Programming involves a lot of monotonous tasks. Based in Gujarat, India, DhiWise wants to makes things less onerous for developers with its programming automation platform. The company, which won Product Hunt’s Golden Kitty award for Developer Tool of the Year last year, announced today it has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Accel and Together Fund, with participation from India Quotient. The round also included participation from founders from companies including WebEngage, Fleetx and Rocketlane. This brings DhiWise’s total raised to about $9.5 million.

Founded in April 2021 by former IT consultants CEO Vishal Virani and CTO Rahul Shingala, DhiWise has been in beta phase during the past eight months and claims it has already saved more than one million hours of programming for its 30,000 users so far.

DhiWise co-founders Rahul Shingala and Vishal Virani

DhiWise’s platform converts designs into code along with data binding, authentication, run time permissions, authorizations and more, allowing developers to focus on business logic and core algorithms. It generates structured, readable and modular code in MVC and clean code that can be later built upon for scalability.

As Virani explained, “with each new app design, developers need to write code for UI and frontend developers need to work on data-binding to make applications dynamic, in general, in any app development, 60% of the time is just consumed by this mundane programming. DhiWise automates all this mundane programming through its platform where developers can feed inputs in minutes to generate hours of source code. DhiWise’s smart algorithms convert all metadata given by users on the platform to clean, readable and customizable code.”

Virani and Shingala worked together for eight years at an IT consultancy they founded with a team of 150 developers who built 200 projects for clients in 24 countries. During that time, they deployed low-code and no-code tools, including Figma-to-code conversion platforms. But their results did not have the required code quality and architecture, or had multiple dependencies on the tool it was built with.

“We had previously set up an IT consultancy, we built software products for North American companies and had taken the topline to over a million dollars,” Virani said. “There was one repeated pain point we experienced that propelled us to set up DhiWise. Developers aren’t able to realize their peak work potential because they spend too much time doing mundane tasks.”

He added that “typically, people just hire more developers to share this workload. But developer, not unlike oil, are a finite resource. You can’t keep throwing in valuable resources at things that technology can solve.”

Launching DhiWise involved six months of research and development and a team of more than 50 developers who came up with algorithms to automate the programming lifecycle while paying attention to the source code standards that allow developers to build upon the code later.

Virani said DhiWise’s main competitor is Anima Apps, but it differentiates by focusing on developer experience. “All other tools available today are limited to just automating design to code whereas DhiWise is laser-focused on automating all parts of the programming life cycle.”

The new investment will allow DhiWise to add features like importing design systems, auto-identification of reusable components from Figma designs and declarative UI in their upcoming releases. It will keep React and Flutter apps as the core of its value proposition.

In a pre-prepared statement, Together Fund founding partner Manav Garg said, “DhiWise’s vision of enabling the ~30 million professional devs today by embedding itself directly into their workflows and not requiring them to change their behavior is compelling.”

Based in Japan, biotech startup Dioseve’s ambitious goal is to grow human oocytes, or eggs, from other tissue. Its aim is to help people struggling with infertility, and it recently raised $3 million led by ANRI, with participation from Coral Capital.

Dioseve’s mission might sound like it comes out of science fiction, but it’s based on a scientific technique called induced pluripotent cells stem (iPS) cells, which was first developed in 2006.

The startup’s scientific advisor, Dr. Nobuhiko Hamazaki, a research specialist at the University of Washington, created Dioseve’s technology, called DIOLs (directly induced oocyte-like cells), which can turn iPS cells into oocytes en masse. DIOLs is currently in trials and has been published in scientific journal Nature.

The new funding will enable Dioseve to hire more people and accelerate its research and development. It aims to establish proof of concept by having mice give birth with DIOLs produced oocytes, and recently established a new lab in Tokyo and hired an iPS specialist.

As Dr. Hamazaki explains, induced pluripotent stem cells can be used to grow all of the cells in the body. For example, other researchers are finding ways to use iPS to grow organs outside of the body, induce beta cells in the pancreas in an attempt to cure diabetes and generate neural stem cells to cure spinal injuries. iPS cells can be made from tissue like muscle or blood cells.

DIOLs first makes primordial germ cells, the source of sperm and oocytes. It differentiates between them to find oogonia, or the precursor of oocytes and then introduces genes into the iPS cells. This means that people who are dealing with infertility can potentially use DIOLs to have offspring with their own genetic material.

Dr. Hamazaki said that in the case of mice, it usually takes 30 days to get oocytes, and that with human oocytes, it can take up to six months.

Dioseve’s CEO is Kazuma Kishida, who became interested in biotechnology when he was diagnosed with hepatitis C as a teenager. At that time, the available treatment had heavy side effects and a low response rate, so his doctor told him to wait a few years, since a new drug was being developed in the United States. After three years, Kishida got the treatment, curing his hepatitis C. “That drug really changed and contributed to the world,” he said. “I wanted to do something that could change the world like the new drug did.”

Kishida said Dioseve has been giving a lot of thought to the safety and ethics of DIOLs by having conversations with potential patients and science and medical ethics specialists. Right now, issues it is monitoring include the inheritance effect of the technology—can it not only produce healthy babies, but also avoid health issues in subsequent generations?

