Here are the top 10 most well-funded internet companies in Singapore

Ask any founder in Asia which country they plan to visit to raise funding, and chances are that diminutive Singapore will come up tops. And it won’t be too surprising – when it comes to startups, its government is probablyone of the most supportive in the world. Plus, there are many VC firms and private investors – including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin – who have chosen to call the island-state their home.

With so much money going into the local tech scene, one wonders which Singapore-based tech firms are the grand winners in the race to get funded. To quench your curiosity, we’ve done the heavy lifting and identified the top 10 most well-funded internet companies in Singapore.

Note: all figures shown below are of public funding rounds, and do not include undisclosed amounts.

1. Lazada, US$686 million (Techlist profile)

The fashion ecommerce retailer is one of Rocket Internet’s greatest successes so far, and is the only unicorn on this list with a valuation of US$1.25 billion. Thanks to its recent shift to a marketplace model for third-party merchants, Lazada’s sales – or gross merchandise volume (GMV) – doubled in the second half of 2014 as compared to the former half, bringing its total GMV for that year to roughly US$274.2 million.

2. Zalora, US$238 million (Techlist profile)

The other Rocket Internet-backed startup on the list, Zalora’s last-seen numbers aren’t exactly rosy. According to leaked documents, it had a net negative income of US$91 million in 2012, expecting to reach profitability by 2015. Whether or not it will actually do so this year remains to be seen, but regardless, the company has certainly won the confidence of several investors who have seen fit to invest substantial amounts.

While there was speculation that Zalora might go public in 2014, its recent plans to merge with four other fashion brands under Rocket Internet’s umbrella to form the Global Fashion Group say otherwise. Rocket Internet, however, did launch an US$8.2 billion initial public offering, which means Zalora might be seeing more capital flowing into its coffers soon.

3. iCarsClub, US$70.5 million (Techlist profile)

A peer-to-peer car rental platform is a great idea in Singapore, given the high costs of car ownership here. Nailing the execution, however, is a whole different ballgame, and iCarsClub has received some negative publicity in 2014 regarding just that. Still, having a war chest at its disposal will certainly help if it is directed in the right direction. iCarsClub and its Beijing-based spinoff PPzuche now have over 120,000 private cars available in their databases.

4. PropertyGuru, US$53 million (Techlist profile)

Online property classifieds are a hotly-contested industry in Southeast Asia, but somehow PropertyGuru have managed to stay ahead of the pack. In Singapore, 99.co is the latest challenger. According to the former’s calculations, however, PropertyGuru has managed to achieve 87 percent market share in Singapore in terms of the total time people spend on the site. Data from Alexa and SimilarWeb also place PropertyGuru ahead of other big players, such as iProperty and STProperty.

CEO Steve Melhuish had revealed a couple of years ago that the company might go public, but nothing has happened since then. 2015 might be the year PropertyGuru joins the small but growing list of Singaporean success stories.

5. Reebonz, US$40 million (Techlist profile)

Besides the Rocket Internet companies listed above, Reebonz is probably the next most well-known name locally when it comes to ecommerce stores. It takes a different tack from the rest with its focus on luxury goods, and last year bought over a similar website called Clout Shoppe from SingPost to boost its reach.

In August 2014, there was speculation that Reebonz – together with gaming hardware giant Razer – might be going public, with reports that the ecommerce startup was looking for investors. There have, however, been no updates on the matter since.

6. Bubbly, US$39 million (Techlist profile)

The earlier half of 2014 are days that the team at Bubbly would probably want to forget. During that period, the social networking startup received multiple offers for acquisition, and in the process laid off its management team and restructured the company for a deal that turned sour and fell through.

While CEO Thomas Clayton had initially made up his mind to liquidate the company, a few weeks later it was acquired for an undisclosed amount by India-based Altruist, a mobile social networking services provider that has its presence in several markets across Europe, Africa, and Asia.

7. MyRepublic, US$37.5 million (Techlist profile)

MyRepublic probably has the most ambitious goal on this list: to become Singapore’s fourth telco. But it’s not content to become just another local player – it also recently went to New Zealand with a free three month trial offer of a 100Mbps ultra-fast fibre broadband.

Last we heard, the telco startup signs up about 2,000 new customers a month, and was on pace to triple annual revenue in 2014 to US$15 million. 2015 will probably see it push further into the rest of Asia.

