Hot on the heels of Amazon’s decision to shutter its local marketplace, Carrefour — another global commerce giant — is switching up its approach to China, and shifting the balance of power between the country’s tech giants.

Carrefour, which is Europe’s largest retailer, sold a majority 80% stake in its China-based business to Chinese retailer Suning, according to an announcement made this weekend. The deal is worth €620 million — that’s RMB 4.8 billion or $705 million — and it is set to close by the end of this year.

Beyond a retail story, the news also has a strong tech angle given the convoluted relationships of the parties that are involved, and it’s a reminder of the power that Chinese tech giants have grown to command.

Ties to Alibaba

Suning has had close links to Alibaba. The e-commerce giant owns a 20% stake in Suning courtesy of a $4.6 billion investment in 2015 and Suning, in turn, invested 14 billion yuan ($2 billion) in Alibaba — a deal that kickstarted Alibaba’s ‘new retail’ strategy.

Suning started in 1990 as a home appliance retail store and is now one of China’s largest retailers with an extensive brick-and-mortar reach and an e-commerce share trailing behind Alibaba and JD.com . While it worked closely with Alibaba on merging offline commerce with online a few years back, the pair have gradually distanced themselves from each other in recent times.

Suning last year cashed out and cut its stake in Alibaba from an initial 1.1% to 0.51%. Since the Suning deal, Alibaba has continued to back old-school retail chains that would ramp up its offline operations through mega-deals like the $2.88 billion offer for Sun Art in 2017.

In other words, Alibaba has gone from being an ally to Suning to a potential competitor in the omnichannel commerce space.

The Carrefour deal is tipped to up the arms race as Carrefour China’s retail presence could boost Suning’s offline reach. Carrefour numbers 210 hypermarkets and 24 convenience stores and generated €3.6 billion — RMB 28.5 billion or $4.09 billion — in sales last year. Suning, meanwhile, has over 8,880 stores across 700-plus cities in China.

Tencent’s attempt

If the sale’s relevance to tech sounds far-fetched, consider that Carrefour China previously had a “strategic partnership” with Tencent, which is, of course, Alibaba’s arch-rival.

Chasing Alibaba’s shadow, Tencent’s retail footprint is most closely associated with its alliance with JD.com — we visited their flagship store last year — but Tencent also ran hybrid stores in partnership with Carrefour in Beijing.

Indeed, the FT reported that Carrefour had tried to sell a minority stake in its China business to Tencent but those talks are now over.

Instead, the Suning deal will give Carrefour “several liquidity windows to sell its remaining 20% stake in Carrefour China,” according to a statement provided to the FT.

That’s the interesting power swing, Carrefour’s allegiance appears to have moved from away Tencent.

It certainly goes against the grain and what you might expect. Tencent and JD.com — its own proxy — have tended to do deals with international retailers.

Walmart sold its China-based business to JD.com as part of its exit from the country in 2016, and Walmart has remained a partner with deals that include leading a $500 million investment in Dada-JD Daojia, an online-to-offline grocery business which is part-owned by JD.com. Other investment-led relationships include an investment in JD.com from Google, which itself has developed partnerships with Tencent.

It is likely too early to know what impact the Carrefour deal will have, but it sure seems significant that the operations will cross a hard line and switch between China’s internet tribes.

Alibaba is being heavily linked with a public listing in Hong Kong, which could reportedly happen in Q3 and raise up to $20 billion. The firm is keeping quiet on those rumors, but it did let slip a major hint after it announced plans for a stock split.

Filings uploaded today (but originally released Friday) announced a proposal for a one-to-eight stock split.

Shareholders are invited to vote on the offer ahead of the company’s annual general meeting on July 15. The initiative has already been approved by Alibaba’s board, which is recommending that shareholders follow suit.

The particularly interesting part of the filing is where Alibaba explains the reasons behind the stock split.

“The Board of Directors is proposing the Share Subdivision to increase the flexibility for the Company in future capital market activities. Among other reasons, the one-to-eight share subdivision will increase the number of shares available for issuance at a lower per share price, and the Board of Directors believes that this will increase flexibility in the Company’s capital raising activities, including the issuance of new shares,” the filing reads.

That would appear to clear the way for a second listing for the company, which went public in a record U.S. IPO that raised over $20 billion in 2014.

Alibaba declined to provide further comment when we asked.

Reports last week suggested that the Chinese e-commerce giant has already filed initial paperwork for the listing, which would become the largest such float on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The city has become a destination for Chinese tech IPOs since relaxed listing rules came into effect two years ago. Ironically, a lack of flexibility was cited as a key reason why Alibaba picked the U.S. over Hong Kong for its 2014 listing.

Tech firms that have gone public in Hong Kong include Razer, Xiaomi, Tencent’s China Literature and selfie app company Meitu. Despite the hype, some have been guarded of Hong Kong’s suitability for tech firms, which are often not profitable when listing. Indeed, Razer CEO Min Liang Tan previously warned that “the U.S. [public markets] are probably more cognizant of tech companies” than Hong Kong retail investors.

