🎣🦐 This Company Is Set To Become Indonesia's Latest Unicorn

Happy Monday and Happy EID Mubarak to all my Muslim friends ☪️ Maaf Zahir & Batin ✨

This is micro digest, your SEA tech coach. We’re here to keep you productive during the holidays.

Here’s what we got for you:

• 🌊 The SEA - eFishery - Indonesia’s latest aquatech unicorn

• ⛵ SEAppets - Private equity activity in SEA saw a decline in deal value and count in 2022 compared to the previous year

• 💰 SEA Deals

• 🖼️ AI Image of the day

• 🐣 Tweet of the day

Markets 📈

The SEA 🌊

This aquatech startup is Indonesia’s latest unicorn. Isn’t that fintastic?

That’s enough fish pun for a day, I’ll tuna it down.

Ok sorry I’ll stop now 😂

If you think of a better pun, be sure to drop us a line.

Today, I’m talking about eFishery.

🤷‍♂️ Who is eFishery?

• Founded in 2013 by Gibran Huzaifah, eFishery is an aquaculture tech startup that develops products to help fish and shrimp farmers in Indonesia

• Gibran was attending an aquaculture class in college when his lecturer said that future restaurants will serve catfish

• That’s when he started rearing catfish but soon realized that feeding costs were substantial - 70% to 90% of total costs

• He then built a prototype for an automatic feeder and launched eFishery a year later

If you want to become an entrepreneur, you have to start from a small scale 😂

🎣 How it works?

• eFishery is a one-stop solution provider that has a variety of products to help fish and shrimp farmers like:

  • eFisheryku - Digitalize operations and provide assistance and recommendations from aquaculture experts

  • eFisheryFeeder Fish - Smart feeder for fish

  • Kabayan - Financing

  • eFisheryFeed - Fish Food Centre

  • Lapak Ikan - Marketplace for fish harvest

  • eFarm - Same as eFisheryky but for shrimps

  • eFisheryFeeder Shrimp - Smart feeder for shrimp

  • Diseases Prevention System

  • Lapak Udang - Marketplace for shrimp harvest

💰 Funding

• The company is in talks to raise USD 100 million in a fresh funding round led by the UAE-based G42 Global Expansion Fund, at a unicorn valuation of USD 1.2 billion

• eFishery has secured venture capital funding and bank loans to expand its markets outside of Indonesia and its top shareholders include Aqua-Spark, The Northstar Group, Wavemaker Partners and Go-Ventures

• The company caters to nearly 100,000 farmers and exports its products to China, Japan, Korea and several Middle Eastern countries and plans to double down on the US market

SEAppets ⛵

1. Silicon Valley's latest AI obsession, Auto-GPT uses OpenAI's text-generating models and a companion bot to perform tasks autonomously. It can interact with online apps, software and services and can be used to complete mundane tasks. However, it is limited in its abilities and users should use caution when using it due to potential errors and risks.

2. Grab, a Southeast Asian super app has partnered with the Malaysian Government to provide e-hailing drivers with PSV vocational licences. This partnership aims to address the shortage of PSV drivers in the country and has already seen 300 candidates (210 of them disabled) receive their licences from the 2,295 applicants.

3. Private equity activity in Southeast Asia (SEA) saw a decline in deal value and count in 2022 compared to the previous year, according to a Bain & Company report. Singapore and Indonesia continued to attract the most investment, but activity fell across all SEA countries. The internet and tech sector continued to lead in terms of deal volume, but opportunities exist in healthcare and energy transition. Despite the uncertainty, the long-term outlook for investment in SEA remains positive.

SEA Deals 💰

1. Singapore-based Oyika, a battery-swapping service for electric vehicles has secured Series B funding. The service bundles the motorbikes with a portable swap battery, a network of swap stations and a mobile app. The battery is brand-agnostic and works with most e-motorbike models in Southeast Asia. The battery is also IoT-enabled and theft-proof. In 2021, Oyika raised investment from Yinson Holdings' green technologies division.

2. Singapore-based document verification provider Accredify has closed its Series A funding round, co-led by SaaS-focused investor SIG Capital and Singapore-based VC firm iGlobe Partners. The company plans to use the new capital to expand its team and develop its SaaS solution. Founded in 2019, Accredify works with Singapore's Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) and the Ministry of Health. They had previously raised USD 2 million in 2021.

3. Betterdata, a Singapore-based programmable synthetic data company has raised an over-subscribed seed round of USD 1.65 million led by Asia-Pacific-based venture capital firm Investible. The funding will be used to launch Betterdata's product, enhance its technology stack and hire new staff. Their product differentiates from traditional data-sharing methods by using Generative AI and Privacy Engineering to generate synthetic data without destroying information and ensuring optimal data quality, risk and fairness. They have already entered into research and development partnerships and are being used by customers.

4. Cortical Labs, an Australian and Singapore-based AI startup has closed a USD 10 million pre-Series A funding round led by Horizons Ventures. The company will use the funding to accelerate the commercialisation and fulfil pre-orders of their Biological Intelligence Operating System (biOS), develop a Cortical Labs 1 (CL1) system for in-vitro cognitive testing and partner with UK-based biotech company bit.bio and academic partners at the Organoid Intelligence Alliance spearheaded by Johns Hopkins University.

5. Creador, a Malaysian private equity firm has acquired a 14.7% stake in CTOS Digital, a credit reporting agency based in Kuala Lumpur. This marks the firm's ninth year of investment in the company and they are confident of its growth potential. Creador recently exited its investment in MR D.I.Y. and is now looking to deploy 35-40% of its fifth fund to companies in India. The fifth fund raised $700 million to invest in both Southeast Asia and India.

🤝 In Collaboration with the Psychology of Business

AI Images of The Day 🖼️

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Tweet of The Day 🐣

That’s why it’s easier to join a community as an adult if you want to make friends.

That’s a wrap for today. See you all tomorrow! 👋

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