Good Startup founders Gautam Godhwani and Jayesh Parekh

Good Startup, a Singapore-based venture capital firm focused on alternative protein, has closed its latest fund. Consisting of $34 million, the new fund, called Good Protein Fund I, included participation from Vinmar International founder and chairman Vijay Goradia; former head of finance and strategy for Fidelity Investments Harris Komishane; and INSEAD professor of entrepreneurship Bala Vissa. 

Founded in 2021, Good Startup wants to remove animals from the global food system. It also invests in non-food startups: for example, companies that make alternatives to leather. So far, Good Startup has invested in 21 companies out of a target of 35 startups. 

Good Startup managing partner Gautam Godhwani told TechCrunch that the firm invests primarily in early-stage companies, with an average check size of $500,000. 

Some of its current portfolio companies include Avant Meats, which produces cultivated fish products and has operations in Singapore and Hong Kong; Nowadays, a producer of plant-based “clean-label” chicken; Mooji Meats, which is focused on 3D-printing capabilities to produce plant-based and cultivated meats; Rebellyous Foods, another plant-based chicken startup that Godhwani said achieves price parity with conventional chicken through a highly-automated production process and is targeted at the food service sector; and VitroLabs, a lab-grown leather producer. 

Travel and tourism are coming back online in the wake of Covid-19 restrictions getting relaxed, and today a startup tackling one part of the equation for getting from home to one’s destination is announcing some funding to capitalize on that. Bookaway, which has built a platform for people to view options for and book their ground transportation — journeys from a long-haul arrival point to a hotel or other final destination, with some 7,000 providers listed in all currently — has raised $35 million.

The Tel Aviv-based startup’s Series C is being led by Red Dot Capital Partners. Menorah, an insurance company based in Tel Aviv, and New York based Tenere Capital, along with previous backers Aleph, Corner Ventures and Entrée Capital are all also participating. The company is not disclosing its valuation but it has raised $81 million to date.

The travel industry sometimes feels like it is in a perpetual state of consolidation: partly because of price pressures due to the slowdown of the last few years; increasing fuel prices; and general competition, companies like Airbnb or Booking, airlines, and hotel groups build more services into their offerings in an attempt to improve their margins and bring more economies of scale into their operations.

But Noam Toister, the CEO and founder of Bookaway, believes that a huge opportunity remains in ground transportation largely because of how offline and fragmented it is, including when it comes to traveling to remote or exotic locations.

“Our group was born during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a shared belief that the ground transport industry will better meet the needs of travelers when it is united, not fragmented,” he said. The company has already made four acquisitions underscoring how some of that de-fragmentation will come in consolidation within the specific area of ground transportation itself. Founded originally to provide services in Asia as Bookaway.com, when bookings collapsed, it started to raise money to buy up other similarly-challenged businesses to shore up for a time when the tide would turn: 12Go and GetByBus acquisitions followed to expand in Asia Pacific and the Balkans, and then Plataforma 10 in Argentina followed.

In all, the company has knitted together thousands of providers — most of them independent and very local businesses — on a platform that travelers can use to book their journeys ahead of time, with providers including busses, ferries, trains, private transportation options and more. Digitizing that experience in itself is a big undertaking and shift: some 95% of ground transportation providers are “offline” according to Toister, and there are some 10,000 globally in what is collectively a $157 billion annual market. “If you are traveling in the world you book flights and hotels, but most destinations still don’t have a airport,” he said, meaning transportation from the airport to the hotel is a trek, “and it’s hard to book transport currently.”

He notes that Uber and companies like it are not currently seen as competitors although Uber has recently started to wade into this market, representing a potential threat, or perhaps a partner. “It’s heavy lifting to connect with 7,000 transport companies globally,” Toister said. 

“This is an experienced management team that have grown successful travel-tech companies before,” said Barak Saloman, managing partner, Red Dot Capital Partners, in a statement. “With a complex task like globalizing ground transport you need local knowledge, technology expertise and industry experience. Bookaway Group has all three and they’re committed to winning this market.”

Hannah Life Technologies, a startup for couples trying to conceive, announced today it has raised $5.15 million in pre-Series A funding led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. Other investors include Golden Gate Ventures, Anthro Ventures, and medical technology entrepreneur Dr. Jack Wang. The funding comes about 18 months after the company raised seed funding from Y Combinator.

Benjamin Tee, who co-founded Hannah Life with Prusothman Raja, told TechCrunch that he and his wife experienced unexplained fertility, a physically and emotionally stressful time. “Although my wife and I finally conceived through IVF, I felt that there could be non-invasive home based technologies to help couples conceive earlier.”

