Blocknom, a crypto-earning platform in Y Combinator’s current batch, has aspirations to become the “Coinbase Earn for Southeast Asia.” Today the company announced it has raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding from Y Combinator, Number Capital and Magic Fund.

Blocknom’s co-founders, Fransiskus Raymond and Ghuniyu Fattah Rozaq say the app gives users a secure way (it partners with crypto infrastructure company Fireblocks) to get stable, high-yield interest of up to 13% per annum. It also enables users to withdraw their money at any time without fees.

The two founders met while working on an open source project in 2020, around the start of the pandemic. “We noticed during COVID, the crypto market is booming in Indonesia, while we were both already crypto investors,” Raymond told TechCrunch.

“We talked to users and found that not everyone can do well in trading.” They found that DeFi is a stable and high-yield way to gain through crypto, but there were no competing products in Indonesia, so they decided to build one themselves. Its DeFi partners include Compound, AAVE, Terra and Cake.

After signing up for Blocknom, users with a bank account can deposit Stablecoins, which the founders chose because it is the most comparable to conventional bank deposits and therefore accessible to new crypto users.

Raymond said Blocknom differentiates from investment apps by encouraging people to save and hold their Stablecoin for the long-term.

AgriAku, a Jakarta-based B2B marketplace for farmers, announced today it has raised a pre-Series A of $6 million. The round was led by Go-Ventures, with participation from MDI Arise, MDI Centauri, Mercy Corps Social Venture Fund and angel investors. The funding will be used on hiring and increasing AgriAku’s market penetration.

The marketplace enables retailers to buy supplies, including seeds, fertilizers and agrochemicals, from wholesalers and manufacturers. Then the retailers sell those items to farmers. AgriAku’s goal is to give retailers and farmers a bigger selection of products and access to transparent pricing. It also gives suppliers business software, like bookkeeping and inventory management tools, to help them make forecasts about what farmers will need. 

AgriAku’s marketplace launched in May 2021 and the company says it has seen average month-on-month growth of 200% in gross merchandise value over the past four months. The number of active users on AgriAku is now about 10,000 registered farmer stores. 

The company was launched last year by Irvan Kolonas, also founder of social enterprise agritech startup Vasham and Danny Handoko, whose was previously CEO of Airy, an Indonesian hospitality startup. The team also includes Rezky Haryanto Agustia, former assistant vice president for supply chain and operations at e-commerce giant Bukalapak. 

Kolonas told TechCrunch that AgriAku is a “culmination of a lifelong mission for me, as I first took on the mission 10 years ago with the start of my first company Vasham, a social enterprise, doing a full close-loop, full-stack model helping smallholder corn farmers.”

After spending years trying different models, including direct-to-farmer and retail stores, Kolonas said he realized it was not sustainable to sell directly to farmers. “Instead, we believe firmly now that the most important stakeholder is the Toko Tanis. The Toko Tanis are our mitras or agents who distribute not only inputs but eventually other services to farmers. We want to leverage the decades of relationship that have been built up by them as community leaders with the farmers in their surrounding areas.” 

AgriAku is the latest among several agritech startups in Indonesia that have recently announced funding rounds. Other B2B marketplaces include TaniHub Group, which focuses on connecting farmers with customers to sell their produce. Kolonas said AgriAku eventually also wants to enable farmers to sell produce, by connecting them to offtakers, or factories like rice millers or corn dryers 

In a prepared statement, Go-Ventures partner Aditya Kamath said, “Indonesia’s agricultural industry contributes significantly to the economy, at approximately 13.5% of GDP. However, the upstream agricultural market is highly fragmented with a disorganized value chain for agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilizers and agrochemicals.” He added, “AgriAku’s B2B input marketplace platform is ideally positioned to improve price transparency and market access for all stakeholders in the agricultural inputs sector.” 

Amazon rules the roost when it comes to e-commerce, not just because of its size but because of how it uses that to amass large amounts information that it in turn uses to continue feeding the machine with sophisticated product recommendations, relevant advertising, and more to keep people finding things to buy, and buying them. Today, a Stockholm-based startup called Depict.ai that has also built a product recommendation tool — which it believes can help any retailer sell like Amazon — is announcing funding of $17 million to feed its own growth in the U.S. an Europe, after picking up 60 customers including Office Depot and Staples.

