usually imagine. Instead they include mobile warehouses (or pre-sorted vans), empty spaces in the parking lot of malls and petrol stations. Moving forward, Rider would also like to have delivery centers in kiranas, or convenience stores. This means delivery centers are flexible enough to move as high volume e-commerce zones change.

“We’re fundamentally building for ‘urban logistics,’ so we don’t have requirements for large sorting centers and spaces,” he said. “Our network consists of numerous small delivery centers which are purposely placed to cover high-volume e-commerce zones, and which ultimately are flexible to move as these zones change.”

Rider’s new funding will be used on its in-house tech, including e-commerce enablement tools like plug-ins and built-in wallets to help SMEs, which Allana said are mostly owned by women, grow their businesses.

“Our ambition from day one—we want to be the country’s number end-to-end e-commerce logistics solution provider,” Allana said. “But we see logistics as a series of building blocks, each of which we need to get right, operationally and financially, before we can build the next. Today, Rider is doing last-mile delivery to the customers’ doorstep. We’ve proven our last mile solutions work, we’ve proven they work at scale and we now need to prove they work sustainably before we enter other verticals.” He added Rider already has an eye on its next phase, and piloted its B2B movement, or overland trucking, in January.

In a prepared statement, i2i general partner Kalsoom Lakhani said, “As the e-commerce industry in Pakistan grows, so will the need for a next generation 3PL player that understands the Pakistani market realities and knows how to build both aggressively but also efficiently. We believe that this player is Rider and have so much conviction in Salman and his vision.