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Despite the market impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, retail investing is increasing in Indonesia, especially among people aged 18 to 30. Today, investment platform FUNDtastic announced it has raised a $7.7 million Series A to tap into that demand, with plans to launch new products for retail investors, reports DealStreetAsia.
The round was led by Singapore-based Ascend Capital Group, with participation from other investors including tech holding company Indivara Group. FUNDtastic plans to add retail bonds, insurance and peer-to-peer lending to its current roster of mutual funds and gold investment options.
FUNDtastic acquired Invisee, a mutual funds and securities portal, last year for $6.5 million, allowing it to sell mutual fund products directly.
Based in Jakarta, FUNDtastic was founded in 2019 by Harry Hartono, Franky Chandra and Medwin Susilo. While capital investing in Indonesia remains relatively low, with many preferring to invest in real estate instead, that number is gradually increasing as young professionals diversify their holdings. The Indonesian Stock Exchange is also launching initiatives to attract more retail investors.
Other startups focused on making retail investment more accessible to Indonesians include Ajaib and Bibit, which both recently raised funding.
Indonesian investment platform Ajaib gets $25 million Series A led by Horizons Venture and Alpha JWC
Twitter recently held talks to acquire Indian social media startup ShareChat as the company explored ways to expand its presence in the world’s second largest internet market and build a global rival to TikTok, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The American firm, which is already an investor in Bangalore-based ShareChat, offered to buy the Indian startup for $1.1 billion and had committed an additional investment of $900 million, two of the sources said.
The talks are no longer ongoing, two sources said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. TechCrunch could not determine why the talks did not materialize into a deal.
Two sources said Twitter had expressed intention to take Moj, a short-form video app that ShareChat owns, to international markets and position it as a rival to Chinese app TikTok.
Twitter declined to comment and ShareChat did not respond to a request for comment.
India’s ban on TikTok last year prompted scores of local startups and international giants to try their hands at short-form video format.
Moj, with over 80 million users already, has emerged as one of the largest players in the category. Earlier this month, Snap inked a deal with ShareChat to integrate its Camera Kit into the Indian short video app. This is the first time Snap had formed a partnership of this kind with a firm in India.
With the buyout offer no longer being entertained, ShareChat has resumed talks with other investors for its new financing round. These investors include Google, Snap, as well as Tinder-parent firm Match Group, the sources said.
TechCrunch reported in January that the Indian startup was talking to Google and Snap as well as some existing investors including Twitter to raise over $200 million. A potential acquisition by Twitter prolonged the investment talks.
ShareChat, which claims to have over 160 million users, offers its social network app in 15 Indian languages and has a large following in small Indian cities and towns, or what venture capitalist Sajith Pai of Blume Ventures refer as “India 2.” Very few players in the Indian startup ecosystem have a reach to this segment of this population, which thanks to users from even smaller towns and villages — called “India 3” — getting online has expanded in recent years.
In an interview with TechCrunch last year, Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder and chief executive of ShareChat, said the startup’s marquee app was growing “exponentially” and that users were spending, on an average, more than 30 minutes a day on the service.
Twitter, itself, has struggled to make inroads outside of bigger cities and towns in India. Its app reached about 75 million users in the country in the month of January, according to mobile insight firm AppAnnie, data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch. It inked a deal with news and social app Dailyhunt to bring Moments — curated tweets pertaining to news and other local events — to the Google-backed Indian app.
The American social network has broadened its product offering in the past year amid pressure from activist investors to accelerate growth.
Zhou Yuxiang doesn’t have the typical profile for working in China’s manufacturing world. A soft-spoken yet incisive person in his early thirties, Zhou graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in government and went on to work in investment banking in Hong Kong, following the path of many Chinese overseas returnees.
But a few years into his career, Zhou realized he wanted to build his own business. This was around 2015, a time when China was consumed by a startup craze amid Premier Li Keqiang’s campaign for “mass entrepreneurship and innovation.” Rather than going into the sleek world of consumer lifestyle, fintech or AI, Zhou picked manufacturing as a starting point.
During his time at Barclays, Zhou helped deep-pocketed Chinese manufacturers scour for merger and acquisition deals in Europe. He saw how factories in Germany digitize their operations using Siemens and SAP solutions. In China, “factories had a lot of money and could buy top-of-the-line equipment. But on the software management front, they were still very primitive,” said Zhou in an interview with TechCrunch.