The Series A is being led by Tiger Global, with Initialized Capital, EQT Ventures, Y Combinator, and a longish-list of high-profile angels. It follows a seed funding round of $2.8 million that the company raised last year from Initialized, EQT Ventures, Northzone and Y Combinator, where Depict.ai was part of the first cohort to go through the program during a Covid-19 lockdown.

As CEO Oliver Edholm  (who co-founded the company with CTO Anton Osika) describes it, Depit.ai’s basic premise is that Amazon’s algorithms work so well because they have so much data on their platform about what you, and people similar to you, are buying. On a platform with millions of products, it gives Amazon the power to figure out what to show you, and also what to stock and develop as product categories, and how to price those products. That’s a paradigm that most other retailers have adopted too, he said.

“This is the same system that everyone else has adopted, but they are usually only looking at their own historical data,” Endholm said, which will never be as extensive as the dataset that Amazon has, and also doesn’t provide information about active purchases.

Depict.ai’s solution has been to amass a much bigger trove of information by aggregating data from across the internet; building its own deep learning-based platform to “read” it in relevant ways (for example in a search for recommendations after someone searches for a dress, identifying data that relates to other dresses, rather than to models that look like the model in the initial search a customer made); and then ordering it to fit searches made on its customers’ sites, to produce relevant recommendations.

It amasses the data initially by scraping a wide array of sites across the web, Edholm tells me. Scraping has had its share of controversy — a number of sites go to great lengths to make it hard or outright prohibit it, and some have gone so far as to take legal action against those who scrape — but Edholm notes that it’s not illegal and is actually quite standard practice in the world of commerce.

“We train on scraped quantities of data from the web, but a lot of models that do that,” he said. “You can learn pretty good abstractions.”

And, in any case, Depict.ai is scraping such a wide range of sites that even if one or two or 10 blocked it, there would still be a huge trove to tap, and Depict.ai already has amassed a huge amount of data.

“We’re not dependent on any specific site like LInkedIn or Craigslist,” he said, referring to two platforms that have been extensively scraped over the years for primary data that gets repurposed by others. “We generally want to find a lot of e-commerce product information and there are a lot of ways to do that, so I’m not worried about blocks. And we’ve already trained our models and can do it again and can drastically change the data set if we need to.”

The recommendation engine then can be integrated into its customers’ backends by way of an API. It claims that its tech can increase customers’ e-commerce revenue by between 4% and 6% “without needing any sales data at all.”

Catch Edholm if you can

Edholm’s resourcefulness and willingness to quickly change up the means to achieve Depict’s ends is a trait that is actually part and parcel of the person himself.

A computer whizkid, Edholm is a self-taught programmer who first got interested in coding after building customized Minecraft experiences as a 12 year-old. He then moved on to building mobile apps after realizing that they, like Minecraft, also used java.

After finishing middle school, Edholm left formal education and turned to home schooling (he credited his parents multiple times for being “super open minded” during our interview; boy, are they). He first came up with the idea for Depict.ai when he was working as a data scientist at Klarna, the buy now, pay later e-commerce powerhouse also based out of Stockholm, where he first started working when he was only 15. (Klarna had to pull a lot of strings to get him working there, he said, and he describes his work there perhaps because of that as “consulting.”)

While there, he became obsessed with artificial intelligence.

“What was super clear was that modern machine learning needs tons of data to function properly,” he said. “When you think you have enough, even more is better. That’s how modern machine learning works. But in e-commerce Amazon has a monopoly on data. The rest of the e-commerce industry doesn’t have the same alternatives. They u lack the quantity of data of an Amazon.”

But between noticing and figuring out (using AI) how to fix that gap between Amazon and the rest of the commerce world when it came to product data, and actually starting Depict.ai to turn that into a business, Edholm had another detour.

When he was 16 he’d saved up enough money from his Klarna work and selling apps in the app store, and he up and bought a ticket to Singapore, where he decided he needed to live to build a different startup: an AI-based accessibility platform for the web, to help those with visual impairments experience the internet.

Singapore was in his sights, he said, because he’d read a few research papers about accessibility that were published by academics in the country on the subject, so he thought that it would be best to be on the ground there to build out his ideas.

“I was very naive. I was inspired by the film Catch Me If You Can,” he said. “I understand that it was dramatic for my parents. I guess I have a track record of booking spontaneous flights.” (In fact, my interview with him was conducted while he was not in Stockholm, but Antwerp, Belgium — where he’d spontaneously flown that morning to try to woo a potential hire that he really wanted to join the team.)

