The rate of dementia is expected to double every 20 years, but many tools for early detection, like MRI scans, are difficult for patients to access. Neurowyzr wants to help more people get brain healthcare through tools like its online Digital Brain Function Screen (DBFS). The startup, which has offices in Singapore and India, announced today it has raised $2.1 million in seed funding. The oversubscribed round was led by Jungle Ventures and Peak XV’s (formerly Sequoia India and Southeast Asia) Surge program, with participation from angel investors.

Neurowyzr has now raised $3.3 million since it was founded in 2019 by Nav Vij and Pang Sze Yunn. It will participate in 2023 Medtech Innovator Asia Pacific, the world’s largest medtech accelerator program.

Vij, Neurowyzr’s chief digital neuroscientist, became interested in early brain decline and related therapies while studying for his neuroscience degree at the University of Melbourne. One of his family members was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease at a young age, which motivated Vij to remove obstacles to brain healthcare. Pang, who has worked on pioneering health initiatives including Asia’s first heart failure monitoring project, got interested in brain healthcare because she saw the impact brain conditions can have on family members, especially women caregivers.

Pang told TechCrunch that a lot of work in neurology currently focuses on treatment for serious brain conditions. But brain decline can start 20 to 40 years before a condition like dementia, mental illness or stroke emerges. As a result, early detection is crucial.

Neurowyzr co-founders Pang Sze Yunn (CEO) and Nav Vij (chief digital neuroscientist)

Traditional brain tests like pen-and-paper tests can be affected by tester bias, while MRI and CT scans are expensive and inaccessible to many patients. Neurowyzr wants to address the gap with its digital neuroscience assessment tool, the Digital Brain Function Screen (DBFS). Meant to be faster and less costly than traditional cognitive testing. DBFS is currently used by healthcare organizations like Parkway Shenton, SATA Commhealth, Farrer Park Hospital, MHC Medical Centre (Amara) and O’Joy in Singapore. It has also completed a pilot with a large private hospital chain in India and is registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Singapore Health Sciences Authority and Australia Therapeutic Goods Administration.

Pang said the DBFS can be completed in 15 to 20 minutes. It assesses a patient’s immediate memory, working memory, attention and executive brain function through a series of gamified neuroscience puzzles. For example, one puzzle has dots with a number on each scattered across the screen, and asks the users to connect them in order. Another shows a series of numbers that users need to memorize and then write in order. DBFS is hosted online, so patients can access it through a web browser link at home, though it was designed for primary care settings.

Neurowyzr’s new funding will be used on product development and regional expansion in Southeast Asia and India. The startup is currently working with academic organizations like the NTU Lee Kong Chian School Medicine’s Dementia Research Centre to develop more digital brain health solutions, with the goal of decreasing undetected cases of early brain decline.

In a statement, Jungle Ventures healthcare partner Seemant Jauhari said, “Projected numbers tell a stark story for Asia: over the next two decades, more than 66 million individuals could face dementia, while mild cognitive impairment could affect over 400 million. Neurowyzr is a direct response to this challenge. By assessing brain and mental health promptly, we’re building a proactive defense against potential epidemic.”

CakeResume, used by tech companies like Google, L’Oreal and TSMC to find new talent, announced today it has raised $5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by returning investor Mynavi, one of Japan’s largest human resources companies, and will be used to expand in countries like Indonesia, Vietnam and India. Based in Taipei, Taiwan, CakeResume currently has five million users around the world, and more than 7,000 clients who use it to source job candidates.

Since TechCrunch last covered CakeResume in August 2020, it has grown from 20 employees to more than 100. The platform has seen a lot of traction in Indonesia, where it now has 1.8 million users, and also has significant user bases in Taiwan and India. It focuses on tech jobs, but covers other industries like fast-moving consumer goods and design.

Founder Trantor Liu told TechCrunch that one of the ways CakeResume differentiates from other job sites like LinkedIn is the ability to build multimedia resumes, so people like software engineers and designers can show off their work. Job seekers are able to customize images, videos and fonts and embed iframes. Some examples of how users take advantage of the multimedia resume builder are software engineers embedding projects from GitHub and designers embedding data visualizations.

Part of the funding will be used to add networking tools, including a new feature on CakeResume’s mobile app called “Talent Network” that lets users swipe on the profiles of people they want to meet. This is intended to make it easier for people to meet headhunters, job seekers and mentors.

CakeResume has also been working on a AI talent recommendation engine for the past couple of years. It is meant to reduce the amount of time companies and recruiters spend sourcing candidates by 40% to 50%. For example, a recruiter can tell the engine they want to hire a senior Java engineer in Indonesia for a salary of $60,000 to $70,000, and it will return potential candidates.

The funding will also be used to support CakeResume’s growth in Southeast Asia, with a focus on onboarding more companies from Indonesia.

