17 startup funding rounds in Asia last week

We ended August with a big bang as we saw 17 startups get funded in the last week of the month. The biggest winner has got to be India’s messaging app Hike, with US$65 million funding raised in its latest round.

1. Xingyun | China

Xingyun, a Chinese niche social network for people interested in the arts and entertainment industry, has just raised an RMB 40 million (US$6.5 million) series A round of funding led by Shenzhen Capital Group.

2. Wecash | China

China’s first big data credit assessment startup, Wecash, has raised RMB 40 million yuan (US$6.5 million) from IDG Ventures.

3. Itugo | China

Itugo, a site that recommends fashion and lifestyle brands to women, bagged an undisclosed amount of funding from Matrix Partners China, InCapital, and a fund managed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

4. WeYap | Indonesia

Online city directory WeYap has received an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Mountain SEA Ventures. The site was beta launched on August 18, one day after Indonesia’s independence day.

5. Tripvisto | Indonesia

Indonesian travel startup Tripvisto, has secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding from East Ventures. The team will use the money to hire more employees and to improve their products. (Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in TechinAsia. See [our ethics page](http://www.techinasia.com/statement-of-ethics/#EV) for more information.)

6. Hike | India

Hike, the Indian answer to WhatsApp, Line, and WeChat, has just raised its largest round of funding: US$65 million led by Tiger Global Management. Bharti SoftBank (BSB), a joint venture of Bharti Enterprises and Japan’s Softbank Corporation, also participated in the latest round. Earlier, Hike had raised US$7 million in 2013, and another US$14 million in April this year from BSB.

7. Theatro | India

Theatro, the developer of voice controlled wearable communications devices for hourly workers in the retail, hospitality and manufacturing sectors, announced it raised US$5 million in series A funding from Khosla Ventures.

8. Attero Recycling | India

Roorkee-based Attero Recycling offers end-to-end electronic waste (ewaste) recycling solutions. It just announced an INR 100 crore (US$16.5 million) series C funding.

9. PriceBag | India

Product discovery and price comparison engine PriceBag netted US$2 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors.

10. Ybrain | South Korea

South Korean startup Ybrain revealed it secured US$3.5 million in series A funding to build up its healthcare platform and launch medical wearables.

The startup is applying its know-how to an upcoming headband that claims to slow the effects of Alzheimer’s, a degenerative brain disease that initially leaves sufferers forgetful and confused, before it later shuts down bodily functions and leads to death. The headband entered clinical trials in South Korea last month and is slated for release early in 2015.

11. Vivit | Japan

Tokyo-based excursion buddy and destination discovery startup Vivit nabbed JPY 30 million (US$300,000) from Venture United and Incubate Fund.

12. Zuu | Japan

Tokyo-based financial advisor matching platform Zuu Advisors announced it raised JPY 105 million (US$1 million) from four angel investors.

13. Korbit | South Korea

Korbit, South Korea’s leading Bitcoin exchange, wallet and merchant processor, has closed a US$3 million series A funding round led by SoftBank Ventures Korea. Pantera Capital led the round from the US, with participation from BAM Ventures and previous investors Bitcoin Opportunity Corp, Tim Draper, Pietro Dova, and initial investor Strong Ventures.

14. PatSnap | Singapore

Singapore startup PatSnap has raised a S$4.5 million (US$3.6 million) series A round led by Vertex Venture Partners, the venture capital arm of Singapore-government-owned investment firm Temasek Holdings. It has raised a total of S$6.7 million (US$5.4 million) to date.

PatSnap wants to simplify the process of searching for patents. It has a search engine that makes finding patents easier, visualizing search results as 3D topographical maps. Patents are grouped into ‘islands’ according to technology area, and colors represent different companies. The startup has already gotten over 500 clients worldwide, including NASA, IBM, Pepsi, Xiaomi, and Vodafone.

15. MyDoc | Singapore

Singapore startup MyDoc recently announced that it has attracted investors. It completed an early-stage funding round of an undisclosed amount led by August Capital Partners. Spring SEEDS Capital, a Singapore government-related fund, also joined the round.

MyDoc offers a web and mobile service where patients can consult doctors online and seamlessly share their personal health data. It hopes that will result in lower healthcare costs.

16. HipVan | Singapore

HipVan, a Singapore-based ecommerce startup that sells “great designs” in home and furnishings, fashion, art, and other categories, has completed its $1.4 million series A financing round led by LionRock Capital and Skype co-founder Toivo Annus. This round marks the second time Annus has backed the startup, suggesting HipVan is looking promising and hitting its targets.

