• Honest

  Led · Equity · May 2024

  Founded in 2023, Honest is Indonesia’s fastest-growing credit-card issuer and the only local fintech holding a credit-card license after acquiring GE Finance Indonesia in 2022. Its flagship product, the Honest Card, delivers instant mobile issuance and approves more than 90 % of applicants, far surpassing traditional banks that approve fewer than 5 %. With fewer than 3 % of Indonesians currently owning a credit card, the company targets a large untapped market and plans to roll out corporate and co-branded cards that can be launched in weeks. Honest draws inspiration from Nubank, Ramp, and Imprint but tailors its user experience for Asian consumers. The founders are Peter Panas, former VP of Product for Apple Card at Goldman Sachs, and Will Ongkowidjaja, co-founder of Alpha JWC. Investors include XYZ Venture Capital, Village Global, Goodwater, Orico, Rakuten, and GMO, as well as notable angel David Vélez of Nubank. Honest has raised $100 million in total equity funding to date and aims for a U.S. IPO before 2030, supplementing its balance sheet with an additional $40 million in debt from Mizuho Bank.

• Secai Marche

  Led · Series A · May 2021

  Secai Marche runs an online marketplace that directly connects Southeast Asian foodservice operators and retailers with producers, while also handling every step of fulfillment—ordering, inspection, packing, and temperature-controlled delivery. By marrying Japanese logistics expertise with local operations, the company seeks to modernize the region’s fresh-food supply chain through a seamless, cross-border cold chain. Its strategy includes extending refrigerated infrastructure to major cities and incorporating maritime transport to maintain strict temperature management from farm to kitchen. The firm positions its service as “Japanese-quality” and aims to cut food waste by preserving freshness throughout transit. Newly raised funds will be directed toward expanding logistics hubs, strengthening cold-chain networks, and scaling temperature-controlled delivery capacity. To date, Secai Marche has secured a cumulative ¥1.2 billion in Series A financing from the corporate venture arms of three leading Japanese logistics groups.

• Algorithmia

  Participated · Series B · May 2019

  Algorithmia offers a cloud-agnostic machine learning DevOps platform that lets data scientists train models with the framework of their choice, bring them to a preapproved enterprise platform, and deploy them to production. The company began five years ago as a marketplace for algorithms but has since pivoted to focus on helping enterprises productionize ML and AI. Its platform is used by more than 90,000 engineers and data scientists and counts the United Nations, several U.S. intelligence agencies and Fortune 500 companies among its customers. Algorithmia says CIOs are bogged down by the difficulty of managing and deploying ML models, and its tools target the complete machine learning lifecycle. With the new funding the company plans to invest in product development and build out its team, aiming to double headcount over the next year. CEO Diego Oppenheimer emphasizes reducing infrastructure burden so data scientists can focus on building ML and AI applications that deliver value. Algorithmia operates a marketplace and enterprise solution that gives developers access to 3,500 algorithms, functions and machine-learning models drawn from university researchers and individual contributors. Its CODEX platform is portable and runs on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, with support for private OpenStack deployments for regulated customers. The company has focused on security to safely run users’ arbitrary code, which has helped it win enterprise customers in finance, telecom and even some intelligence agencies. Algorithmia currently has about 45,000 developers on its platform and has begun growing its enterprise business by offering private, secured cloud deployments. The team is small today (about 13 people, mostly engineers) but plans to expand to roughly 23 staff by year-end and open a sales/solutions office in New York City. Algorithmia builds a platform and marketplace to give algorithm developers in academia and elsewhere a way to share their work. Uploaded algorithms are adapted to Algorithmia’s inputs and outputs and exposed via a REST API so developers can call them from any language. The company runs computation on its own instances that dynamically boot up across different cloud providers and locations to provide better performance. Users pay a base computation fee plus a fee to the algorithm’s creator if that creator chooses to charge, creating incentives to publish and improve algorithms. Algorithmia allows "black box" offerings but encourages contributors to publish source so the community can spot bugs and provide fixes. The service is currently in a private, invitation-only beta with a public beta planned for this fall, and the company says it will use recently raised capital to hire engineers, build its algorithm library, and add more cloud platforms.

