There’s a large education gap in Vietnam between urban centers, which have access to more resources, and the smaller cities and rural areas where 80% of students live. Edupia, an online learning platform, is bridging that divide with its live classes and private tutoring. The startup announced today it has raised a $14 million Series A led by Jungle Ventures with participation from eWTP Capital (a venture fund under Alibaba and Ant Financial) and ThinkZone Ventures. This brings Edupia’s total funding to $16 million.

Edupia currently has a total of 5 million users, with 400,000 paying students. Tran Duc Hung, who founded the company in 2018 as an English self-learning platform, said Edupia is on track to exceed its $100 million revenue target in the next three years. Most of its users are in Vietnam, but Edupia is also expanding into other Southeast Asian markets like Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar, and adding more subjects, including math and coding

Before founding Edupia, Hung spent 10 years as director of digital services at Viettel, the largest telco in Vietnam. While there, he saw how digitization was transforming many aspects of daily life, including e-commerce, finance, healthcare and education. At the same time, Hung tells TechCrunch, he also observed the gap between the educational resources available in larger, wealthier cities, like private language centers, and other areas of Vietnam, especially in English. Hung, whose family includes many teachers, saw an opportunity to launch an online platform to make English education accessible to every K-12 student.

Edupia founder Tran Duc Hung standing against a desk Image Credits: Edupia

As Edupia’s self-learning business gained traction, the team saw demand for more ways to engage with students and started live classes in March 2021. Hung said Edupia will run both business models at the same time, with self-learning serving as the first contact point for users before they upgrade to classes and tutoring.

Parents and students find Edupia through several channels, including its online marketing campaigns, school partnerships, word-of-mouth referrals and key opinion leader (KOL) marketing. Edupia reaches all provinces through its national sales team, and it was also the first company in the market to create a network of thousands of micro-KOLs (aka influencers) in different industries.

While there are many English-learning apps available, Hung said Edupia does not compete directly with them because it seeks to give students a similar experience to offline learning centers, with teachers who assign homework, evaluate students’ progress and organize online activities to increase engagement. Edupia’s closest competitors are therefore offline learning centers, but unlike brick-and-mortar schools, it was able to scale quickly across Vietnam’s 64 provinces. Each 60 students are assigned to a learning group, and each teacher can manage up to 2,000 students across the country.

Part of Edupia’s new capital will be used to upgrade its tutoring platform. The company also plans to hire for C-level positions and senior managers as it scales, and ramp up its international expansion.

Edupia raises Series A to close the education gap in Vietnam by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

A kiryana owner with one of SnappRetail’s point-of-sale devices

The number of global retailers, department stores and supermarkets operating in Pakistan is increasing, which spells convenience for consumers, but trouble for kiryanas, or small general stores. According to a report by the State Bank of Pakistan, general stores’ growth will slow down, especially in urban centers, as large retail outlets continue to expand their networks.

One reason why kiryanas are struggling to compete is that many still run on pen-and-paper systems. Karachi-based SnappRetail wants to help them digitize all their operations, while also providing micro-loans. The Karachi-based company announced today that it has raised a $2.5 million pre-seed funding round led by Zayn Capital’s BitRate Fund with participation from Antler and Century Oak Capital.

The funding will be used for product development, hiring and expanding SnappRetail to 1,000 customers, with the goal of covering 13 cities by the end of 2024. The startup’s CEO, Adeel Rasheed, told TechCrunch that there are 900,000 grocery retailers in Pakistan and it is targeting 300,000 retailers that contribute 50% of grocery transaction volume.

SnappRetail’s products includes point-of-sale (POS) devices and an end-to-end operations platform (for inventory management, stock ordering and analytics) that it says helps small retailers compete against larger ones. The platform also enables them to accept digital and card payments, and access micro credit for working capital.

SnappRetail was founded in 2021 by Rasheed, Moazzam Ali Khan, Ahsan Aziz and Moiz Ali. The team’s first startup was a retail recruitment consultancy called Resource Linked which helped 100,000 retailers hire employees. Rasheed and Khan’s previous experience include time spent working at consumer giants like Unilever and L’oreal.

Rasheed told TechCrunch that the team’s background in the retail sector led them to launch SnappRetail, since they saw that many kiryanas run on manual systems and don’t have bank accounts.

“What this essentially does is that it makes these store owners miss out on a big opportunity to use technology to gain insights out of sales data and create forecasts, improve financial management, manage inventory better and the list goes on and on,” he said.

SnappRetail monetizes by charging a monthly retail fee from its customers. It also sells retail sales data to large consumer goods manufacturers. Rasheed said that as the company signs up more retailers, it will launch more monetization channels through partnerships for products like working capital loans, B2B aggregation and card payments.

