Vietnam – Anfin, a Vietnam-based fintech firm with its proprietary stock trading platform, has announced it has raised US$4.8 million in its pre-Series A funding round led by Clement Benoit, (Business Angel, Founder of Stuart & Not so Dark) and Y Combinator. The round also saw participation from other notable investors including Rebel VC, Kharis Capital, Newman Capital, First Chek Ventures, Micro Ventures, Springcamp, and AngelHub.

The funds will be deployed towards strengthening Anfin’s product development, especially its social investment product which lets users host and join live audio rooms. Through the use of tech-enabled profiling and risk assessment, Anfin will enable credible investors, a platform to share ideas, strategies, and trades.

Furthermore, Anfin will continue its partnership development to offer more financial asset classes from its current offering of over 300 stocks and nine ETFs, allowing users to trade and diversify their portfolios with a few simple clicks. The funds will also be used to bolster Anfin’s relationship with local investor communities. This includes improving the library of free educational content and working directly with universities on products that incentivize financial literacy.

Launched in October 2021, Anfin is a fintech startup that enables customers to engage in stock investment and provides a fast and convenient trading experience. The trading app serves as an engaging, user-friendly experience for new retail investors who are interested in researching and learning about established ways of investing.

Phuoc Tran, CEO and co-founder of Anfin said, “Within a year, Anfin’s stock investment application has had more than 1 million app downloads. In line with the company’s vision for the next phase of growth, it was very important to join hands with the right set of leaders and investors. Our mission is to democratise access for retail investors in Vietnam to a variety of financial assets ranging from stocks, bonds, and structured investment products among others while increasing access to financial ideas.”

The financial app Anfin has seen a jump in activity during the COVID-19 pandemic due to the growing preference for mobile banking and online investments. Currently, counting more than 100,000 in funded accounts, deposits have reached up to US$5 million and US$10 million in total transaction value.

Clement Benoit, Business Angel, Founder of Stuart & Not so Dark, shared, “Anfin has all the ingredients of the recipe to become a category leader in social investment. I have personally been impressed by the maturity and the execution level of the management team. In less than a year of time, Anfin has built a unique product that non only generates a never-ending growth but also a massive adoption.” 

Benoit added, “Democratizing access to stock trading with a social layer through a simple and friendly product is definitely the answer to a large untapped market in Asia. I have no doubt that this series A funding will allow Anfin to scale beyond Vietnam and become a reference in social trading.”

Through its value-added technology and financial services, Anfin’s fractional share trading feature allows users to start investing from only 10,000 VND (US$0.43) while providing a simple way to build a balanced portfolio and invest in shares regardless of the share price.

Singapore – Desty, an Indonesian e-commerce startup, has raised a new funding to develop its full stack e-commerce merchant solutions platform. The funding is led by Square Peg, in addition to funds raised from a Pan-Asia investor base last year, including East Ventures, Jungle Ventures, 5Y Capital and other prominent angel investors in the region.

Desty plans to leverage its new funding to further product optimisation, team expansion and user acquisition.

Desty provides a suite of digital tools that helps merchants, from online sellers to F&B establishments to operate their businesses through a unified platform. Over the past year, Desty has enhanced its multiple merchant enablement tools and proprietary tech infrastructure to offer a full stack e-commerce use case across link-in-bio (desty.page), an online store builder (desty.store), a digital ordering menu (desty.menu) and an omnichannel dashboard (desty.omni).

Mulyono Xu, co-founder and CEO at Desty, said, “We are very delighted to have Square Peg supporting us with their extensive experience investing in comparable business models across the globe. Indonesia has a very unique digital economy with notable fragmentation across merchant traffic, sales channels, payments and logistics. We strongly believe that our full stack approach to empowering merchants with our suite of enablement tools will solve their pain points most effectively.”

Meanwhile, Piruze Sabuncu, partner at Square Peg, commented, “We wanted to partner with Desty, not only because of the traction and customer love we’ve seen so far, but also because of the technical and go-to-market talent Mulyono and Bill were able to bring together. Mulyono and Bill are bringing in years of industry expertise and best practices that will help unlock economic opportunities for millions of small businesses in Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia.”

He added, “We are excited to partner with the Desty team on its mission to bring merchants online, and help them operate seamlessly across Indonesia’s increasingly crowded e-commerce space.”

Jakarta, Indonesia – Indonesia’s consumer payments platform Flip has secured a Series B funding round led by Tencent, with participation from Block, Inc. (formerly Square, Inc.) and existing investor Insight Partners.