“We are really serious about ethics. We need to be very careful because this technology can be applied to the process of making a child,” said Dr. Hamazaki, adding “we need to have a deep conversation with society to get a consensus if this is applicable, and the range we can apply this technology.”

Dioseve isn’t the only biotech startup researching ways to grow human oocytes. Others include Ivy Natal and Conception, both based in San Francisco, which are also developing ways to grow eggs from other cells. Dioseve says its competitive edge is its research progress and practicality.

Internet usage continues to skyrocket, with 29.3 billion networked devices projected to be in use by 2023 and the growth rate currently at around 10%. Today, an enterprise startup called DriveNets that’s built a more cost-effective way for service providers and other outsized connectivity users to scale to meet that demand by leveraging software and cloud innovations — not relying solely on hardware — is announcing a big round of funding, a mark of the rising demand it’s seeing for its tech.

The Israeli startup, valued at over $1 billion, provides software-based internet routing solutions to service providers to run them as virtualized services over “white box” generic architecture, and today it is announcing $262 million in equity funding to continue expanding its technology, its geographical footprint, and its business development. The company today works with close to 100 customers — large networking service providers like AT&T that in turn collectively provide services to millions of others — and in the last year has seen network traffic over its cloud-based architecture grow 1,000%.

This Series C is being led by D2 Investments, a new investment fund with LPs from the U.S. and United Emirates; and existing backers Bessemer Venture Partners, Pitango, D1 Capital, Atreides Management, and Harel Insurance Investments & Financial Services are also participating. D1 (Daniel Sundheim’s fund, no connection to the current lead investor despite the similarity of names) led DriveNets’ previous round, a Series B of $208 million last year, which catapulted the startup to its $1 billion+ valuation. Ido Susan, the CEO who co-founded the company with Hillel Kobrinsky, tells me that the company is not disclosing an exact valuation figure this time around except to say that it “has substantially increased over the previous round.”

If these sums sound very large, it’s because outsized funding is the order of the day for large enterprise startups taking on networking infrastructure leviathans like Cisco, Juniper and Huawei. (It also explains a little of the logic behind the large funding rounds for upstarts in the adjacent area of processors.) Including the company’s debut round of $110 million led by Pitango when it first came out of stealth mode in 2019, DriveNets has now raised just over $580 million.

The funding, we should point out, is a also a measure of the faith investors have in repeat, successful founders. Cisco acquired a previous “self-optimizing network” startup called Intucell founded by Susan for $475 million; and AT&T acquired a (prescient!) web conferencing startup Kobrinsky founded for $121 million. “DriveNets has demonstrated its ability to move the networking industry forward and has gained the trust of tier-1 operators,” said Adam Fisher, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, in a statement. “While other solution providers are facing challenging headwinds, DriveNets continues to innovate and execute on its vision to change the future of the networking market.”

Although there are potential opportunities for DriveNets to work with the biggest enterprises that are building their own networking systems, today service providers account for the majority of DriveNets’ user base. While it first made its name in the U.S., it’s in the last year expanded deeper into Asia and Europe, too.

“Most of our customers are tier 1 and 2 service providers and we found that Asian operators are early adopter and open to new technologies that can accelerate growth and lower their cost,” said Susan this week. A lot of initial engagement is around cost-cutting.

The pitch DriveNets makes is that as demands to provide more network capacity increase, service providers typically have to buy a lot of equipment (and go through the costly and time-consuming process of issuing those tenders and negotiating deals).

Networking as it exists pre-DriveNets is largely focused around costly hardware. The startup’s pitch is that it can replace that with its proprietary sophisticated operating system, which relies on a cloud-based architecture, that can work in conjunction with a cheaper and simpler system of generic network equipment that sits in a provider’s own data center. The switch (pun intended) works out to a cost savings on average of 40%, Susan told me in the past.

The operating system has a lot of different functionality, covering core, aggregation, peering, cable, data center interconnection, edge computing and cloud services, and this means, Susan said, that while customers come for the discounts, they stay for the services, “since our model is software-based we enable faster innovation and service rollout.”

Network operations saw an especially huge boost of demand in the last 18 months, he continued, given the major swing that digital services saw across both consumers and enterprises, although that wasn’t exactly something that played into DriveNets’ hand as much as you might think.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic they grew their existing networks based by simply buying more of the same to minimize the operational burden,” said Susan. That’s now changing, though, in the currently economic climate.

“Now, post pandemic they are starting to refresh these networks and with the growing interest of Cloud Hyperscalers in networking service, operators are looking at more innovative ways to stay competitive and accelerate innovation, by building networks in more like cloud. These are the big customers that we are seeing now – transformative large operators who are expanding the capacity of their networks and are looking to rollout newer services at a wide scale,” he said. 

The rise of companies like DriveNets speaks to wider trends in the industry to replicate, replace and surpass the capabilities of older hardware-based systems with software and specifically cloud-based services. That’s meant that when DriveNets first emerged, it may have been novel, but it is no longer on its own in the field.

“We have seen in the past couple of years some of the incumbent networking vendors starting to adopt our model,” said Susan. He credits the company’s “huge success” at AT&T as a proof that “the model works. You can build networks like cloud at a very high scale and reliability and both lower network cost and accelerate service rollout.” Newer innovations like 5G are thought of as more efficient, but they do not necessarily offset the larger rise in demand and usage.

