Rebright Partners, a Japan-based incubator and one of the parties behind Indonesian VC firm Batavia Incubator has recently launched its new investment fund for startups in Southeast Asia. It has secured two investment deals with the first being made to online ad platform Adskom, which we talked about last week. We spoke with Rebright Partners CEO Takeshi Ebihara (pictured right) to find out more about the fund.

Ebihara first explained that there will be no conflict of interest with another VC firm Batavia Incubator. Batavia Incubator will focus on Indonesian startups with an eye on the domestic market, while Rebright Partners itself will focus on startups who are looking to target multiple countries in Southeast Asia. He explains further about the fund:

Our fund LP investors are Japanese well track recorded entrepreneurs and Corporations. So that the portfolio company can expect LPs wisdom insights and networks to grow own business. In that sense, the fund can be said Super Entrepreneurs Fund.

Regarding the kind of startups they target, Ebihara says that he wants to invest in internet startups as well as those covering the mobile space like media, e-commerce, and mobile apps. Ebihara prefers consumer internet service primarily, and that investing in the B2B business model is a rarity. He admits that Adskom is one of such rare cases. Does Ebihara consider himself as having a hands-on approach to his startup portfolios? He says yes:

In most of investment cases we take the lead position and in some cases our partners will be seated on board. Though we do not deny being in the non-lead minority sometimes.

Talking about the startup scene in Southeast Asia

Ebihara himself said that he has been watching the region closely as mentor for the Founder’s Institute in offices like Jakarta, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, and Kuala Lumpur, and that he likes what he sees. The scene around the region is getting hotter, Bangkok’s current situation reminds him of Jakarta two years back, there are more and more startup accelerators and co-working spaces spotted in Kuala Lumpur. “It is worth trying to find young talented hackers and entrepreneurs in this region,” said Ebihara.

He ends it with an invitation: “If you are a startup or entrepreneur trying to cover large Southeast Asian Internet and mobile space, we are now accepting applications.”

#13:59: Kee Lock has nurtured two billion-dollar companies, so our guest interviewer, Darius Cheung, asks how to build a billion-dollar business. Kee Lock says there are invisible barriers to entry and difficulties, but there are opportunities all across the world to do that. In terms of success factors, he says that it’s all down to the entrepreneur and the staff. Then, the ability to change enough to adapt to shifting markets and technologies. “Ultimately, it’s all about the team”.

#14:05: Regulations are often the biggest barriers, he says. Telcos are an example of where regulations and high prices – previously $1 per minute for SG-US phonecalls – inspire innovations. That’s part of the story behind Kee’s MediaRing business.

#14:08: But he admits to mistakes with MediaRing, like when it ditched PC-to-PC calling. That perhaps caused MediaRing to lose out to Skype. He and his team listened to analysts, Kee says, rather than listeners.

#14:12: However, it’s not really about money – the startup is about a bond among the team, “about building something great” and keeping the right startup culture.

#14:13: What are his favorite portfolio startups? Kee first points out that the VC task his hard – he has to be a sort of fortune-teller. Even after two or three years, he can’t be sure how the startup is performing and new challenges always emerge. So, no names named.

#14:14: Is there a series A crunch in Asia, as hype seems to suggest. He says that NRF does a great job to give funding and often gives around $1 million, which takes them up to the next level. But, for the next levels, you’re talking ten-million-plus levels, taking you to needing $50 million or more in funding for major expansion and capital-heavy work. He concedes that late-stage funding is tougher to find, as well as medium-stage startups. He calls that “the valley of death” where the company is operating well but has no money to scale. That’s sad, he says.

#14:20: Vertex has put three rounds of funding into Reebonz, the luxury flash sales site. At first he called it “a stupid company” but then saw the virtue in it, and at first Reebonz addressed Singapore and Malaysia well. That’s when the first input came.

#14:24: Reebonz is also a good example of keeping ahead of the competition, Kee says. It’s a bit like martial art Tai Qi. It seems easy to copy, but it’s very hard to master.

#14:27: There are still more startup opportunities in social and other areas. Though Vertex tends not to invest in that area.

#14:29: Which leads Kee back to the hardest part of the job: seeing trends. That requires a mix of objective and subjective – data and feelings about the market and where it’s heading. Look for opportunities in growth areas. Like Vertex looking into mobile components and smartphone usage grows.

#14:31: Vertex invests in six, seven, or eight startups per year. Typically mostly in China. Hopefully, he says, in Indonesia soon – but not yet.

#14:32: Vertex does co-invest, he says, in response to an audience question. In terms of startups themselves, he looks for those in the business for the long-haul.

#14:33: “A good entrepreneur needs to be arrogant – but also listen.” That’s hard to do. The arrogance is mainly confidence, he says, which is needed in the industry.

#14:39: What drives you, Darius asks? Kee Lock says that it’s possible to create great companies if you’re passionate. He points out that Singapore Airlines didn’t exist 35 minutes ago. It’s the same in sport: whoever wants to win will stand out from those who don’t want to lose. But those striving to win will succeed in the end. “We need more want-to-win companies”.

#14:41: Thanks for following the live blog.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

It was only three months ago that 360Buy, China’s second-largest online store, wrapped up $400 million in funding. Today 360Buy has confirmed an even bigger injection of capital with a fifth round of funding worth $700 million. [UPDATED: The April 2011 round turns out to have been the largest ever, worth $1.5 billion in total, with $500 million of that from Russian investors, DST; the headline and first paragraph have been amended to reflect this].

It means that 360Buy, which is second in the B2C e-commerce sector in China to Alibaba’s Tmall site, has raised well over $2.5 billion since it first got investment back in 2007.

The massive new round saw participation once again from Ontario Teachers’ Retirement Fund (OTPP) along with new input from Riyadh-based Kingdom Holdings, which was founded by Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud.

360Buy’s previous round effectively valued the store at $7.25 billion, but there’s no indication of its current valuation.

360Buy told Chinese media that the newest financing will be used to bolster day-to-day operations, as well as to build up its fledgling logistics service.

CEO and founder Liu Qiangdong has indicated in the past that 2013 was likely a good time for an IPO, but it’s not clear if the new investment would delay that timeline.

China’s e-commerce sector is marked by a ferocious burn rate for companies, as well as vicious price wars. 360Buy has diversified into a few areas where monetizing is a bit simpler in the past few months, such as by shipping some products to overseas customers, and launching an online music store within China.

(Source: iHeiMa – article in Chinese)

What should startups want in an investor?

Money, smarts, rolodex – sure. But that’s not enough anymore.

I want my VC to do marketing for me too.

Pimp my startup

Ron Conway is certainly no lesser investor than Dave McClure.

But there are 100x more startup people and early adopters in Asia who know 500 Startup from his many tours of duty. (that is certainly true in Croatia too).

More importantly, amongst those are hackers and hustlers I want to hire – people who may never have heard of Ron or SVAngels.

VCs like First Round Capital routinely pimp their startups out, such as through their Holiday Video which has more than 100,000 views.

(FRC Partner Josh Kopelman, the genius who spent $100k to get Halfway, Oregon to rename itself to Half.com and later selling the company for 300M, makes a pretty cool Psy)

Credibility gone wild

VCs lend you their credibility, which is incredibly important.

It used to be about whether the investor is a smart investor with proven good bets. It used to mean Doer, Moritz and Valentine.

No longer. Today, in the world of fans, followers and Klout scores, credibility takes on a whole new meaning.

The fact that Ashton Kutcher can get into deals that even top tier investors can’t (like AirBnB or Fab) says something about the value of investor-as-marketer.

As startups become faster and leaner in a flatter more competitive world, a plug by Ashton on Two and a Half Men, or to his 13.5 million twitter followers could easily be worth as much as the network of a Silicon Valley kingmaker (especially for a consumer company like Foursquare).

You might argue – what credibility could a Hollywood actor command? Well, the fact is, in the eyes of the 20-year-old college kid who is my target user, Ashton’s got way more credibility than Eric Schmidt. Besides, it turns out Ashton Kutcher is a really smart investor too!

If I had to pick between Ashton and Doer, I’d have to admit it could be a hard choice today. (I’ll pick Charlie Sheen over them both though, just saying)

Moral of the story – as a startup, my problem nowadays is a lot less about money or contacts, and a lot more about distribution and adoption. So VCs, please build your brand and learn how to pimp your startups out.

For all the horsepower behind every general search engine in the world, it seems that consumers are increasingly finding product search engines useful. And that’s part of the reason why India’s Pricebaba has attracted an undisclosed amount of seed funding yesterday.

Pricebaba focuses on finding good prices among offline retailers for mobile phones. It differs from some of its product search equivalents in the region by focusing on listing India’s numerous brick-and-mortar phone resellers – not online stores So far it has the details of shops in Mumbai, Pune, and Delhi, and the investment will allow the startup to expand that to 10 cities during the course of this year.

A product listing on Pricebaba.

Pricebaba’s seed funding was led by Pune-based angel investor and entrepreneur Karamveer Singh, with participation from a good amount of other established businesspeople.

Founder Annkur P Agarwal explains to TechinAsia that retailers can get their listings for free within Pricebaba, and he believes that this curated shopping approach – not the usual crowdsourced one – is what consumers really want. The team believes that shoppers “are confused with the wide variety of mobiles” and other gadgets out there, and want some slimmed-down listings that are searchable within their budgets. With tech purchases researched and planned for weeks and months, a simple resource is, they believe, what’s needed.

Annkur insists that Pricebaba’s method is scalable as it moves into new cities or new product categories. Likening its listings to those of the India-based food and restaurant guide Zomato, the founder reckons that it costs the search site not much more than US$2 to keep each store listing fresh for a year.

As for venturing into searching for gadgets for sale on e-commerce sites, like we’ve seen with Telunjuk in Indonesia or the massive eTao in China, Annkur explains to us:

We have thought about it, but there is a huge disparity between online and offline buyers. If we hear enough users ask for it, we would consider it. So far that isn’t the case.

One other investor, Dinesh Tejwani, likes the current approach, saying in the startup’s announcement:

Annkur and team has come up with a unique idea of connecting mobile phone buyers with mobile shops, thereby ensuring lowest price for the consumer and more business for the seller.

Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures has had a Taiwan office for well over a year, and now the VC firm has yet another local site on its portfolio. This morning CyberAgent Ventures revealed its investment in Fashionguide, which it calls Taiwan’s largest beauty and cosmetics-oriented social networking service, but no funding sum was disclosed.

Fashionguide is essentially a socially-equipped clothing and make-up portal that has a mix of news and lots of user-submitted product reviews and enthusiast fashion blogs. CyberAgent Ventures’ Catherine Chang explains to TechinAsia that Fashionguide, although it looks fresh, has been around since 1997 and is one of Taiwan’s top 100 sites by Alexa’s rankings, with millions of monthly unique visitors.

The fashion site will use the funding, according to today’s announcement, to launch a flurry of new sections and services “targeting related women’s lifestyle categories” such as catalog shopping and hair design. The biggest boost will go to the recently launched ‘Ai Piao Liang‘ (literally “Love Beauty”) feature, which is a Pinterest-like social network for fashion and accessories. The hope of the CyberAgent VC office in Taiwan is that Fashionguide can “become the leading women’s lifestyle portal in Taiwan.”

Catherine tells us that the social portal has no current plans for expansion outside of the island. Fashionguide did venture into mainland China a few years ago but “found that market difficult to monetize.” So the focus will remain on Taiwan “where ARPU is higher.” The site monetizes with a mix of advertising and referral links, just as we’ve seen with Meilishuo in China.

CyberAgent Ventures’ last funding round was in the Taiwanese social recipes startup iCook.

Today’s announcement details that the Fashionguide investment “was made through CA-JAIC China Internet Fund II, which is jointly managed by CyberAgent Ventures and Japan Asia Investment Co.”

With China’s e-commerce market consisting of so many sites, the rather unique Mizhe.com is making a business out of being an online shopping guide that offers discounts for shoppers on top Chinese e-tailers. That hasn’t gone unnoticed by IDG Capital Partners, which has invested just over 10 million RMB (US$1.6 million) in a series A funding round for Mizhe.

The investment news was revealed this week, but Mizhe founder Zhang Lianglun said that the IDG backing was wrapped up last summer and the funds have already come through.

As with social pinboard sites like Mogujie), Mizhe’s shopping guide monetizes from referral links to e-commerce sites such as Taobao, Amazon China, and many more. Mizhe claims to generate over 100 million RMB ($16 million) in sales via its platform, though it’s not clear how much revenue can be squeezed from all those referrals. The site says it now has millions of users signed up, and hundreds of thousands of daily active shoppers.

The Mizhe frontpage, which emphasizes getting discounts on China’s top e-commerce sites. Click to enlarge.

The discounts-oriented site claims to offer as much as 50 percent off some purchases, but most price-cuts will be just a few percent. The startup – founded in August 2011 – also has coupons, which are the focus of its Miquan.com sister site.

Founder Zhang Lianglun knows the e-commerce business, being a former employee of Alibaba, the company that runs Taobao and Tmall, the nation’s top two online malls.