Kurly, a startup that operates a grocery delivery service in Korea, said today that it has closed an upsized Series D round that reached a total of $113 million.

The company announced the round in April when it was $88 million led by investors that include Sequoia China, however it has now increased by $25 million. That’s thanks to an injection from China’s Hillhouse Capital, a firm which counts Tencent, Meituan and JD.com among its most successful investments.

Launched in 2015 by former Goldman Sachs and Temasek analyst Sophie Kim, its Kurly Market service is designed to provide groceries and produce to customers who don’t have the time or interest to visit regular retail stores for their shopping.

Kurly Market delivers orders by 7am each morning with customers given until 11pm the previous day to place their order.

Korea is the place for speedy deliveries, if that’s your thing. Coupang, a company backed by SoftBank’s Vision Fund that’s widely seen as ‘the Amazon of Korea’ — and valued at $9 billion, to boot — has built out an impressive network that allows same- and next-day delivery for its “millions”of customers.

Coupang CEO Bo Kim told TechCrunch last year that his company was “approaching” $5 billion in revenue for 2018 with 70 percent annual growth. Additionally, he said, one in every two adults in Korea have the Coupang app on their phone and, having started out in Amazon-like areas, Coupang is doubling down on fresh produce with its own cold chain logistics network.

That represents a direct challenge to Kurly, which differentiates itself by operating through its own brands, unlike Coupang, which runs using a marketplace model to connect retailers with consumers. Kurly is also focused on convenience over cost savings, indeed its service began in Seoul’s high-end Gangnam neighborhood but has since expanded more widely.

Still, investors are bullish on Kurly and its laser focus on produce and groceries.

Kurly said its revenue grew three-fold year-on-year to reach $131 million in 2018, although it did not provide profit/loss figures.

“The latest round of investment is a major endorsement of the progress we’ve made differentiating ourselves in the market through our cold-chain fulfillment infrastructure and unique offering of premium, curated products. Our focus is on further strengthening our relationships with our suppliers, developing our fulfillment infrastructure and continually improving our customer experience,” Kim said in a statement.

Kids gaming platform Roblox has its sights set on China with today’s news that it has entered into a strategic relationship with Chinese tech giant, Tencent. The companies announced a strategic partnership that will initially focus on education — specifically, coding fundamentals, game design, digital citizenship, and entrepreneurial skills.

The joint venture — still unnamed — will be based in Shenzhen, Roblox says. And its eventual goal is to bring Roblox to China. This is something Roblox has been steadily working towards ahead of today, most recently by adding support for Chinese languages and making its coding curriculum available for free in Chinese.

The first initiative from the new JV will be a scholarship fund that sponsors 15 young developers, who will fly to the U.S. to attend a week-long creator camp at Stanford University. The camp, taught by iD Tech, will teach the students game design, including how to create 3D worlds, along with programming fundaments using Roblox’s developer tools and Lua code.

Roblox and Tencent, together with the China Association for Educational Technology (CAET), are calling for applications from creators ages 10 through 15. Teachers will be encouraged to nominate their students, who can apply online on Roblox’s website. The submissions close on June 14, and scholarship recipients will be notified on June 28.

The first camp will run the week of July 23, and a second session will run the week of August 18. During camp, students will work, eat and stay at Stanford.

“I’m extremely excited to partner with Roblox,” said Steven Ma, Senior Vice President of Tencent, in a statement. “We believe technological advancement will help Chinese students learn by fueling their creativity and imagination. Our partnership with Roblox provides an engaging way to reach children of all ages across China to develop skills like coding, design, and entrepreneurship.”

“Tencent is the perfect partner for Roblox in China,” added Roblox Founder and CEO Dave Baszucki. “They have a deep understanding of the Chinese market and share our belief of the power of digital creation and our vision to bring the world together through play.”

The multi-year JV will continue to invest in educational initiatives, including local coding camps, training programs for instructors to build custom courses, and more.

Unlike other gaming companies, Roblox has to do more than just finding a way into China with the help of a local partner — it also has to create an active community of game creators in the region. That’s because Roblox is a gaming platform, not a game maker itself. Instead, third-party creators build their own games on Roblox for others to play.

Roblox gets a share of the revenue the games make through sales of virtual goods.

In 2017, Roblox said paid out $30 million to its creator community, and noted that number would more than double in 2018. In April, Roblox noted that game players and creators now spend more than a billion hours per month on its platform. Now valued at over $2.5 billion, Roblox claims more 90 million monthly active users — a number that could dramatically increase if Roblox launched in China.

At just 26, Waiz Rahim is supposed to be involved in the family business, having returned home in 2016 with an engineering degree from the University of Southern California. Instead, the young entrepreneur is plotting to build the Amazon of Bangladesh.