High energy prices are leading to a solar boom across the world, but in Singapore, many home owners are still hesitant to install solar panels because of the high cost, says Bolong Chew, the founder of Solar AI Technologies. The startup wants to make solar energy more accessible in Southeast Asia with a rent-to-own model that helps customers start saving on their energy bills from the start. It recently raised $1.5 million in seed funding, led by Earth Venture Capital with participation from Undivided Ventures, Investible and climate-tech angel investor David Pardo.

Solar AI was launched three years ago and incubated through Engie Factory, the venture arm of French utility company Engie Group. Chew, who founded the company along with Gérald Chablowski and Luke Ong, said the team realized that one of the barriers to rooftop solar adoption in Southeast Asia is lack of trust and awareness, since significant upfront costs have led to low adoption. As a result, most people don’t know anyone who has already installed a solar system, despite the rising cost of electricity, and the penetration rate of solar systems is still less than 1%.

“The traditional pitch for a rooftop solar system is that you pay $15,000 to $20,000 upfront for it, break even after about seven to eight years and get free electricity for another 20 years,” said Chew. “But when most people don’t know someone who’s already had a solar system for two or three years already, it’s very difficult for customers to take that leap of faith and move ahead. Ultimately, the rental model is a way for us to de-risk solar ownership for these customers.”

Solar AI offers three plans, including a five year plan with 50% down payments, a 10 year plan with zero upfront costs and a traditional upfront purchase. Monthly fees for the rent-to-own plans are about $200 a month, compared to average electricity bills of $250 a month. Chew says this means customers can start saving $50 a month on their energy costs as soon as they get a solar system installed. Excess solar energy generated is exported to the grid and users get paid for it by the grid operator. In Singapore, that is SP Group, which pays customers directly for excess energy regardless of what electricity retailer they use. Solar AI also covers maintenance and warranty costs during the contract period.

Solar AI is currently serving more than 100 customers, and says it has surpassed $3 million SGD on signed rooftop solar contracts.

The rent-to-own model is already prevalent in the United States and Europe, but Solar AI is the first company to offer it in Singapore. When launching the business model, Chew says the team “asked ourselves, are we really ahead of our time or just stupid?” They spoke with traditional industry players who advised the team against rent-to-own from a unit economics perspective. While large-scale rooftop systems are funded through property agreements, unit costs are much higher for smaller scale projects because of the expense of customer acquisition. Chew said one of the advantage that Solar AI has is that a lot of their sales are done through digital channels, which helps drive unit costs down.

Before launching its rent-to-own business, Solar AI had already begun building an audience through educational content on its website. Chew said it is now top ranked in terms of most solar search keywords in Southeast Asia. In Singapore, its web traffic is three times higher than the two other largest solar companies combined. In the Philippines, where it is planning to expand within the next 12 months, its web traffic is five times more than the largest solar company. This helps keep its customer acquisition costs down.

Chew says that over the past one and half years, Solar AI has spent very little on paid marketing, with about 80% of customer segments coming from organic search, including written content on Solar AI’s website and online tools like its instant solar assessment. Potential customers then go into Solar AI’s sales pipeline, where its salespeople have tools to give them a digital picture of the process and send them a proposal. This means the physical part of installing a solar system only comes once a customer has decided they are comfortable proceeding with either a five year or 10 year plan. At that point, Solar AI goes to their property and does a site survey. The other 20% of customer segments comes through referrals.

Other markets Solar AI plans to expand to include Malaysia and the Philippines, where it has already begun working with local partners.

“Ultimately, the reason we built the company is to really try and hyper scale rooftop solar, because we all believe that it’s one of the best climate solutions out there to decarbonize our environment,” Chew said.

In a statement, Investible investment manager Ben Lindsay said, “There is a huge amount of untapped potential for both residential and commercial solar-as-a-service throughout Southeast Asia. The traction and robust pipeline Solar AI team have achieved to date is a strong indicator for their ability to be a leader throughout the region as its development continues to accelerate.”

Before founding dipp, Jennifer Chen and Mikhail Abramov spent 15 years working as art directors in New York City. During that time, Chen says they realized that the marketing, sales and design process have stayed the same, despite new technology and tools being introduced to the market, and is often riddled with bottlenecks.

“Salespeople have sales needs, they communicate with the marketing team and then once the marketing team has a direction they brief a designer, then the designer goes back to the marketer, and then the marketer goes back to the designer,” she said. “There’s that vicious cycle that slows down the entire process because nobody understands the needs and workflow of the other department.”

Dipp was launched three years ago to automate much of that workflow, and allow marketing and design teams to collaborate more effectively, while focusing on their own performance metrics. For example, if a marketing team wants to update a price on their ad, all they need to do is enter it into a spreadsheet instead of asking a designer. The Taipei-based startup recently raised $1.5 million in seed funding from investors including SparkLabs Taiwan, Palm Drive Capital and content-tech unicorn Tezign, and will launch generative AI-powered features soon.