Other Chinese e-commerce sites in IDG’s portfolio include top travel site Ctrip, and the Amazon-esque Dangdang. IDG also led the recent massive series C round in the afore-mentioned social shopping site Mogujie.

(Source: Kuailiyu – article in Chinese)

And this little piggy went wee wee wee all the way to series A funding.

Our first two bits of Chinese startup funding news of 2013 could not have gone to companies with weirder names. Beijing-based Xiaozhu.com (meaning “little piggy” in Chinese) is actually a short-term rentals site in the mold of Airbnb. Today Xiaozhu revealed that it brought home the bacon recently with “nearly US$10 million” in series A funding.

Likewise, the similar Mayi.com (meaning “ants”) disclosed that it had been spun off as an independent entity from its parent company, Ganji, and also secured about $10 million in backing. Mayi’s round is led by VantagePoint, with participation from BlueRun Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

The growth and progress of Xiaozhu is pretty impressive for a travel site that only launched in August of last year. The investors in its initial major round haven’t been revealed yet. Xiaozhu has properties in 13 Chinese cities thus far. But it’s not just focused on China’s middle-classes and fancy homes (like the one pictured above), and even has listings in places like student dorms for a few bucks per night.

A property on Mayi. Click to enlarge.

As for Mayi (pictured right), it claims to have surpassed 300,000 rented room nights in its first year of operations. But if its commission is 10 percent, then it’s difficult to see how short-term rentals can actually be profitable for startups once they’ve splashed out on prohibitive marketing campaigns.

The good news for these two curiously-named travel rivals comes eight months after series A funding for the site that will surely be the nemesis of both sites: Tujia. It attracted interest and funds from China’s biggest online travel company, Ctrip, and followed that up by adding over 2,000 overseas listings in conjunction with its American co-investor HomeAway.

The double investment whammy for Xiaozhu and Mayi is sure to shine a spotlight on the Chinese holiday rentals industry, which has so far been overshadowed by a lot more dynamism in Southeast Asia, with lots of recent action from Travelmob, 9Flats, and Airbnb itself.

(Source: Donews – article in Chinese)

Thailand’s new M8VC fund has 300 million baht (nearly US$10 million) to invest in local startups next year, so it’ll be a new VC player to watch. Myself and the Thumbsup team had the chance to talk to M8VC’s Pornthep “Vincent” Sethiwan, who’s also the co-founder of Launch Pad, one of Thailand’s top co-working spaces.

Started just last week, M8VC is an incubator, accelerator, and technology investment firm with its headquarters and its incubation center in Bangkok.

Vincent started by saying, “Venture capital and angel investing are powerful forces for change. It allows individuals to pursue their dreams that improve society and makes the world a better place.” And so M8VC would like to contribute to the Thai startup community and be an agent of change. Vincent adds:

It is not easy for passionate entrepreneurs to thrive in the Southeast Asia [SEA] market. The way things are done in SEA is vastly different than in the West. Many talented young entrepreneurs do not have the needed experience or networks to take their venture to success. This is exactly where we come in to help.

M8VC HQ. Click to enlarge

Each founder of M8VC has previously started up ventures, and each has experienced successes and failures first-hand. We are confident in our ability to help lead our incubated portfolio companies to success.

Fellow founder Krisd Aksornwong tells us:

M8VC will assist from the start, analyzing each team’s idea and business plan continuously until the prototype is produced, and real products come to market. We share our vision in pitching or selling an idea, and create a financial structure to help mobilize big funds for expanding to markets abroad. We have experts from each field to look after every stage. Since your idea is the most essential aspect of your business, we at M8VC are doing our best to protect the owner of the idea without considering whether it will turn to mutual cooperation later, or not.

M8VC will focus on fairly small amounts of seed money, and startups under its wing can utilize M8VC’s networks both within Thailand and abroad – that includes entrepreneurs, financiers, and investors who all have, we’re told, a great track record of success.

The core M8VC team consists of Vincent and Krisd, plus Shakrit Chanrungsakul, Pawoot Pongvitayapanu, Kit Arunanondchai, Sua Kanjanasakchai, Varut Bulakul, and Permsiri Tiyavutiroj.

This is yet is another movement in the startup ecosystem in Thailand to keep your eyes on.

How the 8 Securities trading dashboard will look for Japanese users.

We’ve been following the progress of Hong Kong-based 8 Securities for about a year, and the socially-oriented stocks trading portal has done a lot in that time. The latest news from 8 Securities is two-fold. Firstly, it has closed another $3 million funding round last week, coming quite a short time after earlier rounds of $1.5 million and $8 million. CEO Mikaal Abdulla explains to us today that the team has “100 percent follow-on participation from our original eight investors.”

The second bit of news is that 8 Securities will open an office in Tokyo in March 2013, and will launch for Japanese users pretty soon. This takes the startup global into what it calls, along with its Hong Kong HQ, the two most important markets for stock trading in Asia. Mikaal reckons that Asia has 80 million online investing accounts among its citizens, leaving it with huge scope for growth. The interface in the top image is how its trading dashboard will appear to Japanese users.

As for 8 Securities’ own progress, the startup says it now has “55,000 accounts holding $1 billion USD in assets with us.”

Co-founder Mathias Helleu explains what Asian investors are interested in on its service:

The biggest trend we see in Asia is customers investing in the US companies they interact with daily. They see the growth opportunity of companies like Google, Apple, and Starbucks in their own markets and it is no coincidence these are some of the most popular stocks. Customer can invest in their local market or the US, all from a single account.

And with that enthusiasm, the startup is keen to disrupt US brokerages where, Mikaal insists, there has been “very little technology innovation in the past decade.”

The trading platform, which features social integration and an API for third-party developers to create their own widgets, came online in April 2012, but we first saw it in action at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing in November of last year, where 8 Securities was one of the Startup Battlefield finalists.

The Burpple crew at OpenWebAsia 2012 in Hainan, China, this week.

The social food app Burpple has been served a double order of good news today, the largest of which is $500,000 in seed funding, which is the startup’s first-ever funding round. It’s led by Neoteny Labs, with QuestVC also providing some backing.

Neoteny Labs has backed lots of early-stage startups in this region, as well as Path and video site Viki; while QuestVC, led by 55Tuan’s James Tan, will also be able to help out, says Burpple co-founder Dixon Chan today, with “growth strategy in China and Southeast Asia.” The funding will be used to build up its app and team even further, as well as “scale growth opportunities across a variety of markets and platforms on the mobile and on the web.” Hopefully that’ll also help speed up its in-the-works Android app.

Indeed, Burpple has already expanded into China, and now claims to have users in over 3,300 cities around the world.

The second bit of good news for the Singaporean startup is that it has been hailed as one of the ‘Top 10 Startups in Asia’ at the OpenWebAsia 2012 event which was held on Monday on the tropical island of Hainan in southern China. One other Burpple co-founder, Elisha Ong, said today:

Burpple’s iPhone app. Click to enlarge.

We’re humbled and grateful to receive this award. It’s been an exciting and favorable journey and we know that this is just the tip of the iceberg of greater things to come!

Also in contention in the top 10 at OpenWebAsia this year was the social app for couples, Between, which is made in Korea.

The Burpple app for iPhone is in the iTunes Store.

Yes, this is the third bit of news for a China-based wine e-commerce site in as many days. This time it’s the turn of WineNice to count some cash as it wraps up series B funding thought to be worth over RMB 100 million (US$15.8 million). No financial details have been given, but CEO Lu Yide, teased the investment news a few months ago and also mentioned that exact figure.

Rumors in the industry suggest, however, that the funding is led by the N M Rothschild Group, the investment arm of the centuries-old Rothschild family empire that also runs Château Mouton Rothschild and Château Lafite. That’s because WineNice has suggested that it’ll reveal its source of funds at a Rothschild event in China on the evening of December 10th.

WineNice’s funding will be used to to build up both its online B2C infrastructure and its offline “experience stores” that now number just over a 100 across China.

The site started in 2008, one of the pioneers of premium wine e-tailing in China. WineNice saw RMB 150 million ($23.7 million) in sales revenue last year, and aims for this to grow to RMB 1 billion ($158 million) in revenue within two to three years.

Earlier this week we saw WangJiu launch as a high-end rival to WineNice (and others like Jiuxian and YesMyWine), and Vinehoo raised a more modest round of funding.

[Source: QQ Finance - article in Chinese]

The newly-expanded EatAds founder crew: (L-R) Nigel, Dhruv, John.

We’re seeing a great proliferation in online marketplaces in Asia this year, and here’s another one that’s blossoming. Singapore-based EatAds is a marketplace for the buying and selling of outdoor advertising space in Asia and Europe, and it has announced today that the startup has an undisclosed sum of seed funding from Crystal Horse Investments, along with some angel investor backing. Plus, it’s also “currently preparing to raise the next funding round of SG$600,000” (US$493,000).

When we last looked at EatAds in September of last year, it was expanding aggressively across Asia. Now we find that the traditional ads marketplace has listings in 16 countries, including as far afield as the US and the UK.

But the startup admits it was, in its own words, “dormant but functioning” for the last year. Now, however, it is revitalized with two new co-founders – Dhruv Sahgal and Nigel Hembrow – alongside the original, John Fearon. You might recognize John from his startup efforts after EatAds, namely Dropmyemail and Dropmysite, both of which have been growing quickly in the past year – and taking up a lot of his time.

An EatAds representative tells us that the site currently has one office based in Singapore, and will eventually expand overseas.

The revamped EatAds crew believes that the offline ads market is riddled with inefficiencies, and is really hard for businesses to navigate. Nigel points out in today’s announcement that there’s “60 percent occupancy in outdoor advertising in India,” so it’s clearly a broken system. Dhruv chips in to say:

Around Asia, many people don’t know how to buy billboards, who to contact, and what are the prices – there are too many barriers. And in addition we are making it much easier for traditional buying agencies to serve their clients.

Being big fans of both alcohol and startups, we’re pleased to hear of yet more funding for a Chinese wine e-commerce site. This time it’s Vinehoo that has pulled in RMB 5 million (US$800,000) – though the investor has not been revealed.

Vinehoo’s funding news comes just a few days after the launch of China’s priciest and glitziest online wine mall, and three months after a much more substantial $32 million in investment for rival Jiuxian.

But Vinehoo is different from those others in being as much a social network as a B2C e-commerce site. Indeed, it started in 2008 as an online forum for wine connoisseurs, and its premium wine sales only began in 2010. The site does limited-time flash sales, which help to reduce costs both for itself and for consumers. Now the site has over 100,000 users, and it’s on course to bring in RMB 10 million ($1.59 million) in sales revenue in 2012.

A flash sale of wine on the Vinehoo site. Click to enlarge.

That’s not a huge amount, and perhaps all its figures would be higher if the website focused more on its flash sales, and less on news and user-generated content. Indeed, it might escape the notice of new visitors that Vinehoo even sells anything.

In terms of flash sales of good wines, Vinehoo is up against more focused opposition, such as Moooton and TasteV.

Sales of alcohol online is expected to reach $2 billion in China by 2014.

[Source: 36Kr - article in Chinese]

It’s not easy to be a young venture capitalist (VC) in Southeast Asia.

I know it because I’ve been one for the past three years at Neoteny Labs. Fred Wilson, who is managing partner at Union Square Ventures and an investor in our fund, would readily agree. As he wrote earlier this year, “startups are a great place to be in your 20s and 30s. VC is a great place to be in your 40s and 50s.” I pored over Fred’s article the first time I saw it, and read it countless times in the weeks after. His article has become my muse as I ponder about my next few years.

I never asked to become a VC. It was a series of locally optimal decisions I made, interspersed with serendipity, which got me to where I am today. My interest in startup ecosystems as a junior officer with the Industry Development division of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) spurred me to take up Peng T. Ong’s offer to join his skunkworks at Infocomm Investments in mid-2007. I spent two years at Infocomm Investments helping venture-backed startups set up software engineering teams in Singapore. In February 2009, YC co-founder Paul Graham shared his views on jumpstarting the startup scene in a city in a blog post; we had been executing an equivalent strategy a good 16 months earlier, in the hopes of accelerating Singapore’s startup ecosystem development. Making a career out of venture capital was the furthest thing on my mind given that I still had three more years before I completed my scholarship bond with the Singapore government.

It was serendipity that brought Joi Ito and me together at his Creative Commons office in San Francisco, and serendipity that reunited us in Singapore when he had a long Singapore layover in mid-2009. But I get ahead of myself; more on that in a bit.

I found it disingenuous to call myself a VC when I only made a grand total of one venture investment in my two years at Infocomm Investments. I figured I needed to learn from the pros, and after being rejected by Vertex and IDG Southeast Asia, joined the Singapore office of Walden International for what would have been a two-year private sector stint. I ended up spending five months with Walden before breaking my scholarship bond with IDA and raising the cash to pay off my bond’s liquidated damages, so I could take up Joi’s offer to work at Neoteny Labs with him.

If it is hard for entrepreneurs to raise risk capital in Southeast Asia, it is even harder for VCs to raise capital for their fund. I had no track record and could not have done it without Joi. We raised US$5 million and invested in 24 startups in the two years after May 2010, leading 13 investments in Southeast Asia and US and co-investing in 11 others. I represented the fund on the boards of eight of our investments. Some of our portfolio companies appear to have traction, while four have since ceased operations. I expect a few to run out of cash in the months ahead, and hope for the rest to do a lot better.