Another startup that is digitizing retail in Pakistan is Bazaar, which announced a $70 million raise earlier this year. When asked how SnappRetail differentiates from Bazaar, Rasheed said that “Bazaar is an app-based B2B platform. We, on the other hand, are deploying a hardware hosted micro-enterprise system in the shop which helps the retailer digitize their core store operations. SnappRetail is more like Square in the USA but for the grocery retail segment and more like Jiomart in India.”

In a statement, Zayn BitRate Fund co-founder and general partner Faisal Aftab said, “Being a proven concept globally, there is no doubt SnappRetail has the right approach to solving the essential problem of the retailer. We were particularly impressed by the experience and maturity this founding team brings to the table, hitting the right balance between hypergrowth and managing the burn.”

SnappRetail helps Pakistan’s kiryanas compete against supermarkets by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Backed by investors including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and CDC Group, Cropin is set on digitizing the agricultural industry. Today, the company announced the launch of Cropin Cloud, a cloud platform with integrated apps. Founded in 2010, Cropin’s other products are live in 92 countries, it is partnered with over 250 B2B customers and has digitized 26 million acres of farmland. It claims the world’s largest crop knowledge graph of more than 500 crops and 10,000 crop varieties.

Krishna Kumar, the founder and CEO of Cropin, told TechCrunch that Cropin Cloud was developed because the agriculture industry does not have access to a “unified, coherent platform that can enable and help build a wide variety of solutions,” even as it faces disruptions caused by climate change, geo-political tensions, food supply chain disruptions and a growing global population.

“The global ag ecosystem is gigantic in depth and breadth, but strangely, the tools to capture and share data coherently are sorely missing,” he added.

Cropin Cloud can be used by agribusinesses of all sizes. It has three sub-platforms that allow farmers and other stakeholders in the food value chain to access tools for earth observation, remote sensing and data and machine learning to help them better manage crops and harvests.

Cropin’s leadership team

The first sub-platform is Cropin Apps, which covers a wide range of uses cases: global farming operations management, food safety measures, supply chain visibility, predictability and risk management, tracing food from the farm to table, research and development and production management. It also helps farmers track deforestation and carbon emissions.

Cropin Data Hub, meanwhile, gathers data from different sources for analysis, including on-field farm management apps, IoT devices, drones, remote sensing satellites and weather reports. And finally, Cropin Intelligence uses the company’s 22 contextual deep-learning and AI models to help agribusinesses with data points like crop detection, crop stage identification, yield estimates, irrigation scheduling, pest and disease prediction, nitrogen uptake and harvest date estimation.

Some examples of how Cropin’s technology has been utilized include Unilever’s work with coconut farmers who used the company’s SmartFarm Plus app to record information about how mature trees were, issues they were facing and productivity levels. The app then used that data to provide location-specific advice, like how much coconut sugar farmers were likely to produce.

Cropin also provided insights about the weather, crop management, pest and disease forecasts, nutrient management and soil and water management practices to the World Bank and Government of India in a project that spanned 244 villages, 30,000 farm plots and 77 crop varieties. Cropin says this resulted in a 30% average increase in yield and productivity, with nearly 37% increase in farm revenue.

Since its launch 12 years ago, Cropin has raised a total of $33 million. In addition the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Strategic Investment Fund and CDC Group, its other investors include ABC World Asia, Chiratae Ventures, Ankur Capital, Beenext and Kris Gopalakrishnan’s family office. Kumar said Cropin is now in the process of fundraising for its Series D round, and aims to raise investments in the range of $50 million to $75 million in the next six months.

Headquartered in Bangalore, Cropin has subsidiaries in the United States, Singapore and the Netherlands. Earlier this year, co-founder and COO Kunal Prasad relocated to the Netherlands to oversee European operations. Kumar says Cropin’s committed annual recurring revenue is $15 million to $25 million and that the company has grown 2.5x over the past few years, and expects to see similar growth this year. “With the launch of Cropin Cloud, we expect 2023 will be a game changer for Cropin in terms of revenue growth,” Kumar said.

Indonesia’s credit bureaus currently have about 92 million credit records, but the founders of SkorLife say many people have trouble accessing their own data. That’s why they built the app, which not only lets people see their credit histories for free, but also gives personalized advice on how to improve data. The Jakarta-based startup announced today it has raised $2.2 million in pre-seed funding.

AC Ventures participated in the round, which also included Saison Capital and angel investors like all the founders of OneCard; Advance.ai’s Jefferson Chan; KoinWorks’ Will Arifin of KoinWorks; Lummo’s Krishnan Menon; Evermos’ Arip Tirta of Evermos; Qoala’s Harshet Lunani; Init-6’s Willy Arifin; Lummo’s Krishnan Menon; Evermos’ Arip Tirta; Qoala’s Harshet Lunani; Init-6’s Achmad Zaky; and executives from Northstar Group, Stripe, Google, Boston Consulting Group, Gojek and CreditKarma.