To use dipp, brands first set up a brand guideline with information including fonts, colors and layout (or they can upload an Adobe Photoshop file). That data is then turned into a dipp file with everything remaining editable. Then prices and other information for ads are uploaded into a spreadsheet, with each row representing a product, so visual assets can be edited in batches. This helps marketing and design teams keep up with the massive amount of visual content that is needed to sell online—Chen said brands typically generate 300 to 500 images at a time, which dipp can help them do in minutes.

dipp’s team

The brands dipp works with are typically Fortune 500 companies in apparel and beauty selling a large number of products, or upwards of 500 SKUs. They have high product rotation rates, often with weekly launches of 20 or more products, and sell on three or more marketplaces, alongside social media advertising campaigns. Chen says most have large sales and marketing teams, but a shortage of designers. Its customers include Levi’s, Estée Lauder and Rakuten. Dipp also works with e-commerce enablers, or agencies that help brands distribute products across multiple channels.

Since its launch, dipp has primarily focused on Taiwan, but is expanding into Southeast Asia, with new clients in Singapore, the Philippines and Thailand. Dipp started in New York, but the team decided to move to Taiwan after getting into Taipei-based accelerator Appworks because of the market potential it saw in Asia.

For example, brands here hold a high number of sales promotions. “Throughout the year, it’s not just Black Friday or Christmas, there’s a sale every month,” Chen said. “There’s a busy season starting in June that goes all the way to Chinese New Year.”

In terms of competition, Chen says potential customers often ask how dipp is different from Rocketium, which helps creative teams build very large marketing campaigns. Chen says dipp differentiates by focusing on e-commerce because brands in Asia often sell through multiple online channels at the same time, including PC Home, Momo, Shopee and Lazada. Each marketplace has its own unique guidelines for visual content, including file sizes and dimensions. That information is embedded into dipp’s platform, so brands can automate their ads to fit different requirements.

Dipp is now working on integrating generative AI into its platform to help address gaps between marketing and design departments. For example, it will allow marketers to use prompts to generate images as a first draft of ideas to present to designers. It also automates the process of reviewing designs, or checking details like character limit and formatting to meet the requirements of different marketplaces and social media platforms.

Dipp’s new funding will be used for team expansion, especially in its R&D and business departments.

In a statement, Palm Drive Capital founding partner Seamon Chan said, “With global venture capital investments in generative AI reaching US$1.7 billion in the first quarter of this year, we are thrilled to support dipp in enhancing their e-commerce solution with AI capabilities. As the company has validated its value proposition in Taiwan by offering a much-needed solution to the multichannel e-commerce operation of global brands, we are optimistic that this solution will bring disruptive impact on e-commerce operating workflows through the APAC region.”

The team behind HealthXCapital, which invested in and helped health tech startups scale up, has joined Singapore-based Jungle Ventures. Seemant Jauhari, who led HealthXCapital since it was founded eight years ago, is now a partner at Jungle, where he will invest in healthcare startups in Southeast Asia and India.

HealthXCapital’s portfolio includes RED.Health, Homage, Medfin and THB. The firm has fully deployed its first fund and will no longer make any further investments.

At Jungle, Jauhari will take a similar approach as he did at HealthXCapital, combining capital with strategic partners in the healthcare sector to help startups toward validation and commercialization. These partners include providers, distributors and IT system integrators.

Jauhari noted that about 30% of the global population live in India and Southeast Asia, but the regions are very underserved, with just 4% of the gross domestic product going toward healthcare. That’s where he sees an opportunity for digital healthcare and new business models to increase access to healthcare.

Seemant Jauhari

As an example of how Jungle has worked with healthcare startups, Jauhari said one of its portfolio companies needed to expand from five to 12 cities. Securing supply from providers was crucial to meet demand, so Jungle’s board partners worked with the startup to create a time-bound group level plan. Then, based on that plan, it used its strategic network to facilitate crucial partnerships across healthcare providers. Then an operational partner helped the startup run a unit economics optimization initiative that improved margins by almost 20% to 25%.

Jauhari added that key trends emerging in Asian health tech include large-scale adoption of digital platforms in markets like India, Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam and specialty care growing by taking a “phygital” approach through a combination of brick-and-mortar locations and online platforms.

In terms of valuations, Jauhari said it has not been a major concern for the healthcare sector since it has been underfunded especially at venture growth stages.

“Case in point, in the last five years, of the 2000+ healthcare startups in India and Southeast Asia, less than 10% reached the venture growth stage and less than 20% of the total capital invested in the region has been invested in venture growth,” he said. “Hence, we see a clear opportunity to invest in an undercapitalized stage and region. Combining this with the resilience of the healthcare sector, we believe that sustainable and scalable businesses will drive steady valuations.”

