We caught up with Antler founder and CEO Magnus Grimeland about the startup scene in Asia, the current tech startup trends in the region, and investment approaches during the rise of AI technology.
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Indian startup Zypp Electric plans to use fresh investment from Japanese oil and energy conglomerate ENEOS to take its EV rental service into Southeast Asia early next year, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The company aims to be in 15 markets over the next two years. Of those 15 markets, Zypp Electric plans to launch its […]
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Google is investing nearly $350 million in Flipkart, becoming the latest high-profile name to back the Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce startup. The Android-maker will also provide Flipkart with cloud offerings as part of the deal, the Bengaluru-headquartered startup said in a brief statement Friday. The Google investment is part of a nearly $1 billion funding round […]
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The graduates of Alliance DAO are often useful indicators of investor appetite and user adaption trends within the crypto space. The latest batch of the stage-agnostic crypto accelerator, unveiled today, comes at a moment of great excitement for the recovering market.
Just two months ago, Bitcoin hit its all-time high; though the value of the largest cryptocurrency has since declined, it continues to trade at much higher levels than during the market downturn following FTX’s implosion in late 2022. Venture investors are responding and plowing money into web3 startups, sending total fundraising in the space to roughly $1.9 billion in Q1, a sharp 58% jump from the quarter before, according to Crunchbase data.
The renewed enthusiasm among web3 believers is evidenced by catchphrases like “we are so back” that have filled crypto X/Twitter. In the meantime, regulatory efforts to rein in the industry have not waned. In the U.S., Binance’s Canadian founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao is set to become the richest person to ever face imprisonment. Uniswap, which has been vocal about its decentralized approach to digital assets, received a notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last month.
Unsurprisingly, the ongoing crackdowns in the U.S. have a palpable impact on Alliance DAO’s geographic composition.
Image Credits: Alliance DAO
As shown in the graph (above) shared by Qiao Wang, one of the founding partners of Alliance DAO, founders based in North America accounted for 45% of the accelerator’s applicants in H2 2021; that share slipped to just 26% in H1 this year.
“Essentially, the U.S. is losing market share for crypto founders over the last three years. This is likely due to 1) regulations and 2) crypto finding product-market fit in emerging markets,” Wang told TechCrunch via email.
Indeed, the accelerator has seen a steady uptick in interest from Asia, which made up 24% of all applications in H1 2024, compared to 14% in H2 2021.
North America’s declining participation in Alliance DAO doesn’t imply founders simply abandon their crypto dreams. Historically, web3 entrepreneurs have been a flexible and nomadic tribe, fleeing crackdowns and seeking out more favorable regions. As a result, some of them may set up physical bases in emerging markets with a more amicable crypto environment.
As TechCrunch has reported, Asia has quickly become a popular destination for crypto entrepreneurs. The user base is large, young and open to new types of technology and financial assets. Several jurisdictions, including Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore, have taken notable steps to provide clearer regulatory frameworks for the budding sector, providing much reassurance to founders facing policy uncertainty elsewhere.
Alliance DAO’s latest cohort, the 12th edition of its three-month program, received 1,503 applications. That marked a significant increase from the last batch’s 1083 applications. Just 21 teams were accepted this time, resulting in a competitive 1.4% acceptance rate. Twelve of them are presenting at today’s demo day.
Projects building on Ethereum, the most active blockchain by developer activity, are still the focus of this cohort, although other ecosystems like Solana and Bitcoin are “making a comeback,” according to Wang. Popular verticals seen across the batch include decentralized AI, crypto infrastructure (especially modular blockchain), decentralized finance (DeFi), and crypto-based payment solutions.