SkorLife says the private, alpha version of its app has been downloaded more than 3,000 times and is growing organically by 50 to 60 new users a day. That surpasses its internal target by 7x and the app will be available for public download soon. The company’s new funding will be used on product development, new hires and marketing. SkorLife currently has 10 employees, with plans to increase headcount to 40.

CEO Ongki Kurniawan was previously country head of Stripe Indonesia and also held leadership positions at Grab, telcoXL Axiata and Line, while COO Karan Khetan is a serial entrepreneur whose past startups include 5x and BookMyShow Southeast Asia. The two met in 2018 while setting up a partnership between Grab and BookMyShow to offer ticketing services through Grab’s super app.

SkorLife founders Ongki Kurniawan and Karan Khetan

Kurniawan tells TechCrunch the two spent a lot of time exploring different ideas. The first was to digitize the “pawn broker”/secured loan industry, but the unit economics did not work.

“However, we found that many Indonesians resort to pawning their items because they believe they will get rejected if they approach banks,” he said, adding that seven out of 10 loan applicants do indeed get rejected. “This was further validated after speaking with a number of industry experts. We learned that Indonesia’s consumer borrowing pool is small.”

While doing their research, Kurniawan and Khetan also saw that many Indonesians don’t have access to their credit scores and other data that would help them see how banks determine their creditworthiness, which in turn means they lose the opportunity to access affordable loans.

SkorLife’s founders say that creditworthiness is underused in Indonesia, where most financial institutions score a person’s ability to get lines of credit based on their “income worthiness.”

“The thing to remember is not everyone who has high income will pay their debt and not everyone who has a low income will not pay their debt,” Kurniawan said.

Kurniawan said that most people in Indonesia are unaware they can access their own credit history and credit scores, and believe that only financial institutions and banks have access to that information.

If they do figure out how to access it, they have two options. The first is the free route, where they request data from OJK (Indonesian Financial Services Authority). But the problem with this is that they either have to go to an OJK office, or wait days for an online appointment. The second, paid route involves customers going to three licensed credit bureaus in Indonesia to get their credit reports. But these reports cost money, and Kurniawan says they are many pages long “and not designed to be digested by consumers because it is intended to be used by analysts in financial institutions.”

SkorLife solves those problems by giving people free access to credit scores they would otherwise have to jump through hurdles to get. Its main product is a credit builder application that enables people to instantly see and monitor their credit scores, credit reports and other data from credit bureaus, for free. It also helps users dispute inaccurate information on their credit reports. If someone doesn’t have a credit history yet, the app will help them start building scores.

Through the app, customers can see their BI Checking Score, or Indonesia’s nationally-recognized credit information that is used by almost all financial institutions to make credit decisions, as well as their credit score, which is generated by credit bureaus to determine the possibility of someone defaulting on a loan in the next 12 months.

They also see what factors go into their credit score, including their payment history, credit utilization, the balance versus their secured versus unsecured credit accounts, the age of each of their credit accounts, ID monitoring to see if a financial institution is doing a hard check on their data, the total number of credit accounts they have, both active and inactive, and outstanding balances.

That data is then used to create AI-based, personalized insights for each customer that they can use to improve their credit scores. The app also has educational content and a features that makes it easy for customers to dispute inaccurate data.

Some examples of insights include payment history, and allowing customers to check bill dates and set reminders, age of credit (or encouraging customers not to close a card that has been open for a long time), and utilization. SkorLife recommends that customers maintain a credit card limit utilization beneath 30% to improve their score.

In a statement, AC Ventures founder and managing partner Adrian Li said, “The opportunity in Indonesia is massive. Even as the space is relatively untapped, the consumer credit market size is already north of US$185 billion. That said, it has always been a challenge here because lenders have never been able to draw holistic conclusions about borrowers based on limited and fragmented information. But with these data troves just waiting to be unlocked and used meaningfully in a consumer-facing app, we are excited about SkorLife’s vision and mission of putting people back in charge of their financial futures.

A call between doctors can save lives. That’s what Docquity co-founder Indranil Roychowdhury learned when his father was hospitalized with a life-threatening condition in India. An emergency room doctor initially told him that there was no chance of survival, but then another doctor called one of his peers in the United States, and they came up with an alternative treatment plan that worked. Docquity was created to help doctors collaborate in the same way, at scale, even if they live in different countries.

The Singapore-based company announced today it has raised $44 million in Series C funding led by returning investors Itochu Corporation, which put in $32 million. The rest of the round came from investors including iGlobe Partners, Alkemi, Global Brain, KDV and Infocom.