He stayed in Singapore for six months on a short-term visa working on the idea, financing his time there by doing more consultancy work. Eventually he realized that it would be a huge challenge to build this out as a business. (Indeed, I think such products probably do have currency, but perhaps more as platform plays than accessibility-as-a-service for end users.)

So, for a Plan B, he also applied to join Y Combinator, now to work on Depict.ai, which had yet to launch. By the time he got a slot to interview, he’d moved back to Stockholm, but hadn’t told YC, so in fact had to fly back to Asia, to Bangalore, for the actual in-person meeting before eventually getting accepted, only to eventually go through the program remotely because of Covid-19.

Since starting Depict.ai, Edholm’s own star as an individual and founder of renown has only gone up: no surprise here, but he’s also now a Thiel Fellow.

Edholm is now only 19, and reading through what he’s done so far, it’s hard to imagine him sitting still for too long, but with Depict.ai still in the building phase, there is a lot of potential still to tap. For starters, it can pick up more customers. It can also diversify what it uses its data for, both to serve e-commerce companies but also in applying that same framework to other verticals.

In that regard, it’s interesting to see an investor like Tiger leading this round. The VC has increasingly been appearing in smaller, earlier stages of funding — in contrast to its early days and perhaps highest-profile investments where it sinks hundreds of millions into already-scaled businesses. The idea here is that Tiger itself is also learning more and wanting to get in on the ground level to make better returns on bets that it thinks might be good ones. In this case, that could just as easily apply to backing Depict.ai as it could to backing Edholm himself.

“Depict.ai’s AI-based product recommendation platform, is completely novel because it does not require historical sales data, enables online retailers of any size to deliver high-quality recommendations, a key driver of increased revenues,” said John Curtius, Partner, Tiger Global, in a statement. “We believe Depict.ai’s technology is poised to be a leader in this space, and we are excited to partner with Oliver and his team as they continue to expand into new markets.”

“At EQT Ventures we generally observe two trends in e-commerce innovation. Entrepreneurs either build tools to “arm the rebels” or create services for incumbents to keep up with the speed of more nimble players. When meeting with Oliver and his team we immediately bought his vision of providing top-tier product recommendation for the masses. Multiple members on our team have experienced the problem first-hand as founders, the Depict.ai technology is both a direct enabler of revenue growth and a time-saver from a development capacity standpoint. We’re excited to continue backing them on their journey from seed to Series A and beyond as they build one of the future giants in the e-commerce infrastructure space,” added Rania Belkahia, a partner at EQT Ventures.

(The angel list includes Fredrik Hjelm, CEO & Co-founder of Voi, Johannes Schildt, CEO & Co-founder of Kry, Carl Rivera, CEO & Co-founder of Tictail, Erik Bernhardsson, creator of the Spotify recommendation engine, Northzone, Nicolas Dessaigne, CEO & Co-founder of Algolia, Vidit Aatrey, CEO & Co-founder of Meesho, Joshua Browder, CEO & Founder of DoNotPay, Finbarr Taylor, CEO & Co-founder of Shogun.)

PayMongo founders (from left to right): Jaime Hing III, Chief Technology Officer, Francis Plaza, Chief Executive Officer and Luis Sia, Chief Commercial Officer

Philippines-based fintech PayMongo, which enables merchants to accept digital payments, announced today it has raised $31 million in Series B funding with an eye on regional expansion. Investors include Justin Mateen’s JAM Fund, ICCP-SBI Venture Partners and Lisa Gokongwei’s Kaya Founders, along with returning investors Global Founders Capital and SOMA Capital. The startup says the round also included founders from European fintechs like Qonta, Viva Wallet, Billie and Scalable.

This brings PayMongo’s total funding to just under $46 million. Its last funding was a $12 million Series A announced in 2020 and led by Stripe.

The company works with businesses of all sizes, but targets micro-, small- and medium-sized businesses in particular, enabling them to accept different forms of payments, including credit cards, online wallets and over-the-counter. Its products include PayMongo API and e-commerce plugins. The new funding will be used to further develop PayMongo’s current payments infrastructure and add more financial services, including disbursements, capital lending, BNPL, and subscriptions and recurring payments.

Part of PayMongo’s product roadmap includes acquiring new licenses that will allow it to operate more financial services. At the same time, the company is also exploring regional expansion.