“Most of the operation was done on paper. Every day, workers received a stack of papers telling them what to do, and in turn, they filled up the sheets reporting what material they had used… When you acquire these financially underperforming factories in Europe, you realize their software infrastructure capabilities are still far superior to yours,” Zhou added.
That digital gap encouraged Zhou to start Black Lake, a software platform for factory workers to log their daily tasks and managers to oversee the plant floor. Since its inception in 2016, the startup has raised over $100 million from GGV Capital, Bertelsmann Asia Investments, GSR Ventures, ZhenFund and others. The company recently closed a Series C round, pocketing nearly 500 million yuan ($77 million) and bringing on new backers including Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek, who led the round, as well as China Renaissance and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Black Lake’s vision is to be a one-stop collaboration platform for factory workers and managers, digitizing data incurred in all stages of production, from client orders, material procurement, quality compliance, warehouse management, to logistics and shipment. The software analyzes these reams of data, churning out reports for bosses to check for abnormalities in production and for workers to see how they could increase their output and income.
Compared to SaaS incumbents from the West, Black Lake’s more localized services and affordable prices have a greater appeal to China’s wide swathes of small and medium-sized factories, Zhou argued. Black Lake tries to simplify its user experience to a Lego-like building process so factory bosses can easily customize the software for their own use. Workers access the cloud-based software from their smartphones, which have become ubiquitous in China’s affluent cities thanks to increasingly friendly device prices and data fees. A foreign SaaS giant’s solution could cost a factory at least three million yuan a year, while Black Lake 300,000 yuan or less, Zhou said.
To date, the company has served nearly 2,000 manufacturers and suppliers across the Greater China Region and Southeast Asia, counting in its customers Tesla, L’Oréal, Xiaomi, Sinopec, and Chinese state-owned conglomerate China Resources’ pharmaceutical group. The company claims to have reached 500,000 production workers.
Manufacturing 2.0
Black Lake’s collaboration and data management software for factories
Black Lake is riding a perfect wave of “upgrading” in China’s manufacturing world. For one, the demand for customized products is rising as consumers become savvier. Instead of producing bottled water with the same packaging, for instance, beverage companies now design various looks tailored to different demographics. Factories need to adjust quickly to the flood of customized orders, and a cloud-based data management platform could be the solution, Zhou suggested.
The U.S.-China trade war is another impetus for China’s push for factory upgrade. Having felt the heat from trade sanctions, Chinese manufacturers look to cut expenses and improve productivity. That shift, along with the government’s “new infrastructure” policy to breathe high tech into traditional industries, makes Zhou all the more bullish about his business.
But Black Lake is certainly not the only one to have spotted opportunities in China’s push to modernize production, and enterprise software in China has a notoriously slow monetization cycle in part due to low adoption and companies’ reluctance to pay for services. The key is finding a viable business model to fund its dream to be the ultimate “data entry point” for China’s millions of factories.
With proceeds from its new funding, Black Lake plans to spend on product development, hiring, market expansion, and building an open platform for third-party developers. The startup realizes it can’t build everything factories need, and it’s already working with partners across telecommunications, cloud computing, automation and consulting, such as Huawei, Alibaba, SAP and McKinsey.
“When Chinese factories ‘wake up’, their speed of digitization will definitely leapfrog that of their American and European counterparts,” Zhou asserted.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/21/black-lake-fundraise-77-million/
“Ten years in, TransferWise is now Wise,” screams the press release that landed in my in-box late last week. The fintech giant, most recently valued by private investors at $5 billion, is re-branding ahead of an expected IPO.
Of course, the company doesn’t actually make reference to a public listing — for regulatory reasons, it probably shouldn’t even if it wanted to — but the change of name will certainly make for a more streamlined ticker, while more broadly, the new moniker reflects how the decade-old company has long moved beyond B2C international money transfers alone to build what it now dubs a “cross-border payments network”.
“Originally launched in 2011 as a money transfer service for people, the company has expanded to build a cross-border payments network helping to make international banking cheaper, faster and more pleasant for its 10 million personal and business customers,” explains TransferWise.
The company has come far in tens years — you can view an early funding deck here — and today processes £4.5 billion in cross-border transactions every month, claiming to help customers save approximately £1 billion a year in reduced fees compared to using legacy banks.