Now, let’s turn to the projects:
Company name: Villcaso
What it does: Permissionless U.S. real estate investing
Founders: Nathaniel Sokoll-Ward, Val Lee
The pitch: REITs, or real estate investment trusts, are designed to offer investors fractional exposure to real estate, lowering barriers to entry. While they offer more liquidity than traditional property investment, REITs are for the most part inaccessible to global investors, who make up an increasing share of total real estate investments in the U.S. Using a “fully legal permissionless token,” Villcaso is working to scale and distribute fractional ownership of U.S. real estate to a global audience. It has small equity positions in a large number of homes across the country.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: GoBankless
What it does: Transferwise with stablecoins
Founders: Ygor Francisco, Khayalethu Mtshali
The pitch: GoBankless has its eye on Africa’s cross-border payments market that’s witnessing explosive growth. Businesses have been stuck with the long processing time and high settlement fees of traditional banks, while those that resist SWIFT’s monopoly are left facing counterparty risks in shadow markets. With the use of stablecoins, the startup is working to make cross-border payments instant without banking intermediaries. Today, GoBankless is serving around 50 small businesses across Mozambique and South Africa and settling $7 million in payments every month.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: Wasabi Protocol
What it does: Leverage trading protocol
Founders: Eren Derman, Kemal Hasan Atay
The pitch: Crypto trading, especially longtail trading of new assets such as memecoins and NFTs, has seen a surge in daily volume. Popular platforms like Aevo and Hyperliquid allow users to gain early access, but they are “dependent on the market being sufficiently liquid,” leading to missed opportunities. Wasabi solves liquidity by backing user positions with underlying assets while its competitors take an algorithmic approach. Launched a few months ago, Wasabi’s total value locked (TVL) has grown to $60 million with over $200 million in volume.
Stage: Recently closed a seed round; raising a strategic round
Company name: Lulubit
What it does: Coinbase for Central America
Founders: Ianir Sonis, Diego Hernan Cabrera, Alan Futerman
The pitch: Central America is among regions that have shown a rapid pace of crypto adoption. Nonetheless, it’s still hard to even just buy and sell crypto in the region. P2P networks are unreliable while established exchanges charge high fees. Lulubit allows retail users in Central America to buy and sell crypto from their local banks and spend through the crypto debit card it issues; users can also send remittances on-chain to Lulubit and withdraw to their bank accounts at lower rates than the traditional method. Launched less than a year ago, Lulubit has amassed more than 18,000 users and processed over $1.3 million in volume in April alone, growing 36% month-over-month.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: ZwapX
What it does: Marketplace for tokenized watches
Founders: Yohan Chiovetta, Noah Chiovetta, Rocco Di Capua
The pitch: The billion-dollar luxury watch market is enormous yet underserved by technological innovation. Peer-to-peer marketplaces are fraught with scams while B2C platforms face online authentication challenges. ZwapX offers a way for users to trade physical watches in the form of tokens, which act as certificates of ownership and authenticity. It has tokenized 44 watches to date with a $1.4 million TVL and a volume of $240,000.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: Fractal Payments
What it does: Cross-border payments for global businesses
Founders: Pavel Skalin
The pitch: Money movement for businesses is one of the world’s biggest industries, yet it’s still suffering from perennial problems like high fees and slow processing. Fractal Payments is another startup aspiring to disrupt SWIFT with the use of stablecoins. Fully licensed in the European Union, it claims to make cross-border payments three times cheaper and six times faster than through legacy banking rails. It has facilitated more than $5 million in payments volume and working with a network of partners that support payments in over 60 countries.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: Código
What it does: Crypto data for AI training
Founders: Jean-Philippe Emelie Marcos, Diego Besprosvan, Jaziel Guerrero
The pitch: Training data for AI is a billion-dollar market opportunity that has spawned unicorns like Scale AI. But existing solutions focus mostly on web2 use cases, with few powering AI training with crypto data. Código provides highly curated datasets to train specialized models for high-stake crypto applications, such as those involving financial transactions. Data is collected automatically through crowdsourcing, after which it is subject to a decentralized review and augmentation process where reviews can earn tokens. The tool has generated 4,000 dApps and four million lines of code within six months.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: Accrue
What it does: Stablecoin payment network for Africa
Founders: Clinton Mbah, Adesuwa Omoruyi
The pitch: Bank transfers in Africa are notoriously costly and slow. Accrue aims to create a payment network that enables instant and affordable transactions — all powered by stablecoins. To that end, the startup is tapping the continent’s existing network of mobile tellers, which allow users to perform bank transactions over mobile phones, often simply through text messages. “10% of these mobile tellers are stablecoin-savvy,” and they are joining Accrue because it offers them more profit share and an upcoming token. The startup is cash-flow positive and has processed $5 million in payments.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: Fig Investments
What it does: Tokenizing hedge fund strategies
Founders: Guanzhi Ma, Tony Qian
The pitch: The interest in decentralized finance (DeFi) services from traditional finance (TradFi) has surged, as seen in institutional players like Blackrock tokenizing stocks. Founded by banking veterans, Fig offers an automated trading desk that “matches TradFi interest in crypto with on-chain LP interest for returns.” It claims to be achieving a 10x scale than its competitor. Since launching four months ago, its TVL has grown to $10 million, with $40 million more in the backlog.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: 0G
What it does: Modular AI chain
Founders: Michael Heinrich, Ming Wu
The pitch: 0G is building in the red-hot and cut-throat area of modular blockchain, which aims to help scale Ethereum transactions. Specifically, 0G is acting as a data availability layer, which ensures nodes in a blockchain network can access and verify transaction data. Its focus puts it in direct competition with well-funded projects such as a16z-backed EigenLayer, industry leader Celestia as well as Avail, which originated from Polygon. Using its unique technology, 0G claims it can achieve performance that’s 50,000 times faster than Celestia while costing 100x less than the rival.