8. Migme, US$34.6 million (Techlist profile)

The social entertainment platform had an extremely eventful 2014. Since listing on the ASX in August, it has gone on to make a couple of key acquisitions – couple chat app LoveByte and penny auction startup Sold.sg – and one investment. In December, Migme had surpassed 9 million MAUs.

Ultimately, its vision is to create a “playful social ecommerce experience” for its users, with Chinese C2C marketplace Taobao as CEO Steven Goh’s inspiration.

9. Wego, US$34.5 million (Techlist profile)

From the left: Wego co-founders Craig Hewett and Ross Veitch

In 2013, the travel metasearch company claimed to be processing over $10 million in potential bookings every day, with a presence in 52 countries. It launched its iOS and Android app in mid-2014, which climbed to the number one spot in Indonesia’s iOS app store.

10. Viki, US$24.3 million (Techlist profile)

If you’re a Singaporean and haven’t heard of this particular crowdsourced video subtitling website, you must have been living under a rock. Viki was the star in the largest acquisition ever made for a Singapore-based startup in 2013, when it was bought by Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten for US$200 million.

A year later, the company reported that it has 35 million monthly active users (MAUs) and 25 million mobile users, up from 22 million MAUs with 10 million on mobile at the time of acquisition.

5 eCommerce Startups You Can Learn From

In the language of business, eCommerce can be compared to being one of the best things since sliced bread made it's debut. The U.S. market alone sees a massive increase in the number of businesses that succeed beyond the six month mark,RJMetrics has compiled a concise report of the current eCommerce growth trends.

A few weeks ago, Neil Patel -- CEO at QuickSprout -- published an interesting articleon his business website, a documentation of a step-by-step guide on how to optimize your eCommerce websites for search engines; still the number one source of organic traffic, leads and sales.

It got me thinking, about the number of eCommerce startups that have already made it, as well as those startups that have managed to grow without the traditional methods, on top of the number of people who reach out to me on frequent basis, I was able to locate some other interesting startups and their founders to see what their products are all about.

What does it take to run an eCommerce startup?

Catvertiser

Catvertiser is a self-serve Facebook ads management and optimization tool with users in over 70 countries across five continents. It helps marketers achieve higher ROI on their Facebook advertising budgets and save tons of time by automating many time-consuming processes.

eCommerce users appreciate such features as:

• CPA bidding on different types of campaigns such as website traffic generation or fan acquisition.
• Google Analytics integration that helps track and optimize based real effects such as purchases or leads generated.
• Hourly campaign statistics that help optimize for best hours generating most effective traffic.

amongst others there's plenty of features that allow for automation, a crucial feature if you want to spend time making great products, rather than single pointedly selling things.

Cirqle

Cirqle is a highly curated product platform for online retailers and consumers, as well as fashion influencers. Expect some stunning visual collections from some of the best product sellers in the World. Cirqle stands out with the concisely tailored list of products that deliver for all types, all beliefs, all your desires. Moreover, Cirqle provides influencers with a platform to monetise their content and retailers with the opportunity to launch campaigns through Cirqle's network of over 3000+ influencers.

In addition, Cirqle recruits social influencers for the marketing campaigns of the world's biggest fashion brands. By integrating their ecommerce and analytics platform into influencers sites, the company's able to track real time ROI of fashion companies marketing spend.

meowbox

meowbox is the best way to discover exciting toys and treats for your cat. meowbox is the original cat subscription box devoted to cats. You can expect a nicely packed, pretty box full of unique goodies, wrapped up beautifully, and delivered it to your doorstep every month. Cats are cool!

eCommerce features to adapt from meowbox:

• Each 'meowbox' is personalized by a unique greeting, written by hand.
• Shipping is always included, save your customers time worrying about extra spending.
• Create a community that's oriented around your product, rather than marketing goals. (e.g. meowbox is active on social media as a medium of sharing stories, and photos about cats)
• Quick and easy shopping page gets you from A to Z in less than two minutes.

community aspects are definitely growing in the field of eCommerce, a lot less thinking should go into the ways of marketing yourself everywhere you can, rather -- one should focus on making every new visitor count.

Pure Chat

Pure Chat is a customer support oriented platform that offers excellent service, reliable tools and features for incorporating a live chat feature within your eCommerce websites. Pure Chat lets you talk to dozens of customers at a time, which reduces the amount of time hat your customers need to hold in order to receive a response. You can easily integrate Pure Chat with your favorite website builders.