More recently, having launched consumer and business products akin to a multi-currency bank account, including its own debit card, Wise has started to resemble a challenger bank, too, even if it has previously stated that there are no plans to apply for a full bank license.
Here’s how the company pitches the current product line:
Wise – building the world’s most international account. Send and spend money internationally, hold money in 55 currencies and get real account numbers in 10 currencies. Customers now hold over £3 billion in Wise, with 1.4 million debit cards issued.
Wise Business – the business account for going global, it has all the features of the personal account plus extras like bank feeds, mass payouts and multi-user access. Over 150,000 businesses joined Wise in the last 12 months
Wise Platform – the platform banks and companies like Monzo, GoCardless, and Xero use to tap into the Wise infrastructure, giving their customers cheaper, faster payments and international banking features. Wise Platform is live with banks in 10 countries across 4 continents.
Cue quote from Kristo Käärmann, CEO and co-founder, of Wise: “Today our name catches up with who we’re already building for – a community of people and businesses with multi-currency lives. That community now even includes the banks themselves. We’ve evolved to fix more than just money transfer, but the core experience of using Wise will remain faster, cheaper, and more convenient than anything else. Our mission remains the same. We’re still making — and always will be making — money work without borders.”
Customers can already opt into the new website at Wise.com. “The final switchover for all customers to the Wise brand will take place in March 2021,” says the company.
It’s been almost 10 years since Justworks launched. The platform, founded by Isaac Oates, was yet another example of software eating the world; in this particular instance, it was the world of HR. Since, the company has raised nearly $150 million in funding.
All the way back in 2016, Bain Capital Ventures caught a whiff of Justworks’ potential for success. Partner Matt Harris led the company’s $13 million Series B round back when Justworks hadn’t even hit $1 million in annual revenue.
On the next episode of Extra Crunch Live, we’ll sit down with Oates and Harris to discuss how they met, how the deal went down, and how they’ve managed their board member/founder relationship over the last five years.
As with any episode of ECL, Oates and Harris will also give live feedback on audience-submitted pitch decks during the Pitch Deck Teardown.
Extra Crunch Live is a members-only series that goes down each Wednesday at 12pm PT/3pm ET. If you’re not yet an Extra Crunch member, you should take a hard look in the mirror and then hit up this link.
Matt Harris started his investing career at Bain Capital private equity in 1995. In 2000, he founded his own firm called Village Ventures where he spent 12 years and invested primarily in fintech startups. In 2012, he returned to Bain Capital Ventures. His portfolio includes Acorns, Finix, Ribbon, and of course, Justworks, among many others.
Oates served for 12 years in the National Guard and Army Reserve as an intelligence officer. He also served as a software engineer at Amazon before starting his first company, Adtuitive, which was acquired by Etsy. Oates led the HR and payments team at both Adtuitive and Etsy, learning first-hand the ways in which the system was fundamentally broken. Justworks was born in 2012 and has gone on to become a household name in enterprise tech.
On Wednesday’s episode, we’ll talk about why Harris felt conviction in making a bet on Justworks and why Oates went with Harris over other investors. We’ll also learn more about how they handle disagreements, build trust, and their broader thoughts on current enterprise trends.
Then, we’ll dive into the Pitch Deck Teardown. Anyone can submit a pitch deck to be featured on an episode of Extra Crunch Live, but EC members will be prioritized in the list. If you want to get in on the action, submit your deck right here.
As with just about everything we do here at TechCrunch, audience members can also ask their own questions.
Extra Crunch Live has left room for you to network (you gotta network to get work, amirite?). Networking is open starting at 2:30 p.m. EST/11:30 a.m. PST and stays open a half hour after the episode ends. Make a friend!
As a reminder, Extra Crunch Live is a members-only series that aims to give founders and tech operators actionable advice and insights from leaders across the tech industry. Here’s yet another chance for you to join.
Harris and Oates join a world-class cast of speakers on Extra Crunch Live. In February alone we spoke to Lightspeed’s Gaurav Gupta and Grafana’s Raj Dutt, Felicis’ Aydin Senkut and Guideline’s Kevin Busque, and Accel’s Steve Loughlin and Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig.
You can check out past episodes of ECL here and upcoming schedule here.
Information on how to register for the Bain + Justworks episode on Wednesday is below.
See you there!