Stage: Recently closed a 20x oversubscribed pre-seed round; raising seed
Company name: Proto
What it does: Google Maps on-chain
Founders: Akshay Yeleswarapu
The pitch: Despite the ubiquitous use of Google Maps, the application is surprisingly inaccurate in developing countries where cities are much denser than their Western counterparts and urban development happens rapidly. Proto wants to make navigation more accurate for underserved markets by crowdsourcing mapping data and allowing contributors to easily upload images with their mobile phones, a process incentivized by token rewards. Launched in late January, Proto has achieved 75% of Google Maps’ coverage of Bangalore through a network of 400 users.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: Dinari
What it does: The global tokenized stock exchange
Founders: Gabriel Otte, Chas Rampenthal, Jake Timothy
The pitch: Global demand for U.S. securities has skyrocketed, yet access remains rather limited. Traditional brokerages have a high barrier of entry for foreign users, while early attempts to tokenize securities such as Ondo restrict certain features. Registered with the SEC, Dinari offers a way for non-U.S. investors to buy stocks via stablecoins. Its unique advantage is that its tokens are backed by real-world stocks. The platform’s TVL has grown to $500,000.
Stage: Closed a $10 million seed round; raising Series A
Alliance DAO invites a range of crypto experts to speak to cohorts about their domain knowledge. This time around, its guest mentors include Jacquelyn Melinek, founder of Token Relations and TechCrunch’s former crypto reporter; Jason Yanowitz, founder of Blockworks; Ming Ng, founder of Jupiter; Greg DiPrisco, founder of Ajna and M^0 Labs; Seung Yoon “SY” Lee, founder of Story Protocol; David Vorick, founder of Sia and Glow; and Ilja Moisejevs & Richard Wu, founders of Tensor.
Piyush Gupta, one of the operating leaders at Peak XV Partners, is leaving the firm at the end of this month to start his own fund, four people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
Gupta joined Peak XV (called Sequoia India and SEA then) in 2017, leading the influential venture firm’s strategic development team. Before joining Peak XV, he focused on similar things – mergers, acquisitions, and IPOs – at Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank for more than a decade.
Though Gupta didn’t serve as an investing partner at Peak XV, he played an important role at some of its programs including Pitstop, where investors from across the globe liaison with Peak XV’s portfolio startups each year.
“For early-stage companies, we take a more programmatic approach, such as UpSurge, where we provide a platform for multiple companies to meet with multiple investors over a few days. At later stages, M&A can be a crucible moment in the journey to becoming a large, enduring company,” his bio on Peak XV reads. “Where our job gets incredibly interesting is when we help companies through the journey from pre to post IPO. Going public is an event and a milestone, but the work continues long after that and preparation is key.”
News of Gupta’s departure was relayed by Peak XV Partners to its limited partners at its annual gathering last month, one person familiar with the matter said, where the fund also unveiled plans to launch a perpetual fund that will be bankrolled by its investment partners and extended team.
The two are parting ways on cordial terms, two people familiar with the matter said. Gupta plans to launch a secondary-focused fund and Peak XV intends to work closely with him to facilitate transactions at its portfolio firms.
Peak XV declined to comment and Gupta didn’t respond to a text.
