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kindrik partners advises carousell on M&A deal
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Lee Bagshaw has advised leading Singapore peer-to-peer marketplace Carousell on its acquisition of car marketplace Caarly.
The acquisition sees Carousell take on all of Caarly employees in order to leverage their automotive sector experience. Carousell will inherit Caarly’s 200 used car dealers, which will be integrated into its current car marketplace platform.
Given that Carousell has over 41 million listings on its marketplace, the focus is now on the company’s monetisation strategy through premium listing services and subscriptions. Operating within the high value vertical of motor vehicles represents a natural progression for the platform whose user base has increasing spending power.
Co-founder and CEO of Carousell, Siu Rui Quek, has said that the company will also be looking at exciting new areas such as machine learning and A.I. to help develop customer engagement.
Carousell closed a US$35million series B financing round earlier this year led by Rakuten Ventures. The company also recently completed an acquihire of Watch Over Me, a Malaysian based personal safety app, a deal on which Kindrik Partners also advised.
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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.
