TradeGecko sale offers good news in gloomy times

Dear readers,

Last week, Singapore software-as-a-service startup TradeGecko was sold for a reported US$80 million.

It’s a great outcome on many counts.

TradeGecko’s Singapore team / Photo credit: TradeGecko

Everyone gets to cash out. Because the buyer, financial software firm Intuit, is a public company, it matters less if the transaction is being made in cash or as a share swap. After all, if TradeGecko’s shareholders end up owning Intuit shares, they would be able to sell it through the stock market, anyway.

Singapore can produce quality software. The sale is a testament to the city-state’s ability to produce world-class enterprise apps, as TradeGecko has been integrated with Intuit for some time. This is literally a bigger deal than Zendesk’s acquisition of Zopim for US$30 million around seven years ago (wow, how time flies).

Shareholders will get nice returns. The valuation is a win for shareholders. Based on its US$10 million series B round, investors will likely get a nice return, and this means that founders and employees will get to cash out their shares, too.

TradeGecko has faced adversity. The startup hasn’t had an easy time. As we’ve exclusively reported, TradeGecko had to lay off a quarter of its staff. Its software was also getting bloated, leading to many complaints from customers.

The deal builds the ecosystem. The SaaS company rose out of the local ecosystem. The deal is a win for JFDI, which used to run the original startup accelerator in Singapore that TradeGecko was a part of. It’s also a win for Openspace Ventures, Jungle Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, 500 Startups, and Golden Gate Ventures – local venture capitalists that invested in the company.

Exits, big and small, benefit the startup scene. It provides a soft landing for failures and financial gain for winners. A good exit not only rewards founders but also employees for taking a chance with a startup.

As our Indonesia correspondent Aditya Hadi Pratama reported last week about how the country lacks an ESOP culture, a history of exits in an ecosystem helps convince startup workers to take up employee stock option plans.

It’s nice that the TradeGecko news provides a bit of cheer in these trying times. While startups are struggling to fundraise these days, we expect cash-rich tech companies to be hunting for deals. Don’t be surprised to hear about more M&As in the coming months.

Speaking of M&As, here’s a cheat sheet of tech acquisitions in Southeast Asia, which contains a list of all the deals in the space that we’ve logged over the years, plus some analysis on the data.

We also published a primer on how eSIMs can change the telecommunications game. We believe eSIMs will be an important development that’s ultimately advantageous to consumers, similar to how content and software have evolved beyond DVDs.