“There is so much more work to do in the Philippines. We also forecast more than doubling our team size to support this increasing demand and deliver on our aggressive product roadmap. In parallel, we have started some initial exploration and leg work to expand in the SE Asia region, a work we have kicked off last year,” co-founder and CEO Francis Plaza told TechCrunch in an email.

Other digital payment gateways in the Philippines include DragonPay, PesoPay, PayMaya and Paynamics. Plaza told TechCrunch in an email that the company differentiates itself by its focus on SMBs and high-growth startups and companies since it was founded in 2019.

“Beyond that, as we work with thousands of businesses on the platform, we are geared towards building more products and services that not only enables merchants to easily accept payments but also to grow through access to other financial services,” he said. “From the ability to move money, store balances, access to credit and other expanded payment options for customers.” Plaza added that it is already testing out several new products and services in beta with merchants.

In a statement, Justin Mateen, the founder of Tinder and JAM Fund, said “As one of PayMongo’s first investors, I’ve seen their path from simplifying payments for a handful of businesses to now being a company that thousands of merchants depend on for their day-to-day operations. I’m excited by their progress and thrilled to support the team once again as they generate greater economic opportunities through the digital economy.”

Mini-apps are lightweight programs that run within a larger app and serve as additional sources of user engagement and revenue. They became popularized by “super apps” like WeChat, Alibaba and Grab. But not all developers have these tech giants’ resources. Based in Singapore, Appboxo wants to level the playing field. The startup’s platform lets developers turn their apps into super apps, either by building their own mini-apps or accessing them through Appboxo Showroom, a marketplace for third-party developers.

Appboxo, whose clients include GCash, Paytm and VodaPay, announced today that it has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by RTP Global. Other participants included its first investors, Antler and 500 Southeast Asia, plus new backers like SciFi VC, Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused venture fund) and angel investors Huey Lin and Kayvon Deldar. 

Appboxo was founded in 2019 by Kaniyet Rayev, its CEO and CTO Nursultan Keneshbekov. TechCrunch first covered it in December 2020, when it announced its seed funding. The company is now used by 10 super apps across Southeast Asia, India and South Africa, and powers more than 400 mini-app integrations, the majority of which are built by third-party developers. The company says it has a combined base of more than 500 million users. 

The company has two main products. The first is Miniapp, a SaaS platform with SDKs and APIs for building and launching mini-apps. For example, mobile wallets can integrate mini-apps for food delivery, shopping or restaurant reservations.

The second, launched about a year ago, is Shopboxo, which lets businesses set up customizable online stores through mobile devices in less than 30 seconds. 

Then mini-apps created with Shopboxo can be integrated into super apps through Appboxo, and Rayev expects that being able to reach a broader merchant base of SMEs will “scale the number of mini-apps into the thousands this year, especially since Appboxo’s clients already use its platform mainly for e-commerce. “Financial super apps want to diversify into new verticals, and in the current landscape, e-commerce looks like the most obvious opportunity and the easiest to execute.”  

Rayev tells TechCrunch that AppBoxo’s new funding will be used to further develop Shopboxo, while also expanding its merchant ecosystem and building out its international presence. At first, the startup will focus on the Asia-Pacific region, where super apps are the most dominant, he says, but it also wants to enter Europe and the United States. 

Small businesses are the backbone of Southeast Asia’s economy, but many struggle to secure working capital loans because they don’t have traditional credit records or collateral, say the founders of Funding Societies. The fintech, which claims to be the region’s largest SME digital financing platform, uses alternative forms of credit-scoring and has disbursed more than $2 billion in financing to MSMEs since it launched in 2015. Today, Funding Societies announced it has raised $144 million in an oversubscribed Series C+ equity round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from new investors like VNG Corporation, Rapyd Ventures, EDBI, Indies Capital, K3 Ventures and Ascend Vietnam. 

It also received $150 million in debt lines from institutional investors, some of which have been drawn down since last year. 

TechCrunch first covered Funding Societies when it raised its Series A in 2016. The company’s previous round was a $45 million Series C raised between 2020 and 2021. Part of its newest funding, or $16 million, will be distributed to former and existing employees through its stock option plan in the form of share buybacks. 

The company was founded in 2015 by Kelvin Teo and Reynold Wijaya after they met in Harvard Business School. It is now licensed and registered in Singapore, Indonesia (where it is known as Modalku), Malaysia and Thailand. It recently began operating in Vietnam and will use part of its Series C+ to enter the Philippines. 