Tee, who met Raja through the Stanford Biodesign program, also found that the “often the burden of pregnancy falls on the female gender’s shoulders, across many cultures. As males, we wanted also to help balance the perception that infertility is often caused by female factors. Roughly half of fertility issues come from males, such as low sperm count and quality.”

The company offers three main direct-to-consumer products, created to give couples home-based non-invasive services as a complement to clinic-based procedures like intra-uterine insemination (IUI).

The twoplus Sperm Guide is a patented device made out of medical-grade silicone that concentrates sperm near the cervical opening to increase chances of fertilization. The twoplus Applicator was created for couples trying to conceive without penetrative sex and deposits sperm directly onto the cervical opening. The twoplus Hormone Test provides detailed reports on hormones, helping couples determine their levels of fertility and potentially spotting health issues.

The company says that since it launched in August 2021, it has provided products to over a thousand households in Singapore and the United Kingdom, with revenue growth of over 300% quarter-over-quarter.

Remember the IkeaBot? The robot went viral for its ability to build Ikea furniture as well (or better) than humans can. The team behind the project went on to found Eureka Robotics, which announced today that it has raised a pre-Series A round of $4.25 million, led by The University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners (UTEC), one of Asia’s largest deep-tech investment firms, with participation from Vietnam’s Touchstone Partners and returning investor ATEQ.

Eureka Robotics’ products are based on research from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and MIT. It focuses on robotic software and systems to automate tasks that require High Accuracy and High Agility (HAHA). Its robots are used for precision handling, assembly, inspection, drilling and other tasks.

The Eureka Controller’s High-Accuracy calibration synchronizes the reference frames of the robot and camera with high accuracy, enabling sub-millimeter accuracy on vision-guided tasks, while Force Control gives the robot the ability to perform tight assembly and insertion, with clearance down to 50 micron. Meanwhile, its High Agility involves computer vision that allows robots to recognize and locate randomly-placed objects. Once the robot finds the position of an object, real-time motion planning helps it move towards it.

An example of how the Eureka Controller can be used is the Archimedes, which deployed technologies originally developed for the Ikea Robot to a shop floor for the first time. It is capable of handling multiple-sized lenses and mirrors and loading those delicate objects onto a tray in order to be coated. Eureka co-founder Dr. Pham Quang Cuong told TechCrunch that the Archimedes is currently operating in a factory in Singapore, serving a U.S. laser lens manufacturer, and that the company has received multiple follow-up orders of the robot.

The funding will be used on accelerating development of Eureka Controller, the company’s flagship product, which allows factories to deploy HAHA tasks in System Integrators and factories. Eureka co-founder Dr. Pham said that “while the core technologies are mature and have already been deployed in production, we want to make those technologies really easy to use by System Integrators. Making advanced technologies easy to use by non-programmer engineers is actually difficult.” Part of the funding will be used to grow Eureka Robotics’ software engineering team and product teams to work on the Eureka Controller.

Eureka Robotics also plans to expand its commercialization in Singapore and China, and new markets like Japan and Vietnam, with the help of UTEC and Touchstone, respectively. It currently has offices in Singapore and France and distribution partners in China, Japan and the U.S.

Atma, an Indonesian startup that wants to make job hunting less painful, announced today it has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding led by AC Ventures, with participation from Global Founders Capital. Strategic investors in the round included founders and executives from GoTo Group, Advance Intelligence Group, Ula, Lummo, Kopi Kenangan, Sampoerna Strategic, MMS Group and Xiami.

The funding will be used for hiring, with plans to expand Atma’s headcount from about 30 employees to 100, product development and its go-to-market strategy. 

The platform targets the lower and middle-income segment of the working-age population in Indonesia, or people earning less than 10 million IDR a month (or about $700 USD). Atma says up to over 100 million people in Indonesia fit into this category.

Edy Tan, co-founder and CEO of Atma, formerly worked as vice president of driver income at Gojek. 

Tan told TechCrunch that part of his responsibilities at GoJek included improving drivers’ livelihoods in a sustainable way. During the peak of the pandemic, driver income dropped by 80% on average. As a result, Tan began looking for other way for drivers to make revenue. During that time, he said, “I discovered that drivers generally wanted income stability more so than higher income.” Intrigued, he began to look at the economic opportunity landscape for the lower and middle income segment. 

“It soon became apparent to me that the job market for the lower and middle income segment is fundamentally broken and ripe for innovation when most job seekers described their job search experience as emotionally traumatizing and companies often described their candidate search experience as a random walk,” he said. 

