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A wrap ad for Tokopedia provided by StickEarn. Photo credit: StickEarn.

Indonesia’s StickEarn has secured US$1 million in seed funding from East Ventures, Tech in Asia has learned.

The vehicle advertising startup acts as an intermediary between advertisers and car owners, who are paid by StickEarn to place ads on their cars and then drive around targeted areas to capture the public’s attention.

These ads typically take the form of adhesive “wrap advertising” that can be stuck onto the windscreens and windows of cars and other vehicles so as to be visible to people outside.

This form of out-of-home advertising has become a fairly common sight in many cities, with US startup Wrapify as one of the most well-known players in this space.

But StickEarn’s co-founders realised this was almost non-existent in Jakarta, which has one of the world’s highest volumes of traffic. People in the capital city spend an average of two hours each day on the road sitting in cars, or on scooters and motorbikes.

StickEarn co-founders: Archie Carlson (L), Sugito Alim (LM), Hartanto Alim (RM), and Garry Limanata (R). Photo credit: StickEarn.

Apart from recognizing the significance of this opportunity, StickEarn has also leveraged technology to allow advertisers to launch, track, and analyze their vehicle-based campaigns through its mobile app. Drivers can use the platform as well to keep them informed about where and how long they should be driving to fulfill their clients’ requirements.

“We want to provide our clients access to a more effective and measurable advertising platform,” said co-founder Sugito Alim in a statement. “Secondly, StickEarn aims to empower our [driver] partners by providing them with additional income.”

The startup launched in January this year. As of this month, it is operating in 14 cities across Indonesia. It has worked with 50 companies, and tens of thousands of drivers have signed on as partners, said co-founder Archie Carlson.

Other companies in Jakarta that offer similar app-based vehicle advertising services include Ubiklan and Karta.

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Lazada boss Max Bittner feels no pressure from parent Alibaba to become profitable. The aim now is to grow the opportunity. “Southeast Asia, for them, is hugely exciting. They see as big an opportunity as China and my mandate is to win the market,” said the CEO during a fireside chat at Tech in Asia Jakarta 2017.

Winning involves having massive ammunition in the ecommerce war that has seen players spend huge sums to lure customers to their sites and gain market share. Thanks to Alibaba’s deep pockets, “we match [our competitors] a lot because we can,” Bittner said.

Shopee – Lazada’s closest rival and part of publicly-listed Sea – “will have a harder time to continuously raise money,” he argued. “At some point public market investors expect improvements in profitability. The luxury of being us is we’re not exposed to that scrutiny.”

But more than the spending power, he believes crucial is their ability to differentiate themselves from competitors. That is by building out Lazada’s infrastructure.

The store started out doing direct sales to consumers from its own warehouses – thus, the moniker “the Amazon of Southeast Asia”. In 2013, it added a marketplace for merchants, using its assets to offer merchants fulfillment, which includes things like warehousing, packaging, and shipping. The marketplace has grown to account for a significant part of spending on Lazada.

Lazada has 15 warehouses across Southeast Asia where it’s trying to put a vast array of products, according to Bittner. Of those, three are located in Indonesia, and two more will be launched in the 250 million-strong market by the end of the year. Bittner says the firm is also expanding its last-mile delivery services as “we really believe in the integrated value chain.”

Photo credit: Lazada.

Bittner is angling for what he calls the three Cs. “Capacity – it’s how much volume you push through the system at any given time. Cost – we want to make it cheaper. And capability – which is really the distinguishing factor.”

“Not everyone wants the same things. Some people are okay to wait, some people want it very fast, some people want a certain delivery window like what we do in Singapore with Redmart […] Whether it’s bulky like a fridge that you need delivered or a small thing that’s cheap, it’s about building that whole portfolio of capability,” he explained.

Clashing models

Shopee does things differently. Sea president Nick Nash believes that creating a marketplace purely for merchants not only requires lowers costs, it is ideally suited to the rather basic level of logistics development in Southeast Asia.

“Our sellers are highly distributed and decentralized across the region, rather than having to rely on one or a small number of mega-warehouses in larger cities […] The very practical result is a more efficient path from seller to buyer as opposed to the potentially longer transit times under a hub-and-spoke model.”