From an eCommerce point of view:

• Live website chat reduces costs, and allows to connect with prospects on the fly.
• Pure Chat, alongside live chat supports, also provides direct email support. Two in one.
• Research shows that simple feature such as live chat, can help to reduce time spent on support tickets by 40%.

be there when your customer needs you, we all know how quickly our minds can change about products and situations if we don't receive the answers we need in a timely and fashionable manner.

Moltin

Moltin provides developers with the building blocks needed to build eCommerce websites and mobile applications through a simple API. This includes components like inventory management, carts, checkout and payments for example. If you work on a custom built eCommerce platform, then Moltin is the choice for building truly remarkable eCommerce components to enrich the shopping experience.

Example components that Moltin can produce:

• Products
• 50+ Payment Providers
• Orders
• Shipping

as well as some technical stuff, like in-built CDN & Image Resizing (for bandwidth and performance), as well as custom data that you wish to incorporate behalf of your own company.

Which are your go-to eCommerce sites for inspiration and insight?

Pocketbook

Mobile payments leap forward but fall short on benefits for merchants

Last week saw a number of significant mobile payments announcements as multiple platforms laid the groundwork for more seamless purchasing experiences but still fell short of mobile payments’ full potential.

Visa, MasterCard, Samsung Pay and PayPal all tried to position themselves to take advantage of the expected surge in mobile shopping during the holiday season. However, last week’s news also shows that mobile payments still have some distance to travel before they are truly beneficial for merchants.

“The adoption of mobile payments hasn’t quite yet reached a point where they will benefit merchants in a major way,” said Gordon Baird, CEO of nD bancgroup. “By this time next year, however, it is possible that merchants will have moved closer to being able to integrate some form of direct mobile payments so that the POS experience for the consumer will be enriched, allowing the consumer to receive incentives in real time.

“In order for this to materialize, though, there needs to be tighter integration of a consumer bank account or equivalent mobile transaction account with near real-time interaction with the POS combined with data from the merchant,” he said.

Being prepared
For merchants, last week’s flurry of developments underscores the need to have a mobile payments strategy in place for the upcoming holiday season.

Visa’s announcement of an integration with Stripe could have the biggest immediate impact for merchants as they look to create more seamless in-app experience (see story).

“Visa investing in Stripe is an important validation of their strategy to the online/app space in conjunction with mobile proximity payments,” said Thad Peterson, senior analyst at Aite Group. “When linked with VDEP, their digital provisioning platform, they’ve created a seamless, secure path from the issuer to the merchant.

“As merchants look to integrate in-app experiences into a more holistic approach to the customer experience, this could be a pretty big deal,” he said.

Samsung Pay

Almost important for merchants was the news that Apple Pay is continuing to gain steam, as revealed in a report from Auriemma Consulting Group showing that 42 percent of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners have used Apple Pay.

The data suggests mobile users may be ready for mobile payments.

CurrentC’s debut
The developments also increase the pressure on CurrentC, the mobile payments app from a number of large retailers that said last week it will launch a trial in August at a limited number of retail locations, including Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins.

“The relatively high rate of trial shown in the Auriemma research at least implies that as distribution of NFC terminals increases, consumers will more predisposed to use mobile,” Mr. Peterson said. “The data could also be another challenge for the launch of CurrentC next month.

“The more customers who are aware of and comfortable with the Apple Pay user experience, the fewer will be likely to either carry another alternative or switch to a new payment platform,” he said. “The only possible exception would be if the user experience and value proposition for CurrentC is superior to Apple Pay and the other NFC wallets.”

The CurrentC app

Other news last week included PayPal’s demonstration that it is still in the game following its spinoff from eBay with a new Subway partnership (see story).

Additionally, MasterPass expanded significantly across the travel industry, through a new partnership with Citibank India and into the quick-service space with Burger King and Firehouse Subs (see story).

MasterCard also extended its partnership with Samsung to deliver Samsung Pay in Europe (see story).

“Despite all the discussion in this week’s news stories about progress or the breakthrough of mobile payments, there really isn’t much that is changing from a merchant’s perspective,” Mr. Baird said. “Apple Pay is still using the old-fashioned credit or debit card to complete the payment.

“These shifts don’t change the 30-year-old economic model,” he said. “The more dramatic change will occur when mobile payments happen with a fully integrated experience and break free from the legacy system and expensive, old technology.

“We need a new paradigm that uses the available technology beyond the 16-digit card. The 16-digit card number is the root of all hacking and fraud, and the space for innovation comes when mobile payments move past this and adopt encrypted private credentials.”

