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lee’s presentation on opportunities in southeast asia
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Last week we hosted two events in our Auckland office for the tech community. Lee Bagshaw, who recently joined our team from Singapore, shared his experiences on doing tech deals in Asia and the opportunities there are for New Zealand tech companies. It was great to see so many people interested and asking questions.
The key take aways were:
- the market opportunity in Southeast Asia is enormous and growing, in part due to increasing income levels and access to the Internet. As mobile penetration rates continue to climb, the appetite for tech products also rise – evident in the number of successful tech companies being built to serve those markets. Take a look at the e27 headlines to get a feel for the region’s tech and startup activity
- at the same time, the region is still young in its technology uptake, and there are many areas left for disruption using technology. This startup opportunity map shows what industries are in their infancy, and the opportunities for new entrants
- there is a significant amount of capital flowing through Singapore, and investors from all over the world have set up large funds to invest into early stage and growth tech companies. It is a good place to raise capital. Unlike the New Zealand investment scene, investors in Singapore compete for good startups to invest in. There is also a lot of government support in funding, and favourable schemes to attract entrepreneurs
- entrepreneurs from all over the world come to set-up in Singapore – it’s very easy to do business, and Singapore models itself on practices used in Silicon Valley. Southeast Asia does not necessarily have to be the final destination – it could be a great place to establish yourself first, and act as a stepping stone onto other markets. However in order to raise capital there, companies will need to have a business plan that is focused on scaling across the Asia region (at least initially).
If you think that capital raising in Singapore may be an option for your company, talk to us about joining Lee in Singapore at Echelon (23 and 24 June 2015), the leading tech conference in the region for investors and growth companies.
We will also be repeating this seminar in Wellington and Christchurch during May – to keep updated with our firm’s activities, sign up to our newsletter.
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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.
