Advertise on podcast: Asia Startup Pulse

Fintech has come a long way in China, from barely being recognized to one of the fastest growing markets in the region. As the world’s leader in Fintech technology, China is a breeding ground for Internet finance companies, and accordingly, investment in the industry. With millions of users and an ever-growing number of fintech unicorns, the future of Internet finance looks exceedingly bright in China.

We are very honored to invite Peng T. Ong, co-founder and managing partner of Monk's Hill Ventures, to join our Asia Startup Pulse today. Monk’s Hill Ventures is a venture capital firm investing in early-stage tech companies, primarily Series A, in Southeast Asia. Peng is an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur, founder, and investor in Silicon Valley and in Asia. He is based in Indonesia and is a board member of Glints, ELSA, Finaxar, and Intelligent Video Solutions. Prior to Monk’s Hill Ventures, he was a Venture Partner at GSR Ventures in China.

India today is home to some of the most innovative and valuable startups in the world. With a thriving startup ecosystem that is seeing more and more foreign capital injection and innovation across the board from tech to business models, Indian startups are well positioned to take on the global startup ecosystem. Although the domestic market is already huge enough, more Indian SaaS startups are venturing out and expanding across borders. In today’s episode, we talk with Sanjay Nath, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Blume Ventures, one of India’s leading early-stage venture funds. Sanjay also represents Blume on the boards of Arka Venture Labs and the Draper Venture Network. Blume focuses on Seed to Pre-Series A stages of funding and has made over 100 investments across its 10-year history across multiple funds. Sanjay has invested in and advises a wide portfolio of startups including GreyOrange Robotics, Dataweave, Locus, Tricog, LBB, Lulu, Lambdatest, TapChief (acquired by Unacademy), Nektar.ai, and Obviously.ai amongst others. What is the trajectory for Indian startups expanding abroad? How do they start in India and move to US and SEA? How can startups build and sell remotely and operate in a virtual world? What are the repercussions of localization when internationalization? Sanjay, as an active investor in the space, brings his experience in answering all these questions and more!

Marketplace is one of the most common business models in Southeast Asia nowadays. In one of our previous episodes, we talked to Aaron Tan, founder of Carro, about how he has built one of the biggest used-car marketplaces in Southeast Asia. Today, we are going to dig deeper into marketplaces again with James Tan, Managing Partner at Quest Ventures. Prior to this, James was co-founder and COO of 55tuan, a NASDAQ listed e-commerce group that grew to more than 200 cities and 5,000 employees across China. In this episode, we talk about all the business fundamentals of building a marketplace: from the advantages and challenges of building a marketplace to how to manage or control it, to the importance of timing in expanding to multiple markets. A someone who has built a successful e-commerce marketplace himself and invested in several more, James also shares the most innovative marketplace models in the market and how he believes the business model can be innovated.

Johnson Yeh discusses why he left his job at the summit of the gaming industry to pursue his long-time passion: circular economy and sustainability. In 2019 Johnson founded ROEHL to provide consumers with a more sustainable and convenient lifestyle, starting with a subscription-based home appliance service.

We sat down with Kamarul Muhamed, founder and CEO of Aerodyne Group, a world-leading drone-based enterprise solutions provider, to talk all things drones, the Uberization of agritech, how drone tech has created a new market for technology talents. We also discussed why Southeast Asia, once dominated by traditional agriculture, is so bullish on new technologies, and the wonderful future of the region’s home-grown unicorns.

The World Wide Web was the first big tech revolution. Mobile was the second and we think blockchain is now the third. This is a period where we're going to have a solid 10-year run of tremendous growth and adoption of this new technology. It's going to bring enormous changes to all sectors that the technology touches upon: entertainment, financial services, e-government, and more.