Back in 2021 and early 2022, there was a flurry of VC interest in Southeast Asian investment apps. One of them was Singapore-based Endowus, which raised two rounds in rapid succession: a Series A in June 2021 followed just seven months later by $25.6 million in follow-on funding. Now two years later, despite a much different funding environment, especially for fintech startups, Endowus is announcing another round.

This time it’s $35 million with new investors including Citi Ventures and MUFG Innovation Partners, bringing the company’s total raised so far to $95 million. Participants also include “four of Asia’s wealthiest families,” the startup said in its press release, whose operating businesses encompass banking and real estate across Southeast Asia and China. Returning investors include notable firms like UBS Next, Singapore’s EDBI, Prosus Ventures (owned by Naspers), Lightspeed Venture Partners, Singtel Innov8 and Endowus employees.

The new funding will be used to scale in its main markets of Singapore and Hong Kong, where it currently serves over a hundred thousand clients in both markets. As a group, Endowus now has over $5 billion in assets under management and $40 million in savings for its clients.

Despite macroeconomic challenges, Endowus said it saw organic revenue growth of 80% in 2022 and tripled its group revenue after completing the acquisition of multi-family office Carret Private. Since TechCrunch last covered Endowus, it has launched more services like low cost passive index funds in Singapore and Endowus Private Wealth for high-net-worth individuals. It also started services in Hong Kong this year as what it describes as the “only independent, commission-free and conflict-free digital wealth advisor and low cost fund platform.”

Co-founder and chairman Samuel Rhee told TechCrunch that Endowus is now “multiple times the size of the next player and now competing with large banks and incumbent players.”

Other investment apps in Singapore include Syfe and Stashaway, which also attracted big VC bucks a couple years ago.

One of the main ways Endowus differentiates is being what it says is the only digital wealth platform that serves both private wealth and public pension as the first digital advisor for Singapore’s Central Provident Fund Investment Scheme (CPF).

Endowus manages more than SGD $1 billion of pension assets on its platform. Rhee said one of the reasons Endowus covers pension funds as well as personal wealth is to serve clients at all stages of their financial lives, including retirement.

For CPF, it built in-house a tech stack that creates a fully-automated digital process for investors. Endowus plans to replicate its CPF work with Hong Kong’s Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF). Instead of being a robo-advisor, Rhee said Endowus uses fund managers with proven track records to make top-performing, institutional-share class funds for retail investors more accessible.

Endowus monetizes only through advisory fees and Rhee says it is the first and largest platform in Singapore and Hong Kong to provide a 100% rebate of all trailer commission fees, paid through cashbacks.

When asked if there is a possibility of consolidation among investment app players, Rhee said “the opportunity for wealthtech players continues to be outsized,” pointing to a McKinsey report that shows the Asia-Pacific region now accounts for at least 40%, or $218 trillion, of total global wealth.

But he added that “we do anticipate increased consolidation in future as wealthtechs in Singapore and in Asia mature, and those that lack scale or technological innovation or a moat around the business will suffer, as we have seen in the recent downturn. We may see some players exit the market, and smaller players closing down.”

As for how Endowus fared during the slowdown in fintech funding (and funding in general), Rhee said the company had no problems securing fundraising from its investors.

“We are also fortunate to have some of the biggest investors as our shareholders,” he added, like Citi Ventures, MUFG Innovation Partners and UBS.

Identity verification platform for businesses, Bureau, has added $4.5 million in its Series A, bringing its total to $16.5 million. The funding was raised from GMO Venture Partners and GMO Payment Gateway. Other investors in the round include Quona Capital and Commerce Ventures.

Bureau has now raised $20.5 million to date. In addition to its new funding, it also announced the acquisition of inVOID, a Y Combinator-backed identity verification startup, and entered a strategic partnership with GMO Payment Gateway.

Founded in 2020, Bureau is headquartered in California, with teams in Dubai and India. It claims that over the last 12 months, it increased its customer and revenue numbers 6x, with 300 million identities verified through its platform. Bureau helps companies prevent fraud and keep in step with compliance regulations. Sectors served by Bureau include banking, fintech, insurance, the gig economy and real money gaming.

Before founding Bureau, co-founder and CEO Ranjan Reddy started mobile billing aggregator Qubecell, which was sold to mobile payments company Boku in 2013. Reddy then served as chief business officer at Boku Identity, which was acquired by Twilio.

Bureau founder Ranjan Reddy

Reddy said Bureau’s approach is build a single source of truth, with its network of verified identities, all tokenized behind a mobile number. Reddy explained that Bureau maps out a digital person, including mobile numbers, emails, devices and IPs, and also a physical identity based on document verification, OCR, Facematch, biometric, info from government databases or database/AML checks. This generates contextual, tokenized insights when someone opens an account, performs compliance for verification, logs onto an app or make a transaction.

An identity network is built up over time by combining digital persons, physical identity and behavior using link analysis. The risk factor of an identity is then assessed based on how many links there are and what type, including indications of past fraudulent activities.