Deligram, Rahim’s vision of what e-commerce looks like in Bangladesh, a country of nearly 180 million, is making progress, having taken inspiration from a range of established tech giants worldwide, including Amazon, Alibaba and Go-Jek in Indonesia.

It’s a far cry from the family business. That’s Rahimafrooz, a 55-year-old conglomerate that is one of the largest companies in Bangladesh. It started out focused on garment retail, but over the years its businesses have branched out to span power and energy and automotive products while it operates a retail superstore called Agora.

During his time at school in the U.S., Rahim worked for the company as a tech consultant whilst figuring out what he wanted to do after graduation. Little could he have imagined that, fast-forward to 2019, he’d be in charge of his own startup that has scaled to two cities and raised $3 million from investors, one of which is Rahimafrooz.

“My options after college were to stay in U.S. and do product management or analyst roles,” Rahim told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “But I visited rural areas while back in Bangladesh and realized that when you live in a city, it’s easy to exist in a bubble.”

So rather than stay in America or go to the family business, Rahim decided to pursue his vision to build “a technology company on the wave of rising economic growth, digitization and a vibrant young population.”

The youngster’s ambition was shaped by a stint working for Amazon at its Carlsbad warehouse in California as part of the final year of his degree. That proved to be eye-opening, but it was actually a Kickstarter project with a friend that truly opened his mind to the potential of building a new venture.

Rahim assisted fellow USC classmate Sam Mazumdar with Y Athletics, which raised more than $600,000 from the crowdsourcing site to develop “odor-resistant” sports attire that used silver within the fabric to repel the smell of sweat. The business has since expanded to cover underwear and socks, and it put Rahim’s mind to work on what he could do by himself.

“It blew my mind that you can build a brand from scratch,” he said. “If you are good at product design and branding, you could connect to a manufacturer, raise money from backers and get it to market.”

On his return to Bangladesh, he got Deligram off the ground in January 2017, although it didn’t open its doors to retailers and consumers until March 2018.

E-commerce through local stores

Deligram is an effort to emulate the achievements of Amazon in the U.S. and Alibaba in China. Both companies pioneered online commerce and turned the internet into a major channel for sales, but the young Bangladeshi startup’s early approach is very different from the way those now hundred-billion-dollar companies got started.

Offline retail is the norm in Bangladesh and, with that, it’s the long chain of mom and pop stores that account for the majority of spending.

That’s particularly true outside of urban areas, where such local stores almost become community gathering points, where neighbors, friends and families run into each other and socialize.

Instead of disruption, working with what is part of the social fabric is more logical. Thus, Deligram has taken a hybrid approach that marries its regular e-commerce website and app with offline retail through mom and pop stores, which are known as “mudir dokan” in Bangladesh’s Bengali language.

A customer can order their product through the Deligram app on their phone and have it delivered to their home or office, but a more popular — and oftentimes logical — option is to have it sent to the local mudir dokan store, where it can be collected at any time. But beyond simply taking deliveries, mudir dokans can also operate as Deligram retailers by selling through an agent model.

That’s to say that they enable their customers to order products through Deligram even if they don’t have the app, or even a smartphone — although the latter is increasingly unlikely with smartphone ownership booming. Deligram is proactively recruiting mudir dokan partners to act as agents. It provides them with a tablet and a physical catalog that their customers can use to order via the e-commerce service. Delivery is then taken at the store, making it easy to pick up, and maintaining the local network.

“We’ll tell them: ‘Right now, you offer a few hundred products, now you have access to 15,000,’ ” the Deligram CEO said.

Indeed, Rahim sees this new digital storefront as a key driver of revenue for mudir dokan owners. For Deligram, it is potentially also a major customer acquisition channel, particularly among those who are new to the internet and the world of smartphone apps.

This offline-online model — known by the often-buzzy industry term “omnichannel” — isn’t new, but in a world where apps and messaging is prevalent, reaching and retaining users is challenging, particularly in emerging markets.

“It’s not easy to direct people to a website today, and the app-first approach has made it hard,” Rahim said. “We looked at how companies in Indonesia and India overcame these challenges.”

In particular, he studied the work of Go-Jek in Indonesia, which uses an agent model to push its services to nascent internet users, and Amazon India, which leans heavily on India’s local “kirana” stores for orders and deliveries.

In Deligram’s case, the mudir dokan picks up sales commission as well as money for every delivery that is sent to their store. Home deliveries are possible, but the lack of local infrastructure — “turn right at the blue house, left at the white one, and my place is third from the left,” is a common type of direction — makes finding exact locations difficult and inefficient, so an additional cost is charged for such requests.

E-commerce startups often struggle with last-mile because they rely on a clutch of logistics companies to fulfill orders. In a rare move for an early-stage company, Deligram has opted to run its entire logistics process in-house. That obviously necessitates cost and likely provides significant growing pains and stress, but, in the long term, Rahim is betting that a focus on quality control will pay out through higher customer service and repeat buyers.

