Help us keep tech unicorns honest

Dear readers,

Happy Lunar New Year!

I, for one, am glad it’s over. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy the holiday, but someone was telling me the other day that either nothing gets done in that awkward month before it, or it’s a frantic rush to finish everything.

Now we can kickstart the year properly, and it’s back to business.

A bombshell report by research firm Spire dropped a couple of weeks ago, alleging high fraud rates among Go-Jek drivers. Check out our article about it, which included new details that have not been written about elsewhere.

It’s easy to dismiss this issue as isolated profiteering among individual actors, but a lot is at stake here. Beyond hurting user experience, rampant fraud can artificially and significantly inflate gross merchandise volume and other metrics, which in turn could present investors and the larger community with a distorted picture about the health of the business involved and the tech industry in general.

It’s an issue that we hope to continue spotlighting so that industry players can stay honest and deal with fraud more seriously. But doing this will take more time and resources, and it’s only possible with your support. Do consider backing us by subscribing.

Here are the rest of our recent subscriber exclusives that you should check out:

• Controversial ‘sugar daddy’ dating app attracts funding
• Snap, list, sell: A look at Carousell’s journey
• ShopBack saw 250% transaction growth in 2018
• New VC firm focused on Southeast Asia and India launches with $50m fund
• Go-Jek reveals first close of new funding round, crucial stats
• Rising SE Asian startups this week: on-demand coffee, edtech, and more
• 6-month-old AI recruitment startup bags $1.5m from Qualgro, others
• A Tencent-backed, Reddit-Facebook hybrid is taking off in China
• Rising SE Asian startups this week: Special Wavemaker edition
• Ex-Uber and Ofo exec leaps into bespoke skincare
• After bringing Lamborghini to Southeast Asia, they’re now building electric motorcycles
• AI beats human players in StarCraft. Here’s why it matters

Cheers,

Terence
Chief Editor