“Now it is not a matter of ‘if’ but of ‘when’ since incumbent vendors have more to lose over that transition,” he added. He believes that DriveNets will emerge a leader in the networking vendor space nonetheless, not least due to being able to invest in further development on the back of funding rounds like this one.

“We are investing in our current solution to ensure that we keep ahead of the market but also continue to add expected capabilities,” said Susan. He notes that the company was the first to support Broadcom’s latest chipset and more than triple the network capacity but also lead the transition to 400Gig. “In parallel, we are already investing in additional solution offerings that will provide additional value to our customers and expand our TAM,” he said.

The biggest challenge is not technological, per se, but one of talent, “recruiting quality people to support our engineering efforts and our global expansion. At the end of the day, it is all about the people,” he said. The company has been snapping up talent from the likes of Juniper and Salesforce, among others to fuel its growth. 

“DriveNets has already made a big impact in the high-scale networking industry and its routing solutions are adopted by tier-1 operators for their quality and the innovation they enable,” said Aaron Mankovski, managing partner at Pitango, in a statement. “This investment will allow DriveNets to expand its footprint in the market and develop additional offerings.”

Sari-saris are small neighborhood stores in the Philippines that are often run on pen and paper ledgers. Inspired by a motorcycle journey, Packworks is on a mission to change that, with a mobile enterprise resource planning platform (ERP) that just raised $2 million led by logistics group Fast Group and CVC Capital Partners, with participation from ADB Ventures, Arise, Techstars and Ideaspace Foundation.

The startup will use its new funding to develop its super app, called The Pack, by increasing its platform offerings, including optimizing store operations, including funding access for businesses, and order management across the entire supply chain. It also plans to build a department that engages sari-sari stores and provides additional services with parters, plus build an open platform for financial institutions and brands to connect directly with sari-sari owners.”

Before raising, Packworks bootstrapped its way to working with 150,000 sari-sari stores, the company says. It was founded in 2018, with an initial client base of five sari-sari store partners. Packworks has now onboarded 150,000 stores and wants to have 220,000 stores by the end of 2022 and 500,000 by the end of 2023.

The Pack SuperStore app enables sari-sari owners to process their business’ inventory, bookkeeping and data collection. It also gives access to financial products and supply ordering at a cheaper price. The app is designed to use low bandwidth, since store owners often pay higher interest rates and pay more for consumer goods. It also wants to bring down interest costs and handle money through its e-payments features.

A sari-sari owner using ERP Packworks

Packworks started after founders Hubert Yap, Bing Tan and Ibba Bernando took a motorcycle journey to rural communities. During that time, they came up with the idea of working with sari-saris after taking a motorcycle journey to bring solar panels to isolated communities. They said they witnessed how sari-saris have a difficult time tracking inventory and getting supplies for their stores, especially in the provinces of the Philippines.

Bernando, Packworks’ chief marketing officer, told TechCrunch that he and his two co-founders are avid motorcycle riders and “while doing our hobby, we also initiate advocacy activities such as bringing solar panels to isolated communities.” During their journeys, they usually stop by sari-sari stores in rural areas to eat or rest. “We observed that these stores have a hard time tracking their inventories and getting supplies for their stores, especially the ones in the provinces.” That’s when the three thought of making a one-stop app. “Witnessing firsthand the challenges brought by limited access to sari-sari owners, especially in far-flung places, we promised to share our technical know-how and inspire them to shift from analog processes to using technology,” he added.

The company originally started as a solution for multinational companies to connect with neighborhood stores. By 2019, it had rolled out nationwide with 220 stores, and a valuation of $400,000. After a year, those numbers increased to 27,828 stores with a $30 million valuation, and as of last year, it reached 130,000 stores with a valuation of $139 million.

He adds that there isn’t just one kind of sari-sari stores, so Packworks built a suite of apps for different types. For the more successful ones, it created a full suite of business tools. For new sari-sari stores, it created a beginner-friendly app that guides them and connects them to mentor stores. “They can order from our platform,” he said. “Not just that, but they are actually micro-support groups that help each other out.”

The Pack: SuperStore app gives sari-sari owners access to financial products and supplies for a lower price. Bernando says it aims to bring down interest costs and handle money through access to e-payments.

“There are not just one or even two types of sari-sari stores,” he said. “There’s a rainbow of them. We are currently working with ones that move consumer packaged goods and fast-moving consumer goods, but are also working with the carinderia type, or sidewalk restaurants, agritype, and rice vendor type, among others. It’s not about the size but the selection of goods. We now have more than 150,000 users with a estimate of 9,000 SKUs and we target to have 220,000 by the end of the year, and 550,000 stores by the end of 2023.”

When asked about what stage of revenue Packworks is in, Bernando said “this year is pivotal for us. We will be expanding our revenue model from project billing with our partners to performance billing, taking advantage of the transactional value of our 150,000 store network.”

In a prepared statement, Brice Cu, senior managing director and country head of Philippines for CVC Capital and a board member of Fast Group, said, “At Fast, we constantly search for ways to improve our country’s supply chain. The over one million sari-siar stores in the Philippines are a critical component of this chain, and we believe that an immense opportunity exists to build a digital layer to connect these stores with customers and suppliers. Layering Packworks’ digital fabric to this network and leveraging its emerging data has exciting prospects for creating supply chain efficiencies, especially when combined with the experience and national scale of Fast.”

