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kindrik partners advises mentoring platform ADPList on US$1.3m seed round
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Our Southeast Asia team have advised ADPList, a cross-border mentoring platform, on their recent US$1.3m seed round. The round was led by Surge, the accelerator programme run by Sequoia Capital India. The funding is supported by prominent angel investors Crystal Widjaja (ex-Gojek executive), JJ Chai (CEO of Rainforest), Quek Siu Rui (Co-founder & CEO, Carousell), Ting Feng Toh (Co-founder of GetGo), and Zopim Founders (Royston Tay, Wen Xiang Wu, and Yang Bin Kwok).
ADPList (formerly ‘Amazing Design People List’) connects people in the design and product management community to mentors in some of the most popular tech companies in the world such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. Mentors can show their availability on a shared calendar that mentees can access in order to schedule virtual sessions. Virtual sessions are conducted within the platform via one-on-one video calls, small group mentoring, and townhall-style talks.
ADPList, originally conceived as a publicly shared Google spreadsheet, started out in April 2020 by Felix Lee and James Baduor as a way for designers to provide peer support and share advice with others impacted by the pandemic. Today, it is available in over 70 countries with 20,500 mentees, more than 2,500 mentors, and 5,000 booked sessions a month. Booking a mentor at ADPList is currently free, with plans to commercialise the service as well as expand the platform to include other professions.
“It’s warming to see people wanting to give back and support upcoming talent in their industry”, partner Chris Wilson says of the deal. “The cross-border element also allows knowledge from some of the most successful companies in the world to circulate beyond Silicon Valley, which is promising for the development of other tech hubs.”
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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.