• Black Fish

  Participated · Series A · Aug 2018

  Blackfish Technology operates a mobile, membership-based consumer service platform built around an "e-commerce + travel + service" model that turns users into members and fans and converges e-commerce functions for an improved user experience. The company targets Millennial and Generation Z consumers, who are the main users of global online shopping. Led by co-founder and president Conor Yang, Blackfish focuses on reserving high-quality products and membership rights for its community. It plans to expand its membership platform horizontally by integrating additional services required by members and by expanding digital content products. The company intends to use newly raised funds to accelerate promotion of its membership system and to optimize distribution of membership privileges. Blackfish completed a $50M Series A+ financing round to support these initiatives. Black Fish is a consumer finance platform based in China’s Nanjing region. The company provides consumer finance services. It completed a $145 million Series A financing. Named investors in the round include Lightspeed China Partners and Gobi Partners. The article describes the raise as coming from a cluster of firms, indicating additional undisclosed participants.

• Carousell

  Led · Series C · May 2018

  Carousell is a mobile-first peer-to-peer selling app that operates across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Australia. Founded by three graduates of the National University of Singapore, the company has expanded its listings into automotive and real estate and monetizes those verticals while keeping its core service free. Prior to this deal Carousell had raised $126.8 million, including an $85 million round that closed in May 2018. The transaction with OLX values Carousell at $560 million based on OLX acquiring a 10% stake for $56 million. The deal also includes the transfer of OLX Philippines to Carousell, bringing six million registered users and a migration expected to be finalized by the second half of 2019. Management said the Naspers/OLX investment will help accelerate Carousell’s regional leadership and its work on technology and AI to improve value, trust and convenience for users. Carousell operates a mobile-first consumer-to-consumer marketplace that lets users list and sell unwanted items; the platform has facilitated the sale of over 50 million items and currently hosts 144 million listings. It has expanded into verticals including cars, property, jobs, services and finance, and is growing premium offerings in automotive and real estate. The primary C2C portion remains free, but the company has begun to monetize through advertising, promoted listings/spotlight ads, cost-per-click ads and partnerships such as financial services and travel insurance. Carousell is investing in AI to improve buyer-seller matching and is focused on expanding premium verticals beyond Singapore into markets like Indonesia and Thailand, with discussions of global expansion “in the next year or so.” Hiring and building engineering talent is a strategic priority; the company already has over 100 product engineers across multiple offices. Management has said there are no immediate plans for an IPO. Carousell operates a mobile-first classifieds app (iOS and Android) with a chat-style interface and photo uploads that connect buyers and sellers directly. The service prides itself on a lightweight, Craigslist-for-mobile experience where users arrange sales and payments themselves; Carousell does not currently monetize the service. The company reports roughly 35 million listings, about 70 new listings added per minute, and average users spend 17 minutes in the app. Today it spans five countries — Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia — and is focused on further international expansion, including markets outside Southeast Asia. Carousell has over 90 staff with around 24 engineers and plans to double its engineering headcount by the end of the year to improve search, buyer-seller matching and reduce spam. The team says the immediate priority is product and geographic growth rather than near-term monetization, though it expects to bring in revenue later. Carousell is a mobile app marketplace that lets sellers upload items with a few taps, use built-in photo-editing, and communicate with buyers via private messaging. Launched in 2012, the app has logged over 8 million listings and 2 million completed transactions, averaging eight transactions closing every minute. It has held the number one shopping app spot in Singapore’s iOS App Store since June. The company is still exploring monetization, including premium seller features and tools for small businesses. Carousell plans to hire growth and web engineers to support expansion into Indonesia, Malaysia, and Taiwan, and says it has broader APAC ambitions including Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. As it scales, the team will add moderation tools to remove fraudulent users and improve its feedback system, and will test desktop-first strategies in some markets. Carousell offers a mobile-first marketplace where users create listings by taking a photo and writing a brief description, with mobile-optimized web pages for each listing. The app includes photo filters, Facebook and Twitter integration, and a private chat feature that buyers and sellers use to arrange payment and delivery. The startup targets women aged 16–34 and says its community has created a million listings, about 20% of which get purchased; early adopters open the app roughly 10 times per day and spend about 24 minutes in it. Carousell’s inventory is largely fashion and beauty, secondhand tech gadgets, and handcrafted items. The company plans to add in-app payment options to enable credit-card transactions and is exploring monetization via premium features and transaction fees. The founding team demoed the first version at Startup Weekend Singapore in March 2012 and began working on the app full-time two months later.

No current team members are available.