17. Spavista | Indonesia

Spavista, an Indonesian platform that lets consumers search for and book beauty and wellness services, announced it has received an angel investment amounting to S$200,000 (US$160,000) from the founding team of Singapore’s automotive marketplace SGCarMart. The Bali-based team will use the cash to hire a few people in Jakarta as it focuses on acquiring more partners in the capital city area.

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The next time you sit down for coffee or pancakes, you might actually be in a PayrollHero Lab

When a patron walks into The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Burgos Circle, Fort Bonifacio, he enters into a testing environment.

Business ideas are put up to the light, so to speak, in the warm, glossy interior of this coffeeshop. In one example, the sponsoring company wanted to see how employees would act if they have a “like” to give to a coworker at the end of each business day.

This is PayrollHero Labs. PayrollHero uses this lab to try out its new products and new features that are related to business intelligence. As of this moment, PayrollHero provides solutions relating to time, attendance, scheduling, payroll, and human resources information systems, but this could evolve as products are put to the gauntlet in its eponymous lab. Their clients include BreadTalk, Candy Corner, Krispy Kreme Donuts, Zendesk, and Faburrito.

Just looking around


PayrollHero Labs is only about three months old. It was formed because PayrollHero CEO Michael Stephenson wanted to test out ideas live at client establishments after testing them internally within the team. Unlike many corporate labs, PayrollHero Labs has multiple locations. In addition to the one at The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, PayrollHero also has labs at Krispy Kreme and iHop. PayrollHero pitched the idea of having a lab at one of their locations, and all three companies readily agreed.

The hope is that the findings across the different outlets will not conform with one another, but that they will differ. “We’re looking to see why they are different,” says PayrollHero co-founder and head of business development Stephen Jagger. “So that we can see the uniqueness across the different stores – iHop being a full service restaurant, Krispy Kreme being a factory store, and The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf being a traditional coffeehouse.”

Though PayrollHero Labs is ostensibly designed to test out new products, it’s also supposed to serve the broader goal of helping the team better empathize with its end users. This process can go really in depth.

Jagger used iHop as an example. The PayrollHero crew toured the restaurant, and they were abuzz with questions. “How does their kitchen work? What are the notices on the boards in the back? How do they disseminate information across multiple locations?” he says. “We’re not looking for something – we’re just looking.”

The goal is that the team finds inspiration to develop a product that solves their customers’ pain points. “The more time we spend with our end user and learn about their role, the better it is for them,” says Jagger.

See: How one startup creates ‘adventure engineers’ to live on the edge in Southeast Asia

Making the team


Developing great products may not even be as important as weeding out the bad ones, which may be promising enough to test in PayrollHero Labs but not great enough to make it out. Jagger emphasized that the goal of this testing is not to bloat their offerings with more products and more features, but to find the ones that are genuinely valuable to their users. PayrollHero prides itself in being what it calls “ridiculously customer focused.”

To find those, PayrollHero has to go through lots of chaff. For example, the PayrollHero team tried out securing “manager tools” with a pin system. “Problem was it was just one more thing for managers to remember,” Jagger says. “In theory, it made sense, but in application, it did not work.”

The feature was quickly nixed. In assessing new products and new features, the PayrollHero team employs an evaluation process that is equal parts quantitative (data driven) and qualitative (feedback driven).

In listening to their clients, PayrollHero pays attention to everyone. While the manager tool is an example of a feature for management, PayrollHero wants to provide value from the CEO all the way down to the cleaner.

In providing their clients with business intelligence, one of the major goals is to help them retain their best employees, and to do so for longer. Churn, after all, is a serious problem in the Philippines – workers tend to have very short stays at companies. Part of PayrollHero’s value proposition is that their data can reverse this trend.

According to Jagger, even PayrollHero’s most basic features serve this purpose. For example, their time and attendance analytics will allow the CEO of a company to see which of theiremployees has never been late.

Though these types of employees are anomalies, they provide a valuable case study, one unique to their company: Why has this person never been late? How we can make other employees as punctual as this one? How can we reward or recognize this employee for their excellence, so that they don’t leave for a competitor?

According to Jagger, PayrollHero’s higher level tools – such as the Daily Pulse feature through which employees can “like” a coworker – only serve this purpose even more. If a worker or manager at an establishment is consistently liked, the manager gets a good lead on who to promote and fight to keep. Conversely, if an employee is almost never liked, the absence of feedback can be an indicator of who to let go.