Some examples of how Bureau has been used is by banks and neobanks to prevent mule accounts and synthetic ID detection at onboarding. Several lending companies are using Bureau’s insights to lend to a larger base of new-to-credit customers by evaluating their risk profile more accurately. Some fintech organizations have use Bureau’s anti-fraud software to detect account takeover.

Reddy said one way Bureau differentiates from other identity management platforms is that it is not a data broker. It shares decisions and not consumer data. He added that tokenized identities are part of Bureau’s data privacy architecture.

Bureau’s new funding will be used in additional investments in data and AI capabilities to automate its decisions, improving their efficiency and coverage. It also wants to expand its current coverage in 20 markets to more than 100 markets around the world.

After reports that it is raising new funding, Indonesian aquaculture startup eFishery announced today that it has netted $200 million in a Series D. The company, which makes a smart feeding system for fisheries, says this makes it the first startup in the global aquaculture industry to pass a $1 billion valuation. It’s goal is to reach one million aquaculture ponds in Indonesia by 2025 and expand overseas.

The funding was led by Abu Dhabi-based 42XFund and included participation from Kumpulan Wang Persaraan (Diperbadankan), Malaysia’s largest public sector pension fund, Swiss asset manager responsAbility and 500 Global. Existing investors Northstar, Temasek and SoftBank also returned for the round, with Goldman Sachs acting as an exclusive financial advisor to eFishery. TechCrunch last covered the startup when it announced its $90 million Series C in January 2022.

EFishery cites a study by the Demographic Institute of the University of Indonesia (LDUI) that showed in 2022, eFishery contributed 1.55% to Indonesia’s gross domestic product in the aquaculture sector. This is significant because Indonesia has the second largest fishing and aquaculture industry in the world, ranking only behind China. According to the World Atlas, the country produces 5.8 million tons of fish each year.

Founded in Bandung, West Java in 2013 by CEO Gibran Huzaifah (pictured above), fishery currently serves 70,000 fish and shrimp farmers in 280 cities across Indonesia. In addition to its IoT auto feeding system, eFishery’s platform includes marketplaces for selling fish and shrimp feed to farmers, fresh fish and shrimp products to B2B consumers and financial products for fish farmers.

Huzaifah started a catfish farming business when he was still in college. He told TechCrunch that during that time, he learned that feed management is crucial because 80% of total cost production is allocated to feeding. But many farmers still do hand feeding, resulting in uneven sizes of fish because not all get the same amount of food.

This is a problem because buyers have specific sizes of fish they want to purchase. Underfeeding isn’t the only problem, however— overfeeding results in nutrient runoff that pollutes water.

Huzaifah saw how tech was disrupting sectors like commerce, financial services and media, but “fish farming practice never changed in the last 30 years. I found it quite ironic that many innovations are developed to solve issues for urban citizens, like online shopping and food deliveries, but the essential sectors, such as agriculture and aquaculture, see almost zero digital innovation.”

After developing eFishery’s smart feeding system, however, Huzaifah faced resistance from fish farmers. After months of convincing them, “they finally wanted to try, not because they believed in the technology but because they pitied me.” One reason was that many farmers were not regular internet users. “I remember we had this Internet 101 with the farmers,” Huzaifah said. “We showed them how to create an email, use Facebook, get information from YouTube and other stuff.”

Even though Indonesia’s aquaculture is already very large, Huzaifah said it has only reached 7% to 9% of its total potential. Some challenges it faces includes fragmentation. Huzaifah explains that Indonesia has 34 provinces with different business practices, so it has to localize for each one.

“I learned the hard way that we have to respect the local players, including using local dialect and building relationships with the middlemen,” he said. “In one case, some middlemen poisoned our ponds. After having a discussion with them, we understood that they just want to do business, that they’re also entrepreneurs. So we found a way to turn them into our local partners because they have the local wisdom, connections, assets and so on.”

At farms, feeding accounts for 70% to 90% of total production cost and much of it is still done manually, just as when Huzaifah was running his catfish farm. eFisheryFeeder automatically distributes feed to fish and shrimp and helps farmers control feed by sensing fish appetite through vibrations, which increase as they get hungry. The system allows farmers to manage ponds from their smartphones and collects data like daily fish usage, the type and brand of feed, how many fish have been produced, fish behavior and appetite, stock density and mortality rate.

With aquaculture so important to Indonesia’s economy, other tech startup are addressing different aspects of the industry. In addition to eFishery, startups that have recently raised funding include Aruna, Delos and FishLog.

In order to improve Indonesia’s aquaculture industry and increase the amount of fish it exports, Hazaifah said communities, the government and institutions have to work together to improve fishery operation infrastructure so they can handle larger volumes of fish and improve product quality.

