Rising Giants Newsletter - N.24 Jazmyn Himel, Incubation Lead, Women in Tek Network
Max & Dom chatting with the boldest and most inspiring entrepreneurs and investors in Cambodia 🇰🇭. Turn on 💡, Tune in 📻, Keep up 🚀
Welcome to the Rising Giant's Podcast Newsletter by Max Thornton and Dominic Kalousek.
If you enjoy our content, please subscribe to our post-interview newsletter as we share our most recent podcast episode, Southeast Asia startup and venture capital news, venture deals, entrepreneur resources, and job opportunities in the region!
In case you missed it earlier this month, we celebrated our Half Year review of Rising Giants by providing a progress update on how much the channel has grown over the past half year. In case you missed it, check it out!
▶️ This Weeks Episode Recap
This week, we have Jazmyn Himel from Women in Tek Network joining us for a fascinating conversation about her journey into the incubation space in Cambodia. WTN is one of the few incubation programs in the country fully dedicated to advancing women's entrepreneurship. Jazmyn is Cambodian-Canadian, having also lived and worked in Canada, Laos, and Thailand. She is intent upon making a big difference in the entrepreneurial community in Cambodia, driving forward the case for women tech entrepreneurship, acting as a mentor, mediator, and confidant to some of the most talented up and coming women entrepreneurs in the country.
We get into:
🧐 'Headstrong with an immense clarity in their direction'; how Khmer women entrepreneurs are making waves in the tech community.
📝 Why incubators should not have a start and endpoint; the need for long term community-driven support for entrepreneurs.
🛠️ Getting more VC/PE investment into Cambodia; create a flywheel of successful Cambodian entrepreneurs reinvesting in startups.
🧠 Want to learn more about Women In Tek Network?
🎧 Find us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Play, and Anchor!
📝 Venture Capital Deal Flow Highlights in Southeast Asia
Indonesian “sea-to-table” platform Aruna announced today it has raised $35 million in Series A funding led by Prosus Ventures and East Ventures Growth Fund. Aruna says this is the largest Series A investment to date in Indonesia’s Agritech and Maritime sector. The company works primarily with small fisheries (or ones that have boats with about one to two metric tonnes of capacity) and focuses on sustainability, helping suppliers adhere to the United Nations Goal 14’s targets. The Maritime sector creates about $4.1 billion in annual export earnings and supports more than 7 million jobs.
GudangAda, a Jakarta-based marketplace that brings wholesalers closer to retail stores and other buyers, announced it has closed a Series B of more than $100 million. The funding was led by Asia Partners and Falcon Edge. Founded in January 2019, GudangAda is now used by half a million SMEs and covers 500 cities in Indonesia. The company helps lower operational costs by connecting principal manufacturers, distributors and retailers, and handling almost all aspects of B2B buying, including deliveries.
Kamereo, a B2B food supplier located in Vietnam, raised $4.6 million co-led by food conglomerate CPF Group, Quest Ventures and Genesia Ventures. The capital will be used for hiring, building a new warehouse management system, user interface upgrades and expanding into Hanoi next year. Many small F&B businesses can’t buy in large volumes, so they rely on nearby markets or multiple suppliers who only sell one category. In turn, this means farmers are disconnected from the end customers of their products, making it hard to predict selling prices or plan their crops. Kamereo’s B2B platform with its own warehouse and last-mile delivery network, to focus on those problems.
Philippine real estate tech startup and prop tech incubator Alternative Housing Group (AHG) has secured a seed funding amounting to P55 million (US$1.1 million) — fueling growth through an asset-light business model and gearing up towards building new technological innovations in real estate. The funding round was led by Foxmont Capital Partners, a Philippine venture capital fund that invested in homegrown Filipino startups such as Kumu, Edukasyon.ph, Booky, and several others.
Notable Deals:
Indonesian e-commerce brand acquirer Hypefast has raised $14 million in new funding, according to regulatory filings accessed by DealStreetAsia. The company is one of the largest houses of digital native brands in Southeast Asia and primarily focuses on investing between $100K-$10 million in top local brands.
📰 Frontier Market Start-Up and Venture Capital News in Southeast Asia
🇰🇭 In Cambodia, the state-run Techo Startup Center (TSC) and the Cambodian Association of Finance and Technology (CAFT) have entered into a memorandum of understanding to promote technology in the Kingdom.
🇹🇭 How a local Thai health tech startup is joining the fight against the pandemic.
🇮🇩 Grab and Gojek commit to 'carbon zero' ahead of public listing.
🇻🇳 Vietnam is seeing a new batch of VC’s seeking to tap its maturing startup ecosystem.
🇧🇩 The guide to raising angle investment in Bangladesh.
🇳🇵 eSatya (Rumsan), a blockchain startup in Nepal, received an equity-free investment of US$100,000 and a year-long mentorship through the Innovation Fund of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
🇵🇭 In the Philippines, 3 startups get P2.5-M funding each from 917Ventures, a Philippine VC fund.
📚 Knowledge Base: Entrepreneur and Investor Learning Resources
This week’s video series, we share a video by The Daily Watch that highlight the extraordinary women in Southeast Asia per the BBC 100 Women list of inspiring and influential women around the world.
Additional Resources To Check Out:
🎥 Some myths about pre-seed investing.
🔨 A simple mental model to improve your ability to solve problems
🔥 Three Big Things: The most important forces shaping the world.
👨🏼💻 Frontier Market Job Opportunities
Smart Axiata is hiring for an Senior Business Analyst in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Emerging Market Consultants is hiring for Senior Consultants in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
DA&G is hiring for multiple positions to help serve their clients in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Clik Payments is hiring for an multiple positions in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
ATEC International is hiring for Marketing Coordinator in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
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🧐 What is Rising Giants?
The Rising Giants Podcast was created in November 2020 by Max Thornton and Dom Kalousek after realizing that there were a limited number of resources available for insight into the local startup and investor ecosystem in Southeast Asia.
Our mission is to talk to entrepreneurs and investors in the world’s most rapidly evolving frontier markets to help understand what it takes to have bold ideas and build the business disruptors of tomorrow. Through our personal exploration of these landscapes, we dive deep in our interviews with inspirational individuals learning about their career journeys, ideas, and insights into the markets of developing startup ecosystems, and expanding on why they see their business and the region as a "rising giant”.