For job seekers, Atma is building a mobile app. When they start applying for jobs, job seekers will go through a screening process, including their qualifications, skills and cultural fit. Atma’s app will also provide them with real-time job application updates, so job seekers don’t suffer being ghosted after submitting an application. For employers, Atma makes the hiring process easier by using data to screen, assess and sort candidates so they know the best people to interview.

 Atma will also include community features, like career development programs, peer-to-peer learning and the chance to meet with other job seekers. 

Hikvision shares fell by 10% after a Financial Times report that the Biden administration is planning to impose more sanctions on the surveillance camera company, accusing it of enabling human right abuses.

The Financial Times reports that the sanctions would have “far-reaching consequences because companies and governments that deal with Hikvision… would risk violating U.S. sanctions.” According to the Financial Times, this would be the first time that the White House has imposed these kinds of sanctions on such a large company. The company is the world’s largest manufacturer of surveillance equipment.

In 2019, Hikvision and Dahua, another surveillance tech company, were placed on the U.S. government entity list for its role in enabling human rights violations among Muslim minority groups in China, including the Uyghurs. And under another sanction imposed in June by the Biden administration, U.S. persons are barred from investing in Hikvision. But many municipalities in the U.S. still use Hikvision cameras. According to contract data reviewed by TechCrunch in May, at least a hundred U.S. counties, towns and cities have bought surveillance equipment made by Hikvision and Dahua. They are able to do so because federal actions do not apply at the state and city level.

In a statement emailed to TechCrunch, a Hikvision spokesperson said, “The potential action by the US Government, as reported, remains to be verified. We believe any such sanction should be based on credible evidence and due process. We look forward to being treated fairly and without bias.”

Hikvision is among a slew of Chinese tech companies that the U.S. government has targeted with individual actions rather than having a coordinated plan to contain their rise.

TikTok was one notable example under the Trump administration. More recently, under the Biden administration, Weibo was added to a delisting watchlist by the Securities and Exchange Commission. DJI, along with seven other companies, was placed on an investment blacklist in December 2021, for alleged involvement in the surveillance of Uyghur Muslims. The drone maker was already on the Department of Commerce’s Entity list, meaning American companies can’t sell it components unless they have a license.

Toplyne founders Ruchin Kulkarni, Rohit Khanna and Rishen Kapoor

For product-led growth companies (PLG), the perennial question is: how do we get non-paying customers to subscribe? Then the second question is: how do we get paying customers to move to higher tiers? Toplyne wants to help by automating the process of identifying promising leads and figuring out what go-to market strategies will work best for each of them. Launched in June 2021, the startup’s customers already include Canva, Grafana, Gather.Town and InVideo.

The Bangalore-based startup announced today it has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India, with participation from returning investors Together Fund, Sequoia India’s Surge program, and angel investors from Canva, Vercel and Zomminfo.

Toplyne was founded by Ruchin Kulkarni, Rishen Kapoor and Rohit Khanna, who met while working as investment analysts at Sequoia India.

During that time, Kulkarni told TechCrunch they discovered that many product-led growth companies were struggling with conversion rates, even if they had a relatively easy time getting free users. Their growth teams had a hard time not only identifying the best leads among thousands or even millions of users, but also what marketing strategies they should use.

For example, Kapoor said a highly-engaged user may just need to be offered a discount on a paywall. But others might respond better to email marketing or contact from a salesperson.

Toplyne integrates with a client’s existing marketing software (including Amplitude, Mixpanel and Salesforce) and analyzes cohorts of users to show which ones have the lowest or highest potential conversion rates. For example, high engagement with an app, opening marketing emails and answering chatbot questions are all promising signals. This in turn helps growth teams plan their go-to-market strategies for each group. Toplyne analyzes which strategies are working best, or suggests other marketing channels, then helps growth teams see how effective each one is.

The funding will be used to grow Toplyne’s data science, engineering, product and design teams. The company is currently working on on its self-serve product and says it has a waiting list of more than 1,000 companies.

In a statement, Naman Gupta, product-growth lead at Canva Pro and an angel investor in Toplyne, said, “Creating the infrastructure and plumbing to support growth experiments, followed by rapidly A/B testing and operationalizing the most repeatable growth strategies is a herculean task spanning several quarters. Toplyne helped us short-circuit this process to a few days.”

Oware co-founders Raza Kasmi and Adil Nasar

Managing goods as they make their way through multiple warehouses and logistics providers is one of the biggest headaches that businesses in the supply chain face. After leaving his job at Careem, Adil Nasar founded a company that sources, manufacturers and distributes lights in Pakistan, and experienced those challenges firsthand. So he teamed up with Raza Kasmi, the former group CFO of one of Pakistan’s largest distribution houses, to found Oware, a network of connected warehouses that let businesses track and manage their shipments from a single portal.