Youth has its benefits, but I’ve since learnt that being a young VC in Southeast Asia is a lot harder than if you’re a young VC in the US. Kevin Kinsella, who is founder and managing director of Avalon Ventures and also an investor in Neoteny Labs, recently asked me how good I thought my crystal ball gazing was. It didn’t take long for me to admit that I’m much improved than when I first began, but can probably still do better. There’s good reason why Kevin is on to his tenth fund at an initial close of US$201.6 million only two years after closing Avalon’s 9th fund, while I’ll most likely not be able to secure investor interest for funds of any sort at all. Kevin is now in his 60s, while I’m only 31.

We were at the Jersey Boys’ gala night at the Marina Bay Sands two weeks ago and I was only able to recognize three of the 20-odd songs that were performed, a stark contrast to Kevin’s enthusiastic head-nodding and feet-tapping throughout the Broadway musical. Kevin’s 30-odd extra years goes beyond his musicality, giving him a keener awareness of how trends will play out over time, the wisdom of lessons gleaned from past mistakes and being a better judge of character. Prospective Southeast Asian investors would probably feel that their money is in safer hands when the general partner has more white hair and decades of experience under his or her belt.

Like Fred said, I made my fair share of rookie mistakes over the past three years. I should have spoken less and listened more. I should have taken less offense and not fought with entrepreneurs over meaningless things.

There are some aspects I think young VCs can be better at without needing extra decades under our belt, but others remain firmly beyond our yoke of control. There’s a lack of critical mass of individuals who’ve made enough money from tech in Southeast Asia and are passionate enough to plough their time and money back into the ecosystem. Entrepreneurs bemoan a series A funding gap, while accelerators and VCs work hard at raising money from investors with little to show for their efforts. Things are getting better, but it will take longer still. In the absence of proven funding and exit pathways, we must continue to get stuck in, seeking out and amplifying the positive deviance within the Southeast Asian tech ecosystem.

Only then can we, the Southeast Asian tech diaspora, be amongst the boats lifted by the rising tide that is Southeast Asia’s demographic dividend.

Singapore-based incubator Red Dot Ventures has announced that it’s ploughing S$600,000 (US$490,000) of seed funding into compatriot startup The Stakeholder Company. Founded last year, The Stakeholder Company, is a data-loving, influence-mapping solution for large corporations to visualize their corporate or market structure – or that of their rivals.

The Stakeholder Company – let’s call it TSC for short – describes itself more succinctly in this pitch from the founder:

This is CRM meets six degrees of separation meets big data issue mining. Essentially it’s your stakeholders relationship mapping on demand, cutting edge intel at your fingertips, and it saves our customers literally years of building the right stakeholder network.

It has lots of major brands across many sectors as its clients, including the likes of HP, Nokia Siemens, and chemical corporation Syngenta.

Despite the global customer base of TSC, it currently has little more than 30 staffers across 5 country offices. The founder is Terence Lyons, who formerly worked in a similar context at Microsoft as the ‘global stakeholder engagement lead’. From Singapore, he tells us some plans for the cash:

The funding will be used primarily to build our V2 solution portfolio [for data management] and increase the size of our dev team. That team has a big program of rapid releases planned over the next four months that cover mobile apps (iOS, etc), new big data mining algorithms, network visualization, etc.

Asked about expanding further to get closer to TSC’s clients, Terence replied:

Presently we are two full-time staff in Singapore (four by January), 28 in India, one in Australia, one in France, and one in the UK. We grew 400 percent this year so, yes, expansion is definitely on the cards and we should be opening a London office in Q1 next year to take advantage of our momentum there. Typically this brings us closer to the HQ’s of our clients though in reality we work on many projects across many countries so it’s the deciders with the budget that we try and stay close to.

Regular readers might recall that Red Dot Ventures is one of eight incubators inducted into the Singaporean government’s Technology Incubation Scheme (TIS) earlier this year. The incubator’s previous investment was a similar seed sum put into digital security startup Innova Technology last month.

A new specialist e-commerce site in the form of Bilna.com launches today in Indonesia, and it comes prepared with seed funding from both CyberAgent Ventures and East Ventures [1]. The online store sells everything that could be needed for babies and infants – and also the mothers – such as food and milk formula, clothing, toys, accessories, and maternity skincare products.

One of the two co-founders of Bilna is Ferry Tenka, who’s formerly co-founder and CEO of Groupon Disdus. Ferry tells us that the team is primarily himself and Eka Himawan, formerly an investment banker at Barclays. The financial details of the funding cannot be revealed.

Ferry explains to us what inspired Indonesia’s newest online product vertical:

We have a great passion in the world of Indonesia’s e-commerce. We believe that in a few years time, the market of e-commerce in Indonesia will be very big. We have also learnt that more than 65 percent of online shoppers in Indonesia are female, thus we believe that baby and mom related products are the right market to target and yet there is no established online player in this space. […]

Bilna homepage – click to enlarge.

We are going to be really aggressive and dominate this space. The value proposition of Bilna.com will be the wide range of products and world-class customer experience. We will ensure fast delivery and best customer service.

So, with the CyberAgent Ventures and East Ventures backing, Bilna is aiming to be the top specialist site of its kind in the country. The site has come online today with 2,000 products already on offer, and is giving away free shipping during its launch week.

Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures last month ploughed funds into Taiwanese social recipes startup iCook, and East Ventures has been busy recently putting seed funding into Indonesian flights search engine Traveloka.

GGV Capital, perhaps spurred on by its new US$625 million fund that focuses on China, has invested in the local recipes sharing startup Douguo.com. This second round of funding for Douguo is worth $8 million, and was only announced today despite being finalized in August.

Social recipes sites are a growing trend, and are doing especially well in Asia. The early success of Japan’s Cookpad.com is proving inspiring, and last month we also saw Taiwan’s iCook raise funds from CyberAgent Ventures.

Douguo has apps for iPhone and Android, and claims to have six million users who have uploaded 10,000 recipes so far. Its first major round was led by China’s Shanda, but the size of that investment was never revealed.

GGV has backed lots of Chinese startups – like Meilishuo or the recently IPO’d YY – as well as local web giants such as Alibaba and Tudou.

[Source: Donews; via Technode]

[UPDATE 1: This was all confirmed by the company later in the day. The story's text has been amended to reflect this just in the first and final paragraphs].

Earlier this year we suggested that 360Buy, China’s second-largest B2C e-commerce site, was focusing on a major new funding round rather than prepping a US IPO. And that is now a reality today with earlier rumors on ChinaByte being confirmed by the company that it has secured series D funding worth $400 million.

The huge fourth round of funding for 360Buy is led by Ontario Teachers’ Retirement Fund (OTPP), with participation from the Tiger Fund. As large as the investment amount is, it effectively values 360Buy at $7.25 billion, which is a lot less than the $10 billion or more that the e-tailer was pegged at after its $500 million injection from DST in April of last year. Indeed, means 360Buy’s valuation has been slashed by a quarter. [UPDATE 2: A DST spokesperson has reached out to clarify that, at the point of DST's investment in 360Buy in June 2011, "360Buy was valued at $6 billion" - and not $10 billion, a figure which was bandied about last year. So the suggestion here (though DST cannot confirm the size of its stake) is that 360Buy's valuation has actually grown].

Ontario Teachers’ Retirement Fund is Canada’s third-largest retirement fund. Bloomberg reported last week that the OTPP is planning to open a Hong Kong office in 2013 as a part of its strategy to diversify the group’s investments.

This summer I asked what on earth 360Buy is truly worth, amidst wildly fluctuating numbers of its eventual evaluation when it finally lists publicly. Some in the e-commerce industry in China reckon that 360Buy should not be evaulated on the same price-to-sales ratio as Amazon, since 360Buy is in a much less stable a position compared to Amazon in the US and many other markets. To cut a long story short, some industry experts reckon that a valuation of $5 to $6 billion is closer to the mark.

360Buy confirmed the news later on Tuesday after many initial reports about the new funding round being secured. CEO and founder Liu Qiangdong has been unusually quiet on social media in the past month and hasn’t commented personally on this.

[Source: ChinaByte - article in Chinese]

Korean game development studio Playnery has been growing quickly since it opened in October of last year. Already partnered up with Zynga to distribute its forthcoming first title Mother of Myth, now Playnery has secured $3.7 million in funding, led by Japan’s Softbank Ventures. Qualcomm and Stonebridge Capital also put some money into the round.

Playnery specializes, notes TheNextWeb, in 3D RPG gaming, whilst also making the titles social and playable in any recent web browser. The startup uses its own, self-developed 3D gaming engine. In this way, it’s pushing forward the current social gaming model of simplistic action that began with things like Farmville. The investment arm of Japanese telco Softbank is clearly impressed with this new vision for social and mobile gaming; SoftBank Ventures’ Seo Il-shik said today:

In the future we predict that the social and mobile market will break off from the casual gaming seen up until now, and achieve rapid growth with the diversification of genres such as MORPG, MMORPG, and FPS. When various user groups form and the market grows rapidly, we expect that Playnery will become a successful game developer through high quality games and global partnerships.

It’s not Softbank Ventures’ first foray into social gaming in the region, as it has also backed South Korea’s SundayToz, makers of the hit game Anipang.

Playnery’s first game, Mother of Myth, is due to launch next year, and is aiming for a global rollout in 12 languages, and will be playable on Zynga’s (NASDAQ:ZNGA) gaming platform, on Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), and as iOS and Android apps. Until then, there’s this interesting demo video of how the game will play:

(Video link for mobile readers)

[Source: TheNextWeb]

Chinese software maker – and disruptive new search engine competitor – Qihoo 360 (NYSE:QIHU) has invested in VIVAme, which makes a magazine subscriptions app and a Flipboard-style reader (pictured above).

The Qihoo investment comes as part of VIVAme’s new funding round, which also saw input from Highland Capital Partners. The news is confirmed by Beijing-based VIVAme, but the total funding amount has not been disclosed. Qihoo’s founder and CEO, Zhou Hongyi, now sits on the board of VIVAme. It raises the possibility of the aggressively-expanding Qihoo using the strategic investment to bring new content into its product offerings, and perhaps into its Android-based mobile software.

VIVAme has partnerships with over 300 magazine titles and claims to have 14 million monthly active users who read over 120 million mobile magazines each month. Its two core mobile apps are VIVAme, which is like a Flipboard-style reader only for iPad (here), and VIVA for in-app magazine downloads (here) which supports eight OSes, including Android, iOS, and Windows 8.

[Source: Sina Tech - article in Chinese]

Just six months after Chinese deals and listings company DDMap attracted $40 million in funding, it has now wrapped up another major round, now series D, that was led by Alibaba Capital, the VC arm of e-commerce giant Alibaba, and CitiGroup’s (NYSE:C) Citi Ventures.

The amount of this new funding hasn’t been revealed, but it’s a major vote of confidence in one of China’s top local and O2O startups. DDMap has daily deals, local listings, and discount coupons for major retailers across China. These also appear in a suite of useful and good-looking apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Symbian.

DDMap CEO Xu Longjiang said that the funding will also see a stronger partnership with Alibaba – which also owns China’s top e-payments service, Alipay – and that will enable his company to grow faster.

Alibaba Capital’s MD, Zhang Hongping, confirmed the strength of the tie-up in yesterday’s announcement, and said that DDMap is well placed at the nexus of the mobile web and the O2O sector in China.

DDMap’s discount shopping app, DDCoupons (pictured above), now has a claimed 13 million users making user of coupons from 100,000 merchants in 38 Chinese cities. The app has also bolstered its location-based features in recent updates, and now can push relevant deals and coupons to shoppers when they come within three kilometres of partner merchants.

[Source: JFDaily - article in Chinese]

Just as the rumors said a couple of months back, China’s top Pinterest-like social commerce site, Mogujie, has secured a major series C funding round. It was led by IDG. The funding was confirmed today by Mogujie, but the startup was tight-lipped about the exact investment amount – though it was happy to say that it’s now effectively valued at $200 million.

The first round for Mogujie was led by BDMI, and series B came from Qiming Ventures – both those raised a total of $20 million.

Earlier this year we described Mogujie as a social commerce money machine. That’s because at that time, as confirmed by CEO Chen Qi, the site was earning over 100,000 RMB ($15,900) per day in ad referral clicks to Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce site. In March of this year, the social pinboard site had 9.5 million registered users.

Mogujie is up against a large number of similar sites that are aimed at young Chinese female shoppers, including ones from major web companies, like Taobao’s Wantu, or Renren’s Plaza site.

[Source: 36Kr - article in Chinese]

The Chinese online security outsourcing company Anquanbao.com has secured series B investment, for an unknown sum, led by Northern Light Ventures. Beijing-based incubator Innovation Works also participated in this second round for Anquanbao, just as it did in the first.

The funding news was revealed by Innovation Works founder Kai-Fu Lee. His incubator ploughed in about $5 million into the first Anquanbao round.

