SEA
Temasek leads $100m round for US-based payments firm Flywire. The round was joined by Bain Capital Ventures and F-Prime Capital. Flywire claims to have processed over $8 billion in payments for over 1,400 clients. (Deal Street Asia)
What we learned 1 year after launching StashAway. It took about eight months to build the product, with the product going live for about a year now. Moving from the main aim to build and ship the product fast, we are now juggling many objectives: improve the existing product, add new features and expand internationally, to name a few. (Tech In Asia)
Deliveroo Singapore revenue up 140% in 2017, almost two-and-a-half times the year before, allowing it to move from a net liabilities position to a net assets position in 2018, according to company’s announcement ot the media. The delivery-only kitchen concept Deliveroo Editions also expanded its kitchen opening in CT Hub 2 in April 2018. (Business Times)
Lower user acquisition costs drive up edtech valuations, says HarukaEdu’s Rustandi. He explained that part of the reason for the high valuations would be low customer acquisition costs and the ability to maintain customers for the long term, despite only having a modest number of users. (Deal Street Asia)
China
Pinduoduo debuts above high-end offer price on Nasdaq. The newly listed PDD saw it shares surge by as much as 44 per cent from $19 apiece on its first day. PDD raised a total of $1.63b via the issue of 85.6 million shares. (KrASIA)
Didi pilots in-car video recording to ramp up passenger safety. This move came in the wake of a series of measures aimed at improving passenger safety after harsh criticism over its lax passenger safety practice following the killing of a female flight attendant a few months ago. (KrASIA)
Ofo’s 3m bikes might see the termination of services. The company might be in for a lock-down, following an ongoing dispute with a provider of the smart-locking devices on Ofo bikes. If true, it would mean that more than one-fifth of its 14 million bikes would not work in the future. (KrASIA)
WeWork China raises $500m from Temasek, SoftBank, others. The co-working space operator expanded into China since 2016 and has grown to 20,000 members across nearly 40 locations in three Chinese cities. It plans to expand to six new Chinese cities this year including Shenzhen and Wuhan. (Deal Street Asia)
Video sharing site Bilibili removed from app stores amid Beijing’s content ‘clean up’. It was criticised by state-owned television for inappropriate content, to which the company responded saying that it will increase self-checking on published content. (SCMP)
Tencent eyes to secure China’s drug safety through new partnership. The company’s cloud unit will be working with Mediway, a medical information service, and drug retailer Jiontown to make an online platform to verify medicine’s supply chains, just a few days after China’s fake vaccine scandal. (Technode)
Huawei increases annual R&D spending amid 5G push. The increased budget will allow its R&D department to dedicate 20 to 30 per cent of its financial resources to basic financial research. (Technode)
Why some of Tencent’s WeChat users are feeling locked out of an online life? The dominant WeChat app, which has about 500 million users in China, is now shutting down individual accounts for seemingly mundane political discussions. This quiet punishment is generating fear among the country’s mobile savvy. (SCMP)
Rest of Asia
Flipkart offers US based footwear brand skechers an out-of-court settlement. Skechers alleged that Flipkart and four other sellers sell fake products in December 2017. (Inc42)
SoftBank to launch mobile payments service in Japan with India’s Paytm. Japan is lagging behind other countries in areas such as fintech and the Japanese government is trying to promote the uptake of digital payments. (Reuters)
World
Twitter says it does not shadow ban, despite complaints by Republicans. Twitter denied of the practice, in which someone’s post is made undiscoverable without them knowing. (TechCrunch)
The end of Facebook’s easy growth. After all the controversy Facebook generated in recent months, the social media giant is now inevitably in the day of its reckoning. Thursday’s historic 19 per cent stock drop appeared to be a fitting conclusion to an easy narrative. (Bloomberg)
Amazon earnings skyrocket on cloud computing and advertising. The company posted a profit that was double Wall Street targets on Thursday thanks to the retailer’s younger and higher-earning businesses. (Reuters)
AWS facial recognition service incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress to mugshots of people who have been arrested for crimes. Facial recognition technology is notoriously inaccurate in identifying people of colour. (The Information)