Roychowdhury told TechCrunch that after his father’s experience, he and his co-founders, Amit Vithal and Abhisek Wadhwa, wondered why “in today’s day of social media, it took a phone call to save someone’s life.” Docquity was founded in 2015 so doctors and other healthcare professionals have an easier way of working with one another.

The new capital brings Docquity’s total raised to $57.5 million. It says it is the largest community of healthcare professionals in Southeast Asia, with more than 350,000 doctors on board. The funding will be used to grow Docquity in its existing markets, like Indonesia and the Philippines, and enter new ones, including Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It recently launched in Taiwan, where more than 2,000 doctors have signed up so far. The company claimed two-fold revenue growth in 2021.

The company now has a team of 300 people and aside from its Singapore headquarters, also has a tech and engineering hub in Gurgoan, India, and other offices in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan.

In addition to giving doctors tools to connect and collaborate, Docquity has partnered with more than 250 medical associations in Southeast Asia to develop learning modules, which can be used to earn compulsory continuing medical education (CME) credits. The company says that so far, its platform has enabled doctors to earn a total of 4.2 million CME credits.

Docquity has three core features. The first, Docquity Academy, partners with universities and senior medical practitioners to create learning tools for doctors. The second, Docquity Clinic, allows doctors to have follow-up consultations with their patients. Finally, Docquity Insights takes data about user engagement on the platform to understand what they need.

Roychowdhury said that on average, about 50,000 doctors take courses on its platform every month, and that it was one of the first companies to launch online lectures and symposiums when the pandemic started in 2020. It now hosts about 500 lectures a month. Doctors taking the courses can also join private groups to discuss real world cases and the best treatment plans.

“While teaching and exam-style education is a key component, we believe that experiential learning through case discussions among peers in a major learning source for doctors,” said Roychowdhury.

Docquity ensures patient privacy through several measures. It’s a closed, GDPR and HIPAA-compliant network that only allows in doctors verified by medical associations. It has also set up internal compliance and pharma co-vigilance team to ensure privacy and security. It lets pharmaceutical and medical device companies to engage with doctors, but no advertisements are allowed on the platform.

Another Docquity initiative is making healthcare more affordable. It recently launched its Patient Adherence Program (PAP) to help doctors bring care to underserved patients. “Making treatments more affordable is a key objective of the platform and we have started working in breast cancer as a therapeutic area with one of our clients, and have already served close to 600 breast cancer patients in the Philippines,” said Roychowdhury.

The process of finding job candidates often entails a lot of tedious manual work for recruiters, like sending versions of the same email over and over again. That’s Kula was created. The platform not only automates tasks like sending introductory messages, but also surfaces promising leads from the first-degree connections of an organization’s existing employee base.

Kula announced today it has raised a $12 million seed round co-led by Sequoia Capital India and Square Peg Capital, with participation from returning investors Venture Highway and Together Fund.

The new funding comes less than six months after Kula’s pre-seed and brings its total raised to $15 million before its public launch. It will be used to expand its research and development, product and go-to-market teams in the United States, Singapore and India.

Kula co-founders Suman Kumar Dey, Achuthanand Ravi and Sathappan M

Before co-founding Kula, CEO Achuthanand Ravi worked as a recruiter at tech companies including Stripe, Uber and Freshworks. During that time, he saw marketing and sales teams get increasingly sophisticated tech tools, but the recruitment process still remained more or less the same.

Kula helps fix that by integrating with tools commonly used by recruiters, including LinkedIn, Github, Gmail and the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and automating workflows. For example, it can send introductory messages to promising leads through emails, LinkedIn nudges and InMails. A feature called Kula’s Circle consolidates all employee networks into one dashboard, helping recruiters figure out potential candidate from the first-degree connections of all their employees. Kula also includes analytics that helps recruiters forecast and measure their talent pipeline more accurately.

Kula is currently pre-revenue with alpha customers, and monetizes by selling to businesses through it’s go-to-market strategy, which is mostly focused on the United States. In particular, it targets SMBs and mid-market organizations with less than 1,000 employees, which Ravi says are underserved.

Ravi identified Gem.com, HireEz and Beamery as Kula’s closest competitors. But Gem.com only offers automated reach-outs as a product, and has no feature for the referral workflow like Kula’s Circle. HireEZ’s only channel to reach out to a candidate is email, but Kula’s platform also automates InMails on LinkedIns, an important source of potential candidates. Beamery, meanwhile, only counts the outbound recruitment workflow as a small part of is platform, Ravi said.