In industry jargon, it’s the battle between “asset-light” (Shopee) and “asset-heavy” (Lazada) models.

Moreover, Nash contends the asset-heavy approach makes it harder to achieve remarkable product breadth. “The supply chain management alone on the inbound side [from the factory] is almost impossible to manage,” he said a few days ago.

Nash views the mix of direct retailing and marketplace as a conflict of interest. “If you’re asset-heavy, your job is to buy wholesale, put it in your warehouse, and then sell one package at a time in great bulk” – putting you at odds with sellers.

Nick Nash (L), group president of Sea. Photo credit: Tech in Asia.

Following Alibaba

Bittner thinks the industry’s biggest challenge lies not in growing merchandise volumes – “we see everyone growing nicely at some point” – but in addressing the region’s overall logistics issues.

“We see logistics as a massive bottleneck […] It’s important that as the market matures, you have a dependable system,” Bittner explained.

In Indonesia, Lazada’s former country boss Magnus Ekbom previously lamented that third-party logistics providers couldn’t keep up with Lazada’s growth. “Indonesia is pretty much running out of logistics capacity,” he said.

The company has relied on logistics companies for its deliveries into customers’ hands – from Ninjavan in Singapore to Go-Jek in Indonesia. In order to better cope with demand, it began investing heavily in its own delivery network. In Indonesia, Lazada now handles the bulk of those deliveries itself.

This investment in infrastructure is something that Alibaba – known for its asset-light Taobao and Tmall marketplaces – has fully embraced.

In September, Alibaba’s logistics unit, Cainiao, pledged to spend US$15 billion over five years to build out a global logistics network. Alibaba is also venturing into new types of retail. Much like Amazon, it’s begun selling groceries online, setting up cold-storage distribution centers across China. It’s also moving into offline retail, investing in electronics and department stores. It’s opened a supermarket chain called Hema, which allows customers to shop, dine, and order groceries for delivery from their mobile phones.

“I think when you are young, tiny, a light model is good. When you are strong, big – think about it – you need heavy things,” Alibaba founder and billionaire Jack Ma said recently. “There is no heavy is good, or light is good. A mix is good. To be efficient, you need to connect light and heavy models together. But with Alibaba’s size today, you should not leave the heavy model to others, it’s something you have to do […] you have to invest.”

Photo credit: Lazada.

A formidable backer

Aside from Shopee, Lazada is competing with the likes of Bukalapak, JD, Qoo10, and new entrant Amazon across Southeast Asia. Another rival, Tokopedia, has recently sold a stake to Alibaba.

Asked how he thinks the competition will evolve, Bittner said “to be honest, I don’t know.”

What’s certain is that “Alibaba [is] here to stay. We’re here to stay. [We’ll focus] on what distinguishes us and we’ll match whatever we can match.”

Lazada is taking stock of many lessons from Alibaba’s playbook.

The duo is working closely to make use of big data to match consumers with the right products, as well as technologies to prevent fraudulent sales on their sites.

“We’re the only platform in the region which actually limits the amount of orders you can do per item. So on Lazada, you can’t just order one item 20 times in one order, you have to come back and order again. That’s how our systems keep track if this is fraudulent behavior,” explained Bittner. “Alibaba has a huge amount of experience in avoiding this kind of behavior.”

The Lazada CEO is also weighing up the possibility of opening a mall in Indonesia, taking cue from Alibaba’s move into supermarkets.

“We’ve got the firepower we need and we have the backing of one of the most profitable companies ever, we’ll do whatever it takes and really win as much as you can,” Bittner concluded.

This is part of the coverage of Tech in Asia Jakarta 2017, our conference that took place November 1 and 2.

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Sansan COO Rio “PopEye” Inaba, speaking on stage last week at Tech in Asia Jakarta 2017. Photo credit: Tech in Asia.

The news (via Nikkei Asian Review):

• Goldman Sachs has invested US$17.6 million in Sansan, a Tokyo-based startup that digitizes business cards to create a professional social network, the US financial services giant said today.
• Today’s investment brings Sansan’s total disclosed funding to almost US$98 million, according to Tech in Asia data. The startup closed its series D round in August, securing US$38 million from investors including the Sumitomo Mitsui- and Toyota-backed Future Creation Fund, and Salesforce.  

