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kindrik partners advises on US$35million VC financing deal
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We recently advised Rakuten Ventures on the US$35million series B investment in Carousell, the social commerce site operating in Southeast Asia. The deal is one of the largest ever series B deals to have been completed out of Singapore. Plus it is one of the biggest VC financing rounds in the region this year.
According to Techcrunch, the company has 35 million listings in total, and 70 new listings added per minute with active users spending 17 minutes on its app on average. Which is pretty impressive, but merely reflects the e-commerce boom, and desire for mobile technology in the region. Whilst there is a lot of competition, Carousell could become a significant c2c player in Southeast Asia and beyond. The company is also already looking at markets outside of the region given that its platform is not bound by geography.
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.
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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.