The platform disburses online loans ranging in size from $500 to $1.5 million. Since its launch, it has disbursed more than $2 billion in business financing to MSMEs through more than 4.9 million loan transactions. Funding Societies’ customers range in size from neighborhood stores and e-commerce vendors, to medium-sized enterprises, like fast-growth startups and established corporations, that want access to faster revenue-based financing than bank loans, which usually take about two to three months to disburse, Teo tells TechCrunch. 

A recent impact study calculated using methodology by the Asian Development Bank showed that Funding Societies-backed MSMEs contributed $3.6 billion in GDP, and 350,000 jobs.

By covering a wide range of businesses, Teo says Funding Societies has better customer acquisition costs and loan-to-value ratios. It also accumulates data faster to train its data-scoring models, which draw from traditional and alternative sources of data. Traditional sources include bank statements and credit bureau information if available, while alternatives ones can include transaction information, online reviews and supply chain data flow. 

One of Funding Societies’ advantages is that some of its data sources are proprietary, while they have exclusive rights to others through partnerships. This gives the startup an edge over newer players, Teo says, as well as the amount of loan repayment data that Funding Societies has collected since its launch. He added Funding Societies’ loan default rate is between 1% to 2%, even through the COVID-19 pandemic, which is why it was able to receive debt lines from so many institutions.

Funding Societies’ interest rates are generally higher than banks, but lower or equal to credit cards—in fact, it offers a credit card with a debit line to serve as a substitute for corporate cards. It also partners with businesses, including e-commerce platforms like Shopee and Bukalapak, bookkeeping app BukuWarung, fintech Alterra and agritech platform Tanihub that offer access to working capital loans to their SME customers.

Teo and Wijaya say Funding Societies’ main competitors are not banks. Instead, Teo says many of its customers were relying on loans from friends or families, their savings and personal credit cards to finance their businesses. “The opportunity is huge because it’s a $300 billion U.S. dollar quality financing gap,” he says.  

In a prepared statement, SoftBank Investment Advisers managing partner Greg Moon said, “SMEs across Southeast Asia have historically struggled to access institutional finance and instead been forced to mainly rely on personal funding to support growth. Funding Societies is establishing a bridge for these companies to access more sustainable and cheaper financing by building unique data sets on their performance and using AI-led technology to assess their creditworthiness more effectively than traditional models.” 

Mental wellness startup MindFi operates throughout APAC, but wants to deliver “culturally competent” care in each of its markets. To do that, it develops programs for its app, available as an employee benefit, with local providers that take into account religion, gender stereotypes, racial representation, communication style and values, co-founder and CEO Bjorn Lee told TechCrunch.

Today the Singapore-based company announced it has closed an oversubscribed $2 million seed round, with participation from returning investors M Venture Partners and Global Founders Capital. Angel investors included Carousell co-founder Marcus Tan, Carro executive Kenji Narushima and Spin co-founder Derrick Ko.

MindFi (short for Mind Fitness) took part in Y Combinator’s summer 2021 cohort. It currently operates across the Asia-Pacific region, including Sinagpore, Hong Kong and Australia, and offers its services in 16 languages. Its corporate clients include Visa, Willis Towers Watson and Patsnap. In total, MindFi’s products serve 100,000 employees across 35 employers in 15 markets.

While mental health startups have gained a lot funding in the United States, especially during the pandemic, it is still a nascent space in much of Asia. MindFi is among a cluster of startups working to change that. Others that have recently raised funding include Intellect (another Y Combinator alum) and Thoughtfull.

The MindFi app contains self-directed mental wellness programs, community forums, group therapy and an AI-based matching system for coaches and therapists. Users’ profiles aggregate data from MindFi with information from their fitness wearables, including sleep, heart rate and daily activity.

Lee told TechCrunch that its seed funding will be used to accelerate the development of its AI engine, advance the integration of physiological data from wearables to MindFi’s mental health data, and work with local experts to create in-app programs in its key APAC markets. Though Lee said there is a relatively low availability of licensed mental health professionals in APAC compared to the USA or Europe, its important to make sure its programs fit into diverse cultural contexts so users feel comfortable about getting support.

In a statement, M Ventures partner Mayank Parekh said, “Mental health has been traditionally overlooked in most countries, more so in fast-growth Asia. We feel the market is currently poorly served, and as founder-first investors, we are thrilled to work with the MindFi team, who together bring complementary skills and insight to solve a significant problem.”