We first encountered the security startup back in November of last year when Anquanbao impressed at the TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing event. Indeed, the team emerged as the runner-up in the Disrupt Battlefield finale.

In Anquanbao’s startup pitch, the team said that they foresee a trend towards security outsourcing for business sites in China, to safeguard them against hackers and DDoS attacks. The startup said it aims to serve two million company sites in China, and 60,000+ government-run websites. Currently the service is growing, and now has just over 6,000 clients.

As for Innovation Works, it recently added $224 million to its second funding war-chest.

[Source: Sina Tech - article in Chinese]

An iCook.tw user’s recipes.

Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures clearly likes the look of what Taiwanese startup Polydice is cooking up, and has today invested in its social site iCook.tw. As the name suggests, iCook is focused on recipes, and provides a Pinterest-esque platform for people to share their tastiest concoctions.

The funding amount hasn’t been revealed, but it’s significant as this is the first Taiwan move since the Cyberagent (TYO:4751) investment arm first set up offices in Taipei late last year. (There was also the backing for restaurant review site iPeen last Spring, before the local office opened). CyberAgent Ventures explains in today’s announcement that the “investment was made through the CA-JAIC China Internet Fund II, which is jointly managed by CyberAgent Ventures and Japan Asia Investment.”

The investment firm reckons that iCook.tw is the fastest-growing social recipes site in Taiwan. Catherine Chang from the CyberAgent Ventures Taipei office tells us that the startup “has been live for 11 months, and has 70,000 users and 10,000 recipes – all user generated.”

Catherine adds that, at the moment, iCook is monetizing via a mix of banner ads and promotional tie-ups with food companies – as seen with its brand-oriented recipe/cooking contents. But the startup is mainly focusing on building up its user-base – and Facebook fandom – for now, as well as its iOS app, which was “released last month and has reached 150,000 downloads.”

As for the appeal of this kind of niche social site, the announcement points out how it’s learning from the Japanese web scene:

As there is a void for this type of media in Taiwan, and successful business models have been executed off existing recipe-based SNS in Japan, CyberAgent Ventures believes that iCook.tw has strong potential to become the leading player in Taiwan and will take advantage of CyberAgent Inc’s wide network of resources to enhance the company’s growth and value.

Indeed, the startup team is particularly looking to Japan’s Cookpad, which brought in over $40 million in sales last year thanks to a mix of ads, brand promotions, and premium content.

You might recall that in June of this year, Groupon China was merged with larger daily deals rival FTuan into a company called GroupNet. And now GroupNet’s CEO, Lin Ning, has revealed that it has recently netted $40 million in funding. The investment is thought to have been led by Groupon (NASDAQ:GRPN) and Chinese web giant Tencent (HKG:0700), but that’s not confirmed by offiicial channels.

This year’s merger was masterminded by Tencent, which already had an undisclosed stake in Ftuan and was also the official local partner for Groupon in China. As a part of the merger deal, GroupNet also runs Tencent’s own QQ Tuan daily deals site. It’s believed that FTuan – which attracted three major funding rounds already before its amalgamation – still holds the majority of the stake in GroupNet.

The investment is interesting as Lin Ning said that it will be used to acquire some smaller deals sites – so we might finally be seeing some of the tens of thousands of group buy sites in China get a meaningful exit. As opposed to collapsing in financial ruin, which is the way that thousands of them are going each year.

Lin Ning also revealed that GroupNet gets many merger proposals each day, and that the troubled 24Quan – which recently suspended operations – is one target that it might actually go for. Any acquisitions will be a case of buying users, rather than talent, in this overcrowded market.

In figures for 2012 Q2, Taobao Juhuasuan (run by Alibaba, which is is Tencent’s e-commerce nemesis) is the top deals site in China with 21.5 percent market share, and Meituan is a steady second place.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

“Guanxi” is the Chinese word for a relationship – and also the broader concept of the benefits of knowing someone, particularly when doing business. That explains the name of the business networking app Guanxi.me, which today received series A funding led by SingTel Innov8. Also participating in the round was Timothy Draper of Draper and Associates. The sum has not been revealed.

Guanxi.me has location-based apps for iPhone and Android that allow users to connect with fellow professionals nearby and then chat with them. It’s sort of like Momo or Skout, except that it’s oriented towards making biz connections, not dating. Guanxi.me is a spin-off from the Shanghai-based mobile search startup mInfo.

SingTel Innov8 is the investment arm of Singapore’s giant telco Singtel. The last major round we saw from SingTel Innov8 in the region was when it pumped up to $5 million into phone-maker G-Mobi.

In today’s announcement, the Guanxi team says it’ll use the funds to “expand its team, build up a carrier-grade operating platform, grow its user-base […] and raise awareness for the service beyond China.”

William Bao Bean, the MD at SingTel Innov8, added:

We are excited about Guanxi’s promise of a more intelligent and automated mobile social networking user experience. We look forward to supporting Guanxi’s geographic expansion of their innovative solution into the various markets the SingTel Group operates in.

Fresh out of this summer’s DemoChina 2012, the Chinese flash sales site Xipin.me – which models itself closely on Fab.com – has secured nearly RMB 10 million (US$1.59 million) in series A funding. It has not been disclosed who the investors are in this major round; previously, Xipin’s angel investors were Korea-based VCs.

Xipin, much like US-based Fab, focuses on stylish or handcrafted products like funky clocks and other creative home decoration items. As with most other flash sales e-commerce sites, a lot of products are sold in limited items for a period of only 72 hours.

Xipin’s CEO and co-founder is “Hiris” Tan Kaiyi (pictured below), one of the all-too-few female startup founders in the country. Onstage at DemoChina in August this year – where the startup went all the way to the finals – Tan told Sequoia’s Neil Shen that Xipin chooses only items to sell that “will inspire people” and that the site has the requisite “social DNA” so that “products can go viral.” The site works with both Chinese and overseas designers to create a number of unique product lines, and that too is touted as a major strength and selling point for the company.

Xipin's Tan Kaiyi onstage at DemoChina recently (Image: cyzone.cn)

From some research I note that Neil Shen responded (via Cyzone) by saying he has concerns that China’s market is not ready for fairly pricey decorative items like these – or that the market is pretty small right now. The Sequoia man also expressed concern, in his role as a panelist at DemoChina, that Xipin will see high costs in terms of working with all those designers and trying to acquire new users in this e-commerce niche.

Nonetheless, fashion-oriented flash sales sites in China have been thriving, with VIPshop (NYSE:VIPS) doing well after its US IPO earlier this year, and the similar FClub wrapping up $30 million in series B funding. The Xipin crew will be hoping that China’s growing middle class – especially the women – will be as keen to spend as much on home decorations as fashionable garments.

[Source: Kuailiyu - article in Chinese]

The TechVenture 2012 conference is going on in Singapore right now, where e27 heard that Jungle Ventures is setting up a US$10 million “pan-Asian super angel fund.” The capital comes from a number of major angel investors and VC groups.

Singapore-based Jungle Ventures (see its homepage here) tends to invest in series A stages and also operates an early stage accelerator in Singapore. Last month we saw the group ploughing $1 million in seed funding into Travelmob, the Airbnb-like travel site set up by the former managing director of Skype Asia.

Jungle’s founder and MD, Amit Anand, said today:

We have made four to five investments every year over the last few years and look to steadily increase this in 2013 and onwards. We are actively collaborating with leading venture capital funds across the world to support go-to market plans for our investee companies under this program.

It also partners with Dave McClure’s 500Startups in the region, and the two groups recently jointly invested in the Singaporean medical appointments service DocDoc.

The Jungle Ventures announcement adds:

Investors in the new fund include Peng T. Ong (founder of Match.com, Interwoven, and Encentuate), Dan Neary (VP and GM Global Market Development, Skype), Anurag Srivastava (CEO of Spacematrix), Jayesh Parekh (co-founder of Sony Entertainment Television), Toivo Annus (former head of engineering at Skype), Lim Der Shing (founder-CEO of JobsCentral) amongst other angels and institutional funds.

Mr. Peng T. Ong thereby joins the core partner team as chairman of the board at Jungle Ventures.

[Source: e27]

Having resisted the temptation to use the tired “China’s something something” format for the headline, I’m going to have to use it in the first paragraph. Here goes. The founder of China’s Tumblr invests in a Path clone. Yes, Xu Zhaojun, the founder of Diandian, one of China’s coolest lite-blogging services, has said that he has personally invested in a very new social app called PaPa . That makes it an app to watch.

Aside from PaPa’s terrible name, it’s a clever app that fuses the best social elements of Path, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter/Weibo all into one. If that’s not enough, it also supports sending voice messages of up to 60 seconds in length, sort of like China’s popular Weixin/WeChat app. It can integrate with Chinese social networks like Weibo. It sounds like an overblown mess, but it might prove a hit with local smartphone users if it can find a niche – perhaps as an Instagram-on-steroids that can do voice plus photos. It was launched earlier this month as an iPhone app from its PaPa.me homepage.

Diandian founder, Xu Zhaojun.

Though it’s not known how much Xu Zhaojun (pictured right) angel-invested in Papa, it prompted speculation in Chinese tech media that his own startup, Diandian, might pivot in the light of PaPa app and its more innovative approach to a social networking. But he has responded by saying that Diandian will focus on being a minimalist and funky blogging platform.

Diandian is backed by Innovation Works and has received over US$10 million in funding from the likes of Sequoia Capital. But Diandian’s initial success prompted local copycats that perhaps ruined its potential – not least when China’s biggest Twitter-esque site, Sina Weibo, launched its own lite-blogging service called Qing.

Get PaPa app, which supports Chinese and English, from the iTunes App Store.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

Season two of the Malaysian startup pitching TV show Make The Pitch has just wrapped up with two of the six finalists securing some serious seed funding from MyEG (MYEG:MK), the e-services provider that also backs the TV show. The larger of the two investments was made into the clothing e-commerce site FashionValet.net, which has secured RM1 million ($326,000) in funding from MyEG.

From its Kuala Lumpur base, FashionValet’s marketing manager Marissa Zamani tells us that the startup has “over 10,000 users, and over 150 brands” on board now, which is way up from 10 fashion suppliers/partners just over a year ago when the site was first conceived – way before the recent TV show appearance. It sells male and female clothing, shoes, bags, and accessories.

Marissa explains that the two founders of FashionValet, Fadzarudin Anuar and Vivy Yusof (pictured above, with Vivy on the left), “had to go through three rounds of presentations and Q&A between us and the [Make The Pitch] panelists throughout the whole show,” and then “all negotiations were done on the TV show and the [funding] deal was made on the spot in the finals.”

As much as we love to see startups moving quickly, that sounds pretty terrifying. Like with Singapore’s similar Angel’s Gate reality TV show for startups, that kind of high pressure, high-speed deal is risky – after all, funding is not just about the money, but also your rapport with the VCs who should also serve as quality mentors.

Anyway, the show allowed Fadza and Vivy to show their mettle, and they impressed the Make The Pitch judges by getting sales to grow 15 percent in the first six weeks of the show’s airing.

FashionValet is up against some strong fashion e-commerce rivals in the region, such as Rocket Internet’s Zalora. Co-founder Fadzarudin Shah recently penned an interesting blog post about dealing with major competition. In it, he writes:

My response is simple: Having huge competitors play in the same space only further validates that there is a huge opportunity available. So forget about getting bogged down by a brand that suddenly blankets the websites you visit with their ads. Instead, now is the time to show potential clients and investors what your website could be. If you are scared of competitors, you will always be behind them in the pack. Take it as a challenge and enjoy the ride.

The makers of the BingDian Hotels app, which we looked at earlier this year shortly after it launched, has checked-in some series A funding. The round was led by California-based Bluerun Ventures, which also has an office in Shanghai and has invested in some other hot Chinese mobile startups such as the karaoke app Changba and the Pinterest-like Meilishuo.

It hasn’t been revealed precisely how much Bluerun put into BingDian with this investment, but Technode reports it to be a “multi-million US dollar” round.

In China’s very mature online travel market, BingDian is one of a number of mobile-only startups aiming to disrupt the homegrown industry leaders, Ctrip (NASDAQ:CTRP) and eLong (NASDAQ:LONG). That puts it right up against other new apps like the Innovation Works-backed Hotel Finder. BingDian says it has seen half a million downloads of its iOS app in the first 150 days after launching in March this year.

But BingDian has a bit of a twist, as it claims to help hotel chains to offer discounts and benefits to loyal customers whilst still allowing them to book via the app. In theory, that makes it into a more attractive platform for major hotel brands. BingDian’s partners run the gamut from cheap business hotels like Hanting and FX right up to top-notch chains like Hyatt and Shangri-La. Plus, the app has auctions for some rooms, rather like with the American travel booking site Priceline.

Prior to this series A funding, BingDian and taken in two rounds of seed funding. Currently its service is only accessible via the iPhone app, and its Android counterpart has still not materialized but is said to be in development.

Check out the BingDian app on its homepage.

[Source: Technode Chinese]

I've always wanted to meet the "Queen of Europe"!