Why it matters:

• According to the The Nikkei, Sansan will use the funds to fuel its expansion into India initially, followed by Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets. Goldman Sachs also has “an eye toward earning investment returns when Sansan goes public down the road,” the newspaper said.
• The US firm also announced that it will be pumping US$876 million into Japan-related investments over the next couple of years – meaning that other local startups are likely to benefit.
• Goldman Sachs said it will invest in “promising startups” and “support their long-term growth.” It will also devote some of the capital to teaming up with Japanese companies on joint acquisitions of foreign businesses.  

Converted from Japanese yen. Rate: US$1 = ¥113.89.

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Photo credit: Jeremy Paige / Unsplash.

Lending startup WeLab is flush with cash today after announcing US$220 million in its latest funding round. It operates WeLend in Hong Kong and Wolaidai in mainland China.

Online shopping giant Alibaba is among the investors, throwing in cash from the Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund it set up in 2015.

The startup – with 5 million users and US$28 billion in processed loans – works entirely online, via a mobile app. It gives consumers access to the kind of relatively small loans that it would be unusual or difficult to obtain from your bank.

“In 2017, we have been focusing on growing the business,” CEO Simon Loong tells Tech in Asia. “Our loan business has grown six- to sevenfold in the first half of 2017 compared to the first half of 2016. This is in addition to the six- to sevenfold growth the company has experienced in the full year of 2016 compared to the full year of 2015. We are also delighted to announce that the business turned profitable this year.” No absolute numbers were disclosed.

Simon Loong. Photo credit: WeLab.

On its Wolaidai service, loans tend to range from US$450 to $7,500. The delinquency rate, or being late to repay, is two to three percent.

See: How fintech startups are using big data to solve China’s huge credit gap

Like many such startups, WeLab delves through some unusual – and rather intimate – data in people’s lives in order to asses their credit worthiness. It uses a mix of facial recognition, text and image analysis, and monitoring online behavior to asses people. “Our quickest approval is only 1.7 seconds, and we process a new user every 1.3 seconds,” Loong adds.

Tech-savvy salaried workers aged between 20 and 35 are its main customers, explains the boss.

Big rivals

“For this round of strategic financing, it was important for us to have participants that would help scale our business to the next level,” says Loong. The money “will be invested into research and development for big data, credit risk management technology, product development, expand business scale, explore new business models, and speed up overseas expansion in 2018.”

It’ll be up against an array of loans startups riding the fintech boom across the planet. Kabbage recently pocketed US$250 million to expand into Asia, for example, while the pioneering Lending Club is already a US$2.2 billion business.

In mainland China, the competition is – perhaps needless to say – especially fierce. Dianrong is arguably the biggest indie startup in the lending space, while Alibaba, via its Ant Financial unit, is the biggest name from which people can borrow a few bucks over their phone.

WeLab has now raised US$425 million in total, with this latest injection described as its series B+. Credit Suisse, China Construction Bank, and International Finance Corporation are among the other participants in this round, which is a mix of “equity and debt strategic financing,” said WeLab in a statement.

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The ShopBack team. Photo credit: Alberto Resco.

Singapore’s ShopBack has just closed a funding round worth US$25 million, it announced today. It has raised a total of US$40 million in venture funding to date.

Fourteen investors participated in the round, which was led by Japanese credit card issuer and Mizuho Financial Group affiliate Credit Saison.

Among new backers to come on board were Thai telco Intouch, Singapore’s 33 Capital and Taiwan’s AppWorks. Existing investors that returned for this round included East Ventures, Qualgro, SoftBank, and Singtel.

The startup said this latest funding will be used to make hires and launch new product features.

Launching in 2014, ShopBack started out as a one-day flash sales site, similar to Groupon. Since then its business model has evolved to aggregating product listings from third-party ecommerce sites, which pay ShopBack a commission for each sale it generates for them.

ShopBack then passes some of this value back to online shoppers in the form of cashback, coupons, and discounts.