In a statement, Square Peg Capital partner Piruze Sabuncu said, Recruitment is an absolute priority for companies across the spectrum of size, industry, and geography, and is still an underserved business function. Kula’s founding team brings an unmatched combination of substantial recruiting experience and distinguishing engineering talent – giving them the ability to understand the problem deeply and build a solution that scales with the organizations they serve.”

Pakistani fintech PostEx has acquired logistics service provider Call Courier, creating what it describes as the largest e-commerce service provider in the country. PostEx will now serve 1.3 million users with over 8,000 merchants across 500 cities in Pakistan, and is on track to having a loan book of more than $12 million.

The acquisition means that Call Courier will become a wholly-owned subsidiary under the group name. PostEx provides services like upfront payments in a country where more than 90% of e-commerce payments are still completed in cash, and revenue-based financing for e-commerce sellers and SMEs.

PostEx co-founder and CEO Omer Khan told TechCrunch that according to the World Bank, about 100 million adults in Pakistan don’t have a bank account. As a result, businesses have limited access to working capital and lack adequate cash flow. On the other hand, consumers are wary of digital transactions, and even many who have bank accounts still prefer to pay cash on delivery for items ordered online.

But cash on delivery is problematic for e-commerce businesses because they have a higher rejection rate at the door. Furthermore, funds from cash on delivery purchases often take up to two to three weeks to be deposited into a business’ banking account, compared to a few days for digital payments.

As a result, PostEx’s founding team decided there was potential to build a reliable logistics service provider, plus upfront cash. Upfront payments mean that online vendors no longer have to wait through long payment cycles, and have better cash flow.

“We’re out there making it simpler for businesses to reach out to more customers, take care of their delivery needs and provide them with upfront liquidity,” said Khan. “This is essential for smaller businesses that need every penny to sustain themselves.”

In terms of competition, Khan says PostEx’s novelty factor is its hybrid of fintech and logistics. It has raised $8.6 million to date, and its backers include Zayn Capital, Global Founder Capital, MSA Capital, RTP, FJ Labs and Shorooq.

In a statement, Senator Afnan Ullah Khan, a member of the Prime Minister’s IT Task Force Committee said, “This acquisition shows the importance of close collaboration between fintech and logistics highlighting the importance of access to capital. This acquisition makes PostEx the largest e-commerce service provider in the market, showing the potential of startups for challenging incumbents. It’s refreshing to see new solutions to old problems.”

Glints, one of Southeast Asia’s largest talent development and recruitment platforms, announced today it ha raised $50 million in an oversubscribed Series D. The round was co-led by DCM Ventures, Lavender Hill Capital and returning investor PERSOL Holdings. This brings Glints’ total raised so far to $80 million.

As part of the investment, Lavender Hill Capital founding partner Xiaoyin Zhang and DCM Ventures general partner Ramon Zeng, will join Glints’ board.

Glints’ platform currently has three million professionals in five markets (Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan), and 50,000 companies that are seeking workers, including AIA, IKEA, GetGo, KKday and Gameloft.

The new capital will be used to expand Glints’ talent supply base in the Philippines and employer demand globally and hiring for its product and tech teams.

Founder and CEO Oswald Yeo told TechCrunch the company is focusing on the Philippines because of “its large and fast-growing international workforce. Additionally, we’re seeing local employers interested in hiring both tech talent locally and also remote hiring as well.

Founded in 2013, the Singapore-based startup says its annual revenue and gross profits grew 2.5x year-over-year, continuing its trend of annual revenue growing at a triple-digit percentage.

One growth driver is increase demand for remote workers. Glints says remote cross-border job postings grew more than 3x year-over-year, and that it sees positive contribution margins across all business units, with Indonesia and Vietnam continuing to be profitable. This continues a trend from earlier in the pandemic: over the past two years, Glints’ remote cross-border job posts have grown more than 11x.

Headquartered in Singapore, proptech startup Propseller is on a mission to make real estate transactions more efficient and data-driven for sellers and buyers alike. Its platform is able to tell users the likelihood of a conversion each step of the way. Today Propseller announced it has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India. 

Other investors participating in the round include returning backers Hustle Fund, Iterative and Rapzo Capital, along with new investors Partech, ICCP SBIT, Vulpes Ventures and Redbadge Pacific. It also includes several prominent proptech founders, like PropertyGuru’s Jani Rautiainen, OpenAgent’s Marta Higuera, Homeday’s Steffen Wicker and Tushar Garg of Flyhomes. 

Founded in 2018, Propseller will use its Series A to scale its business model, expand its offerings (including adding services like moving) and enter overseas markets. It currently has about 50 employees, including 20 salaried real estate agents (or consultants, as the startup calls them), and plans to hire 200 more people for its marketing, operations, product, engineering and sales and real estate teams. 