Based in Singapore with offices throughout Asia and Australia, Reebelo wants to make buying pre-owned tech as desirable as a brand new device. “What we have seen is that many younger generations are very much open to the idea of sustainable consumption,” co-founder Philip Franta told TechCrunch. “We see a lot of growth and momentum in the space globally, but also here in this region, because I think we are finally at the stage as a society where we’ve realized that the way we’ve consumed in the past is not sustainable.”

Investors agree, with Reebelo announcing a $20 million Series A today, led by Cathay Innovation and June Fund. Other participants include FJ Labs, Naver affiliate KREAM, Moore Strategic Ventures, French Partners and Gandel Invest. Returning backers also contributed, like Antler, Maximilian Bittner (co-founder of Lazada and current CEO of Vestiaire Collective, an e-commerce site for curated pre-owned fashion) and Michael Cassau, the founder and CEO of Grover, a tech rental platform.

Reebelo’s last funding was a $1 million seed round announced in June 2020. The company was founded in 2019 by Franta and Fabien Rastouil. It says that in less than two years, its revenue has grown 600% year-over-year and it now has 10,000 monthly customers and is nearing $100 million in annualized gross merchandise value. It has offices in Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Taiwan.

In an interview, Franta and Rastouil said they wanted to create a startup that combined social and entrepreneurial impact. Both had related work experience in Europe—Franta was involved in subscription device programs for telecoms, while Rastouil worked at Recommerce Solutions, a French platform for pre-owned devices.

But the two said something like Recommerce didn’t exist yet in Singapore, where Rastouil grew up.

Unlike many e-commerce marketplaces, Reebelo selects its vendors, with an emphasize on standardizing the condition of devices and a specific grading systems for shoppers, using criteria like aesthetics (for example, if the device has a couple of scratches) and battery life. Partner vendors range from small shops to B2B players with much larger volumes of devices. Reebelo’s goal is to build the biggest inventory of pre-owned, refurbished devices, and says it is already the market leader in Singapore and Australia.

Before adding vendors to its platform, Reebelo screens them, checking that they are legal businesses, assessing their ratings on different distribution channels and making sure they are willing to abide by Reebelo’s quality checkpoints and returns and conditions. The latter includes free returns for 14 days and a one-year free warranty.

“This helps to filter quite well the vendors initially because some don’t want to agree to a one-year guarantee,” Franta said.

But Reebelo also sees its vendors as customers.

“We want to be a platform for all players in this circular economy,” said Rastouil, which includes vendors that are just getting started selling certified pre-owned devices. “Vendors are also our customers, because we really want to create this whole circular economy together with them in the region because it’s new for everyone.”

In terms of competition, Reebelo’s founders say it is a first-move in the APAC region, unlike Europe, where there are already several pre-owned device marketplaces. Instead of other e-commerce platforms, the main challenge is convincing customers that pre-owned devices can be just as good as brand new ones.

“There is quite some stigma in some countries here in the region, so the first challenge we had to overcome in the beginning was creating trust with our users,” says Franta. “That meant really changing minds from buying new to also buying refurbished devices, but I think we have achieved a lot.”

The new funding will be used to hire about 50 new employees in Reebelo’s existing markets across departments, and expand into new markets in 2022, including South Korea. It plans to offer new financial services, like device subscription, extended warranties in some areas, damage coverage or stolen phone protection. It is also expanding its verticals. Right now, Reebelo’s main category is smartphones, but it wants to sell more tablets, laptops and drones.

In a statement, Cathay Innovation investment director Rajive Keshup said, “Reebelo is providing a platform and marketplace for consumers that makes it easier for anyone to obtain electronic goods, all while helping to solve the problem of e-waste. The company is providing a pivotal platform for the circular economy in Southeast Asia and Australia, and we look forward to helping foster their expansion and growth.”

Financial apps are proliferating across Southeast Asia, making things like bookkeeping or securing an online loan easier. But this means fintechs need access to large amounts of data that they can use to verify customer identity, creditworthiness or aggregate information from online accounts. Brick wants to simplify the process with a suite of APIs that connects financial apps to “hyper-local” sources of data, including banks, mobile wallets and telecoms.