More recently, it has added service aggregation features for the ride-hailing and credit card payments verticals, said co-founder and CEO Henry Chan.

$40m total funding revealed

The startup claims that more than 3.5 million consumers have signed up to its service across the six Asia-Pacific markets it operates in. It also said it currently works with around 1,300 ecommerce partners in the retail, lifestyle, and travel segments, generating close to 1,000 orders per hour for them with an annualized sales figure of over US$300 million. 

Moreover, it claims to have dished out almost US$15 million in cashback to online shoppers since launch.

In Southeast Asia it faces competition from a number of companies providing similar services – such as Perx – as well as in-house loyalty and rewards programs, including Grab’s GrabRewards, Lazada’s LiveUp, and Amazon’s Prime Now.

ShopBack had previously disclosed seed investments totaling US$1 million, including US$600,000 it raised in March 2015.

However, it today revealed that it has received a total of US$40 million in funding to date, inclusive of the just-closed US$25 million round.

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Social media mogul Gary Vaynerchuk dishes out advice for graduates on how to stay focused on success.

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The Kaodim team. Photo credit: Kaodim.

Kaodim Group – which runs online marketplaces for on-demand services from providers including plumbers, photographers, cleaners, and personal trainers – has raised US$7 million in its latest funding round, the company has announced.

Australia’s Square Peg Capital co-led the round alongside an affiliate of Shanghai-based SIG Asia Investments – part of US investment firm Susquehanna International Group (SIG).

Since launching in November 2014, Kaodim – which takes its name from the Cantonese phrase “搞掂” (gaau dim), meaning “job done” – has expanded its presence throughout the region. It operates under the Gawin brand in the Philippines, and as Beres in Indonesia.

Users can request a service through the startup’s website, and providers can respond with a proposal. Kaodim charges service providers a fee each time they respond to a user request.

Recently, the company has also introduced several new features. Launched in September last year, Kaodim Direct links users instantly with a highly rated service provider for a fixed package price. The feature is available for select services, such as house cleaning and air-con servicing.

The startup has also rolled out its Kaodim Pro app, which enables closer interaction between customers and service providers by allowing them to connect directly through a Kaodim-designed “white label” platform.

In a statement, Kaodim managing director Jeffri Cheong claimed that many of the startup’s partner service providers have experienced 40 to 50 percent monthly growth from using the app.

Kaodim co-founders Choong Fui-Yu, CEO (L), and Jeffri Cheong, MD (R). Photo credit: Kaodim.

The startup said it will use this latest funding to notch up its marketing efforts while also further expanding its services throughout Southeast Asia, where it faces competitors including RecomN, Seekmi, and ServisHero.

Today’s announcement follows Kaodim’s US$4 million series A round in November 2015 and a US$550,000 seed round in February that year.

Kaodim’s existing backers include 500 Startups, East Ventures, and Venturra Capital, among others.

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Ever tried landing a remote-controlled helicopter without crashing it? Now imagine landing a rover to crawl on the moon.

It’s no longer just Elon Musk and Richard Branson with visions of being space entrepreneurs. Startups like India’s TeamIndus have joined the race.

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Photo credit: Frida Bredesen / Unsplash.

There’s nothing like a good burglary to get you wise about cameras and alarm systems in your house. The same applies to cyber security – the past two years have seen a bunch of well-publicized online attacks that have made a lot of people a lot more interested in the concept.

But while large organizations mostly have the resources to get themselves the electronic equivalent of sturdy steel bars and ferocious guard dogs, smaller companies usually can’t afford such measures or don’t have the people required to set them up.

Horangi hopes to be the cyber security provider for ‘the little guy.’

That’s where Singapore-based Horangi comes in. The young startup makes cyber security tools aimed at small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that want to secure their online presence but can’t afford to install expensive software on the premises.

The startup just announced it’s raised series A funding to the tune of US$3.1 million. The round is led by Singapore-based venture capital firm Monk’s Hill and joined by Right Click Capital, 500 Startups, Hub Ventures Fund, 6Degrees Ventures, and private investors. It had previously raised a smaller, undisclosed amount.