Startups on the rise in Bangladesh

Rahim’s timing is impeccable. He returned to Bangladesh just as technology was beginning to show the potential to impact daily life. Bangladesh has posted a 7% rise in GDP annually every year since 2016, and with an estimated 80 million internet users, it has the fifth-largest online population on the planet.

“We are riding on a lot of macro trends; we’re among the top five based on GDP growth and have the world’s eighth-largest population,” Rahim told TechCrunch. “There are 11 million people in middle income — that’s growing — and our country has 90 million people aged under 30.”

“An index to track the growth of young people would be [capital city] Dhaka… you can just see the vibrancy with young people using smartphones,” he added.

That’s an ideal storm for startups, and the country has seen a mix of overseas entrants and local ventures pick up speed. Alibaba last year acquired Daraz, the Rocket Internet-founded e-commerce service that covers Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Nepal, while the Chinese giant also snapped up 20% of bKash, a fintech venture started from Brac Bank as part of the regional expansion of its Ant Financial affiliate.

Uber, too, is present, but it is up against tough local opposition, as is the norm in Asian markets.

That’s because Bangladesh’s most prominent local startups are in ride-hailing. Pathao raised more than $10 million in a funding round that closed last year and was led by Go-Jek, the Indonesia-based ride-hailing firm valued at more than $9 billion that’s backed by the likes of Tencent and Google. Pathao is reportedly on track to raise a $50 million Series B this year, according to Deal Street Asia.

Its chief rival is Shohoz, a startup that began in ticketing but expanded to rides and services on-demand. Shohoz raised $15 million in a round led by Singapore’s Golden Gate Ventures, which was announced last year.

Deligram has also pulled in impressive funding numbers, too.

The startup announced a $2.5 million Series A raise at the end of March, which Rahim wrote came from “a network of institutional and angel investors;” such is the challenge of finding a large check for a tech play in Bangladesh. The investors involved included Skycatcher, Everblue Management and Microsoft executive Sonia Bashir Kabir. A delighted Rahim also won a check from Rahimafrooz, the family business.

That’s not a given, he said, admitting that his family did initially want him to go to work with their business rather than pursuing his own startup. In that context, contributing to the round is a major endorsement, he said.

Rahimafrooz could be a crucial ally in future fundraising, too. Despite an improving climate for tech companies, Bangladesh’s top startups are still finding it tough to raise money, especially with overseas investors that can write the larger checks that are required to scale.

“I think the biggest challenge is branding. Every time I speak with new investors, I have to start by explaining where Bangladesh is, or the national metrics, not even our business,” Pathao CEO Hussain Elius told TechCrunch.

“There’s a legacy issue. Bangladesh seems like a country which floods all the time and the garment sector going down — that’s a part of the story but not the full story. It’s also an incredible country that’s growing despite those challenges,” he added.

Pathao is reportedly on track to raise a $50 million Series B this year, according to Deal Street Asia. Elius didn’t address that directly, but he did admit that raising growth funding is a bigger challenge than seed-based financing, where the Bangladesh government helps with its own fund and entrepreneurial programs.

“It’s hard for us as we’re the first ones out there, but it’ll be easier for the ones who’ll follow on,” he explained.

Still, there are some optimistic overseas watchers.

“We remain enthusiastic about the rapidly expanding set of opportunities in Bangladesh,” said Hian Goh, founding partner of Singapore-based VC firm Openspace — which invested in Pathao.

“The country continues to be one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, underpinned by additional growth in its garments manufacturing sector. This has blossomed into an expanding middle class with very active consumption behavior,” Goh added.

Growth plans

With the pain of fundraising put to the side for now, the new money is being put to work growing the Deligram business and its network into more parts of Bangladesh, and the more challenging urban areas.

Geographically, the service is expanding its agent reach into five more cities to give it a total of seven locations nationwide. That necessitates an increase in logistics and operations to keep up with, and prepare for, that new demand.

Rahim said the company had handled 12,000 orders to date as of the end of March, but that has now grown past 20,000 indicating that order volumes are rising. He declined to provide financial figures, but said that the company is on track to increase its monthly GMV volume by six-fold by the end of this year. Electronics, phones and accessories are among its most popular items, but Deligram also sells apparel, daily items and more.

Interestingly, and perhaps counter to assumptions, Deligram started in rural areas, where Rahim saw there was less competition but also potentially more to learn through a more early-adopter customer base. That’s obviously one major challenge when it comes to growth, and now the company is looking at urban expansion points.

On the product side, Deligram is in the early stages of piloting consumer financing using its local store agents as the interface, while Rahim teased “exciting IOT R&D projects” that he said are in the planning stage.

Ultimately, however, he concedes that the road is likely to be a long one.

“Over the last 18-20 years, modern retail hasn’t made much progress here,” Rahim said. “It accounts for around 2.5% of total retail, e-commerce is below 1% and the long tail local stores are the rest.”

“People will eventually shift, but I think it’ll take five to eight years, which is why we provide the convenience via mom and pop shops,” he added.