By using technology to make the real estate buy/sell process more efficient, Propseller is also able to charge only 1% commission rate, as opposed to 2% for traditional real estate agencies, its founder and CEO Adrien Jorge told TechCrunch. 

Jorge became interested in real estate while growing up in Nice, France. He says people from his family either became engineers or real estate agents, and he noticed that the latter group made more money than the engineers. Curious, Jorge joined his mother’s real estate agency at the age of 14 and stayed there until he was 22. But when his grandfather asked if the wanted to take over the business, Jorge decided not to.

One of his reasons was that the traditional real estate agency model was hard to scale and very manual, and often charged commissions that are hard to justify. Instead, Jorge went on to work for tech companies, including six years at Groupon, where he was in positions including general manager of Southeast Asia. 

While looking for investment opportunities, Jorge experienced the hassle of buying real estate in Southeast Asia. For example, he says that property prices are often high, but service from traditional brokerages often leave much to be desired. He attributes this to the fragmentation of Southeast Asia’s real estate market, with 200,000 agents across Southeast Asia, who close on average only two transactions per year. 

As a result, Jorge saw an opportunity to build a platform to help people sell their homes more quickly, with transparency and the least amount of hassle. 

The reason why Propseller calls its licensed real estate agents consultants is because the company’s automation gives them the time to work on client relationships. On average, Propseller’s consultants close about 55 sales transactions per year, which also means they make more revenue. 

“We are very likely the only company in Singapore to tell you what is the expected conversion rate of buyer leads coming from PropertyGuru or 99.co,” said Jorge. This means when a lead is generated, it can be tracked from start to finish, so sellers and consultants know how likely a successful closing is at every step of the process. 

Viewings generally take place offline, but Propseller also makes video and VR viewings for each property. Sellers can stay on top of the process with a dashboard that shows them which channels their property is being distributed on, inquiries generated, scheduled viewings and offers. 

The COVID pandemic has made people more willing to buy large-ticket items online and many who will continue to work from home are seeking a larger property. As the pandemic subsides gradually, Jorge believes these trends will stick around. 

The company’s main competition are the 34,000 independent agents in Singapore, who own about 99% of the real estate market share. Proptech competitors include Own My Home and Blue Nest in Singapore, Red Fin in the U.S. and Flyhomes to a certain extend, Jorge said. 

Propseller is setting itself apart with an end-to-end real estate transaction platform, Jorge said. “We have broken down every step of the process, recording everything that happens and we are able to record data that no one else has and identify how that process can be optimized to get the best results.” 

In a prepared statement, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India managing partner Carmen Yuen said that Propseller is “revolutionizing the way we transact our homes in a more cost and time-efficient, using technology and data. We’ve followed the Propseller team for more than two years now, and they have demonstrated impressive resilience and growth over the years.” 

Privacy breaches are not only bad for users, but also costly for tech companies. For example, GDPR fines now total $1.7 billion, and earlier this year Twitter had to pay $150 million for misrepresenting the security and privacy of user data. Based in Pune, India and Delaware, Privado wants to make it easier for developers to keep user data under wraps.

The company announced today that it has raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capita India and Insight Partners. Together Fund and Emergent Fund, which led Privado’s seed round of $3.5 million in January 2022, also returned for the new funding.

Privado’s Series A will enable it to grow its tech, increase its team to 25 people and grow its open source community. It is post-revenue and has signed six-figure contracts. Its pricing model is based on the number of code repositories, or products, that it scans and monitors.

Privado currently monitors over 600,000 code commits and its clients include Here.com, Thrasio and Zego. It was founded last year by Jasdeep Cheema, Prashant Mahajan and Vaibhav Antil, who previously worked in product and engineering teams. They were motivated to launch Privado after interviewing product and engineering teams at an e-commerce company that needed to find a way to monitor data usage and how it changed with each new software release.

The founders told TechCrunch in an email that “to comply with with any of the privacy laws, the first step is to get visibility into how personal data is being collected, used and shared across thousands of apps and services (Netflix famously has over 1,000 services) powering a tech company. Even if companies achieve this mammoth of a task, realistically, it is close to impossible to continue having visibility when code changes take place every week.”

They added that many of the current tools on the market are manual ones that don’t scale and go out-of-date as soon as there is a product change, or automated ones that only focus on discovering where data is stored, opening the possibility of missing issues around data collection, usage, sharing and personal data leakages.

“There are a lot of privacy tech companies that exist today and some of them have raised big rounds like OneTrust, BigID,” said Antil, Privado’s CEO. “Current tools fall short because they sit outside of the development lifecycle where decisions on data collection, use and sharing are made.”

Privado solves these issues connects with source code management tools including GitHub and scanning code for privacy. It’s able to monitor data usage, identify data flows and notify developers of privacy issues, including excessive user privileges or data leakages to logs.