“We target the SME space because we feel it’s underserved,” Paul Hadjy, co-founder and CEO of Horangi, tells Tech in Asia. The startup offers a software-as-a-service suite of products but also connects its clients to teams of cyber security experts they couldn’t afford otherwise.

Horangi, which means “tiger” in Korean, was founded in 2016 and launched its software platform in early 2017.

All-seeing eyes

Hadjy set up the company together with co-founder and CTO Lee Sult. But the two go back further, having been part of storied big data analytics company Palantir. They took on government and commercial projects involving information security at the US firm. The work brought them to South Korea, where they got involved in an initiative by the Korean Information Technology and Research Institute.

The Best of the Best initiative’s purpose was to source the country’s top computer science minds out of 1,000 student applicants. Sult and Hadjy were helping out breaking down all the applications coming in. A software solution they developed proved to be useful for students, which led to the duo deciding to start a company of their own.

By that time, Hadjy was working for Grab in Singapore on the ride-hailer’s information security team. The prospect of his own startup proved irresistible, though. “I really liked working [at Grab] but I had this opportunity and had to make a choice,” he says.

See: MAS appoints first-ever chief cyber security officer

Detect and protect

Horangi’s products revolve around three core tenets of cyber security; protection, detection, and response. “Every cyber security tool you can find either overlaps with some of those sectors or focuses on one of them,” Hadjy explains.

The startup’s products currently include:

• Scanner; which uses a library of more than 50,000 known threats to scan APIs and web apps, report on server and networked device vulnerabilities, and check software code for security gaps. “[It] just needs to be pointed to your hostname or IP address, and it will run a network and application scan, sending queries to assess the configuration and state of security on that device,” Hadjy explains.
• Hunter; which runs on target devices and collects forensic data from the startup’s tools like running processes, system logs, network connections, and more, to determine advanced threats. The data is then reviewed by Horangi’s team of experts.
• Storyfier; which creates comprehensive and easy-to-understand reports on vulnerabilities and comparisons to security systems of other organizations.

This holistic approach helps Horangi acquire customers, offering them first a way to understand what the risks are for their particular business and then producing insights and tools for them.

This is also its edge against the competition, Hadjy thinks. “A lot of cyber security companies in Singapore focus on one specific sector, on solving one problem,” he says. That may suit specific requirements of large companies and organizations, but perhaps not the market Horangi is going after.

This approach has allowed Horangi to get in front of problems fast. Hadjy recalls a client that was iterating quickly on its application, with each new feature or update giving birth to new vulnerabilities. Horangi determined that the client tackled security only in the last stages of its development process.

With a combination of security awareness training and what’s called secure software development process (SSDLC), the company in question saved “weeks” of troubleshooting and patching by adding just two days to its initial development time. “This was an extreme case, but normally a successful implementation of SSDLC pays dividends of developer time by the second or third development cycle,” he explains.

Horangi also gave the company some security-related objectives to include in its overall performance metrics. “I’m not sure if those were implemented,” Hadjy adds.

Some related companies in Singapore include Scantist, Cloak, and i-Sprint, as well as larger companies like Trend Micro and Acronis.

The Horangi team at KITRI. Photo credit: Horangi.

Filling the gaps

Horangi currently has over 50 clients – some of those are firms above the billion-dollar mark but most are SMEs. Hadjy doesn’t disclose who the clients are because of the sensitive nature of the business, but they span various sectors from tech to government to finance. Around 40 percent of those clients are in Singapore.

He also demurs on figures about the company’s revenues but says they’ve been able to keep the business growing since launch.

Horangi has seven offices around the world, including Singapore, Seoul, Manila, Jakarta, and Washington DC.

See: This Temasek-backed startup builder tackles cyber security with army experience

In the coming year, the startup wants to add new features to its platform like multi-user support and machine learning – once it has a competent amount of data to do it effectively. Hadjy is confident that with the company gaining more clients, it will be able to collect larger amounts of meta-data for this purpose. “This meta-data enables us to both understand our clients environments and to better understand the cyber security threats faced by our clients,” he explains.

