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SEA startups still raising capital in difficult times
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With the coronavirus crippling economies worldwide it can sometimes feel like a hopeless time to be operating any kind of business, let alone a startup.
While it is certainly a difficult time, we thought it would be useful to share a few good news stories of companies raising capital during the current crisis. For companies with a compelling offering we are still seeing a number of VCs with dry powder and a willingness to invest.
deals closed during WFH and circuit breaker
During the period from 1 March through the first week of May – essentially since the time that we’ve been WFH and in shutdown according to the Ministry of Health’s recommendations – we have assisted 17 companies and investors close their funding rounds. Some of those rounds were in progress before the shutdown, but we are also working on several ongoing transactions, so we think this is a fair snapshot.
summary stats
Some quick stats on the deals that have completed during the WFH and circuit breaker period:
- Deal size: S$260k to $15m
- Total funds raised: ~S$36m
- Deal stage: 9 seed, 7 series A or later, 1 venture debt
- Source of funds: 2 internal rounds, 14 lead by external investors
- Industries: cybersecurity, fintech, F&B/retail, AI & machine learning, energy, logistics, and (unsurprisingly) health
- Our involvement: we acted for the company on 13 transactions and for the lead investor on 3
takeaway for founders
To founders thinking about raising capital – do not be too discouraged by the current environment. There are still active investors and funds are available for companies with a compelling proposition. For further info on doing deals during through the coronavirus crisis see our other blogs on Covid-19.
explore our other blog posts
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.