This new funding brings Flip’s total Series B to more than $100 million and follows on the heels of Flip’s first Series B round in December 2021, which was co-led by Sequoia Capital India, Insight Partners, and Insignia Ventures Partners. 

With the newly secured funding, Flip will be ramping up its workforce with a focus on engineering and product teams, investing in new product and technology development to provide a higher quality of service, and further accelerating its business expansion.

Flip aims to be the world’s most customer-centric financial technology company by enabling individuals and businesses to conduct fair, low-cost financial transactions from anywhere to anyone on a digital platform. Its products include online P2P (peer-to-peer) payments with interbank transfers to more than 100 domestic banks, international remittances, e-wallet top-ups, and business solution products.

Rafi Putra Arriyan, Flip’s co-founder and CEO, shared that they are laser-focused on helping millions of Indonesians, both individuals and businesses, execute various money transactions at a low cost through their platform. 

“We believe in the vast potential of P2P (peer-to-peer) payment because it is customary in Indonesia to send money via transfer for both personal, family, or household purposes. Despite many others trying and failing, we have succeeded in capturing the market because of our customer-focused understanding,” said Arriyan.

Meanwhile, Gita Prihanto, Flip’s chief operating officer, commented that they are thrilled to welcome Tencent and Block, who share the same purpose of making fintech accessible to everyone in Indonesia. 

“The knowledge and expertise from our strong partners, both renowned global firms and angel investors, will help us to grow our business amid the challenging times facing today’s global market and tech landscape. This investment phase invigorates our aspiration to have an even greater positive impact on society by continuing to expand our fintech solutions and by promoting the digital economy ecosystem in Indonesia,” said Prihanto.

Vietnam – Houze, a proptech startup in Vietnam that offers a fully integrated real estate ecosystem for agents and customers through its offline-to-online platform, has raised a $2m of funding led by DKRA Group, giving the company resources to continue expanding its services and growing its team to meet the demand in Vietnam and beyond.

Houze has created a multi-platform for both real-estate agents and home-buyers, offering integrated services from the transaction, management, investment, and financing options. It features services such as Houze Agent (digital brokerage), Houze Commerce (property management platform under SaaS), and Houze Invest (Fintech resulted from real estate), amongst others. All these services are integrated and linked in Houze, providing a seamless experience for its users, and managing to combine the elements into one unique platform. 

The newly secured funding will be used in completing the leadership team, as well as enhancing the core products. In addition, it will be used for the strategic partnership with Vietnam’s real estate service brand DKRA Group, which creates the advantage of exclusive inventories and enhances battlefield experience in the real estate industry in the country

Houze said that it is also in the process of closing an additional fund with venture capital to launch new products such as Houze Portal, Houze Super App, and Houze Finance.

Pham Lam, Houze’s founder, said, “Technology will disrupt geographical limitations and human capital, closing the gap between agents and home-buyers and professionalise the brokerage community.”

Vietnam – Ancient8, a blockchain gaming guild in Vietnam, has closed a US$6m private round of financing led by Makers Fund and C² Ventures, with participation from existing and new investors Pantera Capital, 6th Man Ventures, and IOSG Ventures, amongst others. This round of financing brings Ancient8’s total capital raised to US$10m.

Ancient8 helps GameFi studios reach passionate gamers and run web3-native targeted advertising through its GameFi Identity product and launchpads. Gamers and crypto communities will soon be able to create GameFi identity profiles to track and showcase their achievements in Web3, discover high-quality blockchain games, and access guild scholarships and blockchain education more effectively.

With this round of financing, Ancient8 will be accelerating the development of the infrastructure for GameFi and the Metaverse by building its next-generation software products, community, and guild. It is also developing a number of software products designed to underpin the future of blockchain-based game development. 

In the coming months, Ancient8 will be launching its GameFi Identity product and a pair of GameFi Token and NFT Launchpads designed to enhance the go-to-market strategy of Web3 games. These products will help the platform connect top blockchain games with its deeply engaged global community of GameFi enthusiasts and enable users to enjoy the most intuitive experience possible in the world of Web3.

Howard Xu, Ancient8’s co-founder, noted that they will continue to expand their product offerings, partner with more innovative projects and games, and grow their influence and reach with a large global community.

“As cultivators of the first native generation of Metaverse citizens, we are excited to be building the foundational infrastructure that will drive mainstream GameFi adoption,” said Xu.

Singapore – Request Finance, the Web3 enterprise crypto payments startup, has secured a $5.5m seed round with institutional backers including Animoca Brands, Balderton Capital, and XAnge. This newly secured funding will support Request Finance’s efforts to expand its in-app services, and grow its team to capture a greater share of the growing crypto payments space.

