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2020 half year capital raising numbers
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Our capital raising lawyers in Singapore have had a busy first half of 2020, even as Covid-19 impacts globally on fundraising. As at end of July, we had 42 fundraisings by Southeast Asian companies, slightly above where we were at the same point last year.
Our numbers (compared with previous years) implies that startup financing, particularly in Asia, has remained pretty resilient. The availability of capital in Southeast Asia, with the particularly vibrant VC scene in Singapore, has ensured financings have ticked over during lockdowns.
It is fair to say that we have seen more bridge financings amongst existing clients than normal, compared to fundraising for new companies. As investors look to support existing portfolio companies over the next few difficult months, many companies have had to change their investment strategy. Venture debt may play an increased role alongside traditional equity financing in more deals we see going forward. Thankfully, to date, we’ve not seen many down rounds, but these could increase over the next 12 months unless founders can find alternative financing structures.
There’s a lot of discussion in the market about how the pandemic has changed the investment landscape, with deals being pulled or delayed. Fortunately, we’ve not seen too much evidence of that in the tech space so far. Deals are taking slightly longer however, and we expect more investor friendly terms to appear.
Stay tuned – we’ll be keeping a close watch to see how fundraisings in tech companies in our key markets continue to look over the rest of 2020.
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Kindrik Partners advised VC firm Illuminate Financial on its investment in Singapore-based AI-driven data processing and automation company bluesheets. Illuminate led the US$6.5 million series A round. Other returning investors included Insignia Ventures Partners, Antler Elevate, and 1982 Ventures.
Illuminate invests in B2B fintech and enterprise software companies that build solutions for the financial services industry. Backed by global financial institutions such as Citi, JP Morgan, Barclays, Jefferies, Singapore Exchange Group, and BNY Mellon, Illuminate uses its extensive network and industry knowledge to help their portfolio companies achieve their full potential in addition to providing capital.
bluesheets offers AI-driven data processing and workflow automation software that helps businesses digitise and automate their bookkeeping processes. It plans to use the funds to further enhance its AI capabilities and accelerate growth in key APAC markets, including Singapore, Thailand, ANZ, and Hong Kong.
We’re happy to have advised Singapore-based synthetic data company Betterdata on an oversubscribed seed round of $1.65 million, led by Investible.
The company was founded in 2021 by Dr. Uzair Javaid and Kevin Yee and allows clients to share data faster and more securely in compliance with stricter data privacy regulations being introduced around the world. Betterdata uses generative AI to convert real data into synthetic data that looks, feels, and behaves like real datasets. These synthetic datasets retain the structure and correlations of the original data while eliminating the privacy and security concerns that come with holding and sharing sensitive data.
Betterdata plans to use the funding to publicly launch its product, hire more staff as the company scales, and improve its technology stack, with the aim of providing support for single-table, multi-table, and time-series datasets. The company also plans to expand across the Asia-Pacific region over the next two years.
