Fruiti King, a natural and nutritional fruity icy treat was able to raise MYR 5 million in CrowdPlus.asia, ASEAN’s first Equity Crowdfunding Platform licensed by Securities Malaysia. The amount is roughly translated to US$1.19 million.

This is the second round of funding for the local fruit icy treats company after it has raised MYR 1.5 million (approximately US$ 357,250) earlier in 2016 from Netrove Ventures Group, a regional venture capital firm.

“The local ice cream hero will utilize this fund for its overseas expansion in markets that have shown a keen interest in importing and distributing its products, including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea and more.” Bryan Chung, the COO of CrowdPlus.asia said in a statement yesterday.

The story goes, as the startup was founded when Gideon Leong tasted a popsicle made in Ipoh. Surprised by the popsicle’s fruity flavor and unique texture, Gideon decided to bring the product to the market that holds no competition.

Mr. Cool popsicles were launched. And since then, the product has been well-received and even further enhanced with the growing health-conscious consumer behavior which brought endless potential to the product.

Fruiti King, on the other hand, was the brainchild created when Gideon met Mr. Teh Kim Seng, the Chairman of Netrove Ventures Group. It was a decision to move the business forward and unlike Mr. Cool who focused on selling popsicles to the mass market Fruiti King was going to tackle the gelato and ice-cream market.

Even its name bore its intended meaning, as “Fruiti” with an Italian flare denotes the emphasis on fruit as a key ingredient in their products and “King” is used to describe the taste of their products as being the pinnacle of its class.

To do so, the company makes its ice cream utilizing the special fruit preservation technique used in their popsicles that will retain the original taste, texture and nutritional value of the fruit in its icy form. To date, the flavors available are Jackfruit, Mango, and Durian which includes Musang King and D24.

Following the funding, Gideon Leong commented saying that “It was indeed a pleasant surprise as I didn’t expect to raise this amount through crowdfunding but I am glad that I did this. The team is thankful for the vote of confidence in our startup by the crowd.”

For more information, please visit http://fruitiking.com/

By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media

Looking at Mario, it is perculiar how such a simple looping animated image featuring viral moments or pop cultural references manages to be so eye-catching.

Known as a GIF, which is short for Graphics Interchange Format, the animated image has exploded in popularity and successfully drawn in big interest from users and investors. As Giphy, the platform for all things GIF has announced today that it has raised US$72 million in its round of equity funding. The funding was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Institutional Venture Partners, and China Media Capital as well as existing backers Betaworks, RRE Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Alphabet Inc’s GV.

Following this, the startup based in New York has now doubled to a total funding of US$150 million as well as a valuation reported at US$600 million. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, this growth in funding and valuation came after the startup made an announcement last week that its GIFs has a daily viewership of 100 million people and that it serves one billion GIFs per day through its search engine, apps, and partnership deals which includes Viacom, Disney, and Major League Baseball. In totality, this culminates to about 2 million hours of GIFs viewed each day.

Understanding the never-ending thirst for silent, short videos ranging from silly to serious matters, the company was founded in February 2013 by Alex Chung and Jace Cooke. Although the company started out as part of a Hacker-in-Residence program at betaworks, it has always held the mission to make GIFs more searchable and shareable. The platform has since then been GIF-orientated, providing GIF-based products, including the ability to turn video into a GIF, Giphy Keys – a GIFkeyboard, and Giphy Cam available App Store, which is a portfolio of tools to help media companies publish GIF contents.

Additionally, the company also has a team in Giphy Studios that helps broadcast GIFs primarily turning media events like the Oscars or the Emmys into a library of GIFs, which is done in real-time. Furthermore, Giphy offers all these tools and resources to individual publishers and media companies for free, without any copyright restraints. In other words, to date, Giphy has not activated any form of monetization and is operating on a zero revenue basis.

Though it may seem like that this lack of exchange does not fare well for Giphy’s future revenue streams, but Giphy founder and CEO, Alex Chung sees a huge opportunity in advertising, saying at the TC Disrupt SF in September that “In a world where mobile messaging needs a native ad format, GIF is the perfect format for that.” He further elaborated that the mobile platform has yet to land on a native advertising format and his ambitions for GIFs to fill that role. It would be done in a way where brands could insert their products into intimate conversations, done so in a format that would feel natural and relevant.

But for now, Giphy says that it is not going to flip the monetization switch as long as the service continues to grow and investments flows in. For this round of funding, Giphy intends to use the funds to hire more editorial staff as well as in projects for the improvement of its technical capabilities.

On the same not, Giphy has also seized on the popularity of Vine, the six-second video service that began shutting down last week, offering users the option to convert Vine videos into GIFs, with the provided option to download the original file, audio and all from Giphy at any time.

For more information, please visit http://giphy.com/

By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media

Baobab Studios is a startup that creates VR animation. It is currently working on INVASION! and ASTEROIDS!, two of its top VR application which are available on all major VR platform. Previously, the startup caught media attention when it was announced that their 6-minute VR animated short, “Invasion!” was going to be made into a feature-length animated film by Hollywood production studio Roth Kirschenbaum.

INVASION! is an award-winning VR animation about two aliens and their plans to take over the Earth, until they encounter a pair of adorable bunnies, in which the player will be one of them. The animation is created by the founder of Baobab Studios and the director of Madagascar, Maureen Fan as well as narrated by American actor, Ethan Hawke.

