There are funding rounds, and then there are funding rounds. Zalora, a Rocket Internet fashion e-commerce venture, has today revealed that it has raised a massive USD 100M in venture capital from Summit Partners, Investment AB Kinnevik, Verlinvest, and Tengelmann Group.
Most of the investors are Rocket Internet regulars: Summit, Kinnevik, and Tengelmann have bankrolled Lazada before, while the latter has funded Zalora once. Verlinvest, a new — or previously low-key — participant, is a Belgian investment holding company.
The repeat investments portends well for Zalora’s prospects in Asia, a challenging market with relatively low basket sizes, tough infrastructural challenges, and market fragmention.
It shows that investors are confident that the business, despite enduring a loss of EUR 70M (USD 90M) in 2012, down-scaling in Taiwan, and a number of high-profile staff departures, will be able to weather the storm and emerge as the dominant fashion e-commerce player outside of China and India. Read more
Nitrous.IO (formerly Action.IO), a Singapore-based startup that makes setting up an Integrated Development Environment a snap, has just announced a USD 1M round led by Silicon Valley based Bessemer Venture Partners.
Draper Associates, CrunchFund, 500 Startups, TIBCO Software, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Singapore’s Golden Gate Ventures, and Peanut Labs co-founder and CTO Prosper Nwankpa also participated in this round. According to Golden Gate Ventures partner Vinnie Lauria, his firm put in less than USD 50k in this round, which was closed third-quarter of last year. Read more
Philippine startup incubator IdeaSpace has announced the ten winners of its national startup competition. The startups will each receive P500k (USD 12k) in seed funding and six months of incubation, where they will get office space, business operations support, and housing facilities for those not based in Metro Manila.
During the incubation period, the more promising startups could receive additional cash support from IdeaSpace of up to P5 million. Teams will also be introduced to other investors in Philippines, Silicon Valley, and other parts of the world. Read more
Ohanae, a Singapore startup that is offering enterprises and professionals a way to safeguard data on the cloud, has raised a six-digit sum from TNF Ventures, a Singapore-based early-stage fund.
While TNF is under the government’s Technology Incubation Scheme, which co-funds startups along with the private investor, all the money from this round is supplied by TNF.
Altogether, the startup has raised USD 2.4M since inception in 2007. It just received a grant from SPRING TECS, and they’re now seeking a Series A round of USD 5M.
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Silicon Valley-based Fenox Venture Capital has announced today that it has invested in IACC, a Japanese startup that is running a solar power marketplace based in Japan. The company has amassed USD 10M in revenue in the last fiscal year, representing a 500 percent year-on-year growth.
The marketplace, called Green-EnergyNavi, matches solar power products to consumers’ energy requirements. The website contains user reviews and cost estimates for a specific item, allowing consumers to select products that best meet their needs. Read more
TribeHired, a social recruitment website started by a team from Malaysia, announced that it has closed SGD 696K (USD 560K) in early stage funding led by TNF Ventures through the Singapore government’s Technology Incubation Scheme. Angel investors Ben Ball and Ben Chew also contributed.
A graduate of startup accelerator JFDI.Asia‘s inaugural bootcamp, TribeHired is currently in beta with several thousand job seekers in Malaysia. It is also being used by companies such as Zalora, Lazada, fellow JFDI.Asia grad Flocations, and Brandtology. Read more
AdzCentral, a Singapore startup building an online targeted media buying platform, announced today that it has raised SGD 4M (USD 3.2M) from Electric Sheep Capital and Digital Media Partners. It is a relatively huge round in the region considering that Asia is facing a Series A crunch.
The funds will be used for expansion first in Asia-Pacific and then Asia, focusing on sales, marketing, and product development. It currently has a team of about 20, mostly based in Singapore, but it also has employees in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Read more
Canva, an Australia-based startup that is aiming to disrupt the desktop design industry, has announced today that it has raised USD 3M in seed funding from Australian and US investors, including Matrix Partners, InterWest Partners and 500 Startups.
The other participants in this deal are: angel investor Bill Tai, Blackbird Ventures, Director of Engineering at Facebook Lars Rasmussen, Yahoo! CFO Ken Goldman, and former Seek co-founder Paul Bassat and partner at Square Peg Ventures. Commercialisation Australia, a government funding scheme, also contributed in this round. Read more
Nonstop Games, a Singapore and Finland-based developer of mobile games, has announced today that it has raised USD 2.9M in early stage funding from Creandum, the Nordic investor in Spotify, and Lifeline Ventures, a Finland-based early stage investor that has funded successful Finnish games company Supercell.
The startup (formerly GamesMadeMe) also unveiled its first mobile game, Heroes of Honor, and revealed that it will be setting up an office in Silicon Valley. It currently has 11 employees in Singapore. Read more
Singapore restaurant booking site Chope has raised a USD 2.5M round led by Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) and two other investors, which are undisclosed. The news was first reported by TechCrunch and announced by SPH to the Singapore Exchange.
SPH, which invested SGD 1.81M (USD 1.45M), now owns 27.8 percent of the startup, which gives Chope a valuation of USD 5.2M. That’s about half of HungryGoWhere, which was acquired by SingTel for about USD 9.4M last year.
While the investment sum is substantial, Chope’s co-founders Clowie Tan and Arrif Ziaudeen appeared to have give up quite a significant chunk of equity — 48 percent to be exact.
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