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kindrik partners singapore is on the way!
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After months of talking about it, we’ve taken the plunge and decided to open a Kindrik Partners office in Singapore. We have obtained a foreign lawyers’ licence from the Singapore regulators, and will formally open for business in market in February 2017.
This may seem like a ballsy move for a boutique New Zealand law firm, but over the last 18 months we’ve been increasingly busy advising Southeast Asian tech companies and investors on venture capital and M&A transactions. Recent highlights include advising:
- Rakuten Ventures on its USD35million series B investment in Singapore based e-commerce business, Carousell
- KFit, an online subscription platform focussed on Southeast Asia, on its acquisition of Groupon’s Indonesian business
- Indonesian and Philippine based fintech company, Compare88, on its series B investment led by Telstra Ventures
- Coins, a blockchain payments startup from the Philippines, on its USD5million series A financing.
We’ve also been helping kiwi businesses stretch their wings, like advising 90Seconds on its re-domicile to Singapore and investment led by global VC firm Sequoia Capital.
This is extremely exciting work to be involved in – the transactions are large and often involve heavyweights in the global tech and venture capital industries. As well as being great fun for our team, it is nice to be able to feed this international experience back into our work within the NZ tech ecosystem.
We think we can grow this part of our business substantially over the next few years, leveraging the international experience of our lawyers and the strength of Kindrik Partners’ brand in the startup and venture capital world.
We will be co-locating with Singapore Xero Gold Partner Futurebooks. Kindrik Partners and Futurebooks already work together on the legal, company secretarial and accounting aspects of Singapore domiciled venture capital and M&A transactions, and co-location will help both companies better serve their international tech company clients. Futurebooks has enjoyed a long relationship with Kindrik Partners partner Lee Bagshaw and they are looking forward to working more closely with the Kindrik Partners team from early next year. As a Xero Gold Partner, Futurebooks are also very happy to be strengthening their connection with the New Zealand technology ecosystem.
Having an office in Singapore will also enable us to offer in-market assistance to our NZ clients. Southeast Asia is a massive and fast growing market and we expect this to be an increasing focus for NZ tech companies – we think Xero’s establishment of a regional office in Singapore will be a tipping point for NZ tech in Southeast Asia.
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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.