Applying for mortgages is often a time-consuming and disorganized process, with reams of manual paperwork required. Based in Jakarta, IDEAL simplifies the process with a platform that lets users compare mortgage products and apply for them from multiple banks at the same time. The startup announced today it has raised $3.8 million in pre-seed funding led by AC Venture and Alpha JWC, with participation from Living Lab Ventures and Ciputra Group.

The funding will be used of product development, hiring and expanding its products. IDEAL eventually plans to add other major lending products and expand into more Southeast Asian countries.

Started last year, IDEAL’s founding team includes Albert Surjaudaja, Ian Daniel Santoso and Indira Nur Shadrina, with Jeganathan Sethu joining this year. Before launching IDEAL, Surjaudaja was former head of operations strategy at digital payment service OVO.

IDEAL founders Albert Surjaudaja, Indira Nur Shadrina and Ian Daniel Santoso

Surjaudaja told TechCrunch that IDEAL was started “with the thinking that consumer lending in Indonesia is broken.”

“Used responsibly, credit is a vital part in fueling the growth of economies. It acts as a multiplier effect in generating value,” he added. “With that in mind, Indonesia has one of the lowest credit to GDP ratios in the region, signifying that there is a lot of economic value potential that can be unlocked. There are a number of reasons for this, but one key reason is the absence of good, accessible options when it comes to lending products.”

Surjaudaja said that traditional retail banks offer a relatively poor digital experience for their consumer lending products, making them less accessible. On the other end, there are P2P lending and BNPL startups, but their products are centered on smaller, more consumptive loans.

“We feel like there is a clear gap in the market, namely conventional, productive and larger ticket size consumer lending products offered on a user-friendly digital platform,” he said.

Surjaudaja says IDEAL chose mortgages as its first consumer lending product because of its market potential, citing 2021 research from Bank Indonesia that says the country’s mortgage industry is valued at $39 billion, with a projected 17% CAGR over the next five years. Gen Z and Gen Y is set to become the primary audience in the home ownership sector.

Indonesia’s mortgage penetration rate is also just 3% of the local GDP, one of the lowest in Southeast Asia.

Surjaudaja added that the traditional mortgage process is very manual, highly fragmented and takes a lot of time and effort from customers.

For example, most people lack information about how the mortgage process works, making it confusing. The document submission process is also manual and unstandardized with multiple parties involved and documents with sensitive information handled without security. Surjaudaja said consumers suffer from lack of transparency in rates and availability of different options, and an opaque application process that means they need to contact their agent numerous times.

IDEAL’s digital platform seeks to solve these challenges. While mortgages are currently primarily suggested by property agents, IDEAL lets buyers select their own mortgage products. It also has a feature, called IDEAL Checking, that lets people check their credit instantly.

It helps users choose a mortgage by calculating costs and installments, and also includes a direct application system that enables users to apply to multiple banks with one set of data and a real-time tracking system. IDEAL says its digital system is secure, and minimizes human error and data leaks that often occur during paper-based or messaging-app-based mortgage processes.

Other features include detailed information about property units from IDEAL’s developer partners, different mortgage products from banks and IDEAL Compass, a short questionnaire that helps the platform understand what a customer needs and produces a simulation of monthly payments, tenor and other information about a mortgage.

The startup is currently focused on the primary housing marketing, but plans to expand to secondary housing and mortgage refinancing/takeover products. It will also launch a dashboard that will help users monitor and manage their mortgages. IDEAL also plans to expand to other major lending products, with a long-term vision of entering more Southeast Asian markets like Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Surjaudaja said 60% to 70% of Indonesia’s mortgage market falls below the secondary housing category. “Our market research signals a strong need and demand from Indonesian consumers for a way to easily takeover/refinance their current mortgage, since the gap between fixed and floating mortgage interest rates in Indonesia can be quite sizable,” with up to a 10% difference.

IDEAL monetizes through commissions from banks and property developers for every successful loan application through the platform. It is currently partnered with five banks, including CIMB Niaga, OCBC NISP and Maybank, and several of Indonesia’s largest property developers, like Sinar Mas Land, Ciputra Group and Agung Sedayu Group. Its platform connects with banks through APIs to make the data-gathering process simple.

Some of IDEAL’s competitors include Pinhome, Cermati and Cekaja. Surjaudaja says Pinhome’s business model is more property-centric, providing an end-to-end solution related to property from home discovery to home financing. On the other hand, he describes IDEAL’s business model as “customer centric” and leaning more toward fintech instead of proptech. Cermati and Cekaja, meanwhile, are financial aggregators that allow users to browse mortgage products from multiple banks, but Surjaudaja said they are not fully digital, do no provide contextual data and still require an online-to-offline process, without a credit scoring pre-check and pre-filtering applicants to banks.

In a prepared statement, AC Ventures managing partner Adrian Li said, “Indonesia’s mortgage penetration is currently at 3% of the local GDP. That is low copared to Malaysia and Singapore, which are at 30% or higher. This presents a US$30 billion opportunity if Indonesia can double its mortgage penetration to 6% via improved financial access. IDEAL’s strong-suited team identified a bottleneck in the mortgage industry and brought domain expertise in fintech and real estate to build a one-stop shop for mortgages in Indonesia.”

