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impressions from singapore
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Happy Chinese New Year, readers! As you might know from our newsletter, I arrived in Singapore in November of last year. Sorry Chris, your corner office is no longer exclusive real estate!
first impressions
It’s been fantastic getting to know the tech and VC ecosystem here. As Chris summed up in his first blog from Singapore, the volume and scale of the tech and VC scene in Singapore is much larger than in NZ. There’s a lot of money looking for a home, and no shortage of entrepreneurial-minded people looking to start ventures. I’ve particularly enjoyed meeting founders from all over the world who have chosen Singapore as a startup-friendly place to do business. For me, this reaffirms Chris’ impression of Singapore as a real global tech hub.
I’ve also noticed that the median age of the founders and VC fund contacts we come across here tends to skew pretty low. As the younger Singapore team member, this makes my work a lot of fun. Going to networking events and talking to clients is way more exciting when you have things in common to talk about!
what’s been happening
In my first months here, Chris and Lee have introduced me to various players in the VC scene. I’ve met some of our existing tech and VC clients and gotten the lowdown on the co-working spaces (e.g. Lattice 80, Impact Hub), universities (e.g. SMU, NTU) and accelerator programs (e.g. Entrepreneur First) that we’re involved with. There is no shortage of networking opportunities, with industry events happening every week. A couple of my favourites so far were the launch of the ASEAN Fintech Network, where I got to meet some of our Singapore fintech clients I’d worked with from NZ, and a talk at Startup Grind by the founder of a local fashion brand that I love.
looking forward
We’ve been working hard on v2.0 of some of our existing Southeast Asia capital raising templates, plus some shiny new ones which we think are going to be really useful. We’re hoping to drop these sometime in quarter 1 so look out for them!
It has been a great experience getting to meet people in the little red dot, not to mention surviving my first Chinese New Year here since my childhood visits! (A tip for young players: don’t leave it to the day of reunion dinner to find mandarin gift bags. Singaporeans will know what I mean.)
I really look forward to diving deeper into the scene here. Tune into my next blog to see how it’s all going!
explore our other blog posts
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.