The company announced today it has closed a $8.5 million seed round led by Flourish Ventures and Antler. This amount includes Brick’s previously undisclosed seed funding, which TechCrunch reported in May 2021, but the majority of it is fresh capital, said co-founder and CEO Gavin Tan. Brick currently operates primarily in Indonesia, but is planning to expand into Singapore and the Philippines before eventually covering all markets in Southeast Asia.

Other participants include Trihill Capital and returning investors Better Tomorrow Ventures and Rally Cap Ventures, along with individual investors like Creative Juice co-founder and CEO and Plaid’s former head of business development and strategy Sima Gandhi; Bond Financial Technologies co-founder Yan Wu; Brian Ma, founder of Divvy Homes; Iterative co-founder and managing partner Ooi Hsu Ken; Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau; and Aspire co-founder and CEO Andrea Baronchelli.

Founded in in 2020 by Tan and CTO Deepak Malhotra, Brick now has more than 50 paying clients and supports more than 13 million API calls and almost one million consumers a month. Tan was an early employee at Aspire, the neobank, while Malhotra was co-founder and CTO of Indian neobank Slice.

Brick’s 25 data partners include some of Indonesia’s largest banks, but Tan says that over the past year, “we actually moved away a bit from the focus on just banking because of the local landscape and huge unbanked/underbanked population in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Only 25% of adults regularly use a bank account in Indonesia, so we’ve expanded to covering mobile wallets, e-commerce, telcos, government social security data, which has proven to be very popular.”

Brick’s APIs include Brick Data, Brick Verification and Brick Payments, which can enable an end-to-end process for online loans, including verifying user identity, underwriting and making sure that funds are disbursed into the right bank account.

When TechCrunch first spoke to Brick last year, many of its customers were online lending providers, but it has since expanded into new verticals. Its second most popular vertical are personal financial management apps, where its APIs powers the budgeting function. Its third-largest vertical are bookkeeping and accounting apps used by businesses. Other customers include investment firms, banks and some of Indonesia’s largest conglomerates, including Sinarmas Group and Astra Financial.

The funding fill be used to double down on Brick’s presence in Indonesia and regional expansion. The Philippines was chosen as one of Brick’s next markets because of “the development in open banking,” Tan said. “There are already draft regulations out in the Philippines by regulators, a lot of open banking and open finance-friendly banks,” said Tan.

Singapore was chosen because “regulators have always been a leader in terms of open finance thinking, so that’s helpful, but another big factor is that there are a lot of modern fintech startups there, meaning they are already aware of open finance solutions.”

Other open finance API startups in Southeast Asia include Finverse, Brankas and Finantier.

Tan says Brick’s advantage is “we are by far the market leader in terms of coverage with 25-plus discrete different data connections” in Indonesia.

In an email to TechCrunch, Flourish Ventures global investments advisor Smita Aggarwal said, “Brick plays an important role as a digital conduit that bridges financial institutions, businesses and customers. It allows platforms, apps and fintechs to integrate identity and financial data through simple automated processes. This investment strongly aligns with our greater commitment to a support financial ecosystem that is inclusive and serves everybody.”

Meal deliveries in Vietnamese cities typically take less than half an hour, but grocery deliveries are lagging behind, sometimes taking up to two to three hours, says Rino founder Trung Thanh Nguyen. By creating a vertically-integrated logistics infrastructure centered around “dark stores,” or stores set up for order fulfillment only, Nguyen says Rino can cut grocery delivery times down to just 10 minutes. The startup, which will launch this month in Ho Chi Minh City, announced today it has raised a $3 million pre-seed round from Global Founders Capital (GFC), Sequoia Capital India, Venturra Discovery and Saison Capital.

After a wider public launch in March 2022, Rino (which stands for “right now”) plans to expand quickly, first in Ho Chi Minh City’s most densely-populated areas, then in Hanoi. 

Before starting Rino, Nguyen was co-founder and chief operating officer of Baemin Vietnam, one of the country’s largest food delivery apps. Before that, he served as Grab Vietnam’s head of GrabBike and GrabExpress.

Rino’s grocery delivery app

When asked why he wanted to focus on grocery deliveries after Baemin, Nguyen told TechCrunch that the rapid adoption of food deliveries in Vietnam “created a clear roadmap for the groceries segment.”

“Four years ago, food delivery in Vietnam was slow. Meals took up to an hour to reach customers, which meant that individuals had to get used to planning meals in advance,” he said. “Once the platforms reduced it to under 30 minutes, consumer behavior changed quickly and the sector as a whole had an opportunity to grow more than 10-fold within a very short time.” 