Since its launch in January 2021, a whopping $203m in crypto invoices has been paid in the app. Today, Request Finance simplifies and automates invoicing, expenses, payroll, and accounting in crypto for more than 2,000 Web3 teams. It also offers enterprises an easy way to document critical information about users’ crypto payments which are typically required by the authorities.

According to Request Finance, its founders saw serious problems that had to be solved before more businesses would start using crypto. For one, making crypto payments by copying and pasting wallet addresses from a spreadsheet is both laborious and frightfully vulnerable to human error. On top of that, keeping proper financial records of crypto transactions was also an accountant’s nightmare.

To address these pain points, the team built a suite of enterprise-friendly features like on-chain payment confirmations, automated billing and payments in crypto, and even integrations with accounting software like Xero. The self-custodial platform currently supports over 150 tokens and stable coins on 14 different chains. By addressing the common challenges faced by companies using crypto, Request Finance has attracted large users from different Web3 verticals, namely DeFi and Aave, as well as metaverse projects like The Sandbox and Decentraland, and DAOs like Maker.

Yat Siu, Animoca Brands’ executive chairman and co-founder, commented, “The services provided by Request Finance allow Web3 projects – including some Animoca Brands companies – to save time and effort on crypto payments. We believe the company has significant potential.”

Jakarta, Indonesia – Super, an Indonesian social commerce platform serving tier-2 and tier-3 cities and rural areas, has completed a US$70m oversubscribed Series C round led by NEA, with additional investment from Insignia Ventures Partners, SoftBank Ventures Asia, and DST Global Partners, as well as Amasia, and B Capital, amongst many others.

Super leverages a hyperlocal logistics platform to deliver consumer goods to agents within 24 hours of the order time. It partners with community agents such as individuals and warungs to aggregate and distribute millions of US dollars’ worth of goods to their communities each month.

The platform has launched two private-label brands that have realized product-market fit and will invest a portion of their new capital towards developing additional FMCG private-label brands in the next several years. Moreover, Super will be using the new fund to launch cosmetics products, as the desire for this segment is rising across Indonesia. It will also launch a feature for community agents to track end-consumer transactions to help community agents offer better-tailored experiences for the end customers.

Steven Wongsoredjo, Super’s CEO and co-founder, shared that Super is going after a huge untapped market; thus, they will deploy this investment to enable equitable access for people in Kalimantan, Bali, West Nusa Tenggara, East Nusa Tenggara, Maluku, and Papua over the next few years.

“We will help more multinational, and provincial FMCG suppliers tap into new markets in rural areas and empower more community leaders to optimize their income and have a better quality of life,” said Wongsoredjo.

Meanwhile, Gisella Tjoanda, Super’s head of strategy and business development, noted, “As Super is entering its 4th year in business, we understand the importance of data collection and analysis as one of the keys to success in launching new SKUs. Therefore, we are going to expand our engineering team to improve Super’s warehouse management system by implementing machine learning to help Super better utilise data to expand its SKUs in the future.”

Andrew Schoen, NEA’s partner, commented that they are thrilled to back the whole Super team, as the platform is positioned to improve the lives of the 260 million Indonesians who reside outside of Indonesia’s capital city.

“Super is going to continuously improve access to basic goods, create meaningful and rewarding jobs, and streamline supply chains for Indonesia’s tier-2, tier-3, and rural regions,” said Schoen.

Singapore – Global insights-led customer engagement platform MoEngage has raised US$77m in its latest series E funding, and is aiming to deepen its global footprint to the US, UK, and Asia markets and also expand in new markets like LATAM and Australia. They are also aiming to explore strategic acquisitions that can help extend its platform capabilities and provide more value to customers.

This is the third fundraising for the company in the last 12 months, having raised US$32.5m in July and US$30m in Dec 2021. This round was led by Goldman Sachs and B Capital, with participation from the company’s existing investors Steadview Capital, Multiples Alternate Asset Management, Eight Roads Ventures, and Matrix Partners India.

Within Southeast Asia, MoEngage has doubled its headcount across Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. This includes new hires Anmol Arora, regional director for SEA & ANZ and Patrick Tang, associate director for ASEAN to lead the business growth and strategic direction of MoEngage in the region, as well as in country-specific sales and support team members. The firm launched offices in Singapore and Philippines this year, with an Australian office coming soon.