Insightly Analytics helps engineering teams stop problems before they happen, like slow release cycles, bottlenecks and uneven workload distribution that can lead to employee burnout. The San Francisco and Hyderabad-based startup announced today it has raised $1 million led by Together Fund, which it will use to expand its product, engineering and marketing teams.

Founded in 2022, Insightly’s target users are chief technology officers and engineering vice presidents who want to analyze their DevOps research and assessment to help make decisions and identify the causes of issues that can potentially lead to less revenue, less productivity or employee attrition.

Sudheer Bandaru, founder and CEO of Insightly, told TechCrunch that Insightly is currently at six-digit revenue and has some unicorns and public companies in its customer pipeline that can potentially take it to a million dollars in annual recurring revenue over the next few months. Its user base includes a total of 12,000 engineers, including teams in the U.S., India, Kenya and Israel. The platform is customizable by company size and its clients range from 50-member engineering teams to multi-billion-dollar organizations that have more than 800 engineers.

Before founding Insightly, Bandaru worked at organizations like AT&T, Merrill Lynch and Hewlett-Packard. Then he moved on to a role as director of engineering at a markets informational resource website publisher that was later acquired by Bankrate. It was at that job, and during his next role as founder of recruiting platform Shortlist Professionals, where Bandaru says he learned the pain points of managing diverse engineering teams across countries and continents. These challenges were exacerbated by the move to remote work during the pandemic.

“There was little to no way for organizations to objectively see how efficient their engineers were,” he said.

As a result, Bandaru began to hack together a solution with data-driven insights to use at Shortlist Professionals. Then, as he started to get interest from leaders at large tech organizations, he realized his hack had the potential to be more than a side project. Bandaru notes a report from Stripe that says $300 billion is wasted per year around the world in software development inefficiency, even though 96% of tech leaders say improving engineering productivity is their top priority.

He adds many engineering leaders try to assess productivity with analytics from Git and Jira, but those processes are manual and time-consuming. Insightly is designed to automate the process of aggregating data to help speed up software development, find bottlenecks and gain visibility into workload distribution. Integrating Insightly takes about five minutes, is no code and immediately aggregates three months of historical data.

Insightly works by pulling in data and metrics from Git and Jita. Bandaru says its insights can help teams release products faster by spotting bottlenecks and distribute workload more evenly to avoid engineer burnout. It also maps business outcomes to tech efforts, helps teams decide if they should rework or do new work on a version, catch bugs and helps reduce tech debt by showing metrics like maintenance percentage to help teams tackle the most pressing issue first.

Insightly’s cockpit

Some use cases include a multi-billion dollar organization with almost 1,000 engineers that discovered most of their engineering teams were stuck for three to four out of five days because of team structure and release dependencies by using Insightly’s metrics on its release cycle and work distribution. Sendy, a Kenya-based logistics company with less than 100 engineers, discovered that the reason for employee attrition was burnout because of an uneven workload, which company leaders had not been aware of because people worked remotely. Meanwhile, one client realized that the amount of time that went into maintaining legacy applications over building new features as engineers left during the Great Resignation. New engineers had no option but to maintain their old code. Visibility into this problem allowed the company’s CTO to sunset low revenue generating products and build new products stead.

Insightly allows customizations at levels including creating teams by squad level, geographic locations, tech stack and business units. For example, Bandaru said one of clients discovered that a team with more reviewers based in Latin America, and the rest of the team in the U.S., had slower release cycles compared to teams who were all based in the same time zone.

Two of Insightly’s competitors are Jellyfish and Linearb.io. Bandaru said Insightly differentiates by not only showing analytics, but also why they are happening, and providing context to every metric and data point.

Omni wants to be the human resources platform to rule them all—or at least all HR-related tasks. The software enables HR teams to digitize employee records, automate administrative tasks like employee onboarding and time-off management, and integrate employee data from different systems. Based in Singapore, it is currently active there and in Indonesia, and plans to roll out in other Southeast Asian markets after localizing for employment regulations.

The startup announced today it is coming out of stealth mode with $2.4 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed round co-led by Alpha JWC Ventures and Picus Capital, with participation from FEBE Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, Ratio Ventures and Frances Kang at Horizons Ventures. It also included investment from angel investors including former executives at U.S. HR software firms Namely and Ultimate Software.

Omni HR had its soft launch in March 2022 and is already used by several companies, including Indonesian investment app Ajaib. The funding will be used to add more features to Omni, including a recruitment module by the third quarter and a performance enhancement module by the end of the year.

The company was founded in 2021 by Brian Ip, a former Goldman Sachs executive, and data engineer YC Chan. Ip told TechCrunch that he had previously worked in software investment at Goldman Sachs Growth Fund and looked at many HR tech deals, which is how he and Chan first learned about the industry.

“Through research and talking to end users, we realized that HR software is a category that requires as lot of localization and there isn’t a winning product for Southeast Asia yet,” Ip said, adding that most local solutions only address limited functions, like payroll.