18 Malaysian startups poised to breakout in 2015

2014 turned out to be quite a mixed bag for Malaysia’s startup community. On one hand, homegrown online payment company MOL Global listed in the US, but hasn’t quite lived up to expectations. Popular taxi hailing app GrabTaxi raised round after round of funding, the latest of which – aUS$250 million series D round – was arguablly record-breaking with regards to the size of the amount. Also, Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC) and its talented CEO Cheryl Yeoh burst onto the scene earlier this year, and they’ve done much in attempting to “fill the gaps and connect the dots” in recent months.

Additionally, the 2015 budget featured a slew of measures pertaining to entrepreneurship.

On the flipside, however, local authority figures haven’t been entirely supportive of the progress technology has wrought. Both Facebook andYouTube have faced the threat of banishment – though no real action was taken against them – and Uber faced the wrath of the taxi association, which declared it to be illegal.

Where they have lent their support, it is half-hearted. 70 percent of the Axiata Digital Innovation Fund – a joint venture between Malaysia Venture Capital Management (Mavcap) and local telco Axiata – for example, wasearmarked for the bumiputera entrepreneurs – those of the Malay race – only. Meanwhile, the aforementioned 2015 budget was not evenly distributed either – 70 percent of the US$153 million set aside by governmental agency TEKUN for entrepreneurship will go to local Malay entrepreneurs as well. MaGIC’s budget was also slashed for the coming year.

Despite taking two steps backward after a step forward, Malaysian startups have shown their resilience and innovation – several have proven themselves to be a step above the rest, and Tech in Asia has taken note of them. Here are 18 of Malaysia’s finest startups that we expect will make it big in 2015.

Shoppr

The team behind the Tinder-like shopping app came together through an interesting series of events that started with a blank cheque. They have so far won a handful of startup competitions, such as AngelHack Kuala Lumpur and the MYDD AT&T Hackathon, and feedback has been “overwhelmingly positive,” according to CEO Kendrick Wong.

With ambitions to become the leader of mobile fashion discovery and shopping in Southeast Asia, they are currently raising a round of funding to achieve just that, and within two weeks of opening the round, they already have a couple of offers from VCs. Wong is hoping to seal the deal soon.

Kaodim

A Malaysia-based service marketplace, Kaodim was founded by not one but two former lawyers. Currently, the marketplace for services in Malaysia is still very much dominated by static directories, listings, and online advertisements, which gives them the first-mover advantage.

In just a month since its official launch, the platform has around 500 vendors on board, with 400 job requests being made and, correspondingly, 1,300 quotations returned, many of which the duo claim have translated into jobs and new clients for these service providers. Now, the founders are looking at raising funds to accelerate Kaodim’s growth. This is what they’ll be focusing on in the coming year, given that they’ve already found product-market fit.

YouthsToday

YouthJam: one of YouthsToday’s biggest events.

CEO Jazz Tan, whose father passed away ten years ago as a victim of gangsterism and drugs, founded YouthsToday in 2013 with the aim of moving young people off the streets.

An online platform for projects spearheaded by youths, YouthsToday works with several government agencies and multinational corporations who target the younger crowd – such as Maybank, AirAsia, and Sony – to get their support for youth-run projects in areas of entrepreneurship, technology, and creative arts. In return, these clients receive significant brand mileage in related events.

Over the past year – from January till November – the team has managed to secure 14 major clients, bringing their revenue to a grand total of MYR 700,000 (US$208,000), which is close to thrice their revenue in 2013.

Tapway

Did you know that 94 percent of total retail sales are being generated in brick-and-mortar stores, according to market research firm eMarketer? For this reason alone, Tapway – which CEO Lim Chee How dubs the “Google Analytics for the offline world” – makes a whole lot of sense.

According to Lim, offline stores simply don’t have access to actionable data that they can use to improve the customer experience – and Tapway provides just that. The team deliberately kept a low profile as they ran beta tests in the past few months, but have recently come out with guns blazing, winning the ‘Best Startup in Malaysia’ title in the local leg of the Seedstars World 2014 competition, and recently pitching at Korea’s DreamPlus Day 2014.

Now, they’re looking to raise between MYR500,000 (US$154,000) to MYR800,000 (US$247,000) to capture the Malaysian market and continue to come up with more creative solutions.

GrabTaxi

Who hasn’t heard of this Malaysian taxi app? GrabTaxi has been grabbing headlines for the better part of 2014, and is indeed the favorite to win the Southeast Asian market.