Ultimately, Horangi hopes to be the cyber security provider for “the little guy,” Hadjy says. “I kind of look at our model as similar to Hubspot,” he says, citing the marketing software’s all-in-one approach.

It also hopes to help grow the community in Singapore and the region and do its part in developing tech talent – something that fits right in with Singapore’s drive to improve its cyber security capabilities. It’s working with parties like the Cyber Security Agency and the National University of Singapore for this purpose.

“There’s a lot of people trying to tackle the cyber security problem in Asia but I think this is a talent issue,” Hadjy says. “That’s one of the reasons why we started the company here, because we want to help with that.”

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Bukalapak CEO Achmad Zaky talks about competition in the Indonesian ecommerce space at Tech in Asia Jakarta 2017. Photo credit: Tech in Asia.

How do you beat a competitor with pockets thousands of times deeper than yours? That was a predicament Bukalapak CEO Achmad Zaky faced during the company’s early days in 2012, when a “European player” entered Indonesia and started to flood the market with generous subsidies.

“It made me sad. I thought Bukalapak was going to die because the money they had was really huge,” Zaky said of the unnamed rival during a fireside chat at Tech in Asia Jakarta 2017.

But the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace would emerge “bigger” four years later as its competitor bled in the costly subsidy war, he said. “Subsidies don’t work. They bankrupt your company.”

To this day, Zaky said they haven’t exactly played the subsidy game, unlike competitors who burn crazy amounts, “maybe 50 times more than us.”

While he didn’t drop any names, Bukalapak is racing against other marketplaces like Shopee as well as Alibaba-backed Lazada and Tokopedia in Indonesia.

“Actually I’m quite happy they’re giving out subsidies. When subsidies come, I ask my sellers to get products from those guys because they’re cheaper, then sell on our platform for the normal price,” he quipped.

Subsidies only bring about “short-term” growth, he said. If you want to attain healthy growth, you have to focus on providing a great customer experience, developing your product, and building a robust team.

Your team, in particular, is crucial. He believes Bukalapak has built a strong engineering culture that’s data- and returns-driven. “If I’m paying you one rupiah, you should contribute two rupiahs to Bukalapak.”

He added that startups must keep a low burn rate – what he called the cockroach spirit. That’s what Bukalapak did to become “the most efficient” C2C marketplace in Indonesia, he said. “Focus on those fundamental things and magic will happen, your company will grow. Trust me.”

He shared some of the company’s other achievements to date:

• It’s now one of the largest marketplaces, with 2 million small and medium enterprise (SME) sellers and 5 million unique daily users
• US$1 billion in gross merchandise volume, with revenue in the tens of millions of dollars a year

Truly local

According to him, their mission to bring value especially to SMEs is at the core of Bukalapak’s strategy.

“A lot of SMEs are finding it hard to make money offline because the cost is really high. This is the problem we solve – we help smaller players become competitive against malls through the internet.”

To this end, Bukalapak has set its sights on untapped second- and third-tier cities in Indonesia. These cities “don’t even use Facebook,” Zaky explained. “That’s the opportunity for us.”

“I can’t mention it right now but we’re building something to crack this market. Indonesia is not just Jakarta. We are a big country.”

He remains unfazed by the presence of foreign ecommerce companies in Indonesia, saying that Bukalapak, as a local player, has an advantage. “I really believe that only Indonesians who lived here for 20, 30 years truly understand the market,” he said.

He thinks it’s too early for the ecommerce industry to consolidate, given that the market is still small. Indonesia’s GDP per capita stands at only US$3,000 per year, he said. “The market will boom if GDP per capita reaches US$,5000 or US$,6000. Maybe in 10 years we could be equivalent to a fifth of China.”

To get there, he said Bukalapak needs to be patient and very smart in spending.

Zaky also weighed in on what’s ailing startups today. “I think the problem right now is we don’t face hard problems. We have so much money going around. It’s totally different when I founded Bukalapak – I had no money, no people, no office.”

“Face the bad times. Don’t settle for the easy way. Behind a problem are a lot more problems you have to solve one by one to be a great entrepreneur,” he urged young startup founders.

This is part of the coverage of Tech in Asia Jakarta 2017, our conference that took place November 1 and 2.

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