Category: Business
Warburg Pincus-backed D&J China launches US$1.45 billion industrial park fund with AVIC Trust
D&J Industrial Property China Investment Ltd., a business park and suburban office developer which is owned by Warburg Pincus through a majority stake, has launched a capital fund with AVIC Trust to invest in industrial infrastructures in China.
Co-founded by the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) and OCBC Bank of Singapore, AVIC Trust is an investment and trust manager in China, with assets under management of over RMB430 billion (about US$62.18 billion).
With this partnership, the D&J Zhiyan Equity Investment Fund raises an initial equity capitalization of RMB10 billion (about US$1.45 billion), founded on a USD-RMB hybrid basis, which is said to be the first of its kind in China.
“In addition to helping tenants lower potential cost of land sourcing, infrastructure and facilities construction, the fund also seeks to provide integrated services in the areas of finance, data storage, consultancy, and R&D,” said the chairman of AVIC Trust, Yao Jiangtao.
The capital is dedicated to China’s industrial infrastructure landscape, where it will mainly be used to invest in modern integrated industrial parks in China’s major cities – backing projects which include business parks, production facilities, and R&D parks.
“Driven by a strong trend for an industrial upgrade, continued urbanization and rise of the knowledge economy, the fund will invest in quality assets and provide modern infrastructure services for corporates and manufacturers across the entire industry value chain,” said Sun Dongping, the co-founder and chairman of D&J China.
China’s D&J Industrial holding is the second real estate platform co-founded by Warburg Pincus and Sun Dongping, after the pair co-founded warehouse developer e-Shang in 2011.
Since its establishment, China D&J has completed two rounds of financing and currently has over 1.2 million square meters of operating and under development properties in Beijing, Shanghai, and other Chinese cities.
The company’s tenants portfolio include Shell, Abbott, and FMC, as well as high-tech knowledge economy companies – Asiainfo and iSoftStone.
D&J China targets to grow its assets to over 5 million square meters in the next three to five years, targeting to increase its total asset value to RMB45 billion by 2020.
By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media
Airfrov, a Singaporean online shopping app connecting buyers with travellers enters Indonesia
Airfrov, a platform that connects buyers with travellers for requesting products from abroad is now expanding its market reach to Indonesia – a strategic move responding to the opportunities in the increasing numbers of travelers that are crossing Indonesian borders.
Based in Singapore, the startup launched in 2015 has been operating for a year and a half, before it began expanding its businesses into Indonesia that has started since last August.
But entering Indonesia, Airfrov will be facing competition from existing peer courier services such as BisTip and Neetip.
“This trend of bringing back overseas products is getting popular, but there are some issues concerning the conventional process, for example, the limited number of products that can be sent, the long duration of delivery, the payment guarantee, and the high delivery fees,” said Airfrov, CEO Cai Li.
In response to the competition, Airfrov intends to set itself apart from other P2P courier services, through offering a safer solution that prioritise the needs of users.
Through its website and mobile application, Airfrov offers a simple way to shop abroad. Requesters simply post the desired items and offer a price quote, while Travelers abroad who are interested will meet the demand.
Additionally, the company will handle the payment from the requester and keep it until the items have been paid for. Travellers will receive their money only after the products have arrived in the requesters’ hands.
Besides, Airfrov also features information on the latest trends and popular existing products abroad.
“We are currently focusing on building the best user experience for our users in Indonesia and a strong local team to understand the people’s culture and local trends more deeply,” said Airfrov CTO Robi Ng, who is an Indonesian.
In this aspect, Airfrov also continued their efforts through approaching users who have used their services in order to get input related to Airfrov development as well as maintaining relationships in order to re-use the service and recommend it to people nearby.
Airfrov is said to have more than 95,000 active users, some of whom reside in Indonesia. Its soft launch event held in August has claimed to have received more than 1,000 offers from 150 travelers.
In an effort to continue increasing the number of users in Indonesia, Airfrov has partnered with Martha Tilaar, a homegrown cosmetics company. This partnership is in part due to the potential of the beauty school student who requires imported beauty supplies not found in Indonesia.
“Those who need products that are outside the country is expected to see Airfrov as a solution,” Cai Li adds.
By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media
Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6O8Bt1I78Y&feature=youtu.be
Apache Zeppelin secures US$ 4.1 million Series A funding round led by Vertex Ventures
ZEPL, an enterprise analytics company, has closed a US$ 4.1 million Series A funding round, led by Singapore-based Vertex Ventures. The round also saw participation from other investors which included Translink Capital, Specialized Types, and Big Basin Capital.
This funding round also debuted with a fresh new brand – ZEPL, similarly founded by the creators of Apache Zeppelin to replace the formerly known NFLabs.
“Our new brand identity, ZEPL – Zeppelin RELP – reflects our mission to provide an interface for modern day analytics workflow,” said Sejun Ra, the co-founder and CEO of ZEPL.
“For decades, enterprise analytics has been mired in silos – data silos, skill silos, team silos – that regardless of computational power, hindered speed and efficiency of analytics,” Sejun explains.
He continues, saying that “And though recent advances in Hadoop, Spark and other compute frameworks, alleviate some of the data silos issues, the myriad of choices further compounds the skill and team silos.”
In this case, Apache Zeppelin attempts to break down those walls providing a pluggable and open-source solution that enables data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts to use and share the same interface to source, process and analyse various data types.
Besides, using its JDBC Interpreter, Apache Zeppelin supports a majority of the modern day frameworks, from Spark, Cassandra, MongoDB, Elastic Search as well as standard relational databases such as Oracle and MySQL.
The data product is also integrated and available with various services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Dataproc, as well as most of the major Haddop distributions.
