Entrepreneurship runs deep in the Chearavanont family

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Happy hump day! Ever wonder what kind of startup would catch a billionaire’s eye? Scroll down to find out. 😉 But first…

Your quick bytes for today:

🚶‍♂️ Another high-ranking individual has left his post. This time, it’s Mark Porter, Grab’s CTO for its core technologies and transport business.

🎥 Believe us when we say that livestream ecommerce is huge – our explanation for this was in yesterday’s email if you missed it. The industry is so large that China is going to start regulating it.

🍔 In other news on regulations: Thailand will begin implementing measures to regulate the online and food delivery services in the country.

🎤 You can now sing along to Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now, as Spotify has released a new lyrics feature in Southeast Asia and India.

💳 Food delivery startup Swiggy enters the fintech sphere as it launched its own digital wallet, Swiggy Money, in partnership with ICICI Bank.

👀 Facebook’s new Avatars feature in India is a customizable sticker creator that looks a lot like Snapchat’s Bitmoji.

The heir to a Thai billionaire family made an acquisition

The Chearavanont family are real-life crazy rich Asians – they own Thai conglomerate CP Group and are ranked third on Bloomberg’s Asia’s richest family list in 2019.

The grandson of the family, Korawad Chearavanont, is a techie at heart. He’s the co-founder of Thai work collaboration app Eko, which recently acquired local AI chatbot firm ConvoLab for an eight-figure sum and launched a new parent company called Amity.

Amity is booming
Amity (previously known as Eko) is similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams. And like many remote working tools, it’s seeing huge growth during the pandemic.