Today, the company once again make the headlines as they made an announcement that it has ended its Series B round with a funding worth US$25 million. The round was led by Horizon Ventures with participation from Twentieth Century Fox, Evolution Media Partners, China’s Shanghai Media Group, Youku Global Media Fund and LDV partners.

Existing investors such as Comcast Ventures, HTC and Samsung has also contributed to the funding. With the end of this round, the company has become one of the largest single funding rounds for a virtual reality creative studio to date with an accumulated total funding of US$31 million.

The new funding will be used to expand its executive team whereby Larry Cutler, the Pixar’s technical director for Toy Story 2 and Monsters Inc, will join the team as the chief technology officer (CTO) to help lead and produce great content.

Baobab Studios aims to create VR animations that can inspire a sense of wonder through compelling stories, believable characters, immersive worlds, beautiful art, and high-quality animation, inspiring people to dream.

“We believe that the story should always come first and that the technology should work to serve the story,”said Maureen Fan, the CEO of Baobab Studios

But this is just only part of the VR entertainment industry, as VR continues to expand its reach into gaming experiences and even theme parks. The Void from United States, Zero Latency from South Australia, and the upcoming EXA Global that is slated to open in Malaysia early next year has all announced that VR is here to transform our reality. Then again, VR is more than just a new way for hardcore video gamer to immerse in all the technical gizmos that these entertainment park can wow users with, what matters at the end of the day is also great content.

“We are in the midst of a virtual reality revolution with the technological advancements that provides us the opportunity to develop immersive experiences and encapture audiences like never before.” says Daniel Tan, the CEO of Next Unicorn Ventures.

For more information, please visit http://www.baobabstudios.com/

By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media

Boarding the virtual reality shinkansen is a Tokyo-based startup known as VRize. But this company is not into the VR world of entertainment or social networking, instead the startup is running an ad business that utilizes the virtual reality space. More specifically, VRize is providing a 360-degree VR ad network for enterprises.

Today, in addition to VRize Ads, the startup has also announced the launch of another new service, VRize Video along with the news that it has secured a round of seed funding from Japanese investment firm B Dash Ventures and Japanese web marketing company Speee. The amount of the funding has not been disclosed, but according to sources, it seems that the company has raised a six-digit sum in terms of US dollars.

To date, VRize is working on two applications, one being VRize Ads, an application launched earlier in August which produces VR ads that can be distributed in three different formats including 360-degree video ad, over 150-inch large-screen feel video ad and 3DCG video ad.

On the other hand, VRize Video is a content management system for VR which will allow companies to develop VR applications, that is including in-app video clips for several VR platforms such as Oculus, PlayStation VR, HTC Vive, GearVR and Daydream.

In addition to the distribution of VR apps including 360-degree and 2D video clips, VRize also plans to improve the system by adding several other features such as live-streaming and in-app analysis.

VR is on the rise, with Mark Zuckerberg latest keynote offloading many considered a “crazy demo” of VR, especially taking photos in an virtual reality and share it on “real-reality”, and Malaysia’s Havson Group is on it’s way to building the first ever VR theme park in Malaysia, who has recently won South East Asia Champion at Create@Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) Cloud Startup Contests, the world is seeing a revelation of new possibilities.

“The lines between virtual reality and “real” reality is getting blurred”, says Daniel Tan, CEO at Next Unicorn Ventures.

About VRize
VRize is a startup that provides VR advertising network, a solution that will help VR content producers and game developers to better monetize. The idea behind this startup was inspired by Immersv, operating on a similar business overseas. Besides that, VRize also aims to move the ad networks in the web field to the VR field. In any case, VRize is the first and true VR ad network in Japan, providing VRize Ads and VRize Video services. For more information, please visit http://vrize.io/

By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media

Competing with Apple’s GarageBand, Soundtrap is a recording studio app that allows users to record music or audio with their friends online. Recently, the startup announced that it has raised US$6 million in its Series A led by Industrifonden, a Nordic VC firm based in Stockholm. The funding was also participated by its array of existing and new investors which includes Peter Sterky, the former CFO and COO of Spotify.

Founded in 2012 by Gabriel Sjöberg, Björn Melinder, Fredrik Posse, and Per Emanuelsson, Soundtrap is based in Sweden like its industry peers Spotify, Soundcloud and Tidal. Though its vision differs as it aims to democratize music and creative audio production, making it accessible to users with all levels of musical interest and abilities.

Since its official launch is in June 2015, Soundtrap has to date garnered more than half a million users from 200 different countries worldwide. Additionally, with the education version of the Soundtrap app launched in January in California, the Soundtrap application is also popular with more than 3000 schooling establishments and the number continues to grow.

Soundtrap CEO and co-founder Per Emanuelsson said, “What differentiates Soundtrap is that it’s designed to allow users all over the world to collaborate on a song, movie soundtrack or other audio creation, no matter what computer or mobile device they’re using. All the audio elements are created and shared in the Web-based app.”

In other words, the application is browser-based and is available on iOS, Android, Chromebook, Mac and Windows and it’s this cross-device compatibility function that sets it apart from its competitor, Garageband, which is restricted to only Apple devices.

Along with the Series A funding, this brings the total amount raised by the startup to US$8.5 million. According to Soundtrap, this funding will be used in international expansion, as well as to expand its reach in both consumer and education markets.

About Soundtrap
Soundtrap is a cloud-based music and audio recording platform that help people make their music online. Users can record their song by linking their instrument to the computer or just record a song directly with the microphone.

For more information, please visit https://www.soundtrap.com/

Contact Info
Name: Vivian
Organization: Unicorn Media