An obscure Chinese e-commerce site that sells sex toys has caused quite a shock in the industry by securing the biggest funding round for a highly specialist e-tailer in the country this year. AiLu is said to have wrapped up RMB 300 million (US$47.4 million) in series A funding from Shenzhen Capital and New Margin Ventures.

The news comes from the August venture capital report by Coinsay, as spotted by Chinese finance site Ebrun. Beijing-based AiLu – see its site here – sells all kinds of erotic toys, sex dolls, and revealing underwear – a product vertical in which its main local rival is Gdian. The company hasn’t commented publicly on its major funding round, so it’s not clear how the business will spend its new capital.

Hopefully some of that money will be spent on web design, as the site right now has the most eye-stabbingly awful user interface that we’ve even seen on an e-commerce site. Think of a Geocities site in 1999, and you’re close.

The last major round by a Chinese specialist e-commerce site was just last month when the wine e-tailer Jiuxian secured $32 million in series C funding.

[Source: Ebrun - article in Chinese]

Earlier this year, the former managing director of Skype Asia, Turochas “T” Fuad, left to form a new startup called Travelmob. And today, Travelmob has revealed that it has raised US$1 million in seed funding, led by Jungle Ventures and with participation from other “prominent, private investors.” The money will be used to “help drive further growth and expansion for Travelmob across the Asia Pacific region.”

[UPDATE on November 28th: Travelmob has revealed today that the other participating investor is Silicon Valley VC firm Accel Partners].

When we looked at the online travel service and chatted to Turochas in March, Travelmob.com was still in stealthy beta mode, and it eventually launched in July. The Singapore-based site is different to most others in the travel sector in that it focuses on short-term rentals – not hotel bookings. In many ways it’s like Airbnb for Asia, but Travelmob focuses on consumers traveling in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, promising a much more authentic and social travel experience than you’ll usually get at hotels.

Though nearly all its rentals are in this continent, a Travelmob representative tells us that its user-base is much more mixed:

50 percent of [the site’s] visitors are currently coming from within the Asia Pacific region and the remaining 50 percent from markets like the US, Europe, and the Middle East. However, we are increasingly getting more intra-APAC travelers.

For all those folks, the site runs in English, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese, and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Plus, it supports 13 currencies – 10 of which are Asian ones.

The startup has added some new features recently, such as “experience tags” to allow potential travelers to search by the kind of trip they want – one more oriented to “nature” or the “beach” or “nightlife” for example.

We heard rumors about J.P. Morgan wanting to invest up to $50 million in Rocket’s e-commerce Lazada.

It’s official now. The press release doesn’t reveal much detail about the investment, but you can read it in full below:

LAZADA, the leading online department store in Southeast Asia, has confirmed an investment by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, which will take a stake in LAZADA through its German holding.

Following its parallel launch in five Southeast Asian countries during the spring of 2012, LAZADA has become the fastest growing online department store in the region. Since then, LAZADA has surpassed most established local and international competitors and according to web ranking site Alexa.com it is already ranking among the top local B2C eCommerce sites in all of its markets. This growth is a testament to the huge potential of this region with a population of more than 600 million people and a growing young middle-class which are embracing new online experiences – ranging from eCommerce to social media – at an ever increasing pace through their mobile phones or other connected devices.

With the support of Rocket Internet, the leading global online venture incubator (e.g. Zalando, Dafiti), LAZADA has already established itself as a household name in the region by providing a one-stop shopping experience online. With an unrivalled brand and product selection available online, LAZADA has developed a wide offering ranging from consumer electronics to household goods, toys and sports equipment. Today, approximately 1,000 employees are operating streamlined businesses with own logistics and distribution centers in Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia.

“We feel very honoured to welcome J.P. Morgan to our investor group and are particularly excited to be joined by an investor that shares our vision and belief in the huge potential of this populous region replicating online shopping behaviours in developed countries”, regional CEO Maximilian Bittner commented. “This will further support our growth as we strive to offer all of our customers fast, convenient and secure online shopping experiences”.

J.P. Morgan Asset Management Portfolio Manager Robert Cousin, who worked on the deal from New York, confirmed the transaction, saying, “We are excited to partner with LAZADA as it continues to expand its eCommerce presence in Southeast Asia.

This month marks the third-year anniversary of Innovation Works, the startup incubator founded and run by the former head of Google China, Kai-Fu Lee. To celebrate the occasion, Kai-Fu has revealed some stats about the group that added a $148 million second fund earlier this year.

The prime stat is that Innovation Works (see its homepage) has backed 50 startup projects so far – which means mentorship and an array of advantages above and beyond just the seed investment. Those 50 young companies are worth an estimated RMB 3.9 billion (US$615.8 million).

A total of 5,000 potential projects were screened before those lucky startups got incubated under the wing of Innovation Works. The accepted ones include the likes of the mobile apps cross-promotions tool Umeng, the company behind the Hotel Finder mobile commerce app, and the third-party Android store and sync service Wandoujia.

As well as seed funding, Innovation Works can also go up to series A investments, and maybe even beyond. It has put in a first round of funding into 18 projects, and one startup got series B backing from the incubator. Almost inevitably, some projects failed: the crash-and-burn tally so far is four.

Its first fund was worth $180 million dollars.

We look forward to seeing more startups leaping into flight from the Innovation Works nest.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

The Chinese-made Dolphin Browser could be on course for a second, major round of funding, according to rumors on Chinese tech blogs. Word is that an unnamed contact at Mobotap, the makers of the smartphone-only Dolphin Browser, has confirmed that series B funding has been going on, but no other details have emerged. Thought to be worth “tens of millions of dollars,” it wouldn’t be too great a shock if the second round was worth more than its first round, in July last year, which raised $10 million.

The first time around, the investment was led by Sequoia Capital; but the rumors suggest that Qualcomm Ventures, the investment arm of chipmaker Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), would be ploughing in the greatest amount for the series B. We contacted two Mobotap people in the US – at their San Francisco base – over 12 hours ago, but have yet to get a response.

Dolphin Browser has been a worldwide success, generating over 12 million downloads on iOS and Android since it launched in early 2010. Over 80 percent of its user-base is in the US, meaning that its home market of China is not so much a priority. Another Chinese browser maker looking overseas is UCWeb, makers of the multi-platform UC Browser for mobiles, which is aiming at a US IPO in 2013.

When we last heard from Mobotap, it had inked a deal with Japanese telco KDDI to have Dolphin Browser pre-installed on some of its new smartphones.

We’ll update if we get a response, or when this is made official.

[Source: Leiphone - article in Chinese]

Just a week after one rival pocketed $32 million in funding, an executive at the wine e-commerce site WineNice – or Jiumei in Chinese – has revealed in an interview that it’s on the verge of wrapping up series B funding worth over RMB 100 million (US$15.8 million).

WineNice.com completed its first major round at the end of last year when it netted RMB 80 million ($12.64 million) from Shenzhen Capital Group. The CEO, Lu Yide, did not identify who’d be leading this next injection of capital. But in his talk to Chinese tech blog Donews, he did explain that the RMB 100 million or more in funding would be used to bolster its B2C logistics and to grow its offline retailing operations.

The site initially grew slowly after launching in 2008. WineNice mostly sells foreign wines, but also has a selection of Chinese rice wines and overseas liquors. Most of its stock is in the pretty affordable sub-200 RMB ($32) category, though I spot a 1988 Pétrus for a cool 30,000 RMB ($4,740).

A WineNice wine "expericence store" takes the e-tailer into the offline world. (Image: winesino.com)

As for its offline ventures, it aims to have 100 brick-and-mortar stores around China by the end of the year, such as its “experience stores” (pictured right) which hold regular wine-tasting events.

Now, claims Lu Yide, WineNice saw RMB 150 million ($23.7 million) in sales revenue last year, and he aims for “this to grow to RMB 1 billion [$158 million] in revenue within two to three years.”

WineNice also has virtual stores on Tmall, China’s biggest online mall, as well as on Yihaodian, the largest food-oriented e-commerce site in the country.

We’ll update with more details once the funding news becomes officially official.

[Source: Donews - article in Chinese]

This calls for a drink! The Chinese e-commerce site Jiuxian.com, which specializes in selling wines and spirits, has cause to celebrate after wrapping up series C funding worth RMB 200 million (nearly $32 million). Jiuxian representatives have confirmed the funding news, but declined to identify all the investors involved save for the participation of Rich Land Capital.

Earlier this year, the company said it aims to hit 2 billion RMB (US$317 million) in revenue by the end of 2012. That’d be quite a leap up from iResearch’s estimate of RMB 500 million in sales in 2011. But Jiuxian has expanded its storefronts for this year, and now has a virtual store on the nation’s largest B2B2C e-commerce site, Tmall, as well as now being drafted in to run Dangdang’s (NYSE:DANG) alcoholic beverages portal.

Jiuxian is close to its third-year anniversary; it previously secured $20 million for its first round in April 2011, then an undisclosed amount for its second in November of last year. It’s one of many sites riding the luxury boom in China, selling items as pricey as a Remy Martin cognac for $3,300 per bottle.

We recently reported that Jiuxian executives went on a mission to France to connect with vineyards and make some direct partnerships.

[Source: Sina Tech - article in Chinese]

The Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital is reportedly close to finalizing three major new funds which will pack a total of nearly $1 billion. The trio of separate funds will include, says Bloomberg, $325 million for a China venture fund. The other two will be focused on startups in the US and Israel.

Bloomberg is hearing that the new funds will be closed next month, but it’s not known when they’ll be ready to roll into action. Sequoia is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and already has offices in the three afore-mentioned nations.

Sequoia Capital has long been very active in Asia – and especially in China. It is thought to have taken part in the recent $60 million fund-raising by Dianping, China’s largest Yelp-like site, having participated in earlier rounds. Sequoia also backed the last major Chinese tech IPO in the States, the flash deals site VIPShop (NYSE:VIPS), in which the VC firm has a 20 percent stake.

And, last December, Sequoia entered into a joint-venture with China’s Zhenfund, called Zhenfund 2.0, which packs a total of $200 million in investment potential.

[Source: Bloomberg]

Despite a fairly sluggish VC funding scene in China this year, the Chinese flash sales site FClub has secured $30 million in series B funding. This significant second round – three times larger than FClub’s first, back in April 2011 – was led by IGC, along with IDG Capital, Zero2IPO Capital, and SK Capital.

The news comes from the VP of FClub.cn, Yi Zongyuan, in a post on his personal Weibo account. The flash sales site – also sometimes referred to as “VIP sales” in the industry – launched in July 2009 and focuses on mid-range clothing and accessories, with some luxury offerings as well. The site partners with over 1,500 brands to buy up items that are then sold over a period of just five days to its members.

The return of IDG and Zero2IPO in a second round could be construed as a very good sign for FClub’s growth in the past year. The site is following the path first taken by the Chinese flash sales site VIPShop, which listed on the NYSE in March of this year.

Speaking to the Chinese media last week, Zero2IPO’s Wang Lipeng praised FClub’s “precise positioning and meticulous management” in this tricky B2C e-commerce sector.

FClub has self-reported having two million registered users, of whom 400,000 are active. It has 500 employees, including all those at its warehouses. Based in Shanghai, the startup site has offices in Guangzhou and Hong Kong too.

[Source: Donews - article in Chinese]

In great news for China-based startups, they’ll soon have a new potential source of seed funding in the form of a $10 million fund from Shanghai-based AngelVest. Co-founder David Chen points out that the new AngelVest Fund LP will be ready “in the next 12 to 18 months.”

While AngelVest has been actively funding a number of startups since its inception in 2007 – such as very recently in the language learning marketplace iTalki – this is the investment group’s first dedicated China fund.

The AngelVest move fits in nicely, states David, alongside the recent second fund, holding $148 million, from Innovation Works. That’s because the AngelVest Fund will be geared totally towards seed funding of about “$250,000 per company” in contrast to how Beijing-based Innovation Works can go as high as series A funding of millions of dollars. But there’ll undeniably be a bit of competition at seed-fund level – which can only be good for China-based entrepreneurs.

Looking forward, AngelVest’s David says in the recent announcement that the group might “look to raise multiple funds in different cities” in China, such as, say, one that focuses on startups in just the south of China, in the Shenzhen and Guangzhou area.

The Chinese Yelp-like site Dianping has once again hit the jackpot, pulling in, it has announced, “over $60 million” in series D funding. It’s less than the company’s third round of $100 million in April of last year, but it’s still a huge boost as the city directory site also has a growing daily deals business – and that’s a very fragmented market that relies on heavy ad spending.

The new Dianping funding news was tweeted out by the company on its own Weibo page (see it here). Dianping says it will use the new round to focus on its mobile business, as well as general biz development.

In its previous round, those who took part were Trust Bridge Partners, Sequoia Capital, Qiming Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. It’s not known exactly who led this newest round, but we’ve reached out to Dianping HQ to see if they can comment on that. [UPDATE: nope].

Just yesterday we looked at the latest stats for China’s daily deals industry and saw that Dianping has grown to become the nation’s fourth-largest group buy site in terms of market share. It took 8.3 percent of revenue in the sector in 2012 Q2. Dianping has been already pushing its mobile commerce, and recently revealed what its Android and iPhone users were buying.