“Think of us as Grammarly for your code,” the founders say. “We give you a data privacy score for existing products and point out privacy and data security issues as you are writing new code.”

It also created a free tool for Android developers that generates Play Store data safety reports that is used by developers including Automattic and Blinkist. Privado is now expanding it into an open source privacy code canning project.

“We tell engineers to build code and ship features out fast, and we tell them they are responsible for privacy,” said Antil. “If we are giving them the tools to grow engagement, we should also give them tools to grow privacy at the same time.”

AI copywriters are getting a lot of attention from investors. A couple that have recently raised funding include Copy.ai and Copysmith. Now Scalenut is entering the arena with a $3.1 million funding round led by Saama Capital and Amit Singhal, formerly a senior vice president at Google and head of Google Search.

Launched earlier this year by Mayank Jain, Gaurav Goyal and Saurabh Wadhawan, Scalenut says it has since signed up 100,000 users, primarily SMBs and mid-market sized businesses, grown its revenue 10 times and is now trending at a seven-digit run rate.

About 70% of its paying subscribers are from the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, and the rest are from Asian countries. Its last round of funding was a seed round of $400,000 led by Titan Capital, First Principles VC, AngelList, Abhishek Goyal and other angel investors.

When asked how Scalenut sets itself apart from other AI copywriting startups, Jain said “whilst Copy.ai, Copysmith and quite a few other tools have built a layer over a vanilla integration with [language model] GPT-3, we on the other hand have built a comprehensive content marketing suite that automates the entire content workflow.”

Scalenut founders Gaurav Goyal, Saurabh Wadhawan and Mayank Jain

“Our in-house deep learning models and integrations with other NLP providers enable end users to create content that has a much higher chances of ranking on search engines, hence driving organic growth,” he added. “Having said that, we also host one of the highest quality generic copywriting toolkits as well.”

One of Scalenut’s key differentiators is covering the entire content lifecycle, from content planning to research, writing and SEO optimization.

Jain demonstrated the platform for TechCrunch. For example, a green tea manufacturer who wants to create a blog post about the benefits of the beverage would first use a keyword to create topic cluster reports, or lists of potential topics with clusters of keywords. If they select the topic cluster “green tea benefits,” they would see keywords like “green tea benefits,” “dandelion benefits” and “tazo green tea benefits,” among many others.

Then they open the report they want and see statistics for the top 30 URLs ranked on search engines already, as well as their outlines. Other information includes the questions that people are asking about the topic on Google or Reddit, citations and key search terms to help content rank better on search engines.

Once a content creator has this info, they can enter Scalenut’s “Cruise Mode.” This provides a title, defines an outlet, provides writing points and creates a first draft, as well as SEO insights they can use to optimize the content.

Jain says users have relied on Scalenut to create in-depth blog posts, along with how-to guides, listicles, “why” posts, FAQs and comparison posts. Scalenut’s SEO optimization features tells users how long their posts should be. It can write blog posts as long as 10,000 words, but Jain says they’re usually between 1,200 to 1,500 words.

In a prepared statement, Saama Capital managing partner Ash Lilani said, “One common problem that businesses face to power up their organic marketing is scaling content meaningfully. There is no easy way to scale content and Scalenut is solving precisely that with its robust AI platform.”

Alex Hofmann once served as Musical.ly’s president, overseeing the North and South American markets for the TikTok precursor, then leaving shortly after the app exited to Chinese tech giant ByteDance in 2017. For his next act, the startup exec returned to the consumer social space with the launch of 9count — the maker of the popular friend-finder Wink, mobile dating app Summer (previously Spark), and others.

Though it’s typically difficult for new consumer social apps to gain widespread adoption, 9count’s apps have already seen some early traction — and investors have taken notice.

As a result, the company is today announcing an additional $27.5 million in new funding from GGV Capital Redpoint, Signia, Greycroft, Progression, Crosscut Grishin Robotics, I2BF, and Waverley Capital, among others. The round is an extension of 9count’s earlier Series A and includes only its existing investors.

In particular, 9count’s backers were impressed with the metrics coming out of Summer, which launched as Spark back in May but later rebranded. The dating app targets a younger demographic, ages 18 and up. But unlike traditional swipe-based dating apps, Summer’s differentiator is its grid that displays many users at once — an experience meant to more closely mimic the way it feels to walk into a crowded space in real life, like a bar or a party, for example.

“[Summer is retaining users] better than the top apps, especially in our strongest markets,” Hofmann says. “That just tells us that we’re on the right path with this product.

