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kindrik partners advises on US$10.5million investment in leading AI startup
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We recently advised global VC funds, Rakuten Ventures and WI Harper, on the US$10.5million series B investment in global A.I. startup, ViSenze. Using machine learning, ViSenze develops visual search and image recognition technology solutions for retailers and digital content publishers. For example, online shoppers can upload an image and use ViSenze’s technology to recommend visually similar products on e-commerce platforms, or within other digital published content.
The startup was a spin out from the National University of Singapore three years ago and raised US$3.5million in 2014. The company has had significant growth working with e-commerce platforms in Asia and elsewhere, creating exciting online shopping experiences. The company is now looking to develop new technology for video that will benefit both content publishers and advertisers.
This kind of A.I. technology, which focusses closely on visual attributes, is likely to become even smarter over time. In the retail space at least, we can expect visual or customizable search solutions search to eventually replace much of our keyword searching. Particularly once the conversion rates for retailers using such solutions starts to materially increase. Maybe too early to predict but the days of online shoppers key typing a description of a retail product into Google may soon be over.
Rakuten Ventures is the venture capital arm of Rakuten Group, the Japanese e-commerce giant. The US$200 million fund has invested globally, including across Southeast Asia, in Japan, Korea and the US. Based in the US, China and Taiwan, WI Harper is a global leader in cross-border investments.
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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.