China’s new rules on video games, introduced last month, are having an effect on the country’s gamers. Today, Tencent replaced hugely popular battle royale shooter game PUBG with a more government-friendly alternative that seems primed to pull in significant revenue.

The company introduced ‘Game for Peace’ in a Weibo post at the same time as PUBG — which stands for Player Unknown Battlegrounds — was delisted from China. The title had been in wide testing but without revenue, and now it seems Tencent gave up on securing a license to monetize the title.

In its place, Game for Peace is very much the type of game that will pass the demands of China’s game censorship body. Last month, the country’s State Administration of Press and Publication released a series of demands for new titles, including bans on corpses and blood, references of imperial history and gambling. The new Tencent title bears a striking resemblance to PUBG but there are no dead bodies, while it plays up to a nationalist theme with a focus on China’s air force — or, per the Weibo message, “the blue sky warriors that guard our country’s airspace” — and their battle against terrorists.

Game for Peace was developed by Krafton, the Korea-based publisher formerly known as BlueHole which made PUBG. Beyond visual similarities, Reuters reported that the games are twinned since some player found that their progress and achievements on PUBG had transferred over to the new game.

Tencent representatives declined to comment on the new game or the end of PUBG’s ‘beta testing’ period in China when contacted by TechCrunch. But a company rep apparently told Reuters that “they are very different genres of games.”

Fortnite may have grabbed the attention for its explosive growth — we previously reported that the game helped publisher Epic Games bank a profit of $3 billion last year — but PUBG has more quietly become a fixture among mobile gamers, particularly in Asia.

At the end of last year, Krafton told The Verge that it was past 200 million registered gamers, with 30 million players each day. According to app analytics company Sensor Tower, PUBG grossed more than $65 million from mobile players in March thanks to 83 percent growth which saw it even beat Fortnite. There is also a desktop version.

That is really the point of Tencent’s switcheroo: to make money.

The company suffered at the hands of China’s gaming license freeze last year, and a regulatory-compliant title like Game for Peace has a good shot at getting the green light for monetization — through the sale of virtual items and seasonal memberships.

Indeed, analysts at China Renaissance believe the new title could rake in as much as $1.5 billion in annual revenue, according to the Reuters report. That’s a lot to get excited about and resuscitating gaming will be an important part of Tencent’s strategy this year — which has already seen it restructure its business to focus emerging units like cloud computing, and pledge to use its technology to “do good.”

Fintech continues to be among the biggest topics driving startups and investment in Southeast Asia. The region’s ‘internet economy’ is forecast to grow massively as its 600 million people increasingly come online — already Southeast Asia more internet users (350 million) than the U.S. has people but developing a robust payment landscape underpins those heady growth forecasts.

Beyond the most prevalent consumer brands — such as ride-hailing giants Grab and Go-Jek — and the outsiders pouring money into the region — including Tencent and Alibaba — fintech startups take a different approach to other parts of the world. Unlike Europe or the U.S, where disruption is the name of the game, Southeast Asian fintech is about third parties working with the system to make it more efficient and wide-ranging. That’s because credit card ownership is low double digits, and transfers from bank accounts — which aren’t universally operated by all consumers — represent an estimated [PDF] half of all online purchases.

The most visible niches attracting investor attention and capital is the data-play — companies that operate as super aggregators of financial services, such as insurance or loans — but there’s also an increasing number of startups that enable banks to kickstart their digital strategy.

Brankas, an Indonesia-based startup that operates regionally, is one such young company — it operates a platform that gives banks and financial companies the tech to roll out digital products and embrace online services.

The company takes its cue from Western success stories — U.S-based Plaid (a Disrupt alum no less) is valued at $2.65 billion while, in Europe, Tink and Bud have both raised big sums from investors — to offer a service that essentially provides the digital plumbing to ease Southeast Asia’s financial incumbents into the digital era.

“What we’re doing is similar to banking API infrastructure,” Brankas CEO and co-founder Todd Schweitzer told TechCrunch in an interview. “The difference being that in Southeast Asia it is very early days and little to no regulation.”

Former management consultant Schweitzer founded the startup in 2016 with Kenneth Shaw, his former classmate in California who had been CTO of Southeast Asian online marketplace Multiply.com. They describe themselves as “now longtime Southeast Asia residents.”

Brankas — which means safe in Indonesia’s Bahasa language — graduated Plug And Play’s first incubator in Southeast Asia and it grew from being a service managing multiple bank accounts to a platform that digitizes banking. Today, it is headquartered in Jakarta with 25 staff — 15 of whom are engineers — across that office and another in Manila, Philippines.

The company raised an undisclosed investment from investors, including Singapore fintech fund Dymon Asia, earlier this year and now its founders have their eyes on growth.

The service is currently operational in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Schweitzer said the plan is to expand to Thailand and Malaysia around the middle of 2019.

“We are excited to partner with Todd and Kenneth as they build out open banking infrastructure in the region. Brankas enables seamless connections between financial institutions, merchants and fintechs. This is critical for the next stage of growth of the digital ecosystem in Southeast Asia,” Dymon Asia partner Chris Kaptein told TechCrunch.