Last year we chatted with Dianping’s VC, Michael Jiang, at an event in Beijing. You might like to see that video here.

With the idea that we learn faster from fellow humans than from textbooks, Shanghai-based italki is a language learning social network and marketplace. And now, the company tells us, it has raised a second round of angel funding from an assortment of international investors. italki’s marketing manager, Ross Cranwell, tells us that the round is worth “hundreds of thousands, rather than millions” of dollars, and that the service has over 900,000 users from more than 200 countries using it to learn numerous languages.

The italki.com site is where its members use P2P video and voice chats, and literal peer-to-peer interaction, to learn in an active way. As for the teachers, many of those are native speakers of a language who earn money via italki as a community tutor; but there are also professional teachers and free language exchange partners. The platform describes itself as being cheaper and more flexible than going to language schools.

The site launched in 2006, so it can’t really be described as a startup anymore. Its learners can purchase material and take tests on the site, such as those from Oxford University Press and the “Oxford online placement test.” Co founder Kevin Chen said in today’s announcement:

Over the past few years we have built a strong ecosystem for language learners to find online teachers. Our new financing will help us expand internationally, as part of our mission to help more people become fluent in foreign languages.

Among its private investors are William Bao Bean (separate from his work as MD of the Singtel Innov8 VC fund), and Marc Van Der Chijs, who’s the co-founder of UnitedStyles and Chinese video-streaming site Tudou.

Here’s a demo video from the company of a Korean youngster learning English online with the service:

Tweaky.com, an online marketplace for people to connect with web designers, has recently raised a seed round of AUS$450,000 (US$468,000) from Australian investors Mark Harbottle (founder of 99designs), Leni Mayo (Learnable CEO), and the Sitepoint group. The startup based in Australia is founded by Ned Dwyer and Pete Murray; it won Startup Weekend Melbourne in November 2011.

Tweaky’s vision is to be a marketplace for customizing websites. It is intended to make it easier for small businesses to make minor changes to their website. An example for a change would be updating a picture, removing some whitespace, or adding social media sharing links. These changes are known as “tweaks” – hence the name.

Regarding the investment, CEO & co-founder Ned told us:

(Click to enlarge)

The main motivation behind the investment was to allow us to launch and grow Tweaky.com. We decided to partner with Mark Harbottle (99designs.com and Flippa.com founder) and Leni Mayo (Learnable Founder) because they have deep industry expertise in the web development and design space, specifically around two-sided marketplaces. They’re seasoned entrepreneurs and investors who have built multiple global leading businesses.

In theory, Tweaky operates similarly to marketplaces such as Fiverr, Freelancer, and Odesk. Tweaky has several key differences to other crowdsourcing websites to enable small businesses to use it for website customization.

Tweaky provides a concierge service which acts as a virtual project manager. The concierge service will break down the project into a series of tasks and manage the project by allocating it to pre-qualified developers. Each task will cost AUS$25 ($26), which is equivalent to 30 minutes of work. Tweaky takes 50 percent commission on each project for providing the concierge service, website credentials, and the assets to the developer.

The concierge service is currently performed manually. The challenge is whether this service can be scaled and automated so that this process can be more efficient. Dwyer, co-founder & CEO is confident that it can:

We have ways of automating it, which we’re already starting to do, including asking common questions to the client in advance through the briefing form, etc. We’re benefiting from the experience of Mark Harbottle in building 99designs in this regard where they have a significant customer support team which has scaled well with their business.

Clients provide their website credentials via a fully encrypted service to the developer along with the required assets. The client then has two options, as Tweaky can setup a staging server for their website or work directly on their live site. Tweaky provides a full backup of the website and a 100 percent money back guarantee.

If Tweaky can optimize these processes to ensure quality and ease of use, there could be a significant opportunity for a website customisation market for small business owners. The Sitepoint group of websites (99designs, Sitepoint, Learnable, Flippa) could be used to help drive traffic to the website to provide supply and demand. Potentially, the Sitepoint group could provide multiple services in the life cycle of a small business: have your new logo done on 99designs, use Tweaky to make changes to your website using pre-qualified developers from Sitepoint, and then sell it on Flippa.

This recent news continues Australia’s development as a global leader for marketplaces. In addition to the Sitepoint group, there is also Freelancer, DesignCrowd, and Envato. It is increasingly becoming a country where you can find world-class talent to build marketplaces, and where new ones can emerge and be funded by local investors.

We spotted a report on ChinaVenture (article in Chinese) earlier that says there’s a rumor that Ushi.com, the Shanghai-based business-oriented social network, was looking to raise $1.5 million in a new round of funding. This seemed like a small amount compared to the $3 million it raised last October, so we talked to a Ushi representative to clear things up.

The Ushi spokeswoman said that it’s true that Ushi is playing around with AngelList, the US-based platform for startups – as the initial rumor stated – but that the purpose wasn’t to raise funds exactly, but to learn from it and implement an AngelList-esque module within Ushi (pictured below). As the provided screenshot shows, it’d be a useful summary of funding rounds and valuations.

(Click to enlarge the screenshot).

As for that mooted funding figure, the same Ushi rep told us:

We are considering to make a second round this year, it’s not the right time to tell the exact number, but it should be over US$5 million.

Indeed, it makes sense that a startup would want to raise more in a new round than it did before. It has had a total of $ 4.5 million in funding thus far. The major new round is not guaranteed to happen this year, but it sounds like a plan.

In terms of updated stats, Ushi now claims to have, among in users, 40,000 entrepreneurs and 6,000 investors, making it a challenger to AngelList itself, as well as LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD), which is thought to be looking more closely into expanding in China. The local market leader in terms of this kind of social network is Viadeo-owned Tianji, which raised $32 million in funding in April, of which about $10 million in cash went to Tianji itself. And don’t forget the local AngelList clone called, almost inevitably, AngelCrunch.

In more new developments, Ushi has also just rolled out its “Ushi search concierge” which is a social recruitment service platform. It launches with some high-profile firms who are major employers onboard with it, such as Adidas, Coach, and the Chinese children’s entertainment network Taomee.

Gurgaon-based fashion e-commerce site Yebhi.com has just announced that its parent company has wrapped up Rs 100 crores (US$18 million) in series C funding. That’s its biggest ever round. The site is owned by Big Shoe Bazaar, one of India’s top online wholesale cash and carry companies.

Two new investors led this third funding round in Big Shoe Bazaar – Fidelity Growth Partners India and Qualcomm Ventures – that also saw participation from previous backers Nexus Venture Partners and Catamaran.

Its main site, Yebhi, is one of India’s leading e-tailers of low- to mid-range clothing and shoes for both men and women. It has recently diversified into other items, such as electronics and mobile top-up payments. Its first funding round in November 2010 raised Rs 10 crores, followed by raising Rs 40 crores last year.

Qualcomm Ventures, the investment arm of the chipmaker Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), usually invests in mobile-oriented startups, and it seems that mobile commerce is on its mind with its first backing of Big Shoe Bazaar. Qualcomm Venture’s senior director Karthee Madasamy said in an announcement today:

The number of mobile internet users has already surpassed those who use PCs, creating a growing opportunity to reach mobile-connected consumers and provide them with unique shopping experiences. Our investment in Big Shoe Bazaar has come at a time when the rapid rise of smartphones, tablets, and social media networks stands to greatly influence the way people engage in online shopping.

Last year, Big Shoe Bazaar acquired the jewelry portal Stylishyou.in, and more acquisitions might be in the offing with its biggest-ever VC funding.

ClickTRUE, a startup based in Singapore focusing on helping brand owners with online strategy such as design, experience, search, and conversion, has just raised series A funding from Nusantara Ventures. The startup recently expanded into Indonesia, setting up its clickTRUE Indonesia subsidiary. The locally-sourced funding will differentiate the digital agency from its rivals, said CEO Jackie Lee today.

It is an obvious move for a Singapore startup to expand to neighboring Indonesia. Indonesia has most of the wishlist ticked for any internet company – moreover a digital agency – in that it has a young and social population, internet usage is increasing, and digital ad spending will reach US$10 billion this year. It explains why Google has presence here now too.

With this investment, Shinta W. Dhanuwardoyo, founder of Bubu.com and managing partner of Nusantara Ventures, will sit on the board of directors of clickTRUE Indonesia. With years of experience in the digital industry, this will only aid the expansion of clickTRUE. Shinta said in an announcement this morning:

There is so much potential for growth in Indonesia. clickTRUE has the expertise and tools to help businesses in Indonesia click their way to success. With the evolving internet landscape, it’s still very exciting for me to be a part of this even though I’ve been doing this for years. This is exactly what we need for Indonesia to move forward in terms of performance marketing in the digital space

With the rise of internet literacy, usage, and spending, Indonesia’s definitely a place to expand. We have seen JWT expanding through acquisition, and I believe these moves are just the start of the capital inflows. At the same time, this also marks the first series A investment by a local venture capital group in Indonesia, and I definitely hope to see more local startups get investment from them too.

For some background knowledge, Fetch Plus is a Singapore-based company, which aims to help brand franchises to deploy brand compliant Facebook Brand Page apps for its local franchisees rapidly, while giving the franchisees the ability to localise to market needs and opportunities.

On the funding, Carmen Benitez, Fetch Plus founder and managing director said,

This investment will help us drive uptake of our FetchFans.com service worldwide. We are now positioned to corner the APAC social media SaaS market and our new investor consortium brings strategic opportunities to service the largest global brand franchises.

Since graduating from the recent JFDI-Innov8 Bootcamp, Fetch Plus has achieved pretty good results. The FetchFans.com platform is now public, and has secured major brands in the real estate and US multifamily housing sector. And in Asia Pacific, it has Singapore Press Holdings Magazines on board with them, on top of other impressive magazine titles such as Her World, Men’s Health, and Golf Digest.

[UPDATE on June 27th, three hours after publishing: The original version of this article identified a different company with the name General Mobile, which was inaccurate. Our apologies. The article has been changed significantly to reflect this].

SingTel Innov8 is in action again, this time ploughing its venture capital into – along with Japan’s Mitsui & Co. (TYO:8031) – General Mobile (G-Mobi), which makes mobile platforms and runs mobile services aimed at developing nations. The funding amounts to US$5million, which G-Mobi plans to use for future growth.

The financing clearly represents an investment in mobile tech in developing nations as a whole, since Innov8’s parent company, SingTel (ASX:SGT) has hundreds of millions of customers around the world not just in Singapore but also in nations like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and across Africa. Plus, another of General Mobile’s investors is Taiwan-based MediaTek (TPE:2454) which makes processors that are commonly used in some budget smartphones.

In addition to its mobile apps and services – which include making JAVA MRE versions of apps like Facebook and Yahoo Messenger – G-Mobi generates revenue from partnerships with mobile telcos in developing nations, as well as from its app store.

G-Mobi’s CEO, Paul Wu, said of this funding round:

With this round of investment, we have on board world-class strategic partners across all the fields to help accelerate our worldwide service deployment as well as enabling us to provide a more complete set of services and solutions.

The CEO of Innov8, Edgar Hardless, said that the investment recipient “addresses the strong demands for mobile application and services seen by emerging market mobile users.”

The Xiaomi M1 - so far, the company's only phone.

It has just been announced by Lei Jun, founder and CEO of the disruptive startup phone-maker Xiaomi, that the company has secured a staggering $216 million in third-round funding. The financing was agreed to over the weekend, he said, but would not reveal who led this newest funding round.

This confirms earlier rumors we reported upon which suggested a major round of funding that effectively values the company at $4 billion. Yes, that would efectively make the Chinese startup – which so far has only one phone model, the Android-based M1 (see our video review) – worth about half of Nokia, and nearly as much as the troubled RIM. That earlier rumor suggested that DST was leading the funding this time, but we’ll have to wait for that to be confirmed. Yuri Milner’s DST was a more minor participant in the last funding round.

In the past, IDG and Morningside have led the series A and B rounds. The first was worth $41 million, while the second round totaled $90 million.

Lei Jun also revealed today some interesting stats from Xiaomi, saying that it has sold 70 million Xiaomi phones up to the end of 700,000 phones last month alone, and that it has so far generated over a billion RMB ($157.11 million) in revenue, making profits that amount to just over 100 million RMB ($15.71 million). The company is due to unveil its much-anticipated follow-up to the M1 sometime this summer or autumn.

As for the path forward, Mr. Lei told Chinese media that, “Copying Apple is no way to go,” and suggested that mobile commerce is one path that the company is looking into.

We’ll update if we get more on this developing story – especially if the investors are named.

[Source: Sina Tech - article in Chinese]

It’s still early days in the Indian e-commerce scene – despite the emergence of Flipkart – and so now is the time to invest and expand. And today, India’s top food-oriented e-tailer MyGrahak has revealed its investment aims looking ahead for the next three years. It plans to raise a total of Rs. 200 crores (US$35.82 million) up to 2015, by which time it also hopes to have a turnover of Rs. 1,000 crores ($179.1 million).