Today the company announced it has raised $3.3 million pre-seed funding from investors including Flexport Fund, Ration Ventures, Seedstars International Ventures, Sketchnote Partners, The Osiris Group, Swiss Founders Fund, Reflect Ventures, +92 Ventures and Walled City Co.

Nisar told TechCrunch that while starting novo, his biggest challenge as a small business owner was finding a reliable fulfillment partner and managing upfront capital costs related to warehousing.

Oware’s warehouse portal

Oware is meant to provide businesses with an affordable and scalable solution to traditional warehouse networks, while ensuring timely deliveries to end customers. Most of its customers are B2B market and retail companies that are looking for backend warehousing and transportation to their last distribution point or dark store.

Oware currently has 18 warehouses in five cities in Pakistan, with a total space of 500,000 square feet. Part of Oware’s funding will be used to increase its coverage, which the company says can already provide same-day delivery to 75% of the population and next-day delivery to 85%.

The company rents its warehouse space and works with third-party logistics providers. Oware’s clients can quickly start their operations from any of its locations, picking the ones that are closest to their end customers. Oware’s partners handles almost everything they need for deliveries, including picking, packing and shipping. Its online portal manage product inventory at their warehouses and track shipments in real-time with digital proof of delivery.

In a prepared statement, Seedstars partner and CIO Charlie Graham-Brown said, “Pakistan has a massive opportunity in logistics presented by the 2 million SMEs and the rise of e-commerce in the region. We believe that Oware has a solid position to be an integral layer to an ecosystem that’s becoming digitally enabled. We are proud to have been Adil’s and Raza’s early backers and thrilled for the journey ahead.”

Dat Bike founder and CEO Son Nguyen

Dat Bike is on a journey to reduce the amount of gasoline used in Vietnam. The startup makes electric motorbikes with key components that it designs and produces domestically to reduce costs and improve performance. Today, Dat Bike announced it has raised a $5.3 million Series A led by Jungle Ventures, with participation from Wavemaker Partners.

Both are returning investors. Jungle Ventures led Dat Bike’s seed round a year ago, when TechCrunch first profiled the company. The latest funding brings Dat Bike’s total to $10 million raised since it was founded in 2019 by Son Nguyen.

Dat Bike is recognized by the Vietnam Ministry of Transportation as the first domestically-made electric bike. Nguyen said that Dat Bike uses vertical integration instead of relying on third-party, imported electric drivetrains and parts because that keeps costs down while improving quality. Most of the parts on Dat Bike’s vehicles are designed by the company and 80% of its suppliers are located in Vietnam. It also uses a direct-to-consumer distribution model, pushing prices down lower.

Part of the funding will be invested in its technology. Nguyen explained that the three most important parts of an electric bike are its battery, motor and controller. Right now, Dat Bike owns technology for its battery packaging and controller. With its new capital, it will be able to invest in its engine technology. Nguyen added that the company will also upgrade its mobile app, adding new features and shortening the feedback loop on its error reporting feature.

One major thing the company had to address was consumer concerns about the performance of e-bikes compared to their gasoline counterparts. The company says its first product line, the Weaver, displayed three times the performance (5 kW versus 1.5 kW) and two times the range of (100 km vs 50 km) of most competing electric bikes. Dat Bike’s second model, the Weaver 200, was launched last year with higher performance, or a range of 200 km and 6 kW power. It also reduced charging time from 1 hour for 100 km to 2.5 hours for its full 200 km charge.

“We aim to develop a new product every year and research for faster charging,” Nguyen said.

Dat Bike currently has two stores in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, and its bikes can be ordered online, too. Part of the funding will be used to expand its offline-to-online model into more large cities, including Thai Nguyen, Bac Ninh, Hai Phong, Hai Duong, Ha Long, Vinh, Quy Nhon, Nha Trang, Danang, Can Tho and Vung Tau.

MadEats, Y Combinator alum, claims to be the first “‘full-stack’ delivery-only startup in the Philippines,” with their own virtual storefront, ghost kitchens and fleet of drivers. More than that, they also conceptualize and launch their own brands, making them a delivery-only restaurant group.

The company announced today it has raised $1.7 million in seed funding led by JAM Fund, Crystal Towers Capital, Starling Ventures, MAIN and Rebel Fund.

Launched in November 2020, MadEats currently has three ghost kitchens: one each in Makati, Quezon City and the City of Manila. They aim to cover more of Metro Manila’s north, and eventually open physical storefronts, too.