When asked how people generally tend to give feedback for Daily Pulse – do they vote for friends? do they vote exclusively based on merit? do they vote for their peers more than they do their higher-ups? – Jagger deferred to PayrollHero’s evaluation process with a smile. “We haven’t pulled the reports,” he says. “So we can’t draw conclusions just yet.”

Top image via The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Philippines Facebook page. Editing by Jeff Quigley. 

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Uzabase lands extra $4.5M to speed up and simplify corporate data digging

Tokyo-headquartered Uzabase, a company and industry information platform built to overthrow Bloomberg Terminal, announced today that it has secured JPY 472 million (US$4.5 million) from a total of nine investors. The funding will be used to drive further expansion in Asia, using the company’s current offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore as launch pads.

Uzabase’s flagship product, SPEEDA, has grown exponentially since launching in 2008. It now boasts 100 percent coverage of publicly-listed companies in Asia. Maintaining that strong focus on Asia, SPEEDA also provides data on roughly 600,000 unlisted companies with strong Asian ties.

Uzabase recently integrated a one-million-deal-strong mergers and acquisitions (M&A) database – one of the world’s largest, according to the company – into the SPEEDA platform.

“A lot has also been said about 2014 being the most active M&A year since 2007, and how this year will be China’s biggest on record,” Jordan Krogh, associate director of global marketing and media at Uzabase, tells Tech in Asia. “One of the of the cool things about SPEEDA’s M&A is that the data source is highly reliable, so as far as tracking rumors and deals in literally any industry goes, it’s a pretty handy tool at such an interesting time in the industry.”

On top of SPEEDA, Uzabase offers a Japanese-language business news aggregation app called NewsPicks. The service was given a boost by the hiring of former Toyo Keizai Online editor-in-chief Norihiko Sasaki – the first major move from a traditional media firm to a solely digital one in Japan, says Krogh. The Weekly Toyo Keizei is considered one of Japan’s big three business magazines.

The series C funding was led by Itochu Technology Ventures and accompanied by YJ Capital, Kodansha, SMBC Venture Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and Shinsei Bank. Existing investors Globis Capital Partners, GMO Venture Partners, and Monex Ventures also increased their contributions.

See: After helping Skype and Box, Itochu Technology Ventures wants your startup to win in Japan

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Why Flipkart is shutting down its electronic wallet PayZippy

India’s ecommerce poster-boy Flipkart is shutting down its electronic wallet PayZippy, just over a year after it launched. “While we phase out our own payments product, PayZippy, nothing changes for our customers, who will continue to enjoy all the benefits of a safe and secure payment system through Flipkart,” a Flipkart spokesperson told Tech in Asia.

The news was first reported by Medianama. With PayZippy, ecommerce merchants can accept payments from all credit and debit cards as well as use 53 net banking options.

The PayZippy clsoure is linked to Flipkart’s recent investment into mobile payments company Ngpay (Next Generation Pay). This Bangalore-based startup lets users book flight, train, and bus tickets, top-up mobile phones and satellite television subscriptions, and do online shopping through mobiles. It claims to carry out a transaction every 0.1 second.

Now that more and more consumers in India are using their smartphones to shop, mobile banking and online payments are hotbeds for innovation. According to a Frost & Sullivan report, mobile commerce in India will record estimated revenues of US$1.26 billion with close to 72.5 million subscribers by the end of 2018. Currently, there are about 900 million wireless subscribers and 150 million mobile internet users in India.

See: India quickly ditching feature phones for cheap smartphones

Flipkart co-founders Sachin and Binny Bansal expect their marketplace to be largely an mcommerce company in a couple of years. “India is at an inflection point right now. In a couple of years, 500 million people from all over the country will get online through their mobile phones. Shopping will have to be very different then. This funding is all about making it happen,” Sachin Bansal said when announcing US$1 billion of funding in August. “Twelve months ago, just five percent of our revenue came from mobile shoppers. Now, 50 percent of our shoppers are mobile users,” he added.

So it makes good business sense for Flipkart to focus more on improving mobile payments for its customers. “Payments is core to Flipkart and we see this partnership (with Ngpay) giving rise to the largest mobile payments brand in India,” the company says in a statement today. Referencing Ngpay’s founder and CEO, it continues: “Sourabh Jain’s expertise will help us drive innovation in payments, with features and products that provide a competitive end-to-end customer experience, to redefine the payments ecosystem in India.”

While it is boom time for mobile payment enablers like Ngpay, Paytm, and Freecharge, along with opportunities arising from a take-off in smartphone and internet usage, there are new challenges such as clunky payment gateways, regulations, and even language barriers across India. Those who figure out the best way to jump these hurdles will score big in a diverse mobile-first market like India.