The country should encourage sustainable aquaculture practices, like training, promoting advanced techniques and ensuring access to quality fish seed, to increase fish production, and also engage in trade negotiations to get more buyers. Efishery plans to expand overseas by exporting fully traceable, antibiotic-free shrimp.

In a statement about the funding, 42XFund principal Iman Adiwibowo said, “The technology and comprehensive aquaculture solutions provided by eFishery have made a significant impact on the aquatech industry and have benefited small farmers in Indonesias. We are confident that eFishery will continue to promote a sustainable and inclusive economy, as well as contribute to environmental preservation goals not only in Indonesia but beyond.”

Indonesian aquaculture startup eFishery nets $200M at unicorn valuation by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Brinc, the Hong Kong-based accelerator backed by investors like Animoca Brands, is launching a new program for fledgling climate tech startups. The three-month program is tailored for founders who are focused on carbon dioxide removal (CDR). They will receive fundraising support, guidance on how to scale up and introductions to Brinc’s network of follow-on investors, mentors and corporates.

Janina Motter, Brinc’s Climate Tech Program manager, told TechCrunch that the accelerator has focused on climate tech for several years through its food tech vertical. “From those successes, we recognized sector specificity is key to maximize value for founders,” she said. “This is why we plan to have several different climate tech programs over time, with this new program focused on carbon removal, utilization and storage.” She added that Brinc has seen underinvestment in carbon removal relative to its climate impact.

The inaugural cohort includes four startups. Motter said “the strongest applicants understand how their approach fits into the competitive landscape and have compelling answers about ‘why them? why now?’ for the company to grow. Furthermore, for CDR in particular, it’s critical that startups have some initial understanding of how their technology fits into broader context (ecological risk, co-benefits, local communities, etc) and are willing to develop a robust framework which will help them scale responsibly.”

From the United Kingdom, Airhive is creating geochemical direct air capture (DAC) to scale carbon removal. Its DAC system is modular and based on a fluidized nano-structured sorbent.

Based in the United States, CarbonBridge captures fermentation CO2, or CO2 generated by fermenting plant matter to make beer, wine and other products, before it enters the atmosphere, and produces eco-friendly methanol through a microbial conversion process. The startup says this is a cost-effective alternative to mainstream methanol made from fossil fuels.

Hong Kong’s Formwork IO wants to reduce carbon emissions in architecture and other parts of the built environment. It does so by creating carbon-negative concrete through the use of waste carbon dioxide and materials as binders. Formwork IO is focused on the Asian market, where it says more than 70% of cement is produced.

Poas Bioenergy, based in Costa Rica, turns agricultural waste, including coffee and pineapple residue, into biochar and syngas, making waste management more efficient and giving farms a source of clean energy.

The Climate Tech Program is supported by organizations like Artesian, Carbon Business Council, CO2CRC, Direct Air Capture Coalition, PML Applications and others.

Brinc launches new program for climate tech startups by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Shoppable Business Chris Blanquera, Sam Blanquera and Carlo Silva

Shoppable Business wants to make it easier for businesses in the Philippines to source and procure branded products and other inventory, with an emphasis on making sure products are authentic. The B2B e-commerce marketplace announced it has closed what it says was an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round of $1.15 million.

The round was co-led by Foxmont Capital Partners and Seedstars International Ventures, along with angel investors. Shoppable Business previously got backing from AHG Lab.

Shoppable Business was founded in 2022 by a team including Carlo Silva, who previously started and exited e-commerce business process outsourcing company 2ndOffice. The founders also include Sam Blanquera and Chris Blanquera, who co-founded and existed Openovate Labs and Galleon.ph.

Silva told TechCrunch that after working at startups and conglomerates in the Philippines since 2013, Shoppable Business’ founding team noticed that there was a huge gap in the marketplace for a efficient digital procurement process. “The traditional methods were slow, opaque and painstakingly manual and it was hard to find trusted suppliers,” he said.

One problem that businesses face when procuring online is not knowing if goods are authentic. While there have been a lot of e-commerce innovations in the Philippines, like social commerce, a lot of them are targeted toward consumers. But businesses often have to rely on Facebook Marketplace and classified ads for procurement, which means processing orders is a time consuming business.

Silva said that in the Philippines, the traditional procurement process is manual, with orders usually processed through messaging apps, email or in person. Questions are sent through word documents or spreadsheets. “It’s also difficult to search for authentic products online, and to compare quotations as they are funneled through messenger apps and email, making it an inefficient process,” he said.

Shoppable Business is aimed at businesses that want to procure goods quickly and more cheaply, but don’t have a dedicated procurement team. It also works with companies that manufacture their own brands and distributors. The platform specializes in branded products and services for resellers.

Shoppable Business helps them by operating as a horizontal B2B marketplace for products and services from multiple categories. In addition to using the platform to find products, businesses can also access services like marketing, sales support, procurement outsourcing, logistics, financing and payment infrastructure. Shoppable Business also issues official BIR (Bureau of Internal Revenue)-certified sales invoices and receipts, which companies need in the Philippines to claim the full purchase. To ensure authentic products, Shoppable Business is a marketplace partner of GS! Philippines (GSI is the standard for barcodes and product identification in 116 countries, and has 2 million member companies).