Secondary transactions are on the rise in India. Peak XV itself has seen some exits — Pine Labs, K12 — through secondary transactions in the past two years. The firm’s holding in Mamaearth, Zomato, K12 Techno Services, Go Colors stood at a 10x-plus multiple as of last November, TechCrunch reported at the time.
SentinelOne acquired PingSafe, an early-stage startup in India, earlier this year for more than $100 million, TechCrunch reported earlier. PingSafe, which counted Peak XV’s Surge among its backers, had raised less than $4 million before the acquisition deal.
TransferGo, the U.K.-based fintech best known as a consumer platform for global remittances, has raised a $10 million growth funding round from Taiwan-based investor Taiwania Capital, with a view to expanding in the Asia-Pacific region. It last raised a $50 million Series C funding round in 2021.
TransferGo claims its growth, combined with the new investment, doubles its valuation. In September 2021 Dealroom valued it at $200 million-$300 million, but TransferGo declined to go into specifics.
Daumantas Dvilinskas, TransferGo co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch: “We have been profitable for the last year in and out, and the only burn was marketing, but the burn was very limited. We achieved sustainability of the business and became profitable and we still have proceeds from the last funding round. So we are profitable. We don’t need external capital to grow.”
However, he saw the opportunity to raise funding from Asia to expand there. “We raised money because we wanted to expand faster in Asia Pacific. So that’s the next frontier for us,” he said. “We are still taking customers from incumbents: 75% come from cash, banks and Western Union — that’s still the gorilla in the room.”
He puts TransferGo’s growth down to focusing on the consumer experience. “We’ve always been probably the most consumer-centric company in the space,” he said. “This is evident in our Trusted Reviews — still better than others. We really build out the product for our consumers. So that instant settlement of 90%, 24/7 instant, consumers love that. And it’s not easy to do. It takes time. You have to solve existing technology issues.”
Still, it hasn’t all been plain sailing. Last year TransferGo was hit with a €310,000 fine from the Bank of Lithuania for AML (i.e. anti-money laundering) failings.
“We’ve been going through inspection and they found some procedural gaps that we closed by the end of the year,” Dvilinskas told me. “Regulation is getting stronger, but we’re happy that we closed the door on that, because we received successful feedback from them after closing the mediation.”
TransferGo largely competes with market dominator Western Union, but newer upstarts such as Remitly and Wise are also in the competitive mix.
Pula, an insurtech based in Kenya, has since 2015 been keen on enhancing the access to agricultural insurance by small-holder farmers across emerging markets, shielding them against losses from pests, diseases and/or extreme weather events like floods and droughts.
So far, the insurtech has supported 15.4 million farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America to get insured, and it is eyeing more following a $20 million series B funding that will enable it to establish new partnerships, including for livestock covers.
Global investment manager BlueOrchard led the round through its InsuResilience strategy, which aims at providing access to climate insurance to vulnerable people in emerging markets. The IFC, through its $225 million venture capital platform, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Hesabu Capital, and existing investors, also participated in the round.
“Partnering with this group of like-minded investors to boost the growth of Pula globally is a very exciting milestone in driving our triple 100 vision, through which we intend to bring insurance to 100 million smallholder farmers. What started nine years ago as an unconventional idea that many deemed un-scalable is now a proven solution that has solved real needs for millions of smallholder farmers across 22 countries,” said Pula CEO Thomas Njeru, who co-founded the insurtech with Rose Goslinga.
Pula co-founders Rose Goslinga and Thomas Njeru have agricultural backgrounds. Image Credits: Pula
Pula embeds insurance in partners’ products
Instead of selling insurance directly to farmers, Pula has built a distribution channel of over 100 partners, including charitable organizations, banks, governments and agricultural input companies, to serve even the hard-to-reach farmers, by embedding insurance, for instance, in farm input costs or credit.
Each product Pula offers is customized to suit the demands of its clients, and the needs of the beneficiary farmers. The products, underwritten by insurance and reinsurance companies, are designed (including premium setting) through Pula’s digital actuary platform, based on historical data including weather patterns, and the frequency of events like floods or drought, harvests, losses and inputs used.