Many of the leading ecommerce companies in India, including travel portal Makemytrip, jewellery estore Bluestone, and baby and mom products marketplace Babyoye, use Flipkart’s Payzippy. It will be interesting to see if this clientele will now move to Ngpay.

(Top image: Wikipedia Commons)

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Fashion brands in China work hard to get dedicated followers on WeChat

Julia Q. Zhu is the founder of Observer Solutions, a China-focused ecommerce consulting and research firm, and runs the China Ecommerce Pulse Newsletter. She formerly held management roles for Alibaba Group. She’s @juliaqzhu on Twitter.

 
In China, social media is more than just a way for people to stay ahead of the news and connect with friends. While Western companies tend to focus on advertising on social media, Chinese brands use social platforms for deeper customer engagement – and even for ecommerce.

WeChat, China’s most popular mobile messaging app with 438 million active users, has already become a handy tool for businesses in China – including foreign brands – to engage with Chinese customers. It’s used by more than two million bloggers, celebrities, media outlets, small companies, and major brands to reach out to people.

Italian online fashion store Yoox recently launched a shop inside WeChat (called the “Yoox online concept store”). The retailer not only uses WeChat for advertising, which is typically how businesses use social media in the US and Europe, but it also provides online shopping and customer service directly inside the messaging app.

From the Yoox store inside WeChat we can see a good model for how a brand can use the versatile social app. This is what the Italian brand does:

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  Shares the brand story – As shown in the case study picture below, the first tab on the bottom of Yoox’s WeChat official account is called ‘explore’. It allows WeChat followers to learn about the brand story, receive the latest news and updates from the retailer, and play a social game called Shake the Style. This mini game allows the brand’s WeChat followers to shake his/her phone to make various fashion matches that the user can then share directly on WeChat or other social media. That in turn helps spread the Yoox brand in China.
  
• 
  Online selling – The ‘shop’ tab is the second component. In this, Yoox’s WeChat followers can browse and shop in sections dubbed “New arrivals” or “Look book”. The store has “exclusive deals” for WeChat followers. WeChat’s own epayment system means that shoppers can complete payment directly within the app.
  
• 
  Providing instant services – The last tab is called ‘service’. It includes live-chat customer service, chat-based fashion consulting every Friday, special discount codes, and a general guide to Yoox’s WeChat store. The fact that WeChat is a messaging app makes it well suited to conversing with a brand representative in this way. All replies from the brand trigger notifications in the same way as a chat message from a friend.

 
See: LV or not LV? WeChat has a big problem with fake brand accounts

Chasing a $29 billion luxury market


A number of other brands are also making full use of WeChat. Another good example comes from US luxury brand Coach. Consumers in China will account for about 20 percent of global luxury sales in 2015, according to a report from McKinsey – that’s worth RMB 180 billion, or US$29.1 billion. It makes China a crucial luxury market.

Similarly to Yoox, Coach also uses WeChat to push out its latest products and news. It also sends out fashion guides and special offers to its followers. Coach has gone even further in trying out several brand awareness strategies on WeChat that are worth noting.

One such initiative ran in China in the run-up to Chinese New Year. Coach released a phone wallpaper (shown below) that spread virally between WeChat users in the country. The wallpaper captures much of the symbolism associated with Spring Festival, as it’s dubbed in Chinese. For example, the Chinese character 福 (fu) which means ‘luck and prosperity’, sits at the center of the wallpaper. Meanwhile, the color red is consistent with the Chinese New Year theme. Coach subtly incorporates its well-known logo as a pattern in the wallpaper’s background. The classy design and timing of its release allowed for a simple and effective viral campaign, spreading the branded wallpaper across new and existing WeChat followers.

 
In another ploy, Coach sometimes runs a lucky draw within its WeChat account that encourages consumers to return to its WeChat page on a regular basis. It’s easy for a WeChat user to quickly go to the Coach account and see if they’ve won anything in the lucky draw by tapping a single button.

Neither of these two approaches are particularly novel, but they demonstrate how Chinese consumers are willing to interact with brands on WeChat in a variety of ways – not all of which need to be highly complex. A simple piece of wallpaper that people want to share with friends or a giveaway set on a regular cadence are simple ways for Coach to increase the ‘stickiness’ of its WeChat presence and encourage Chinese consumers to interact with the brand.

See: China now has a luxury electric car brand after $149 million bid for Fisker

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