In terms of convincing sellers and businesses to move off Facebook Marketplace and the other platforms they are currently using, Shoppable Business makes the process easier by providing a single product listing catalog feature, which means if a product is already in its catalog, sellers don’t need to recreate the product listing. Instead, they can start selling it with a few clicks, by inputting their selling price, stock and any bulk discounts they would like to offer.

Sellers also get their own store on Shoppable Business that enables them to accept payments from different options like Gcash, Maya, credit cards, bank transfers and even check or manual bank deposits. Shopppable Business also does away with the hassle of shipping by arranging deliveries through third-party logistic partners.

To make it easier for sellers to move their current customer base to Shoppable Business, the platform offers a program called Shoppable Direct which enables them to refer existing customers to become buyers. Shoppable will tag seller’s customers as their direct customers if they buy something from the seller that referred them. It also waives marketplace fees for the buyer.

Silva said the wide array of services Shoppable Business offers sellers and buyers, like sales support, procurement outsourcing and logistics, helps it compete with other B2B marketplaces. In addition, it guarantees the issurance of BIR (Bureau of Internal Revenue)-certified sales invoices and receipts for every transaction, and also protects product authenticity through its partnership with GS1 Philippines.

The funding will be used to hire for Shoppable Business’ business development team, product and feature development and expanding into new markets in Southeast Asia. Silva said the startup will target new markets by the first half of 2024.

In a statement about the investment, Foxmont Capital Partners managing partner Franco Varona said, “Sourcing and procurement have traditionally been a very manual and a very challenging experience in the Philippines. The lack of transparency in pricing and difficulty in finding goods at scale and quickly is something Filipino companies have had to deal with for too long.  Shoppable Business helps to directly solve that problem, and we believe Carlo and his team are exactly the right team to do it.”

Philippines startup Shoppable Business smooths bumps in the business procurement process by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

The Philippines’ startup ecosystem is poised for strong growth, thanks to the country’s rising GDP, fast adoption of online services and a new generation of founders. Launched by tech and investment veterans, Kaya Founders wants to back the most promising startups from the very beginning. The venture firm announced today that it has closed $12 million in funding across two new funds, bringing its total committed capital to $16.5 million, with a target of $25 million. The new funding was led by the Gokongwei family.

Kaya (which means “can do” in Tagalog) was founded in 2021 by former Zalora Philippines CEO Paulo Campos, Summit Media president Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng and Locad CEO Constantin Robertz. Both Gokongwei-Cheng and Robertz are prolific angel investors, and have backed startups like Good Glamm Group, Kumu, Dali and Edamama.

The firm now has 32 companies in its portfolio, including e-commerce enabler Etaily, on-demand wage startup Advance, online clinic Kindred and MSME point-of-sale app Peddlr. Kaya’s Zero to One fund focuses on pre-seed companies, sometimes before they have gone to market. Its One to Ten Fund invests in more mature companies, from seed to Series A, that have already found product-market fit and are on their way to profitability.

Zero to One will invest $$150,000 to $250,000 checks into 20 to 30 pre-seed companies, while One to Ten’s checks will range from $250,000 to $500,000 and go toward 30 to 40 startups.

Kaya’s investment thesis centers around the Philippines’ young population, economic growth (the country’s GDP is expected to double to $6,500 by 2030) and high adoption of online services.

Its founders point to a report by Foxmont Capital, another venture firm focused on early-stage Philippines startups, that show funding in the country grew to $1.03 billion in 2021 and $1.1 billion in 2022, despite the global slowdown in deal activity. Based on Kaya’s calculations, $4 billion in capital has been closed by local and regional funds over the past two years, which means Kaya’s portfolio companies have plenty of opportunities for follow-on funding.

A lot of funding in the Philippines comes from corporate venture capital, but new players are emerging, says Campos. These include regional and global investors who are investing for the first time in the Philippines, like Sequoia Surge in Locad; KKR in GrowSari; A16z in Yield Guild Games; Tiger Global in PDAX; and Cecano and SoftBank in Sprout Solutions, plus local funds like Kaya, Foxmont Capital and Core Capital.

Kaya Founders’ team

Campos compared the growth of the Philippines’ startup ecosystem to India in the 2000s and Indonesia over the past decade. One of the main reasons is founders who have experience working at large tech companies like Grab, Lazada and Zalora, as well as Filipinos who were educated abroad returning to start companies in their home country. Campos told TechCrunch that Kaya has seen four founder archetypes emerge thanks to a confluence of the Philippines’ economic, business and cultural development.