Here are some numbers that show GrabTaxi’s stunning progress over the last year:

• Number of taxi drivers in the network increased by almost 300 percent to 60,000
• Mobile app users grew by 500 percent to 500,000 users
• Mobile app downloads increased by 400 percent to 2.5 million
• Three taxi bookings made every second, an 800 percent improvement

Presto Grocer

Ten years ago, zero online supermarkets were available in Malaysia. Today, retail group Presto Grocer has changed that. The way they went about it, according to co-founder Azrin Zuhdi, was unusual – she and her other co-founder Daniel Ruppert decided to open physical grocery stores first, prior to going online. The reason: to establish their brand name.

Now, with four outlets in Klang Valley and a newly revamped website, the team is ready to take over the rest of Southeast Asia. One of the countries they intend to hit is Singapore, where incumbent RedMart is in pole position. Zuhdi believes, however, that the online grocery market is big enough for multiple players. Having managed to raise an undisclosed amount of seed funding, they are looking to raise their series A round to make this a reality.

iMoney

Other than GrabTaxi, iMoney is the next household name that everyone in Malaysia’s startup ecosystem knows and loves. Similar to the former, CEO Lee Ching Wei has had an outstanding year, having raised US$4 million at avaluation of US$20 million.

Currently, the personal finance platform sees over 1.5 million unique visitors a month, which is several times more than the 100,000 unique visitors that Ching had aimed to reach by the end of 2013. His next goal: to roughly triple the web traffic to five million unique visitors a month by the end of 2015.

Socialwalk

Many a successful entrepreneur will point to serendipity as a key factor in their wins. The same undoubtedly goes for the founders of business matchmaking platform Socialwalk, who chanced upon the idea through one of their clients three years after establishing an event registration business.

According to COO Eileen Feng, the platform today has 170,000 members spread across the world, with its top three regions being Asia, Middle East, and Europe. Having raised a grant from Malaysia’s CIP500 seed fund in 2011, as well as MYR1 million (US$309,000) in seed funding from Crystal Horse Investments back in 2012, Feng and CEO Tham Keng Yew are looking to conquer Europe and the US, and are raising a series A round to do just that.

Flexiroam

Bill shock: the bane of all travelers, for business or holiday alike. For some reason, telcos tend to charge customers a huge multiple of local costs the moment they stepped out of the country – something that Flexiroam founder and CEO Jefrey Ong found strange.

So he set forth to create a product that would allows users to keep their original number, together with unlimited data and voice calls, all for a per day flat rate. This product, which they called the Buzz Sim, turned out to be their bestseller, and the team has inked partnerships with about 580 telcos around the world so that no matter which country you go to, you will always be able to access the local networks for data and voice calls.

Having established a firm customer base in Malaysia, the team is now looking to move into Singapore first, followed by Indonesia and Thailand. While they have received some VC interest locally, Ong felt that the valuations were too low. The fledgling company is now looking for backers beyond Malaysia’s borders to aid in its expansion to those three new countries.

Lovesprk

Is there such a thing as “hassle-free romance?” Apparently so, at least according to Lovesprk co-founder Tanuja Rajah. The dating concierge service was indeed born out of this belief, which claims to take care of all the details, from planning to making reservations, and provides the option for add-ons such as bouquets of flowers, a specially-picked gift, or even a chauffeur-driven limousine for the night.

Lovesprk earns by receiving a commission from each ‘date experience’ purchased. Their concierge service – which couples can choose “to enhance an existing pre-planned date, or to create a bespoke date from scratch with the help of Date Consultants” – comes at an additional cost. Their goal now is to expand this service across Malaysia, and had inked a partnership with Korean dating app Between earlier this year to accelerate this.

AgilityIO

Many startups find themselves stifled by the lack of technical talent. Chok Leang Ooi observed this while he was working in New York and Silicon Valley. Seeing the opportunity in the “talent gap”, he decided to found UX design and software development firm Agility to fill it up.

Its name reflects the agile software development process that the team has mastered working with around 50 startups over the past three years, and Ooi claims that this is their main advantage over other development firms. Of the startups they have helped, some of the bigger names that have gone on to succeed include personal finance site NerdWallet, sustainable fashion site Modavanti, and Boston-based SparkCommerce.

Agility opened an office in Singapore earlier in August with the aim of growing their business across Southeast Asia, and the team is engaged in talks with startups in Thailand and Indonesia as well, with several accounts currently in the pipeline.