Before founding MadEats, CEO Mikee Villareal told TechCrunch that the team worked for some of the top restaurant groups in the Philippines, launching, managing and working on over 20 restaurant concepts. “At the beginning of the pandemic, we were asked to operationalize these restaurants to be delivery-forward due to stringent quarantine restrictions,” she said. “Dine-in concepts were heavily affected and we saw the need for our business.”

She added that ghost kitchens have a different cost structure than traditional restaurants, which gives the team freedom to create product concepts that are more delivery-friendly.

MadEats now has six brands and is expanding its portfolio: Yang Gang (Korean fried chicken); Chow Time (Chinese takeout); Fried Nice (fried rice); Dot Coffee; MadBakes (a test kitchen for desserts), and MadMakes for bulk orders, corporate packages and packed meals. The company is currently adding more brands, including smash burgers and Japanese food.

MadEatsOS, its suite of internal tools, is what makes MadEats approach scalable. It includes an automated order routing system that makes sure orders are fulfilled at the nearest location, and analytics that show which brands and food items are performing well.

The company has its own MadEats riders and as demand for orders increases, have also worked with third-party logistics providers. It is available on third-party apps like GrabFood and Foodpanda, but Villareal said over 50% of its orders come in through its own platform, Madeats.co.

Ordinary Folk, a Singapore-based telehealth startup dedicated to men and women’s health issues, has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding from Monk’s Hill Ventures. The funding will be used for hiring and expand into Hong Kong while scaling in Singapore.

Founded in 2020 by Sean Low, the startup has two main platforms: Noah is for men’s sexual health, mental wellness, hair care and weight management, while Zoey focuses on sexual wellness, fertility, mental health and wellbeing.

Low says he started Ordinary Folk to ease the pain points of an in-person clinical visit, while also making it easier to seek care for stigmatized conditions like erectile dysfunction.

“Men’s and women’s health conditions are intimate problems that affect all of us at some point of our lives, whether directly or through your partner,” he told TechCrunch. “And before we started Noah and Zoey, there weren’t any good solutions in Singapore and Hong Kong.”

The company chose Hong Kong as its next market to expand into because there are many similarities between Singapore and Hong Kong, Low added. For example, both are densely-populated and fast-paced, with healthcare systems that have the same issues, he said.

“While there are nuances, Singaporeans and Hong Kongers also identify similarly on issues such as high healthcare costs, fear of illegitimate medication, inconvenience of visiting a doctor and the stigma attached to men’s and women’s health conditions,” he explained.

Ordinary Folk says that since its launch, its revenue has grown by over 130% and it has had over a million unique visitors. It differentiates from other telemedicine startups by building a full healthcare stack, Low said, including healthcare and logistics for medication in non-description packaging.

This also means Ordinary Folk was able to create a health assessment patients take before scheduling an appointment, allowing doctors to make more detailed diagnoses.

“In the case of sexual health, having to answer intimate questions can be tough and what more to a stranger whom you’ve never met,” said Low. The health assessment was developed in partnerships with doctors and health experts. Ordinary Folk’s network of providers include physicians, psychologists, therapists and other specialists.

In a prepared statement, Peng T. Ong, the co-founder and managing partner of Monk’s Hill Ventures, said, “Millions of people across Asia find it difficult to access proper treatment and care for health conditions that have tremendous taboo attached. Through Noah and Zoey, Ordinary Folk is uniquely positioned to bring in value through the consumer journey of healthcare services, creating an ecosystem where patients have access to medical experts and products, and a wide range of treatment options.

NOICE, an Indonesia audio content startup, has raised $22 million in Series A funding led by Northstart, with participation from returning investors Alpha JWC Go-Ventures and Kinesys.

NOICE is different from other audio streaming startups because its focus isn’t on music. Instead, NOICE, which has 2 million users, focuses on podcasts, radio, audiobooks, and live audio. For example, it hosts drama series from Indonesian writers and works with influencers to create podcasts and live audio.

The company claims that daily listeners spend about 80 minutes per day on the platform. It currently has more than 40,000 pieces of content for them to chose from.

NOICE recently launched an audio creation platform, called the Noicemaker Studio, to encourage more creators to publish audio content directly onto NOICE.

The funding will be used on content acquisition, building NOICE’s technology for users and creators and adapting stories from local writers into an audio format.

In a prepared statement, co-founder and managing partner of Northstar Group, Patrick Walujo, said, “We have seen NOICE’s plans to aggressively scale and we are excited to partner them on this journey.”