Asia Startup Pulse Chinaccelerator

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.