But most HR teams Chan and Ip spoke to wanted an all-in-one solution. Many were still using spreadsheets or basic payroll software. Examples of work they were doing manually that can be automated by Omni include onboarding new hires, recruiting employees, performance reviews, collecting documentation like employee IDs and preparing HR reports for internal management.

“From a strategic point of view, what we think makes this startup opportunity even more interesting is that, we do not see HR software as a silo-ed tool used only by the HR department,” Chan said. “Instead, we see it as a ‘system of record’ of employee information.”

Almost every app or business function within a company, including software, devices, office admin and finance, can be connected to Omni, turning it into a software infrastructure layer.

In terms of competition, Chan said he sees two categories: local payroll software and imported software from overseas. He added that this disadvantage of payroll software is that they only provide basic admin functions around payroll calculation, and are not scalable. They also don’t have features for performance appraisals, recruitment, onboarding and employee document management.

Imported HR software, on the other hand, is not localized, which means they lack features like payroll modules for Southeast Asian countries, local customer support and “sometimes even modules like time off tracking or attendance management that are not built flexible enough to accommodate policies in one market,” said Ip.

He added that Rippling and other top U.S. HR platform like Gusto and Namely are currently not available outside the United States. “We believe that, even if they do expand internationally at some point, localization requirements and the geo focus will allow us to build a strong moat.”

Localizing for each market can be quite complicated. HR managers in different countries need to collect different employee information. For example, in Singapore, employees provide the birth certificates of their children so companies can use them to apply for government reimbursements when they take childcare leave. On the other hand, companies in Indonesia collect multiple forms of ID information, including KTD (resident’s card), KK (family card) and NPWP (tax ID).

Each country also has different workflows. In Singapore, Ip said, the probation period of permanent staff can be “extended,” but in Indonesia a maximum of only three months is allowed, and it cannot be extended or renewed.

Payroll calculations also differ from country to country, and include factors like tax, pension and other statutory withholdings. Time off rules also vary. For recruitment, Omni can localize by connecting with local job boards instead of US-centered ones.

Singapore and Indonesia were chosen as Omni’s first markets because the startup’s initial customer segment are companies in tech and tech-adjacent verticals, in particular other VC-backed companies, Ip said. He added that “Singapore is possible the most mature market in Southeast Asia Asia in terms of software/cloud adoption and willingness to spend. Indonesia is one of the biggest, and rapidly growing, market opportunities in Southeast Asia.”

“Buy now, pay later” (BNPL) startups have gained traction by targeting consumers, but BNPLs for businesses are also starting to take off. One example is Fairbanc, which is based in Singapore but focused on Indonesia. It allows small businesses to take out short-term credit to purchase fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) inventory. Fairbanc announced today it has raised $4.8 million in pre-Series A funding led by Vertex Ventures.

Other participants in the round included Indonesian conglomerate Lippo Group, Asian Development Bank and Accion Venture Lab. Fairbanc also received previous investment from East Ventures, 500 Global and Michael Smapoerna.

Fairbanc will use its new funding on expanding in Indonesia, and exploring new markets like Vietnam and the Philippines in partnership with Unilever. It also plans to expand into verticals beyond fast-moving consumer goods, including within the B2B supply chain.

Fairbanc has partnerships with 13 consumer brands, including Unilever, Nestle, Coca Cola and Danone. It says it has already onboarded over 350,000 merchants in less than 12 months. Of that number, 75,000 are purchasing inventory with its BNPL feature, which have terms of one to two weeks for fast moving products.

Its users are typically last-mile micro-merchants that purchase $50 to $300 of each brand’s products every week. Fairbanc also finances small retailers that sell smartphones.

According to a survey done by Unilever and Fairbanc, 80% of Fairbanc’s users are unbanked, meaning they don’t have bank accounts, and about 70% are women. The startup claims merchants increased their sales by an average of 35%.

Fairbanc was founded in 2019 by Wharton-graduate Mir Haque, who first piloted the startup in Bangladesh before choosing Indonesia as its main market. Haque was born in Bangladesh and described it to TechCrunch as “the birthplace of micro-finance.” After living and working in the United States for almost 25 years, he moved back to Bangladesh in 2018 to digitize micro-credit, with the goal of creating a digital credit platform for micro-merchants that did not require a smartphone or digital literacy.

“After some market research, I saw an opportunity for large-scale ecosystems lending in offline market with Unilever by integrating our API with their own app used by their offline sales agents to take orders from the merchants,” he said. “But it didn’t work out in Bangladesh because the market was oversaturated with micro-finance, with many merchants having overlapping and overdue loans.”

As a result, Fairbanc decided to pilot with Unilever in Indonesia instead. Haque says that resulted in 35% sales growth for almost 500 small merchants with zero defaults over one year. “Because merchants must pay last week’s BNPL to place orders for the current week, this model of ’stop supply until repayment’ results in very low defaults,” he said.

Indonesia was chosen as Fairbanc’s first market after its pilot in Bangladesh because it is “not only a much larger market in terms of population and GDP compared to Bangladesh, but it also doesn’t have the problem of too many microfinance chasing the same merchants,” Haque said. “I guess because of this same reason of banks in Bangladesh weren’t all that excited the way Indonesian banks are.”

