asia News of 09/27/20

This New Southeast Asian Fund Has Its Eye On Chinese Cross-Border Firms

As U.S.-China relations remain tense, Southeast Asia becomes the darling for investors and tech companies from both sides as they seek overseas expansion. Behemoths like Google , Facebook , Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance have elbowed into the ...

Indonesian Cloud Kitchen Startup Yummy Gets $12 Million Series B Led By SoftBank Ventures Asia

Yummy Corporation , which claims to be the largest cloud kitchen management company in Indonesia, has raised $12 million in Series B funding, led by SoftBank Ventures Asia. Co-founder and chief executive officer Mario Suntanu told TechCrunch that the ...

India’S ShareChat Raises $40 Million, Says Its Short-Video Platform Moj Now Reaches 80 Million Users

ShareChat, an Indian social network that focuses entirely on serving users in non-English languages, said on Thursday it has raised $40 million from a clutch of investors after the Indian startup added tens of millions of new users in recent ...

WeWork Sells Majority Stake In Chinese Entity, Seeks Localization

Four years after its foray into the Chinese market followed by rapid and cash-hemorrhaging expansion , WeWork decided to wind down its involvement in the country. WeWork’s Chinese unit has secured a $200 million investment led by ...

Facebook Gives More Details About Its Efforts Against Hate Speech Before Myanmar’S General Election

About three weeks ago, Facebook announced will increase its efforts against hate speech and misinformation in Myanmar before the country’s general election on November 8, 2020. Today, it gave some more details about what the company is ...

TikTok Files For Injunction Against Pending Trump App Ban

TikTok’s fight with the Trump administration doesn’t yet appear to be over, regardless of what the deal that was signed between its parent company ByteDance and Oracle says. Earlier today, the company filed a motion to stop the Commerce ...

Japanese Startup Nature Launches Remo 3, Its Home Appliance Smart Remote, In The U.S. And Canada

Nature , a Japanese hardware startup that focuses on IoT home devices, announced the launch Remo 3 , its home appliance smart remote, in the United States and Canada today. Priced at $129, the Bluetooth-enabled Remo 3 allows people to control ...

Apple Partner Servify Raises $23 Million To Scale Its Devices After-Sales And Management Platform Overseas

Servify, a Mumbai-headquartered startup that operates a device lifecycle management platform and works deeply with brands including Apple and Samsung in a number of geographies, has raised $23 million in a new financing round. The Series C ...

Apple Launches Its Online Store In India

For the first time in more than 20 years since Apple began its operations in India, the iPhone-maker has started selling its products directly to consumers in the world’s second largest smartphone market. Apple launched its online store in ...

China Says It Won’T Approve TikTok Sale, Calls It ‘Extortion’

The September 20 deadline for a purported TikTok sale has already passed, but the parties involved have yet to settle terms on the deal. ByteDance and TikTok’s bidders Oracle and Walmart presented conflicting messages on the future ...

Singapore-Based Syfe, A Robo-Advisor With A Human Touch, Raises $18.6 Million Led By Valar Ventures

Singapore-based Syfe, a robo-advisor with a human touch, raises $18.6 million led by Valar Ventures image Dhruv Arora, the founder and CEO of Singapore-based investment platform Syfe Syfe , a Singapore-based startup that wants to make investing more accessible in Asia, announced today that it has closed a SGD $25.2 million (USD $18.6 million) ...

Amazon Adds Support For Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil And Telugu In Local Indian Languages Push Ahead Of Diwali

More than seven years after Amazon began its e-commerce operations in India, and two years after its shopping service added support for Hindi, the most popular language in the country, the American giant is embracing more local languages to court ...

China’S Electric Carmaker WM Motor Pulls In $1.47 Billion Series D

Chinese electric vehicle startup WM Motor just pocketed an outsize investment to fuel growth in a competitive landscape increasingly coveted by foreign rival Tesla . The five-year-old company raised 10 billion yuan ($1.47 billion) in a Series D ...

Impossible Foods Nabs Some Canadian Fast Food Franchises As It Expands In North America

After rolling out in some of Canada’s most high-falutin burger bistros, Impossible Foods is hitting Canada’s fast casual market with new menu items at national chains like White Spot and Triple O’s, Cactus Club Cafe and Burger ...

Despite Slowdowns, Pandemic Accelerates Shifts In Hardware Manufacturing

The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t hit every factory in China at once. The initial impact to China’s electronics industry arrived around the time the nation was celebrating its new year. Two weeks after announcing 59 known cases of a new form of ...

TikTok Fact-Checks: US IPO, Chinese Ownership, $5b In Taxes

There is no shortage of speculation and reports around TikTok’s future in the U.S. Amid a swirl of rumors, TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance issued a statement (in Chinese) on Monday morning, bringing clarity to its ongoing deal that ...

Indian Mobile Gaming Platform Mobile Premier League Raises $90 Million

Mobile Premier League (MPL) has raised $90 million in a new financing round as the two-year-old Bangalore-based esports and mobile gaming platform grows its user base and looks to expand outside of India. SIG, early-stage tech investor RTP Global, ...

Thanks To Google, App Store Monopoly Concerns Have Now Reached India

Thanks to Google, app store monopoly concerns have now reached India image Last week, as Epic Games, Facebook, and Microsoft continued to express concerns about Apple’s “monopolistic” hold over what a billion people can download on their iPhones, a similar story unfolded in India, the world’s second largest ...

Gangster Capitalism And The American Theft Of Chinese Innovation

It used to be “easy” to tell the American and Chinese economies apart. One was innovative, one made clones. One was a free market while the other demanded payments to a political party and its leadership, a corrupt wealth generating scam that by ...

The TikTok Deal Solves Quite Literally Nothing

Well… that was pointless. After debasing the idea of free commerce in the U.S in the name of a misplaced security concern, stringing along several multi-billion dollar companies that embarrassed themselves in the interest of naked greed, and ...