WaryBee

The initial prototype of WaryBee.

Malaysia is probably not the first country that comes to mind when talking about safety. In particular, its capital Kuala Lumpur has become infamousfor its rising crime rate. It is for this reason that Ray Teng created safety wearable WaryBee, which comes in the form of a necklace or bracelet, with the triggering device hidden in a tiny pendant on the jewelry.

To mass produce this wearable, Teng took to Singapore telco StarHub’scrowdfunding platform, Crowdtivate, to raise funds. The campaign didn’t do too well, however, only achieving S$3,000 (US$) out of the initial aim of S$50,000 (US$40,260). Teng reveals that he has received feedback that the device is too big to be visually appealing as a piece of jewelry, but is determined to shrink its size by half in the coming year.

TableApp

Food blogging might seem like a dream – who doesn’t want to eat free food and write about it? But having started out on this path, Benson Changrealized it wasn’t as easy as it seems. Unable to compete with the hordes of Malaysian food bloggers, Chang decided to create an online restaurant booking site called TableApp instead.

To his surprise, the concept proved to be very popular among the local restaurants in Malaysia, and to date, Chang and his team have managed to get 120 restaurants on board, with 50,000 diners using it so far. While the team will continue to focus on Malaysia, Chang reveals that Bangkok is the next city on the list.

EasyUni

By any measure, higher education is a significant investment for parents, which means that research is essential. With information on universities and colleges scattered all over the web, Edwin Tay decided to build a platform – called EasyUni – to facilitate comparisons between institutions.

While the portal started off with 100 institutions spanning five countries – with their audience consisting mainly of Malaysians – today EasyUni has traffic coming in from over 202 countries. In addition, the portal’s listings have also swelled to include 27 countries, making up about 2,000 universities and 70,000 courses. Tay is now looking to raise its series B round of funding.

Predictry

Amazon has tapped into consumers’ desire to be told what to buy and built a billion dollar business around it. Product recommendation engine Predictry wants to help small businesses do the same. According to CEO Seng Teong Chua, the engine was by far the easiest product he ever had to sell. “I didn’t even need slides. All I needed to ask was, do you want the Amazon trick? I’ll give it to you,” he says.

The team has been receiving a lot of interest from around the world, particularly from Asia. This is fortunate for Chua as he intends to focus on Asia, and in the near future, Europe.

Soft Space

While smartphone penetration in Asia might seem rather low compared to other developed countries, don’t be fooled – the total volume of smartphone owners in Southeast Asia together numbers in the billions. This is what Chang Chew Soon, founder and CEO of mobile card payment solution Soft Space, betted on when he founded the startup – and it paid off in spades.

In Thailand alone, Soft Space has processed over US$1 billion in transactions since the platform was launched in January 2013, and more than 10 banks across Asia Pacific have already signed up. Chang’s secret sauce: a focus on payment behavior in Asia, and getting full EMV – which stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa – accreditation when they first started out.

The team is now looking to move into North Asia, and are currently in discussions with banks in Taiwan and Hong Kong. At the same time, Chang reveals that they are looking to take their technology – in the form of ewallets and contactless payment solutions – and security to the next level.

Wedding.com.my

Weddings might appear sweet and lovely on the surface, but only those who organize them understand the wheeling and dealing that goes on beneath. Kelvin Leow, who founded online wedding network Wedding.com.my together with his wife Petrina Goh to combat the dark side of this industry, calls it a “cutthroat business.”

The platform today actively plays a middleman role between vendors and the 300,000 or so soon-to-be-married couples who tie the knot in Malaysia each year. Since the website was revamped in September 2013, it receives about 100,000 visitors per month. Their next goal: to go regional in the third quarter of 2015, starting with Singapore and Indonesia

TrustedCompany

Throw a stone into a crowd, and you’re almost certain to hit someone who has been scammed online one way or another. One of the greatest challenges online merchants face when trying to solicit business is in earning the customer’s trust. Open review community TrustedCompanywants to help both parties involved. On one hand, its reviews will help consumers identify trustworthy and reliable online merchants, while on the other, it will validate the merchant’s trustworthiness.

The team raised a US$1 million series A round in 2014. According to co-founder Frederik Krass, the platform has seen a 40 percent month-on-month growth in terms of users, and almost 500,000 site profiles have been created since inception. Having achieved a measure of success in both Southeast Asia and India, TrustedCompany is now looking to spend the latest funding raised in expanding across the world to South Africa and Brazil.