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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SkorLife founders Ongki Kurniawan and Karan Khetan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

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.”