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.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

Alex and Grace are back to cover the biggest and most interesting technology, startup and markets news. Sitting as we are on the precipice of a huge data dump, we had lots to chat through!

• Stocks are mixed around the world, while crypto selloff modestly after some recovery gains. In general, the value of securities are down in recent weeks and months, and now, frankly, quarters.
• This is Earnings Week: Yes, friends, get ready to hear from Alphabet and Amazon and Meta and Microsoft and Apple. The Big Five are reporting this week, providing us a glimpse into the health of a host of businesses. Recall that we have seen the major slow hiring lately, perhaps a harbinger of the (meager) feast to come?
• Cartona is building something neat in Egypt, TechCrunch reports. And there is still venture capital money flowing in China, despite, you know, all the stuff going on there.
• Zomato is sinking, Voyager is biting the hand that wants to feed it at least a little, and it turns out that the grocery delivery war is only heating up.

No live show this week, just three episodes! Hang in there we got you!

Snap, the parent company of the popular Snapchat social media service, reported earnings last week that investors rejected. In the wake of its second-quarter financial reporting, shares of Snap cratered from $16.81 Thursday afternoon, before its earnings report, to around $10 per share as of this morning.

Snap was not the only victim of its lackluster earnings digest — other companies that make money off of advertising incomes saw their share prices dip on concerns that the social network was not an outlier. Alphabet, Meta, and Pinterest also took blows, cutting their worth ahead of earnings disclosures as investors lowered their hopes for ad-based incomes.

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Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Given the sheer number of mega-tech companies that are betting on the advertising market, the news matters. Mix in the fact that startups are also pursuing ads as a monetization lever, and concerns about the health of advertising spending matter to tech companies big and small.

Seedstars’ portfolio founders

Since its launch nine years ago, Seedstars has invested in 81 companies in over 30 emerging countries. Now it’s set a goal of investing in 100 more startups with the launch of its second emerging market seed-stage fund, called Seedstars International Ventures II (SIV), with a first close of $20 million. The fund is expected to total $30 million and its limited partners include the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Visa Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and Symbiotics. The firm’s is to invest in pre-seed and seed-stage startups in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin American over the next three years, with follow-on investments up to Series A.

Some examples of Seedstars’ portfolio companies include Pakistan e-commerce startup Dastgyr; Saudi Arabian cloud-based point-of-sale and restaurant management system Foodics; Indonesian workforce marketplace MyRobin; Latin American restaurant CRM OlaClick; and Nigerian B2B marketplace Omnibiz.

Patricia Sosrodjojo, partner at Seedstars, told TechCrunch that the second fund’s investment thesis is similar to its predecessor: to come in at very early stages, in tech ecosystems in emerging markets, and look for startups that have the potential to make a wide impact.

“I think of it as three different levels,” she said. “The first one is the fact that we’re coming in very early, we’re usually one of the first institutional checks after the angels so we can help catalyze capital. The second is the countries we cover, where the ecosystems is still not that developed yet. And the third one is that we look for business models that can scale up quickly, similar to the normal VC model, but that they would be able to affect a lot of people. We align ourselves with a lot of the ESGs.”

One difference between SIV II and the first fund is that it can writer bigger checks. Initial checks will be between $150,000 to $250,000, with potential follow-on investments of $500,000. It will also have a tighter geographical focus. The first fund invested in 30 countries, and the second fund will also have a global outlook, but it will focus on one to three countries in each region.

Specifically, these are Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines in Southeast Asia (though Sosrodjojo said SIV II will also look at other countries); Pakistan and Bangladesh in South Asia; Egypt in MENA; and Mexico in Latin America. Its view on Africa will be more distributed; it has already done investments in Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria.

SIV II plans to follow on 25% of its portfolio.

“We’re really looking to diversify holdings, leveraging learnings from one market to another,” said Sosrodjojo. “For example, if we’ve invested in a B2B supply chain play in one country, we can take the learnings from that and apply it to another geography. We see that different trends can come in at different times in different markets, so it helps us to see the typical trajectory of a certain industry.”