Among its collaborations is a long-term partnership with the government of Zambia, where the insurtech embeds insurance premiums with fertilizer and seed packages, reaching farmers across the country. In Ethiopia, it partnered with the World Food Programme and German Development Bank KfW and a local insurer, where it embedded insurance in the input voucher scheme that reached 122,000 farmers. And its impact is about to be felt following an outbreak of wheat rust disease in the Amhara region, where Pula is set to make the largest insurance payout to date, estimated at $800,000.
Pula says they have seen increased investment, yields and savings by farmers using its products, underscoring the benefits that agricultural insurance portends for emerging markets like Africa, where small-scale farmers contribute 70% of the food supply yet only 1% of them are covered. High-cost, lack of awareness and access are some of the barriers to agricultural insurance access.
“Research carried out by Pula in some African countries where we have delivered insurance shows that agricultural insurance helps smallholder farmers to on average increase investment in their farms by 16%, improve yields by 56%, and increase household savings by up to 170%. Also, an impact on farmers’ livelihoods can be seen through our partner insurer’s payouts – which have reached close to over US$40 million to 900,000 farmers since Pula’s inception to date,” said Njeru.
“Lastly, our impact is reflected in our renewal rate and growth. Eighty percent of the farmer groups and aggregators that buy Pula-developed insurance products from our partner insurers renew the following year, which is above the industry average, and reflects our customers satisfaction with our comprehensive products.”
Building on the success of its crop insurance products, Pula is set to introduce livestock covers in countries like Kenya upon the completion of a pilot program that kicked-off in Nigeria last year. Pula, through insurance partners, has been offering rural families in Nigeria comprehensive coverage against banditry, disease and death of animals. It is also doubling down on Asia and Latin America, markets its entered in 2021.
Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal is in talks to raise capital for his new startup, Indian fintech Navi. Bansal is talking to investors to raise at a valuation of around $2 billion, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. One source said he is looking to raise between $200 million and $400 million.
Bansal has largely self-funded Navi up to now, and this would be the Bengaluru-headquartered startup’s first large outside fundraise since it was founded in 2018.
Talks have yet to materialize into a deal, so the terms, as well as Bansal’s appetite for outside funding, may change, the sources cautioned. A Navi spokesperson declined to comment.
Navi, which offers personal and home loans as well as health insurance to customers, has been through a few financial twists and turns. Navi originally wanted to raise $440 million in a public listing, according to paperwork it filed in 2022. With the IPO market in a slump, however, the startup abandoned those plans last year.
The funding deliberations point to a significant shift in the venture market in India and are an encouraging sign for fintech more globally. After a particularly rough 2023 in which overall startup funding fell 73% in the country, this could be a signal that growth-stage funding rounds are back on the table.
Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund ADIA is in talks to back Indian audio-storytelling platform Pocket FM, TechCrunch reported last month. Indian eyewear brand Lenskart, Temasek-backed consumer nutrition platform HealthKart, and bike-taxi aggregator Rapido are also in talks to raise new growth-stage rounds, Indian outlet Economic Times reported Thursday. Khazanah, Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, is among investors that Swiggy-backed Rapido has engaged with in recent weeks, one source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
India’s startup ecosystem saw a steep decline in large funding rounds last year as global investors, including Tiger Global and SoftBank, reduced their investments, while domestic VC firms shifted their focus to early-stage companies, according to a recent Bain report.
The Reserve Bank of India’s regulatory actions in recent years have also impacted startups issuing cards and lending, further spooking many investors in the fintech sector.
Under Bansal, Flipkart was a trailblazer for startups in India, raising billions of dollars from a storied list of strategic and financial investors. He then left the startup in 2018 with a $1 billion windfall and opted for a bootstrapped approach for Navi, which he founded the same year.
Even if this might become Navi’s first external raise, that doesn’t mean Bansal has not been talking to interested parties. As TechCrunch previously reported, the fintech spoke to potential investors, including SoftBank, ahead of its IPO filing. Those discussions stalled after Navi’s application for a banking license was rejected by the country’s central bank, TechCrunch previously reported.
In recent quarters, Navi has narrowed its focus. It sold its microfinancing unit Chaitanya India for $178.5 million in August as part of a “strategic plan to focus on our digital-first businesses,” Bansal said at the time.
In an interview published by the Indian outlet Moneycontrol on Tuesday, Bansal said he would revive plans for the IPO, but only in a “few months, once we are ready.”