The open-source model has been a big catalyst for technology businesses across the world. While it is clear how they fit into other business models, it is still unclear what the business model behind an open-source business is. In this episode, we aim to answer that and more. We invited Neil Han, Head of APAC and EMEA for PingCAP, the first open-source unicorn in China, which raised 340million USD in total. Neil is a hardcore software person and a well-connected professional in the software industry across the globe with great operations and management skillset, looking forward to working with a fast-growing company and great leadership team to grow together. PingCAP raises $270M in Nov. 2020 to develop core technologies and advance the global expansion of its offerings! PingCAP is founded by the team that built TiDB, a world-leading open-source, cloud-native, distributed SQL/NewSQL database for elastic scale and real-time analytics, which is compatible with MySQL and enables companies to painlessly scale their business while keeping the underlying infrastructure simple and serve as a one-stop solution for all online transactions and analysis. PingCAP is the most valued NewSQL company on the planet!

India today is home to some of the most innovative and valuable startups in the world. With a thriving startup ecosystem that is seeing more and more foreign capital injection and innovation across the board from tech to business models, Indian startups are well positioned to take on the global startup ecosystem. Although the domestic market is already huge enough, more Indian SaaS startups are venturing out and expanding across borders. In today’s episode, we invite Sanjay Nath, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Blume Ventures, one of India’s leading early-stage venture funds. Sanjay also reprerepresents Blume on the boards of Arka Venture Labs and the Draper Venture Network. Blume focuses on Seed to Pre-Series A stages of funding and has made over 100 investments across its 10-year history across multiple funds. Sanjay has invested in and advises a wide portfolio of startups including GreyOrange Robotics, Dataweave, Locus, Tricog, LBB, Lulu, Lambdatest, TapChief (acquired by Unacademy), Nektar.ai, and Obviously.ai amongst others. What is the trajectory for Indian startups expanding abroad? How do they start in India and move to US and SEA? How can startups build and sell remotely and operate in a virtual world? What are the repercussions of localization when internationalization? Sanjay, as an active investor in the space, brings his experience in answering all these questions and more!

What does it take to launch a VC fund in China? What are the differences between RMB funds and USD funds? And how can VC funds exit themselves? We invited Chris Lerner, Managing Partner at MSA Capital, to join us to share his experience on starting and running a successful venture fund, and also how MSA Capital has supported startups to grow and expand to different markets. Founded in 2014, MSA Capital is an independent global private equity and venture capital firm with over $1.5 billion assets under management. Most notably, 60% of its 26 early stage investments have become super unicorns. We also extended the conversation from a “cross-border” perspective by discussing about the potential opportunities for foreign startups and foreign VCs to enter China.

While Southeast Asia remains one of the hottest markets in the region, South Asia is also catching up, especially with the likes of Bangladesh and Pakistan. The region is also home to some of the fastest-growing tech startups, and today, we venture down south to Bangladesh and talk to the co-founder and CEO of Pathao, Bangladesh's largest tech company which is valued at over $100 million. Pathao is the leading ride-sharing, on-demand logistics, and food delivery platform in Bangladesh. Today, its motorbike and car-hailing vertical alone serves five million riders across five cities in Bangladesh and Kathmandu in Nepal.

The increased showboating and “greenwashing” of the term “Impact Investment” has virtually led to the term being thrown around loosely: especially, as it is hard to gauge the tangible impact sometimes startups working in this domain bring. But, what exactly is impact investment? How different is the understanding of the term in developed countries compared to emerging markets? How can startups working in this domain find the sweet spot between profitability and impact? Is tangible impact more valuable than intangible ones? Or the other way around? These are some of the many questions that arise while trying to understand the impact of investment space. And in this episode, we bring a prominent guest whose experience across Asia and the US in the impact investment space makes her the perfect guest to answer these questions and more. In this episode, we are joined by Ilaria Chan, Advisor on Tech & Social Impact for Grab, one of Asia’s most prominent tech unicorns. Having started her career in investment banking with Goldman Sachs, today Ilaria is a global keynote speaker, private investor, and serves on the Board of Trustees of several humanitarian organizations. We talk all about impact investment and socially conscious startups and the investment ecosystem that revolves around them.