So what does the plumbing service for financial organizations actual entail? Brankas focuses on two distinct audiences at this point: banks and financial companies, and companies providing online services, predominantly e-commerce.

For banks, Brankas uses its APIs and systems to essentially slot new services into their platform.

Schweitzer said banks are aware that they need to offer “more open” services. Even in the event that they can figure out what that means in terms of product, they typically don’t have the in-house team to build and manage the tech stack, let alone make it “productized” — i.e. usage by their customers.

“Banks here in Southeast Asia aren’t investing in consumer banking,” he explained,” because the bulk of their revenue comes from traditional corporate lending.”

For those using banks and collecting money from consumers, the end play is different. The challenges are often similar. For example, most consumers in Southeast Asia use bank transfers to pay for online. That works for collecting payment in theory, but there is no system that optimized for that — actually making sure the correct amount money is in from the correct customer.

Schweitzer recalled a story of how he visited an unnamed (but high profile) e-commerce company’s office and noticed “a whole floor of people who hit refresh on online banking systems to figure out who had made the transfer.”

The Brankas system helps handle that local complexity, and other areas like direct payouts without middlemen, or batched and real-time payments for gig workers and others who receive daily payouts. Other products in the pipeline include credit scoring, a much-needed resource across the region.

To date, Brankas has picked up partnerships with six banks in Indonesia, three in the Philippines and one in Vietnam, where it is in talks to add others. Schweitzer said it has “dozens” of customers across e-commerce, consumer finance and insurance verticals. The startup is also a part of Indonesia’s Open API Sandbox hosted by the country’s Central Bank.

“Today, we address the domestic, non-card payments market in ASEAN,” he told TechCrunch. “That includes everything from bank transfer fees to domestic remittance fees, POS merchant fees, payment aggregator fees and more.”

That alone, he estimates, is worth $7.8 billion in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy. Then there’s the rest of the region to factor in, too.

China’s Ctrip, the world’s second largest online travel company, is doubling down on India after it announced a deal to increase its ownership of travel company MakeMyTrip to nearly half.

Ctrip will boost its ownership of MakeMyTrip, which is listed on the Nasdaq like Ctrip, to 49 percent through an exchange deal that sees Naspers, the South African internet giant and early backer of Tencent, swap its shares for 5.6 percent of Ctrip. Ctrip said the investment leaves it with four percent of MakeMyTrip’s voting power.

On paper, each stake is worth around $1.3 billion. MakeMyTrip has a current market cap of $2.69 billion while Ctrip’s current share price gives it an overall valuation of $23.5 billion. In the industry, only Booking Holdings is valued higher with a current market cap of $84 billion.

There’s a long history between the three companies. Ctrip and Naspers invested $330 million into MakeMyTrip two years ago, a move that saw Naspers deepen its involvement after its portfolio company Ibibo merged with MakeMyTrip in January 2017. Prior to that, Ctrip invested $180 million into the India company in January 2016.

“Over the past years we have witnessed the great achievements of MakeMyTrip, and we are confident that MakeMyTrip will extend its success in the future,” read a statement from James Liang, co-founder and executive chairman of Ctrip.

“We are also delighted to welcome Naspers to become our shareholder. Ctrip will continue to work hard to create greater value to our customers, our partners and all shareholders,” added Ctrip CEO Jane Sun.

MakeMyTrip co-founder and co-CEO Rajesh Magow said the deal would take his company’s partnership with Ctrip “to the next level.”

The deal comes as Naspers prepares to list its international business, which includes advertising giant OLX and stakes in numerous internet companies, in the Netherlands.

Ctrip’s past deals have included the $1.74 billion acquisition of Scotland-based Skyscanner and the undisclosed purchase of U.S-based travel discovery app Trip.com. It has also invested $463 million in China Eastern Airlines and swapped shares with Chinese rival Qunar.

Today’s share swap deal is forecast to close in this current Q2, according to an announcement from Ctrip.

Nintendo’s Switch has now outsold its N64 console on lifetime sales, but prospects for the portable gaming system look mixed for the next year following a conservative sales forecast.

Nintendo just announced its end of year financials, and in doing so it revealed that it sold 16.95 million Switch consoles in the last year, taking it to 34.7 million sales to date and therein surpassing the N64. That annual sales figure is about on par with Nintendo’s target of 17 million — which was revised from an initial (and very ambitious) 20 million — but what happens over the next twelve-month period is less clear.

The Japanese company is predicting that it will shift 18 million Switch units over the next financial year, and there are positive and less positive signals to back that up. It would be hard to imagine that demand for the same device continuing for another year without changes.

Will be there new things?

That seems likely, we just don’t know exactly what and when.

“As a general rule, we’re always working on new hardware and we will announce it when we are able to sell it,” Nintendo CEO Shuntaro Furukawa told Bloomberg, although he refused reports that a new, lower-priced model will be unveiled at the E3 show in June.