Nguyen believes grocery deliveries will follow the same pace. Adoption of grocery deliveries increased during COVID-19 lockdowns in Vietnam last year, and have become a regular part of consumer purchasing habits, he said. “Customers are ready, but existing delivery options including retail chains or third-party platforms who deliver on behalf of retailers are either too slow or unreliable.” 

Rino plans to cut that time down by owning its inventory, purchased directly from suppliers, and integrating its own dark stores into its logistics infrastructure. In order to make deliveries in such a short time, Nguyen said Rino will divide each of its cities into service zones with a radius of one to three kilometers. Each zone will have  a dedicated dark store owned and operated by Rino, with last-mile deliveries performed in batches by its own fleet of riders.

In a prepared statement about the investment, Saison Capital partner Chris Sirise said, “The quick commerce landscape has benefitted from permanent gains as consumers of all demographics continue to rely on e-commerce options even after COVID-19 lockdowns taper off. What we’ve seen from the founding team leading up to the launch reaffirms what we’ve seen from Trung throughout his time spearheading growth at Baemin Vietnam and Grab—high caliber industry leaders who not only have the insights required to lead the market but also the local know-how needed to truly cater to local needs.”

Retail investment apps in Southeast Asia attracted a lot of funding last year, and the trend looks set to continue with Vietnam-focused Infina announcing that it has added $4 million to its seed funding. Along with the $2 million it announced in June, this brings the round’s total to $6 million.

Investors include Sequoia Capital India’s Surge program, Y Combinator, Saison Capital, Starling Ventures, Alpha JWC and AppWorks.

Infina was part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 cohort and aspires to become the “Robinhood of Vietnam.” It launched in January 2021.

Like other Southeast Asian investment apps that have attracted venture capital over the past year (a partial list include Indonesia’s Pluang, which recently raised a $55 million follow-on to its Series B, Bibit, Ajaib, Pintu and Syfe), Infina is focused on first-time Gen Z and millennial investors.

More Vietnamese people began participating in the stock market last year, driven in part by a jump in the market value of publicly traded companies. Infina says it saw a compound monthly growth rate of 64% in funded accounts in 2021.

The app enables investors to pick from several asset classes, including fixed-income products, mutual funds and stock trading. It also offers fractionalized trading, which means users can invest with lower minimum amounts. Part of the reason for Infina’s growth is its integration in third-party super apps, including e-commerce app Tiki.

Applying to colleges is one of the hardest parts of high school, especially for students who want to study abroad. Cialfo wants to make the process easier, with a platform that includes school research, communication tools for counselors and students, and Direct Apply, which helps international students find and apply to hundreds of programs with a single application form.

The Singapore-based edtech announced today it has raised $40 million in Series B funding, led by Square Peg and SEEK Investments.

The round, which also saw participation from returning investors SIG Global, DLF Ventures, January Capital and Lim Teck Lee, brings Cialfo’s total raised so far to to $55 million, including a $15 million Series A announced in February 2021.

The company currently has more than 170 employees in Singapore, India, the United States and China, and is partnered with about 1,000 universities around the world, including Imperial College London, the University of Chicago and IE University in Spain.

Ciaflo was founded in 2017 by Rohan Pasari, Stanley Chia and William Hund. The team told TechCrunch in an email that Pasari was prompted by his own experiences as a student. He grew up in India and his high school didn’t have a career counselor. As a result, students were left to navigate the college application process on their own.

Pasari originally wanted to go to a four-year university in the United States, but his parents could not afford the high international student fees, so he applied to schools in Singapore instead, getting a full scholarship to Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Before graduating, Pasari helped his sister and some of his friends through the college application process, which planted the idea of launching a business in his mind.

Pasari originally started an education consultancy firm with Chia, working with about 200 students at its peak. But the two wanted to use tech to scale up their operations, so they sold their education consultancy in 2017 and used the proceeds to launch Cialfo.

The company operates on a B2B model, selling subscriptions to schools. College counselors then invite students onto the platform, which parents or guardian have access to as well.

“Our mission has always been to help one million students in their journey of getting college ready. We believe there are three pillars required—access to information, personalized assistance and financial resources—and bring all of the three together will enable the democratization of education,” the team told TechCrunch.

The new funding will be used to grow Cialfo’s global user base, add more features and look at potential acquisitions.