Bansal has also not given up the idea of turning Navi into a bank. “For now, I would say we have parked them, until we see that it is a possibility again in the future,” he told the Indian outlet. “Then we will pick up again when there’s some green light from the regulator at the right time.”
Chatbots have come a long way. For years, they were limited to responding with predetermined replies that followed a simple logic structure. But customers can have complex problems, and no tree-diagram of possible replies can have enough branches to account for all the edge cases that arise. Thankfully, the advent of large language models (LLMs) has finally rendered chatbots useful. Armed with mountains of data, startups are now leveraging generative AI to create custom chatbots for all sorts of businesses and use cases, particularly those where people want to be sure about what they’re buying.
Thailand’s HD is building chatbots aimed at one such industry: healthcare. The company started as a marketplace for third-party healthcare and surgery services and sees a strong case for developing conversational AI for the healthcare customer journey.
“The products we are selling are not the typical stuff you buy on Amazon. They are hospital services, so people shop the same way as they do offline,” co-founder Sheji Ho told TechCrunch.
Even though each product has a description on HD’s marketplace HDmall, Ho says people still prefer to ask first: “90% of the chat messages are people asking about product information. The chat commerce process [is similar to] the offline experience,” he explained.
To advance its AI ambitions, HD recently raised a $5.6 million Series A round led by SBI Ven Capital, a subsidiary of the Japanese financial giant SBI Group, through its joint fund with Kyobo Securities from South Korea and NTU Singapore’s NTUitive. M Venture Partners, FEBE Ventures, Partech Partners, Ratio Ventures, Orvel Ventures, and TA Ventures also participated in the round.
Ho says HD is working on building the “Sierra AI of the Southeast Asian healthcare industry.”
Over five years, Ho and his team saw that the faster HD’s representatives responded to inquiries, the higher the conversion rate. “So there’s a very good case to use AI to automate that process,” he said. The company expects conversational AI to not only help cut costs, but also allow staff to focus on higher-value tasks, like answering more complex customer questions.
But Ho and his team seem to have a realistic view of what they can achieve. It will not be able to match U.S. firms that have “nearly limitless access” to powerful GPUs, talent and venture capital, so the company is focusing on building vertical AI, with local data being its moat.
“Emerging markets need to compete and take advantage of AI by using the data they have — proprietary data that nobody else has,” said Ho. “We see that happening in other places, too. Some call this vertical AI, where they use a vertical domain-specific data that is proprietary to a certain business or industry. Then they build on top of that, and they enhance the model to the point where they have an AI application that is practical and they can start monetizing.”
HDmall. Image Credits: HD
HD therefore plans to train chatbots with the sea of anonymized transaction, chat, FAQ, and product catalog data it has accumulated over the years. Currently, 30% to 40% of the company’s transactions are done through chat commerce with customer service workers.
The company is planning to use the new capital to roll out a chatbot for its marketplace within three months and to open up the technology for third-party use by the end of this year. Potential customers are hospitals and clinics that need 24/7 customer support. The startup has already worked with some 2,000 healthcare providers in Asia, which will enable it to fine-tune its base language model for the healthcare domain. Eventually, the chatbot service will give the company a new SaaS revenue stream in addition to its marketplace commissions.
Like many other startups, HD cut costs and aimed for sustainable growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company “didn’t necessarily need to raise,” as it was heading toward profitability on 2x year-on-year growth after the pandemic was over, but Ho also saw an opportunity to move faster when others were slowing down.
“You hear people saying, ‘You should raise money when you don’t have to raise.’ If we raise now, then everything else will be cheaper. For example, customer acquisition is cheaper because everyone else stopped advertising in a recession. Talent acquisition also [costs less] because companies are unfortunately laying off people.”
Globally, startup valuations have been on a decline for the last few years. HD hasn’t escaped that wave, but Ho says he recognized the benefit of accepting a more moderate valuation early on.
“I think it’s pointless for companies to worry about valuation at such an early stage. We’ve seen that over the past few years, especially 2021, when companies started the race at such high valuations,” he said, pointing as an example to Indian health tech unicorn, Pristyn, which lost half of its valuation after a period of frenetic growth.
“Because they raised at such a high valuation, they were forced to grow super aggressively, and that leads to founders and companies cutting corners. You can’t cut corners when you’re in healthcare and you’re dealing with people’s lives,” Ho said.
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