Beyond new models, there will also be new markets. Nintendo is poised to enter China after it last week secured a key approval to sell the Switch in the country in partnership with Tencent.

Gaming in China is currently in flux — last year was a dismal one for companies like Tencent, but new regulations are incoming — but Nintendo’s catalog of family-friend and cute titles are likely to fare better than more edgy content in terms of approval. Even though the Switch is over two years old, opening China as a market will create a lot of new demand if it is marketed right.

Meanwhile, on the software side, the Switch is performing well with more than 23 titles now at one million sales or more, while Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Pokemon: Let’s Go have generated 13.81 million and 10.63 million sales, respectively.

More broadly, Nintendo’s general financial update disappointed investors.

Annual operating profit of 250 billion yen ($2.2 billion) rose by 41 percent but revenue grew just 14 percent to 1.2 trillion yen ($10.7 billion). For the fourth quarter, operating profit came in at 29.7 billion JPY ($266 million) which was below the 36 billion JPY average for analysts polled by Bloomberg.

Nintendo’s annual forecast was also seen by many as tepid, perhaps because the company was burned by those aggressive Switch sales targets set last year.

“Nintendo is being extra cautious as it wouldn’t want to miss its target again,” games consultant and former TechCruncher said Serkan Toto told the Wall Street Journal in a statement.

Mfine, an India-based startup aiming to broaden access to doctors and healthcare using the internet, has pulled in a $17.2 million Series B funding round for growth.

The company is led by four co-founders from Myntra, the fashion commerce startup acquired by Flipkart in 2014. They include CEO Prasad Kompalli and Ashutosh Lawania who started the business in 2017 and were later joined by Ajit Narayanan and Arjun Choudhary, Myntra’s former CTO and head of growth, respectively.

The round is led by Japan’s SBI Investment with participation from sibling fund SBI Ven Capital and another Japanese investor Beenext. Existing Mfine backers Stellaris Venture Partners and Prime Venture Partners also returned to follow on. Mfine has now raised nearly $23 million to date.

“In India, at a macro-level, good doctors are far and few and distributed very unevenly,” Kompalli said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We asked ‘Can we build a platform that is a very large hospital on the cloud?’, that’s the fundamental premise.”

There’s already plenty of money in Indian health tech platforms — Practo, for one, has raised over $180 million from investors like Tencent — but Mfine differentiates itself with a focus on partnerships with hospitals and clinics, while others have offered more daily health communities that include remote sessions with doctors and healthcare professionals who are recruited independently of their day job.

“We are entering a different phase of what is called health tech… the problems that are going to be solved will be much deeper in nature,” Kompalli said in an interview with TechCrunch.

Mfine makes its money as a digital extension of its healthcare partners, essentially. That means it takes a cut of spending from consumers. The company claims to work with over 500 doctors from 100 ‘top’ hospitals, while there’s a big focus on tech. In particular, it says that an AI-powered ‘virtual doctor’ can help in areas that include summarising diagnostic reports, narrowing down symptoms, providing care advice and helping with preventative care. There are also other services, including medicine delivery from partner pharmacies.

To date, Mfine said that its platform has helped with over 100,000 consultations across 800 towns in India during the last 15 months. It claims it is seeing around 20,000 consultations per month. Beyond helping increase the utilization of GPs — Mfine claims it can boost their productivity 3/4X — the service can also help hospitals and centers increase their revenue, a precious commodity for many.

Going forward, Kompalli said that the company is increasing its efforts with corporate companies, where it can help cover employee healthcare needs, and developing its insurance-style subscription service. Over the coming few years, that channel should account for around half of all revenue, he added.

A more immediate goal is to expand its offline work beyond Hyderabad and Bangalore, the two cities where it currently is.

“This round is a real endorsement from global investors that the model is working,” he added.

India-based educational startup Byju’s was widely reported to have raised a massive $400 million round and now the company is making things official. The ten-year-old company revealed today it has pulled in a total of $540 million from investors to go after international opportunities.

The round is led by Naspers, the investment firm famous for backing Tencent that also includes educational firms Udemy, Codecademy and Brainly among its portfolio. The Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) provided “a significant portion” of the round, according to an announcement which also revealed that the deal included some secondary share sales. A source told TechCrunch that’s from Sequoia India, an early investor which is cashing in a piece of its winnings.

This round takes Byju’s to $775 million from investors to date. Its backers include Tencent, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife — General Atlantic, IFC, Lightspeed Ventures and Times Internet.

The deal takes the company valuation to nearly $4 billion, a source told TechCrunch. That’s in line with what was reported by India media last week and it represents a major jump on the $800 million valuation that it commanded when it raised money from Tencent in July 2017. It also makes Byju’s India’s fourth highest-valued tech startup behind only Paytm, Ola and OYO.