“We have been watching the organic growth of Zeppelin for some time, and are incredibly impressed with the demand and adoption of the technology, by everyone from small teams to the largest Fortune 100 companies,” said In Sik Rhee, the General Partner of Vertex Ventures that will be joining ZEPL’s company board.
Vertex Ventures is a network of funds that invest in and guides technology companies to an exit event, with Singapore’s state investment fund Temasek Holdings as a primary limited partner (LP).
“Enterprises have been clamoring for a way to seamlessly apply analytics across their organization. The team at ZEPL has a clear vision to drastically change the way companies leverage analytics to further their business goals, and we are pleased to support them as they expand Zeppelin’s reach,” In Sik Rhee adds.
With this new funding, ZEPL looks forward to expanding the Apache Zeppelin experience to enable the delivery of a single platform for end-to-end data analytics workflow.
According to ZEPL, Apache Zeppelin is fast becoming the standard big data visualization interface to explore and conduct deep data analysis. It also sees a significant adoption by corporate across different industry verticals, ranging from finance to high technology enterprises.
“Our mission is to transform the way people engage with data, and make big data analytics accessible and easy to use by anyone within an organization,” said Moon Soo Lee, creator of Apache Zeppelin and co-founder and CTO of ZEPL. “By building on top of Apache Zeppelin’s extensible, pluggable, open interface, we believe we can tear down the walls that currently limit how organizations leverage and communicate analytics.”
By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media
31VENTURES of Japan leads investment in Dronomy, the Israeli construction drone-software startup
Japan venture capital (VC) firm 31VENTURES has recently made an investment with Dronomy Ltd., an Isreali-based construction technology startup that provides a drone-based solution.
Mitsui Fudosan’s 31VENTURES has led the round along with other existing investors which include Battery Ventures, Lool Ventures, and Oryzn Capital which had also participated.
The announcement about the funding came on Friday, December 9 through the corporate VC fund – 31VENTURES Global Innovation Fund, an investment platform which is jointly operated by Global Brain Corporation for speedy investments.
No financial details were disclosed about this funding rounds. Though it is known that this funding round will allow the company to launch its solution into international markets and to ramp up its acquisition, starting Q1 2017.
Founded by two physicists interested in autonomous drone flight, current CEO Ori Aphek and VP of R&D Dr. Guy Raz, the venture identified the gap in the ability of construction companies to frequently and accurately monitor their construction sites.
The Tel Aviv startup leveraged upon this. providing the solution of a software company that builds actionable knowledge into construction projects through the analysis of unique and frequent project data collected by autonomous drones.
These pieces of information collected and analysed are shared via the cloud to relevant construction projects.
Commenting on the investment, Akira Sugawara, the GM of 31Ventures said, “It did not take us long to realise the outstanding business potential of Dronomy, which led us to make our first-ever investment in an Israeli technology company.
“The construction market, its challenges and the opportunities it encapsulates are well known to us. We were impressed to see how Dronomy and its remarkable team understand and address these challenges,” Sugarawa further adds.
Construction companies, developers, and subcontractors are beginning to realise the benefits of incorporating these unique technological solutions as part of their business processes.
With Dronomy, the process of mapping, monitoring, inspecting and sharing site details becomes an autonomous part of the daily site routine, leading to reduce in ever-occurring project delays, exceeding cost budgets, and disputes.
These can account for a significant percentage of a project’s overall costs. Besides, construction companies can also use Dronomy to build a knowledge corpus that can be shared over the cloud to all relevant stakeholders.
“We are consistently receiving extraordinary feedback from customers who experience what our solutions can do for them. This is now ratified by one of the world’s largest players in our market,” said Ori Aphek, the Founder and CEO of Dronomy.
“Our ability to make consumer drones fly low and close to construction sites, capture the right visual data, translate it into knowledge, and appropriately deliver this knowledge is what makes us different,” Aphek adds.
In September 2015, Dronomy has raised US$ 1.5 million funding led by Battery Ventures with participation from other VC fimrs and angel investors.
By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media
Singapore Ruvento Ventures raises US$25 million seed funding to invest in hardware startups from Singapore, China, and the United States
Singapore-based venture capital (VC) firm Ruvento has a new US$ 25 million seed fund to invest in hardware startups across Singapore, China, and the United States.
The fund is founded and managed by a Russian team, Vyacheslav Slava Solonitsyn and Alex Toh in 2011, who play the role of the Managing Partner and General Partner at Ruvento respectively.
At the same time, Vyacheslav Solonitsyn also maintains a role as the Managing Partner at EnchantVC, which also serves as an accelerator for consumer hardware startups.
According to the company, about 70 percent of the transactions by the VC firm will be an investment between US$ 100k and US$ 500k. While remaining of the capital will be reserved for follow-on investments with a budget up to US$ 2 million.
In terms of the company’s investment interest, Ruvento is particularly interested in infrastructure hardware, focusing on the Internet of Things (IoT) as well as sensor integrations.
Besides, the VC firm is also interested in the commercial applications of drones and robotics, in addition to creative startups that provide VR/AR solutions.
“Hardware shouldn’t mean gimmicks,” said Slava Solonitsyn, Ruvento Managing Partner. “We are not investing in things you don’t need.”
So far, Ruvento using this fund has already written checks to more than 14 companies.
Some of the startups include a startup developing precise autonomous drones, Prenav which received US$ 6.5 million for its seed round and Naked Labs which designed the world’s first home body scanner.
The company also operates in Russia and other Republics of the former Soviet Union, helping startups from the region to expand into Asian markets.
Ruvento is backed by an undisclosed family office. The firm has an eight-year fund lifecycle with a potential two-year extension.
By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media