The 9count co-founder says Summer hit the No. 1 position in the App Store in two markets immediately following its launch and now has over 300,000 monthly active users, only a few months later. If looking at growth metrics alone, Hofmann claims it’s the fastest-growing dating app to hit the market since Bumble arrived in 2014. When he showed these figures to current investors, they wanted to double down on the app’s growth.

The company plans to use a large portion of the new investment to fuel marketing efforts for Summer after it launches on Android next month. This will include some in-person events in the startup’s hometown of L.A. 9count will also use the funds to expand its 35-person team, though Hofmann says they haven’t yet determined the exact headcount they plan to add.

Image Credits: 9count, Alex Hofmann and Joe Viola

But more than betting on Summer’s success alone, investors seem interested in the model 9count espouses.

Founded in January 2019 by both Hofmann and an experienced product manager, Joe Viola, 9count isn’t focused only on developing a single app and perfecting it. Instead, it’s co-developing multiple consumer products at once, iterating using data and customer feedback, then cross-promoting the apps within its portfolio. In addition to Wink and Summer, the startup has also developed social arcade app Juju, motivational app Everland, creator-fan connection app Popstream, and more.

This multi-product approach is something Hofmann is familiar with, thanks to his time spent at Musical.ly.

There, the team ran four different products: Musical.ly, its live-streaming counterpart known as Live.ly, and two others that weren’t as well known to the public. This model, Hofmann notes, is popular in Asia, where tech companies often operate multiple products — including TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, as well as Tencent, Alibaba, and others.

To benefit from this method, 9count tests and iterates on its products using a combination of A/B testing, data analysis, and user feedback. It additionally hosts employee hackathons and runs a “labs” division where it can try out new ideas to see if anything sticks.

“The learnings we have by rolling out new products are just tremendous,” Hofmann notes. “We can either make them into a standalone product or feed them into existing products.”

Image Credits: 9count

In fact, this model is what led the company to develop Summer in the first place, the co-founder explains.

He says some Wink users were asking for a way to use the social app for dating purposes. But Wink also caters to minors aged 13 to 17 (who aren’t allowed to interact with adult users, we should note). This focus skews the app toward a younger crowd, which wouldn’t be appropriate for online dating, even if it’s what some of the older users wanted. That prompted the team to break out the feature request into its own, new product — the app that has since become Summer.

Today, 9count claims its new dating app has already attracted over 500,000 downloads, over a million registered users, and more than 300,000 monthly actives. This makes it the sixth most popular dating app in the U.S. and the fourth in Canada, Hofmann said. (App intelligence firm Sensor Tower confirmed this with TechCrunch, saying Hofmann’s statement is correct based on App Store and Google Play downloads for July 2022.)

In addition, the video chat app Wink reportedly has over 2 million monthly active users, remaining 9count’s largest app to date.

In total, 9count’s app portfolio now reaches over 10 million users, the company says. Sensor Tower data indicated an even higher figure of 16 million-plus downloads across all their products launched to date. Wink was the largest chunk of this with over 15 million lifetime downloads.

Image Credits: 9count team photo

“Alex and Joe are building a next-generation social application company at 9count, consolidating disparate products under one banner, with one team to find what works for the next generation,” said Hans Tung, managing partner at GGV Capital, a 9count board member and early investor in Musical.ly. “The team at 9count is poised to experience rapid growth among their user base and we’re excited to partner with them to bring their vision to reality,” he added.

The new investment is also another signal that there’s an increased willingness from VCs to again back the often difficult consumer social app market.

Historically, it’s been near impossible to unseat Facebook and Meta’s other products from the top of the App Store. But TikTok has proven Facebook’s hold on the market could be winding down. The Meta-owned social network is no longer popular with Gen Z users, who are also growing frustrated with Instagram’s clutter and its continual attempt to force video on them through Reels.

Hungry for new experiences, today’s younger users are sampling a range of social apps, like the chart-topper BeReal, the home screen widget provider Locket, and the video chat app Yubo — a Wink rival. Not surprisingly, these apps have also pulled in VC backing. BeReal was valued at $600 million following its Series B this past spring, for instance. Locket announced this month it has closed on $12.5 million across two seed stage rounds. And Yubo banked $47.5 million in its 2020 Series C. Even Pinterest’s brand-new experimental app Shuffles has rocketed to the top of the App Store’s “Lifestyle” charts, despite being in invite-only status.

According to Hofmann, fueling this trend is younger users’ demand for apps offering them “niche” experiences.

“[9count’s team] looked at the market and realized that in the last ten years, there were really just — in our opinion — two major consumer social products. One is Musical.ly/TikTok, the other one is Discord. We realized that to build products that connect people, it might not be a one-product approach, but a multi-product approach,” the co-founder explains. “We see this trend towards…niche desires and niche preferences. We realized that very few products can serve a larger audience and bring them joy and happiness,” Hofmann says.