Founded in 2008 by Byju Raveendran as on offline teaching center, it moved into digital courses as recently as 2015. The company specializes in grades 4-12 educational courses that use a combination of videos and other materials. Besides courses, the service covers exams, free courses and paid-for courses.

It claims to have registered over 30 million students, while more than two million customers have signed up for an annual paid subscription to date. Raveendran told TechCrunch in an interview that there are currently around 1.3 million paying users. He said that the service enjoys a renewal rate of around 80 percent, and that it is adding 1.5-2 million new students per month, some 150,000 of which are part of paying packages.

English learning for kids worldwide

This new money will go towards globalizing the service beyond India with an international English service for children aged 3-8, an entirely new category for the company, set to launch next year.

Raveendran told TechCrunch that the service will target English-speaking markets, as well as other major international countries including India.

“There’s a growing percentage of people wanting to learn English or [in countries where] it is becoming aspirational. Slowly but surely it is happening around the world,” he said in an interview.

The company will release the new services at the beginning of local academic years — which vary worldwide — with the aim of appealing directly to kids. If the youngsters enjoy the app, parents can buy the full experience for them. It’s a logical way to find a global audience — families prepared to spend on English tuition exist worldwide — whilst also expanding into a new customer base that could become users of the core Byju’s service.

While the company has developed the core content aspect of the service, Raveendran said he is on the lookout for acquisitions and partnerships that can add more to the appeal.

“They will all be product-based acquisitions that will be value-adds on top of our core product,” he said. “Over the last 12 months, we’ve scouted for core product acquisitions but went the other way around and decided to build it ourselves.”

Further down the line, Byju’s may develop more localized services in countries where it sees high demand for the children’s product, Raveendran added.

Global investor base

That expansion is likely to be influenced by Naspers which has a very global portfolio, including deals in emerging markets like Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Asia. Indeed, the deal sees Russell Dreisenstock — head of international investments for Naspers — join the Byju’s board.

Tencent also has experience and connections, having backed China’s Yuanfudao education platform, which is now reportedly valued around $2.8 billion. Alongside Sequoia — another Byju’s investor — it is also part of VIPKid, a hugely successful platform that connects U.S-based teachers with English language learners in China.

Despite that, Raveendran said those investments are unlikely to be core to this global push.

“We expect [our investors] to help us finding partners through portfolio companies or others [but] there is no significant overlap with what we will do,” he explained.

In the case of VIPKid, he said that if Byju’s “ever decides to do anything in China” then it is likely that it will complement VIPKid’s tutor-led approach to learning rather than take it on directly.

Still, Raveendran expects the global business to become profitable and self-sustaining within the next three years. Already, the India-based business is profitable as of this year, he said, but its appeal has grown globally somewhat even before this new product launch. Overseas is currently 15 percent of revenue, a figure that the CEO puts down to the Indian diaspora globally.

LemonBox, a Chinese e-commerce startup that imports vitamins and health products from the US, has raised $2 million to develop its business.

The company graduated from Y Combinator’s most recent program in the U.S. and, fuelled by the demo day, it has pulled in the new capital from 10 investors which include Partech, Tekton Ventures, Cathexis Ventures, Scrum Ventures and 122 West Ventures.

LemonBox started when co-founder and CEO Derek Weng, a former employee at Walmart in the U.S, saw an opportunity to organize the common practice of bringing health products back in China. Any Mainland Chinese person who has lived or even just visited the U.S. will be familiar with such requests from family and friends, and LemonBox aims to make it possible for anyone in China to get U.S-quality products without relying on a mule.

The service is primarily a WeChat app — which taps into China’s ubiquitous messaging platform — and a website, although Weng told TechCrunch in an interview this week that the company is contemplating a standalone app of its own. The benefit of that, beyond a potentially more engaging customer experience, could be to broaden LemoonBox’s product selection and use data to offer a more customized selection of products. Related to that, LemonBox said it hopes to work with health and fitness-related services in the future to gather data, with permission, to help refine the personal approach.

LemonBox’s team has now grown to 20 people, with 12 full-time staff and 8 interns, and Weng said that the new funding will also go towards increased marketing, improvements to the WeChat app and upgrading the company’s supply chain. Business, he added, is growing at 35 percent per week as LemonBox has adopted a personal approach to its packaging, much like Amazon-owned PillPack.

“This is the first time people in China have ever seen this level of customization for their vitamins,” Weng told TechCrunch.

Qi Lu, the former Microsoft and Baidu executive who leads YC’s new China unit, said he is “bullish” about the business.

“What LemonBox offers resonates with me and is serving a clear China market needs. Personally, I travel a lot between China and the U.S, and I often was asked by my relatives to help purchase and carry them similar products like vitamins,” he said in a prepared statement.

“More importantly, what LemonBox can do is to build an initial core user base and a growing brand. Over time, by serving their users well, it can reach and engage more users who want to better take care of their broader nutrition needs, use more data and take advantage of increasingly stronger AI technologies to customers and personalize, and become an essential service for more and more users and customers in China,” Lu added.