The first is “second generation tech talent,” or former employees of large tech companies that “had their eyes opened to how quickly a unicorn can be born when you hit product-market fit,” said Campos. The second is corporate executives who left their jobs to start companies and bring domain expertise to their new roles. Peddlr founder Nel Laygo is one example—he worked at Unilever and Proctor and Gamble before launching the company to provide a POS system for sari-sari, or corner stores.

The third segment are founders who have experience working abroad, including Filipino expats and members of the Filipino diaspora, and the fourth are non-Filipinos who decided to start companies in the Philippines, taking advantage of the fact that English is the main language of business (Kaya’s portfolio includes founders from countries like Germany, the U.S., Singapore and India).

An example of the third segment is Kindred founder Jessica de Mesa, who was chief commercial officer at Zalora and spent half a decade working at its parent company, Global Fashion Group, in Singapore and London. De Mesa returned to the Philippines to lead Zalora Philippines’ commercial team, but wanted to return to healthcare (de Mesa is a registered nurse). Kaya had previously developed Kindred as a concept under its healthcare-focused joint venture, Pulse-63, and backed de Mesa as a “institutional co-founder” from its beginning.

“We are really seeing an acceleration of the flywheel of startups seeing customer traction and adoption, attracting investors both locally and internationally, and those success stories and fundraising round announcements inspiring a new breed of founders to throw their hat in the ring as well,” said Campos. “We see this as being very similar to what has emerged in Indonesia the past six to seven years, with the Philippines being at the cusp of the inflection point, just before the rocket takes off.”

Some challenges the Philippines’ startup ecosystem still have to deal with include a fairly nascent venture ecosystem, dominated by local CVCs, and problems sourcing tech talent and finding strategic partners with experience in go-to-market strategies, Campos said. Kaya was founded to help bridge the gap, giving founders access to people like former Lazada Philippines CEO Ray Alimurung, who was recently appointed as general partner of the Zero to One Fund, and Gokongwei-Cheng, for mentoring and strategizing.

Other support founders can get from Kaya include recruitment, legal services, educational material, office space and product development support, and a network of downstream investors, strategic partners, beta testers and pilot customers.

“We feel strongly that from now until the end of the decade, we will be living through the ‘golden age’ of startups in the Philippines,” Campos said. “That opportunity is also not just for local homegrown ventures, but also regional SEA or global startups that target the Philippines as a growth market.”

Kaya Founders backs Philippines startups from “Day 0” by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Finfra, an Indonesian startup that provides the tech infrastructure for online businesses that want to offer embedded finance products, has raised $1 million in new funding. The round included participation from DSX Ventures, Seedstars International Ventures, Cento Ventures, Fintech Nation, FirstPick, BADideas Fund and Hustle Fund.

The startup’s new funding will be used on product development and to grow Finfra’s engineering, data and finance teams. Finfra grew out of consumer financial services provider Danabijak, which is profitable and will continue operating as a subsidiary of Finfra.

Finfra is industry-agnostic, but it focuses on digital supply chain platforms, agritech companies and merchant e-commerce platforms, said co-founder and CEO Markus Prommik. It provides a loan management system so businesses can offer credit to clients through their platforms. The most popular way Finfra is used is by businesses who want to add invoice financing or purchase financing solutions. Finfra primarily serves B2B, but can also be used for B2C applications.

Prommik describes Finfra as a “one-stop shop to launch and scale white-labelled credit services,” explaining that without the startup, its clients would need to spend millions of dollars to develop the necessary tech and infrastructure, spend up to five years acquiring lending licenses and building a team. Instead, by using Finfra’s APIs, they can start offering embedded finance within weeks.

Finfra’s key value proposition is control over the customer experience. It integrates risk controls and data from clients’ platforms so they can extend affordable credit without taking on too much risk. Finfra also has portfolio analytics to help customers monitor performance and key lending KPIs.

Finfra’s team (left to right): Reinis Simanovskis, Dionysius Yogadhitya, Markus Prommik, Hilda Indriana, Varun Rathi

Prommik said that Finfra’s differentiator from other embedded finance platforms in payments, data and infrastructure is that they do not offer credit, even though it is the most in-demand financial service. Instead of seeing them as competitors, Finfra views those platforms as potential allies.

One thing that Finfra believes will bolster its growth is the Indonesian Financial Services Authority (OJK) to reach financial inclusion targets of 90% by 2024, up from 75% in 2019. Despite growth in online platforms in Indonesia, many people and small businesses still lack access to credit through traditional means, like banks and other financial institutions, and instead rely on alternatives, including embedded finance.

In a statement, Patricia Sosrodjojo, general partner at Seedstars International Ventures, said, “We’ve seen similar initiatives succeed in emerging markets where MSMEs face significant hurdles to accessing capital. Finfra’s approach not only aligns with national economic development goals but is well-positioned to take on the challenges of this rapidly growing market.”

Finfra lets Indonesian businesses add embedded finance to their platforms by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch