Progressly – Business process platform

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Progressly - Business process platform Progressly, a new platform for supporting growth within large enterprises, just got a big boost in both money and staffing. Ruslan Belkin, a former top exec from Twitter and Linkedin will be joining the roughly two year old company. With the spotlight drawn, Progressly is taking the opportunity to formally announce a $6 million Series A, led by 8VC, as part of its official coming out… Read More

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Progressly – Business process platform

 

StarOfService – service marketplace

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StarOfService French startup StarOfService just raised another $10 million for its European Thumbtack alternative. Andrea Piccioni and Silvio Pagliani, ENERN Investments and Point Nine Capital participated in today’s round, as well as various business angels. When I first covered StarOfService, the company didn’t even try to hide from me that it was a Thumbtack copycat. The main difference is… Read More

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AdStage – cross-channel ads

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AdStage - cross-channel ads  AdStage announced today that it has raised an additional $2 million from Verizon Ventures. The company offers tools for businesses to manage their ad campaigns across Facebook, Google, Bing and elsewhere, and it says it’s currently managing $100 million in quarterly ad spend. CEO Sahil Jain recently told me that his goal is to create a broader marketing platform including content… Read More

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Aircall – cloud phone system for teams

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Aircall - cloud phone system for teams In case you missed it, Aircall announced last week that it had raised another $8 million dollars in funding for its call center software-as-a-service. New York-based VC firm FJLabs as well as existing investors put money into this Series A round. I’m a bit late to the news because last week was TechCrunch Disrupt SF. It’s worth mentioning that because Aircall also participated in… Read More

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Aircall – cloud phone system for teams

MyStartupTool – improve your SEO and gain exposure

MyStartupTool – improve your SEO and gain exposure

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Lunch Actually bags 7-digit Series A from Fatfish and a Japanese social network

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The Singapore-based premium dating platform plans to ramp up presence in existing markets as well as expand to one new market

Lunch Actually

Singapore-based dating services provider Lunch Actually has raised an undisclosed 7-digit Series A round from Japanese social media network and publisher of mobile game Monster Strike mixi; and ASX-listed Singapore-based VC Fatfish.

The newly-raised capital will be used to increase its presence in existing markets — Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia — as well as expand to one new market in Asia. In addition, it will be ramping up marketing and hiring efforts.

First established in 2004, Lunch Actually operates a suite of dating services including its bread-and-butter dating consultation service, online matchmaking platform esync, and dating app LunchClick.

It made two acquisitions in the past two years including dating app Love Out Loud Asia (LOLA) and Thailand matchmaking company MeetNLunch.

Lunch Actually claims to have more than half a million users and a five-fold revenue growth since 2011.

Despite its optimistic outlook, the dating company attracted controversy in the online community over claims of poor customer services and hard-sell tactics.

Lunch Actually, however, vehemently defended itself in an exhaustive article on Vulcan Post.

Image Credit: LunchActually

 

 

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MACROKIOSK enables content providers to monetise their digital content

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MACROKIOSK enables content providers to monetise their digital content across Southeast Asia via a single direct connection to its mobile payment platform

MACROKIOSK

Goh Brothers, Founding team of MACROKIOSK-final

Malaysian mobile technology company MACROKIOSK has secured an undisclosed sum in strategic investment from GMO Payment Gateway, a unit of Japanese conglomerate GMO Internet Group, in return for a substantial stake.

“Having GMO-PG as a strategic stakeholder puts us at a higher level-playing field, extending beyond our leadership in the Southeast Asia regions, and we see that there will be substantial synergies and business leverage arising from this investment. It will significantly accelerate the speed in which we adopt new technologies and innovate solutions to meet the dynamic needs of our diverse clienteles from 18 industries,” the company said in a statement.

MACROKIOSK was founded in 2000 by brothers Goh Chee Ken, Goh Chee Heng and Goh Chee Seng. It is an enterprise mobility and mobile payments services company that enable leading content providers to monetise their digital content across Southeast Asia via a single direct connection to its mobile payment platform.

It serves more than 2,000 clients, reaching out to 37 countries within 18 industry verticals ranging from financial services, aviation to hospitality and leisure, offering complete secure and scalable enterprise mobility solutions in key engagement areas such as interactive, notification, authentication and security.

Also Read: Malaysian industry players weigh in on the GrabGas controversy

The company has presence in 12 countries across Asia namely Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Macau, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and the UAW. It has more than 250 employees.

GMO-PG is one of the largest payment service providers in Japan offering payments and financial-related services to e-commerce merchants, banks and leading companies in Japan and across Southeast Asia.

It has been looking to expand its current provision of e-commerce and payment services to local banks and leading companies in the Southeast Asia region, in which this strategic investment will pave way for the service extension.

GMO-PG currently has five local companies in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand. It also runs GMO Global Payment Fund that invests in capital, creates business alliances and works collectively in advancing the company’s overseas business expansion mainly in the payment sphere.

GMO-PG has also committed further cash investments into the company MACROKIOSK.

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MACROKIOSK

 

Spotlight Reporting – business intelligence reporting tools

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Spotlight Reporting -Global from Day One is a cross-border technology fund with the majority of capital to be invested in New Zealand and Taiwanese startups

Spotlight Reporting

Spotlight Reporting CEO and Founder Richard Francis

Spotlight Reporting, a Wellington-based cloud software company, has secured US$5 million in Series A funding from investors such as Global from Day One (GD1) — a VC fund formed by Auckland-based Sparkbox Ventures and Taipei-based VC firm Pinehurst Advisors.

Former Xero Director Graham Shaw, Vend Director David Wilson, MYOB Co-founder and Xero Director Craig Winkler also participated.

“Spotlight Reporting continues to go from strength to strength, so raising smart capital allows us to maintain momentum and open up new opportunities in line with our ambition to be a global leader in our space,” CEO and Founder Richard Francis said.

Founded in 2010, Spotlight Reporting provides business intelligence reporting tools to accountants, advisors and business owners. Its tools import data from Xero, QuickBooks and other software products and create reports, forecasts and dashboards.

The company has offices in New Zealand, the US, the UK and Australia.

Founded in January this year, GD1 is a cross-border technology-focused fund with the majority of capital to be invested in New Zealand and Taiwanese startups with a focus on the US and Asian markets.

In May this year GD1 raised NZ$38 million (US$26 million) towards its second fund.

This is GD1’s second investment since launch. Earlier, it has invested in another New Zealand company called Qotient.

The post Global from Day One co-invests in New Zealand firm’s US$5M Series A round appeared first on e27.

Spotlight Reporting

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Spotlight Reporting

 

Geniee invests in AdPushup to expand into Indian adtech space

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The partnership aims to provide combined services to users in Japan and Southeast Asia

Geniee invests in AdPushup

The AdPush team

Japanese adtech company Geniee, Inc has invested an undisclosed sum in AdPushup, a provider of ad revenue optimisation product catering to web publishers and online media companies globally.

The investment is intended to integrate Geniee’s solutions, designed to maximise ad revenue for Internet media publishers, with AdPushup’s display ad-based revenue optimisation capabilities, and provide combined services to users in Japan and Southeast Asia where the Geniee SSP (supply side platform) is used. This is expected to further improve display ad revenues for publishers in the region.

The companies also plan to expand business in India and the US by providing the Geniee SSP to AdPushup, which conducts transactions with over 400 Internet media companies primarily located in those countries.

In addition to the capability enhancement and integration with Geniee services, AdPushup also plans to expand and accelerate the services that it provides to web publisher and online media companies across the world.

Established in 2014, US- and Delhi-based AdPushup is an ad technology company that provides a product, which helps optimise revenue from display ads on the Internet.

The ad revenue optimisation product being integrated in this alliance is intended to boost display ad revenues by using machine learning to optimise the layout, size and type of ad in the ad space to suit each individual website visitor.

Also Read: AdPushup raises US$632,000 through LetsVenture

To date, the company has achieved an average revenue optimisation of 69 per cent for over 400 web publishers in India and the US, it said in a statement.

In 2014, AdPushup received seed round funding from group of angel investors, including Jonathan Boutelle and Amit Ranjan, previously director of LinkedIn and Founder of Slideshare; Ravi Srivastava, Founding Partner at Purvi Capital; Sachin Arora, previously Principal Data Engineer Advertising Products at Yahoo; Kima Ventures; and Microsoft Ventures.

Founded in 2010, Geniee develops and provides the Geniee SSP, a platform designed to maximise revenue for Internet media publishers, which currently serves 60 billion impressions per month.

Geniee not only provides comprehensive analyses of web browsers and apps for advertisers, but also offers MAJIN, a marketing automation service that utilises AI and automation to improve marketing activities at every stage, right from attracting customers to prompting sales.

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ChatWork – office communications platform

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Can this Japanese startup give Slack a run for its money, targetting new markets in Asia?

ChatWork

Vietnam’s up and coming tech scene is starting to grab some significant notice. With an estimated 50 million people using the internet, companies are looking to appeal to this market and take advantage to gain a foothold.

One such service is ChatWork, an internal communications product that was came together in 2012. CEO Toshi Yamamoto had previously opened his company EC Studios to work in web marketing in 2000, but recognised a space for growth in chat, and made the pivot.

Having received their Series A of US$2.5 million from GMO VenturePartners in April 2015, and then pulled another US$12.5 million for their Series B in January from JAFCO Japan and other investors, ChatWork is headquartered in Tokyo and Sunnyvale.

ChatWork was built with the intention of replacing those long threaded internal emails, simplifying communications within the team with features such as text, voice and video chat, task management, file sharing, etcetera.

Also Read: The rise of chatbots: targetting Southeast Asia’s booming chat commerce space

Unlike Slack with their wealth of integrations such as Trello, Wunderlist, GitHub, etcetera, ChatWork gives users a straightforward messaging app that they believe has a wider appeal to users in workplaces that fall outside of the startup niche where those integrations are more commonly utilised.

ChatWork has also made efforts to secure communications, telling Geektime that they are, “focussed on the protection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on the Cloud, and ChatWork is the only messaging platform to provide this layer of security for its customers – which is particularly important for businesses.” They are ISO27001 certified, which counts for something in the wild west that is data storage of your communications.

This model seems to have an appeal to a wide audience, with the company telling Geektime that they work with over 100,000 companies. They cite a strong base of users in the Asian Pacific area – supporting Japanese, Vietnamese, as well as traditional and simplified Chinese – and a growing presence in English speaking countries such as the US. Backing these efforts, they have offices in Osaka, Taipei (Taiwan), and two in California.

Also Read: A day in the life of a WeChat-obsessed user (According to Tencent)

ChatWork

ChatWork CEO Toshi Yamamoto (Image Credit: PR)

Looking to a rising Vietnam

False expectations that Vietnam could become the next Silicon Valley aside, the country is already being recognisedfor its tech talent and growth potential. Its small but vibrant startup scene is attracting funding with 67 investment deals signed in 2015.

With the evolution of the local ecosystem there, it makes sense that services such as ChatWork might look to establish a greater presence there as it continues to grow. Beyond the startups, it appears that other parts of Asia are looking to Vietnam as an ideal site for outsourcing, which is how Yamamoto discovered the expansion opportunity.

“We have a strong user base in Japan and we noticed that many of these companies also have outsourced offices and teams in Vietnam,” he told Geektime in an email. “Once those Vietnam-based teams adopt ChatWork, they also then add new local contacts they work with (like vendors and consultants) to their accounts.”

“It’s been a very natural and viral process,” he said of their entrance into Vietnam, adding that, “We’re seeing viral growth in the Southeast Asian markets due to our success in Japan.”

As Vietnamese internet use and local business ecosystem continue to expand, it will be interesting to watch as other services such as CRMs, marketing tools, other productivity apps, etcetera start trying to sell to the Vietnamese, adapting their products to the local market.

Also Read: A day in the life of a WeChat-obsessed user (According to Tencent)

Where to next

Looking ahead, Yamamoto said that they will, “likely target countries around the world where personal chat apps are already popular.” He noted that, “A user’s adoption of personal chat apps tends to segue into them adopting business chat apps as well.”

Their plan is to add more native language capabilities and features to the product to meet the needs of people in a diverse set of locations across the globe that could be open to their product.

It is worth noting that while US-based companies such as Slack and Facebook are able to gain considerable market share around the world, there are often more local or regional options that meet the tastes of users there. Think about WeChat in China or the Russian social network VK that have held on strong and even grown despite the rise of their global competitors. In the business chat space there are players such as typetalk and Jandi that are also geared to address Asian users.

While Slack probably is not going anywhere any time soon, ChatWork could start to challenge them in smaller markets where they might be able to provide a more basic and effective bang for the buck.

The article Taking on Slack, Japan’s office communications platform ChatWork adds Vietnamese first appeared on Geektime.

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