Before founding Fairbanc, Haque worked at companies including Google, Adobe, McKinsey and Deutsche Bank. The company’s founding team also includes Kevin O’Brien, former chief technology officer of non-profit lending platform Kiva, and Thomas Schumacher, who co-founded emerging market microloan platform Tala.

Zipmex, a digital assets exchange with operations in Singapore, Australia, Indonesia and Thailand, said on Twitter that it “would be pausing withdrawals until further notice.”

The Singapore-headquartered company cited a “combination of circumstances beyond our control including volatile market conditions, and the resulting financial difficulties of our key business partners.”

Due to a combination of circumstances beyond our control including volatile market conditions, and the resulting financial difficulties of our key business partners, to maintain the integrity of our platform, we would be pausing withdrawals until further notice.

— ZIPMEX (@zipmex) July 20, 2022

Zipmex is not the only crypto exchange that has run into difficulties amid a global sell off in crypto markets. Crypto unicorn Babel suspended withdrawals in June, while Celsius, one of crypto’s biggest lenders, filed for bankruptcy a week ago.

Vauld, another Singapore-based crypto platform, suspended withdrawals, trading and deposits due to financial challenges earlier this month.

TechCrunch has reached out to Zipmex for comment and will update this story if we hear back from them. Reuters reports that in a livestream on Wednesday evening, Zipmex Thailand CEO Akalarp Yimwilai said its office’s difficulties were because of problems at Singapore-based Zipmex Global, whose partners Babel Finance and Celsius, were experiencing liquidity problems.

Prerna A Jhunjhunwala and Nikhil Naik, founders of Creative Galileo

People who work with kids know how difficult it is to keep them engaged with online learning content. Creative Galileo keeps children hooked by adding in their favorite cartoon characters. The Singapore-based edtech platform announced today that it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding from Kalaari
Capital, East Ventures, Affirma Capital and angel investors.

The funding will be used to start scaling Creative Galileo across Southeast Asia, hiring for local teams in Indonesia and Vietnam, its next markets. The app is currently most active in India, where it says it has seen about seven million downloads.

Creative Galileo’s new funding brings the company’s total raised so far to $10 million, including a pre-Series A round of $2.5 million in October 2021.

Founded in 2020 by Prerna A Jhunjhunwala and Nikhil Naik, Creative Galileo describes itself as “Southeast Asia’s first-of-its-kind character-based early learning platform for kids aged three to 10.”

Jhunjhunwala told TechCrunch that Creative Galileo differentiates from other children’s learning apps by offering preemptive aptitude tracking, so their learning content is personalized based on what they already know. At the same time, it also aligns with the NEL (Nurturing Early Learners) curriculum developed by the Ministry of Education in Singapore. Its learning concepts include STEM, animation and graphic design, social and emotional learning and financial literacy.

Creative Galileo’s language dashboard

Jhunjhunwala said she wanted to found an edtech startup because she grew up near jute factories, largely in Tier 3 Indian cities, and saw how educational disparities affected children. “During that time, when interacting with children and parents, I came to the realization that there was a major learning crisis. There was a vast divide to access in education and many children I met were unable to read and write, or do simple mathematics.”

This is still an issue today, with Jhunjhunwala pointing to research showing that 70% of 10 year olds are unable to do basic subtraction, and a further 70% of 15 year olds cannot read books meant for a nine year old.

“Essentially, these children were, and still are, set to enter adulthood without basic education,” she said. “I knew from my experience that my mission was to create opportunities for children to access education that would set them up for life.”

After moving to Singapore, she realized that the curriculum being taught across Southeast Asia was also missing the mark.

“Children across the region are still following the same age-old learning methodologies that their parents and grandparents experienced and are not being taught skills that are relevant for today’s world. The education system, with a ratio of 1 teacher to 30, or even 40 students, is creating a cookie cutter approach,” she added. “It’s like fast food for the mind.”

Initially, Jhunjhunwala sought to fix the problem by setting up a chain of schools called Little Paddington with its own curriculum. But even though the schools were successful, she felt they fell short in her goal of democratizing education. That was why she decided to found Creative Galileo with Naik, a parent at Little Paddington who has had experience building direct-to-consumer products and internet ecosystems in Asia.

Localization, especially for languages and intellectual property, is a big part of Creative Galileo’s strategy as it expands into new Southeast Asian markets. Jhunjhunwala explained that the platform is modular so it can handle changes to characters and support cultural nuances, local languages and curriculum.

“Every country within the Southeast Asia is extremely diverse and so the product was built to be easily adapted in order to ensure local relevance and support multiple languages, even within a single country,” she said.

She added that the startup is currently in the middle of conversations to secure some of the region’s most popular children’s cartoon characters for the platform. It’s already signed an agreement with EBS Korea, a public broadcaster and one of the largest early education content companies, to bring its content onto Creative Galileo.

Indonesia is one of Creative Galileo’s next markets because “the challenges faced by children there are similar to those we have experienced in India,” said Jhunjhunwala. Meanwhile, Vietnam has a strong focus on English-language education, giving the startup a chance to offer dual language capabilities for kids. “In addition, both countries already have strong infrastructure and smart device penetration rates, which paves the way for easier adoption of our solution,” she added.

The app has already started to monetize on a small scale, Jhunjhunwala said, but at this time, it’s focused on scaling. It makes revenue using a freemium model.