The figures come from MyGrahak.com founder and CEO Ambuj Jhunjhunwala in an annoucement earlier this evening. He stated, “We would be considering private equity investors for our next level of capital infusion,” but did not name any possible VC backers. He added:

MyGrahak is gearing up for the next level of growth. Our monthly revenues have crossed Rs. 1.25 crore [$223,900] last month and we will break even by December 2012. We believe the stage is now set for more capital infusion. We plan to use the capital to double our warehouse, to improve logistics and supply chain, for a new office premise in Ghitorni and to enhance our customer experience.

Based in Delhi, MyGrahak was founded in December 2010 and aims itself at middle- and upper-income Indian families who might lack the time to go out and shop for boring necessities. Mr. Jhunjhunwala specified that they’re planning to invest Rs. 20 crore ($3.58 million) of that Rs. 200 crore total “by November 2012.” Who might step up and back this online supermarket business? One strong likelihood might be Sequoia Capital which has in the past invested in other Indian e-commerce sites such as Fashionandyou and Freecharge.

The site also revealed that it currently has only 22,000 registered users on the site, but that it’s growing at the rate of 25 percent per month.

Earlier this year we saw how MyGrahak was rolling out ‘card on delivery’ as a payment option by equipping its deliverymen with credit card transaction devices.

Hudong is China’s massive, crowd-sourced encyclopedic wiki – with 6.4 million articles to date – which is run as a for-profit company. And now it has more cash to play with after raising $50 million in third-round funding.

CNN’s Term Sheet blog reveals that the new Hudong investment round is being raised in part via Xpert Financial, the electronic trading platform that allows companies to raise capital while maintaining independence and perhaps avoid having to IPO.

Xpert’s chairman, Tim Draper, has been encouraging his circle of VC contacts to back Hudong by teling them via email:

Hudong is China’s leading for-profit social knowledge platform – a wiki-enabled encyclopedia that monetizes its content through advertising. China is one of the largest and fastest growing internet and mobile markets in the world.

DFJ Dragon has invested in the Series A, B, and B-1 offerings, [and] I have personally invested in the B and B-1 offerings — as have other leading venture capital firms — and we intend to participate in the Series C offering. I would urge you to consider this opportunity.

Indeed, Hudong has previously raised over $45 million from DFJ Dragon, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Northern Light Venture Capital. It seems DFJ Dragon is participating in this newest round, but it’s not yet clear if Northern Light joined in again.

Just a few days ago, Hudong announced that it has partnered with Microsoft’s Bing search engine to help improve Bing’s Chinese search results from its own knowledge-base.

[Source: CNN]

At the Echelon 2012 conference yesterday, Tigris Capital and Spring Seeds Capital announced their investment in Luxe Nomad, a Singapore-based luxury travel startup. The concept works like many VIP, invitation-only, flash-, and time-limited sales sites. But instead of luxury goods, the flash deals focus on luxury travel deals. Details of the funding haven’t been disclosed.

The startup was founded by Stephanie Chai, a model-turned entrepreneur who wanted to start something on her own. She was inspired by her grandfather and father who were also entrepreneurs. At the event, Stephanie recalled some early entrepreneurial experiences from her school days:

I remember when I was 11 we had a competition to come up with a business idea and I sold brownies to my classmates. I enjoyed it so much that I kept selling brownies even after the competition was over… haha! So I would say that with some dreams – you’re simply born with them.

The concept of Luxe Nomad was also largely influenced by her interest in luxury hotel flash sales. Stephanie even went for courses to understand the travel market better.

So what exactly is luxury travel? The term is subjective but Stephanie explains that it covers four- to five-stars hotels. But it could be a boutique hotel because luxury is such a subjective word. The key is to give consumers a choice and chance to enjoy this luxury. Luxe Nomad makes money through a revenue-share agreement with hotels across the world, though Stephanie is tight-lipped about the exact revenue-share ratio.

I loved the whole concept of luxury hotel flash sales which is doing very well in the States and Europe. What a clever way of pulling in customers by offering exclusive, time-limited deals that you can’t find anywhere else! And when I looked at myself and the world around me, I saw a growing number of people traveling on a whim and even on a monthly basis.

Locally in Singapore, Impulseflyer is a competing site that does the same thing.

The Mumbai-based digital advertising platform Komli Media has just announced its fourth round of major investment – and its biggest to date. The funding round is worth US$39 million, and was led by Norwest Venture Partners. Also taking part were Nexus Venture Partners, Helion Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Western Technology Investment.

In a press release to announce the funding, Komli Media revealed that the cash “will be used to invest in the company’s core media technology platforms and to expand its presence across the Asia Pacific region.”

Komli hails its integrated coverage of digital display media – with a focus on mobile ads, and its social ad platform – as being key to its success. In updated stats, the company reveals that it now has more than 5,000 clients on board, “reaches over 270 million users monthly, and actively services more than 1,000 advertisers” across Asia (APAC). It says it’s riding the wave of data-enabled phones and smartphones in the Southeast Asia region to hit ever greater numbers of ad impressions.

To mark the biggest-ever backing from Norwest, the VC firm’s managing director, Niren Shah, explained the attraction of Komli:

We are very pleased with the exceptional work done by the leadership team in driving growth and establishing Komli Media as the leader across APAC. With early investments in superior talent and its innovative platforms, the company has completely transformed its business. Today, it is well positioned to capture a much larger share of digital media within some of the fastest growing markets in the world.

Komli Media has busy splashing the cash recently, acquiring mobile ad network ZestAdz last summer, and then snapping up Admax Network earlier this year.

Chinese home furnishings e-tailer Meilele has announced that it has put to bed US$40 million in second-round funding. The significant investment was led by Singapore’s Vertex Venture Holdings, with Lightspeed Partners, Xianfeng Huaxing Group, LionRock Capital, and KTB Ventures also taking part.

Meilele was originally started back in 2008 as a store within Taobao, China’s biggest consumer-to-consumer e-commerce site, before then setting up on its own as a B2C service. Quite unusually in this sector, it then branched out into the world of bricks-and-mortar retailing with, so far, over 50 stores (pictured above) around the country. The company has plans to double that, and says it expects sales to total more than 1 billion RMB ($157 million) in 2012 from both its online and offline ventures.

Out of China’s very numerous specialist e-commerce sites, only a handful have taken their brands offline. One notable example is Redbaby, the children’s clothing website.

The lead investor in this Meilele round, Vertex Venture Holdings, is a subsidiary of the Singaporean government-owned sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings. The latter fund is also a major shareholder in China’s e-commerce giant, Alibaba Group, which will soon buy back a large part of Yahoo’s stake in it.

[Source: Donews - article in Chinese]

[UPDATE: The original version of this post confused VIPShop and VIPStore, which are two different companies. The first paragraph has been altered to correct this]

U.S. retailer Macy’s (NYSE:M) has made a move into China today by investing in the Chinese discount e-commerce site VIPStore, which is known as Jiapin.com to Chinese consumers. The investment sum is US$15 million, led by Macy’s along with Intel Capital.

The deal will allow Macy’s to sell clothing items on VIPStore’s fashion-oriented site, Omei.com. The company’s press release states, however, that that won’t occur until spring 2013.

Macy’s CEO, Terry J. Lundgren, conceded that “We still have a great deal to learn about the shopping patterns and merchandise preferences of consumers in China.” He added:

Our relationship with VIPStore will allow us to gain additional experience in the fast-growing Chinese market, and to better understand how consumers across China interact with Macy’s and the products we sell.

Mr. Lundgren also said that the new luxury-oriented Omei site in China would be “a good match for our current interests” in that country.

China’s e-commerce industry is well advanced to the stage that it’s a massively cut-throat market. Few overseas retailers or e-tailers have a fairly sizeable stake in the country, except perhaps Amazon China, and Walmart with its major investments in Yihaodian, the food-based online retailer. Chinese authorities estimate that the country’s e-commerce industry will be worth 18 trillion RMB ($2.8 trillion) in 2015.

The specialist Chinese e-commerce site Mbaobao.com, which sells only women’s handbags, has wrapped up a fourth round of funding, according to its CEO Ye Haifeng. The circumstances around this news coming out are rather odd, however – the confirmation from Mr. Ye was in response to rumors that one of its major backers, DCM, had refused to take part in further financing. But the CEO insists that DCM and a number of familiar investors are still on board. But no further details about this fourth round have been made public, except that it was finalized in February.

The CEO’s retort to the rumors came on his official Sina Weibo account – see the tweet here – where he also tackled the insinuation that the site was struggling. “Gross profit is up and costs are down,” he added.

A few hours after this kerfuffle, the accountants China Renaissance confirmed the D-round funding on its own Weibo page, but the investment amount is still hushed up.

Mbaobao – one of numerous specialist e-commerce sites in China that rely on customer loyalty in a niche area – completed its first ever major funding round in September 2010, which amounted to US$30 million and was led by DCM. When we chatted with DCM’s Hurst Lin last winter, he told us that lady’s bags are one of the best items to sell via the internet: because the bags don’t have sizes, and are often replaced annually. DCM also backs a lot of other niche Chinese e-tailers, such as VIPShop, which recently floated on the NYSE.

We’ll update if we get an official list of investors in this round.

UrbanIndo, the Indonesian online real estate marketplace, is the latest startup to slip into the East Ventures’ investment portfolio. This round of funding also sees Chandra Tjan of East Ventures joining UrbanIndo’s board of directors.

The site was launched on November 2011 and has seen decent growth ever since. In six months, it now generates over 100,000 visitors and has over 10,000 real estate listings. Arip Tirta, CEO of UrbanIndo, said in a statement:

What we are doing is unprecedented amongst online property sites in Indonesia. We are trying to modernize how Indonesians look for property. We are really big in analyzing the data that we have to help our users find, sell, or rent their property in the best way possible.

UrbanIndo faces some tough competitors who include rumah123.com, rumah.com, rumahdanproperti.com, rumahku.com, and kolomrumah.com. It also competes with forum-based and listings sites like Kaskus and Tokobagus which both have property listing sections.

The team right now has a total of five people and is based out at Bandung, Indonesia. Interestingly, co-founder Arip Tirta was the former director of investment analyst and strategy at Hercules Technology Growth Capital (HTGC), a US$1.0 billion investment firm in Silicon Valley. He shared with us more on his experience and credentials:

For seven years at HTGC, I was instrumental in completing investments worth more than $2 billion in about 150 technology companies in the US. I received a bachelor of science in mathematics of computation from UCLA, and a master of science in scientific computing and computational mathematics from Stanford University.

I look forward to seeing how UrbanIndo pans out, especially since it is founded by an investor-turned-entrepreneur.

Disclosre: East Ventures is also an investor in Tech in Asia. See our ethics page for further details

TNF Ventures will officially launch this May 18, and is inviting startups to its fun mini-poker tournament. Aspiring participants must submit a video clip in order to get selected by investors and mentors to play in the poker game which will be held on launch day. Basically, TNF Ventures is creating a setting where participants can reveal their pokerfaces, allowing both startups and investor mentors to interact and understand each other in a fun and relaxed manner.

The investors at TNF Ventures are made up of established entrepreneurs and professionals within the ICT industry, where most have experience in bringing companies from their infancy stages to public listings, and they will be pretty hands on mentoring startups. On top of the investment factor, they’re looking to guide startups to success.

TNF Ventures is also one of the eight incubators which was recently selected under the National Research Foundation (NRF) Technology Incubation Scheme (TIS) in Singapore. Along with the NRF, they are looking to invest approximately S$500,000 (US$400,000) to S$600,0000 ($480,000) in each startup, and will also assist startups for follow-on funding.

According to Shirley Wong, managing partner at TNF Ventures, each startup will be assisted by at least two investor mentors. As TNF Ventures is not limiting the number of startups to fund, it will be selective with the startups they choose to invest in, as investor mentors will be spending much time and resources working closely with startups to maximize their chances of success.

Shirley added:

TNF Venture’s vision is to help local startups to achieve success, which will spawn more entrepreneurship in the industry. Since most investor mentors have built their expertise in [areas of] telecommunications, media, medic and eco-technologies, TNF Ventures will be focusing investments in these, and the startups which [we will be] investing in are likely to be Singapore-based companies.

So if you’re a Singapore-based startup within those afore-mentioned sectors, you can submit your video application to stand a chance of having a go at the poker game. Details below:

Video Contest
Contest link: bit.ly/tnfpoker

TNF Ventures Launch
Date: 18 May 2012
Time: 4.30pm – 7.30pm
Venue: Media Development Authority, F11 Screening Room, 3 Fusionopolis Way, Symbiosis Singapore 138633
RSVP: bit.ly/TNF_RSVP

The Chinese startup behind the popular photographic app Camera360 has secured nearly US$10 million in series A funding, led by Singapore-based Gobi Partners and US-based Matrix Partners. The team behind it is Pinguo, which also makes the Viddy-esque app Movie360.

The funding was revealed by Gobi’s MD, Tong Weiliang, who also confirmed the financing figure.

Pinguo says it has over 30 million users across its three image-filtering apps for Android and iPhone (there’s also the PhotoShop-esque Photo360). The app makers are located in southwestern China’s Sichuan province, far from the usual startup hubs around Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangdong. CEO Xu Hao has told Chinese media that he’s already working on some series B funding that could be wrapped up in the second half of the year.