The fund will focus on verticals including finance, commerce, health, work and education. In particular, “financial inclusion is challenging in many of these markets. It’s something we’ll continue focusing on,” said Sosrodjojo.

One of the things that makes SIV II unique is that it has a blended finance structure with facility provided by IFC, one its LPs. As part of the fund’s mandate, it will invest up to 25% of the fund in IDA countries, or low-income countries as defined by the World Bank. This mitigate the risk of these investments, because there is a first loss guarantee. That means if SIV II makes an investment in an IDA country like Senegal and the company doesn’t do well, a portion of the investment will be covered through the structure.

To help them scale up, Seedstar portfolio companies take part in a program called the Value Creation Platform, which has a network of 1,300 mentors and includes a three-month “mentor-led sprint” called the Growth Track. Supported by Seedstars’ entrepreneur-in-residence Jon Attwell, formerly of Naspers and Prosus, with operators who have experience working at high-growth firms like Careem and SkyScanner. During their time in the Value Creation Platform, companies can perform experiments to see what growth strategies are best for them.

“Startups can cover different modules, like if their key is acquisition,” said Sosrodjojo. “They can really look at their acquisition strategy and if it’s not working well. They will work together with their mentor and our entrepreneur-in-residence John, create a strategy, run with that, monitor it and see if it works. Each startup will decide on what experiment they want to do and decide if they want to translate it into their operation or not.”

Gender equality is also important for Seedstars, which points to data that shows just 11% of enterprises that obtain seed funding in emerging markets are led by women. Seedstars’ team has already achieved a 50:50 gender split, and its first fund had 26% female co-founded businesses. Seedstars has set a challenge for it second fund of at least 30% of its portfolio companies having female founders or leadership. Another criteria is to back local founders.

“There are cases where there are expert founders with really good startups, but we do try to cultivate local talent,” Sosrodjojo said.

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.”

Once seemingly unstoppable, big tech is now in reset mode.

We’re not talking about Snap’s earnings sending its stock plunging, or Twitter’s lackluster earnings report from earlier this morning. No, we’re talking about big tech. The world’s largest tech companies are pulling back in a way that could, perhaps, clear some brush for startups still making their way through the wild (the private markets) towards the promised land (the public markets).

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

This is good news for smaller companies, which were long irked at the sheer amount of cash the Googles and Microsofts of the world could throw at potential hires, some of whom came from smaller, more financially-constrained startups.

But as with most good news, there’s a catch.

“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.

The big news of the morning is that Amazon is buying One Medical, a previously venture-backed consumer healthcare company with a technology twist, in an all-cash deal worth $3.9 billion inclusive of debt. The announcement follows recent reporting that One Medical was in play.

Seeing One Medical taken off the table, then, is not a surprise, but Amazon being the acquiring entity is a bit more of a shock. What is the company getting for its billions, how does the buy fit into its overall business, and what does the deal mean for startups?

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Recall that Amazon has been making moves in the healthcare space for some time. Back in 2018, the AWS parent company bought PillPack, a consumer-focused online pharmacy, and it previously worked with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan to revamp American healthcare, though that effort fizzled.

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.”

An investor in Instacart, Capital Group, has repriced its shares in the company, lowering its estimation of the value of the online grocery delivery service. The news follows other, similar repricings by companies like Fidelity, which also own a stake in the decacorn.

It’s really not surprising that one more investor agrees Instacart’s 2021 valuation was too hot. It filed to go public in May a couple months after a new 409a valuation reduced its own internal valuation.

The scale of the repricing, however, is leaving us scratching our heads. If Instacart, which was able to raise aggressively during the pandemic, is actually worth a fraction of what investors calculated last year, what about other unicorns? How many billion-dollar startups aren’t worth that much today? More simply, how many unicorns have now effectively been dehorned ahead of their next funding rounds?

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This question is important, because we often note the sheer number of unicorns, and their value, in the market. Crunchbase, for example, counts 1,372 unicorns today worth some $4.6 trillion. For reference, tech’s big five (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet) are worth just under $6 trillion today.