Raviteja Dodda, co-founder and CEO of MoEngage, said, “Our rapid growth is validation that consumer brands today are moving beyond campaign-centric tools and are adopting an insights-led multi-channel approach to customer engagement. Innovation has also been a key priority for MoEngage, with the launch of ‘Push Amplification Plus’, a trademark feature that provides the best delivery rates for push notifications in Southeast Asia. Businesses across the region have already seen positive impacts from the solution, with proven push notification delivery rates of up to 91%.”

Meanwhile, Saurabh Madan, vice president & general manager of SEA and ANZ, MoEngage said, “As the Southeast Asian region continues to digitise rapidly, we have only strengthened our commitment to the region to help businesses navigate the future economy. Our investments have resulted in the adoption of MoEngage’s platform by over 220 consumer brands in Southeast Asia, and a new milestone of over 100 customers in Indonesia.” 

He added, “Today, MoEngage partners with some of the leading brands in the region, including Alfagift, AllValue, Astrapay, Blibli, CIMB Bank, JD.ID, Lummo, POPS, Syfe, Telekom Malaysia, theAsianparent, XL Axiata. MoEngage has seen more than twice the growth in Southeast Asia over the last year and we look forward to building on this momentum in the future.”

Sydney, Australia Smart content marketing engine, Convo Ink has announced it has closed a $1.5 million seed funding round led by 3C and M2 Capital. 3C Capital is a UK based private investment house led by Australian investor Richard Gazal. M2 Capital is a Sydney based private investment firm led by technology entrepreneur, Matthew Hunt.

Convo Ink will use the new seed funds to expand their content platform capabilities and further invest in the recently launched attention measure, the Quality Attention Score – an algorithm that combines three core indexes for measurement; time in view, engagement and environment. The funding will also accelerate delivery on their technology road map with dynamic content optimisation powered by applied machine learning, the next feature to be released to the market.

Launched in September 2021, Convo Ink is a smart content marketing engine connecting marketers, content producers and publishers to deliver branded content to audiences with precision and at scale. Convo Ink’s content platform integrates with all major DSPs including DV360, The Trade Desk and Amobee.

Aaron Macarthur, CEO of Convo Ink, said the investment from 3C and M2 Capital allows Convo Ink to capitalise on growth opportunities with our partners who are telling us that content has never been more important in driving commercial growth. Over the past nine months we have seen the critical contribution that branded content has played in overall campaign performance. 

“Our proprietary attention analytics have been pivotal in providing actionable insights to our marketing, content and publishing partners and we’ve only just scratched the surface in applying this capability,” Macarthur said.

 Macarthur added, “The combination of our content marketing platform, with live attention analytics, has the potential to rewrite the book on content campaigns in the future. This is one of the most exciting areas in content technology, the combination of content design with rich data sets to tell truly dynamic brand stories.”

Meanwhile, Richard Gazal, Principal at 3C, commented, “The technology sector is an important growth area for us, so we jumped at the opportunity to partner with M2 Capital on this deal. We see a revolutionary business in Convo Ink. This is a smart combination of product, tech and data that will shape advertising for the better. 

“We are excited to be in partnership with Aaron and the Convo Ink team as we look to scale this platform around the world,” Gazal adds.

Jakarta, Indonesia – Xendit, an Indonesian fintech, has raised US$300m in their series D funding, aiming to empower startups and SMEs in the Southeast Asian region. In total, Xendit has raised a total of US$538m in funding.

Coatue and Insight Partners co-led the round with additional investment from Accel, Tiger Global, Kleiner Perkins, EV Growth, Amasia, Intudo, and Justin Kan’s Goat Capital.

Xendit has been making strategic investments that serve startups and SMEs in Southeast Asian countries. The company recently invested in Bank Sahabat Sampoerna, a private bank in Indonesia that focuses on micro and SME businesses, as well as banking-as-a-service for technology-enabled businesses. 

Meanwhile, to complement its expansion into the Philippines, Xendit made a strategic investment into the leading local payment gateway, Dragonpay, doubling down on its commitment to modernising hyper-localised payments infrastructure in each market it enters.

Tessa Wijaya, co-founder and COO at Xendit, said, “We will continue to deliver access to Xendit’s payments products and services to enable more businesses and people in the region to participate in the digital economy. Xendit will continue to expand into new markets – like Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam – where we can identify a need that doesn’t exist, similar to what we did in the Philippines. We plan to diversify our products with value-added services, like lending programs we’ve already started in Indonesia.”

Over the last year, Xendit tripled annualised transactions from 65 million to 200 million and increased total payments value from US$6.5b to US$15b.