Camera360 was one of the first Chinese-made apps to go global, so far racking up over five million downloads on the Google Play Store (for Android) alone, where it has an exemplary four-and-a-half star rating.

The last time we saw Matrix Partners in action, the VC fund was backing the Taiwanese social gaming devs SNS+, while Gobi recently installed entrepreneurial and cultural maven Shaw Soo Wei as a Singapore Fund partner.

Find all of Pinguo’s apps on its homepage.

[Source: Sohu IT news - article in Chinese]

Chinese online city listings company DDMap has today revealed a new and sizable round of funding. CEO Xu Longjiang, talking to Chinese media, said the financing was worth US$40 million and was led by US-based CID Capital and China-oriented F&H Fund Management.

Much of DDMap’s business is actually in local promotions via its mobile apps DDCoupons, DDLife, and the newer DDCheckins. Therefore, Xu Longjiang says that much of the funding will go towards investment in its smartphone apps and this “local lifestyle” and discounts sector. For example, through partnerships with venues in over 40 Chinese cities, users of the DDCoupons app could get an immediate in-store discount of, say, 20 percent without the need for printing a voucher or anything.

The Shanghai-based company was started up in 2005 and has received funding in the past from HTC (TPE:2498) in a $9million round, and also from Morningside Group and KTB Ventures before that.

In addition to its mobile internet business, DDMap has a daily deals portal, and online maps and local bus routes. It’s up against local promotions from the likes of the startup Buding, as well as major group buy and review sites such as Dianping.

Check out the DDMap apps on its homepage.

[Source: QQ Tech news - article in Chinese]

Back in February we encouraged startups to apply to win a place on the Impact Ventures Accelerator Program (IVAP) which had just launched across Southeast Asia. And now we have word of the two winners of the Indonesian leg of the contest, which was run in association with the Global Entrepreneurship Program Indonesia (GEPI).

The two winning startups are ones that, in line with the aims of the LGT Venture Philanthropy-run IVAP, “strive to have a direct social or environmental impact.” One was Bali Recycling (pictured above on stage), which is a waste management system; the other eye-catching enterprise was ALUMIBP Sukses Mandiri which runs mentorship programs for rice farmers. Both those teams win places on the IVAP 8- to 24-month program for early stage entrepreneurs, with the possibility of up to US$50,000 in backing from Lichtenstein-based LGT Venture Philanthropy.

Shinta Kamdani, vice chairwomen of GEPI, praised the strength of the entries, saying, “we admire knowing that all the businesses are run by entrepreneurs with their inspiring social vision.” LGT’s SEA investment manager, Joan Yao, hailed the quality of all the submissions in the past few months:

We found interesting businesses by entrepreneurs who applied, which the businesses have direct social and environmental impact that can be scaled up for long run. It has been a great pleasure to see entrepreneurs from agriculture, education, waste management, and foods sectors showcasing their real impacts to their surrounding communities.

Bali Recycling collects and processes hazardous materials for both businesses and households. The organizers pointed out that “helping solve the waste problem is the first step in creating an ‘environmental awakening’ in many countries,” with the hope being that the team can do exactly that on the Balinese island.

ALUMIBP Sukses Mandiri aims to educate and support rice farmers in Indonesia, with its mentorships designed to enlighten on the subject of seeds, organic fertilizer, and such-like; whilst also hopefully increasing the numbers entering into rice farming.

Four other IVAP runners-up were 8 Villages, a business social network for farmers; Kedai Balitaku, a project to sell nutritious budget food in areas plagued by malnutrition; Sulis, a technology to pasteurize milk without using heat sources; and Provisi Education, which runs support groups in public schools.

The China-Singapore venture fund Gobi Partners has announced the appointment of a new venture partner for the Gobi Singapore Fund in the form of Shaw Soo Wei (pictured right). Ms Shaw is an experienced media executive as well as someone who’s steeped in the Singaporean entrepreneurial scene, recently working as a consultant to businesses in the region and getting some of them into the mainland China market.

Revealed exclusively to Tech in Asia by Gobi Partners this morning, Shaw Soo Wei becomes the second such venture partner after Dextrys’ James Tong. Her knowledge of both her home country and the China market – in both the private and public sectors – will be put to use at Gobi helping startups to expand across the region. Gobi invests in early-stage IT and media startups and manages over US$300 million in potential funds.

Shaw, in a statement issued upon her appointment, described the Gobi Singapore Fund as “a leading investor in cross-border opportunities in China and Southeast Asia.” Outlining her role, she explained:

As Chinese and Southeast Asian media companies start to expand beyond their home markets, my focus will be identifying early-stage investment potential and key leaders in disruptive innovation.

Ku Kay Mok, a partner at Gobi Singapore, lauded the new venture partner by describing her as an “experienced executive with strong connections with the media sector.” Mok added:

As we continue to invest in consumer-oriented digital media startups, she will be instrumental in identifying media trends and opening doors towards business and market opportunities as these companies scale and work with existing content providers and other traditional media players.

The last time we saw Gobi Partners in action was just last month when a game studio that it had invested in was sold at a very tidy profit. That sale saw Gobi claim that it has now achieved 60 percent in internal rate of return (IRR), a quantitative measure of a fund’s profitability of investments.

Silicon Valley startup accelerator Plug and Play Tech Center has given growth capital to the Singapore-based virtual currency exchange service First Meta. Together with backing from Singapore’s NRF, the Plug and Play funding is worth SG$588,000 (US$468,000) to First Meta.

Avid online gamers might know that First Meta was the first provider of ATMs and credit cards inside Second Life, that vast virtual world which was in the news for a few months before being largely forgotten about. Still, the Singaporean company is active across a number of games and platforms, providing virtual goods as well as the Forex-like trading of virtual currencies. It’s a huge business, especially in Asia.

First Meta CEO, Autumn Radtke, said in an announcement today that the company already has stable revenue and that the funding will be used to develop the next generation of virtual goods and move onto new platforms. She added:

We believe as gaming becomes more mainstream so will secondary trading. We’re here to help the new generation of game companies and currency issuers participate in revenue and avoid the black market fraud problems associated with unsanctioned trading.

Plug and Play arrived in Singapore in 2010. The director of Plug and Play Singapore, Jupe Tan, said that First Meta is a leader in “a fast growing and exciting industry” and hinted that it wanted to help the virtual goods company succeed on the global stage.

Earlier this month, Singapore’s NRF announced a second batch of incubators added to its Technology Incubation Scheme to co-fund startups. Plug and Play Singapore was in this from the beginning as one of the first-wave of approved incubators. Today’s funding is also a part of this TIS initiative.

See the full announcement on the Plug and Play site, or check out First Meta.

[Post updated 2pm SG/BJ time: Amended my mistaken dates in the fifth paragraph]

La Miu, the Chinese lingerie brand and e-tailer, has secured its third major funding round, according to co-founder and VP Hao Jianyao. The finer details have not been revealed, and the series C funding will be complete by the end of the month. The financial backing is reportedly well into the tens of millions of dollars.

Last year, La Miu’s series B VC funding was led by DCM and totaled $40 million. Series A backing in 2009 came to $5 million, led by the Japanese triumvirate Rakuten (JSD:4755), Daiwa (TYO:8601), and Lotte; the startup’s seed funding in 2008 came mostly from Japanese sources as well.

LaMiu.com is not just an e-commerce site, as all its underwear – and a new range of casual outdoor wear as well – is designed and manufactured by the company. It’s a model that was taken and run with by China’s Vancl with its own-brand leisure-wear.

We talked to La Miu’s other co-founder, Dong Lu, who’s the CEO, last November, when he told us how he envisaged a sort of luxury shopping experience like Victoria’s Secret in the US – yet more affordable and accessible as well. A move into Japan is being planned for this year.

Just a few days ago, a lingerie-oriented Indian e-commerce startup, Zivame, secured some series A funding, proving that mid- to high-range lady’s underwear e-tailers are of big-time interest to investors right now.

[Source: QQ Tech news - article in Chinese]

The Indian e-commerce site Zivame, which specializes in selling premium lingerie items, was only launched in August 2011 but has already wrapped up some major series A funding from IDG Ventures and IndoUS Venture Partners. The financial terms of the funding have not been revealed.

Zivame claims that the lingerie segment is the highest growth category in women’s apparel, yet it is poorly served in bricks-and-mortar stores across India – and so online shopping can make it a more comfortable and less awkward experience for female consumers. The site only sells mid- to upper-range brands of lingerie, mostly from international marques, and says it has seen its growth in visitor numbers go up from just 6,000 per month after its launch, to over a quarter of a million in the month of February.

Apparently that’s the kind of growth and market specialization that interests the two VC firms. The MD of IDG Ventrures India Advisors, T.C. Meenakshisundaram, said in an announcement:

Zivame is a leader in the category of lingerie which lends itself extremely well to e-commerce. […] Zivame has one of the best teams comprising varied experience in retail, technology, and strategy. We believe that Zivame will be able to extend its lead significantly with this capital raise.

The store’s CEO, Richa Kar, said that the funding would be invested in “providing a top notch customer experience and making many more brands and products available for our customers, scaling our technology and operations, and to create many more consumer touch points.”

Just last month, IDG Ventures India put $14 million into Brainbees Solutions which runs two e-commerce stores for baby and beauty products. And so IDG seems to be on something of a VC shopping spree for Indian online malls. And that can only be superb news for the country’s burgeoning e-commerce industry which has huge but as yet very much unfulfilled potential – as shown in this excellent infographic.

While most of the far-too-numerous daily deals sites in China are going through a rough time, the woman-oriented group buying website MaiHao has today announced that it has secured some major investment funding.

The VC backing amounts to US$5 million, coming mainly from the Washington-based ICI an unidentified US investment firm. MaiHao’s CEO and co-founder, Hong Miaolong, hasn’t explained to the media how the funding might best be spent or invested.

[UPDATE on March 3rd - After checking with ICI, it is not the source of the investment funding, and seems to be a mistranslation on my part. The local media seems to identify only an unspecified US investment firm].

The MaiHao site – at 17mh.com – sells discounted deals on products such as make-up, skincare products, and clothing. The company guarantees that all its branded products, such as Clinique and L’Oreal, are genuine items, which can be a serious issue on some group buy and e-commerce sites in the country. There are plenty of other deals sites taking a similarly specialist approach – in terms of focusing on women and a certain genre of products – such as Rakuten China’s group-buy portal which is a joint-venture between Rakuten (JSD:4755) and Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU).

The timing for the MaiHao funding news is pretty apt, as today is International Women’s Day.

[Source: JRJ Finance - article in Chinese]

Women’s e-commerce can often be the hottest e-tailing ticket – and with that prospect in mind, the Indonesian fashion site Berrybenka has secured funding from East Ventures. The terms of the VC backing have not been revealed.

In an announcement issued by the startup, it said that East Ventures was attracted by “the amazing growth rate and strong business concept” of Berrybenka, which curates and sells items from relatively small and affordable Indonesian and regional clothing and shoe brands. The site started in August 2011, now has 50 brands on the site, and claims double digit monthly growth in both user numbers and revenue.

Berrybenka’s co-founders are Claudia Widjaja and Yenti Elizabeth, who recently brought on board some experienced advisors to guide them during their early-stage growth.

On today’s funding, Widjaja told the media:

I started Berrybenka in order to pursue my passion in fashion. We believe that Berrybenka can bring additional value for fashion lovers in Indonesia – and now we are very excited to have East Ventures as our partner. […] We believe that through this partnership, we will grow this website to be the leader of fashion commerce in Indonesia.

East Ventures has generally been investing in social and gaming startups, so it’ll be interesting to see if this marks a shift towards backing more e-commerce in the country.

Disclosure: TiA has also received seed funding from East Ventures

The Impact Ventures Accelerator Program (IVAP) is launching across Southeast Asia today, bringing funding and support to early-stage startups in the region. The initiative is run by LGT Venture Philanthropy around the world – and now Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines get to join in as well.

To make IVAP happen, Lichtenstein-based LGT is partnering with four different partners in those countries: with GEPI in Indonesia, ChangeFusion in Thailand, CSIP in Vietnam, and Xchange in the Philippines. The program is essentially an 8- to 24-month course for early-stage entrepreneurs, providing consulting and financial support during the first stages of tentative scaling.

The program prefers to back young teams that “strive to have a direct social or environmental impact that can be scaled.”

In a press release for the Indonesian IVAP, GEPI’s Chris Kanter added:

GEPI and LGT Venture Philanthropy together will be able to further catalyse Indonesia’s entrepreneurship ecosystem and link aspiring social entrepreneurs to global investments, expertise, and support networks.

Access to financing and investment, particularly at the early stage, has been one of the key challenges for entrepreneurs in Indonesia; hence with LGT Venture Philanthropy we will provide investment up to US$50,000 and up to one year of consulting support to visionary entrepreneurs. Furthermore, the access to a global network will benefit the entrepreneurs for long term growth.

Eligible entrepreneurs in the four nations better move quickly, as the deadline for submissions to the program is March 5th. You might like to read the entry criteria first, before starting your application process on the IVAP minisite.

For an idea of what kind of idea might be a strong candidate, read about the Indonesian startup Go-Jek which has enjoyed separate backing from GEPI.