“We have been frugal in our expenses and have achieved this scale with a product- and content-led approach,” she said. “Our consumer acquisition cost has been less than U.S. two cents, and as a result we have a lot of buffer capital and long runway to the next raise.”

In a prepared statement, Kalaari Capital managing director Vani Kola said, “In the last six months, [Creative Galileo] have achieved strong growth with low marketing spends. Creative Galileo has also consistently ranked among the top 20 educational apps on India’s Play store—the only early learning app to achieve this distinction.”

Complicated supply chains mean that consumers in Tier 1 and Tier 2 Indonesian cities often end up paying more for goods than their peers in large cities, like Jakarta. KitaBeli is on a mission to change that, with its own distribution network and a direct-to-consumer social commerce app. Today the startup announced that it has raised $20 million in fresh funding led by Glade Brook Capital Partners, along with participation from returning investors AC Ventures and GoVentures, and new backer InnoVen Capital.

TechCrunch covered KitaBeli’s last raise, a $10 million Series A, in March 2021.

The funding will be used to expand into more small cities in Indonesia, and add new product categories like beauty, personal care and mother and baby products.

The startup says it has grown more than 10x in six months and claims to be the largest direct-to-consumer social commerce platform in Indonesia. It now has more than 400 employees.

KitaBeli says Indonesia’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities make up a $100 billion market, with 200 million consumers that contribute more than 50% of Indonesia’s gross domestic product. But they face more challenges ordering online compared to their peers in Tier 1 cities like Jakarta. For example, long delivery times, higher prices because of complicated supply chains and trust issues because customers don’t know who is selling a product.

To address these, KitaBeli has opened a warehouse in every city it operates in, enabling same-day and next-day deliveries. It procures products directly from brands and principals, resulting in savings that can then be passed on to their customers. Finally, it addresses the trust issue through the social commerce model, in which users gather people from their social networks for group buys.

Co-founder and CEO Prateek Chaturvedi tells TechCrunch that when he moved from India (where his previous startup GetFocus was acquired by Mokapos), he was struck by the differences and similarities between the Indian and Indonesian e-commerce markets. For example, e-commerce in Tier 2 cities was underdeveloped compared to Tier 1 cities.

“On digging deeper, we found that users in these smaller towns are buying online for the first time, and they face trust issues with these faceless services and need help and guidance on using the app,” he said. As a result, KitaBeli experimented with social features in its app, like having agents, called Mitras, in each neighborhood, referrals and group buying.


Fast-moving consumer goods were picked as KitaBeli’s first category because they are frequently purchased. “Since we are direct to consumers, we want users to build a habit of buying with us,” Chaturvedi said.

To buy on KitaBeli, users open the app, place an order, then receive incentives for sharing these purchases with their friends. KitaBeli’s shoppers use it to purchase staples like rice, oil, sugar, milk and personal care items. Chaturvedi said each user generally spends $5 to $10 in every order, and each group usually consists of 5 to 25 people.

KitaBeli is able to scale up its distribution network by opening small warehouses in each city instead of having large distribution centers. “Since we focus primarily on FMCG, we are able to churn our inventory very fast,” said Chaturvedi. “Our system works to minimize the days of inventory for each item. By reducing the amount of stock in the warehouse, we able to reduce the space required as well, which reduces the cost.”

Kindly His’ at home semen test kit

Hormonal healthcare can be intimidating, since it touches on the most intimate parts of our lives. Kindly Health wants to make it accessible to more people, with a combination of at-home diagnostic tests (including semen tests and tests for polycystic ovary syndrome), telehealth consultations and supplements.

The Bangalore-based startup, which has ambitions to expand into global markets, announced today it has raised a $3.25 million seed round from investors including Y Combinator, Olive Tree, Soma, Goodwater and Gaingels.

Kindly Health has two product lines, KindlyHis and KindlyHers. KindlyHers will launch a PCOS predictive test that can help women diagnose and manage PCOS. It also sells routine lab work for PCOS profiles and STD diagnosis. KindlyHis’ sperm tests lets users take the test at home and then send it to a test center for diagnosis.

Kindly Health was founded in 2020 by Nilay Mehrotra, its CEO, and previously known as Janani.life. Mehrotra told TechCrunch that before taking part of Y Combinator’s winter 2022 cohort, Kindly Health was focused on fertility, specifically building a B2B tool for IVF clinics that would help them select the right embryo.

“But as we start to get a better understanding of the market and our customers, we realized the problem was indeed much bigger and we needed to focus on lifestyle disorders,” he said. “We realized that at-home semen testing and diagnostics had a much bigger use case than just fertility and we didn’t want to limit ourselves to that.”

Since launching a month ago, Mehrotra said revenue growth is trending at 30% month-over-month, and the company expects to reach $1 million in revenue at the end of the year.

Mehrotra says the market opportunity in India for lifestyle disorders, sexual performance and hormonal wellness is $8 billion, based on the startup’s findings that 130 million people in India spend about $60 on sexual wellness and performance products.

In the future, Kindly Health will also focus on more wellness categories, and expand its product portfolio to include eczema, psoriasis and gut health. Its goal is to acquire 130 million users, and it plans to launch an app within the next few months.