Financial services marketplace CompareAsiaGroup raises $20 million in new funding led by Experian

Experian, one of the largest credit reporting bureaus in the United States, announced today that it has invested in CompareAsiaGroup, the financial services marketplace. Experian led the initial closing of a $20 million B1 round.

In addition to new funding, the investment also gives Hong Kong-based CompareAsiaGroup access to Experian’s technology, including Experian One, a cloud-based credit scoring and risk assessment platform. CompareAsiaGroup recently opened a research and development center in Singapore to develop more tech tools and its partnership with Experian will enable it to launch new open banking services in Hong Kong that can also be adapted for other markets.

The platform currently claims 60 million users in Asian countries including Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand who use it to comparison shop for bank accounts, personal loans, insurance, credit cards and other financial products.

This is the latest investment Experian has made in Asian fintech startups (the others include Jirnexu in Malaysia, C88 Financial Technologies Group, and India’s BankBazaar). It is also participated in Grab’s Series H, announced earlier this summer.

Ben Elliot, the CEO of Experian in Asia Pacific, tells TechCrunch that Experian focuses on investments that gives more people access to financial services. “Obviously we benefit from that, but I think this really shows our commitment to Southeast Asia in particular, and also in this case Hong Kong and Taiwan,” he said about the new funding in CompareAsiaGroup. “My view is that overtime we’ll see our capabilities and CompareAsiaGroup really improving the experience of customers while they are borrowing.”

CompareAsiaGroup has now raised more than $90 million to date since it was founded in 2014. Its other investors include World Bank Group member IFC, Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, ACE and Company, Jardines, Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, SBI Group and H&Q Utrust.

India’s GoWork raises $53M in debt financing to expand its co-working spaces business

GoWork, a Gurgaon-based startup that runs a co-working spaces business in India, said on Tuesday it has raised $53 million in a debt round to scale its business in the country as competition in the market, including from recent entrant Oyo Rooms, intensifies.

The debt round for the two-year-old startup — not to be confused with an Indonesian startup with the same name that operates in the same space — was financed by a private fund managed by BlackRock’s Private Credit team and CLSA Capital Partners’ Special Situations Group, the startup said. Prior to today’s announcement, GoWork had raised an undisclosed amount from Nimitaya fund, a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Sudeep Singh, CEO of GoWork, said the startup will use the fresh capital, which will flow for the next two years, to expand its footprints in the country. GoWork plans to establish 50 centers across several major Indian cities by 2025, up from two it currently runs in Gurgaon.

In the immediate quarters, it plans to expand its accommodation capacity to 25,000 people, up from 12,000 currently. GoWork counts corporates such as Paytm Mall, CoverFox, and Impactify Consulting among its clients.

In addition to fast Wi-Fi, shuttle service, parking facility, cafe, and food court services it currently offers, the startup plans to include additional add-ons such as pet care facility and brewery in the coming months.

In a statement, Neeraj Seth, BlackRock’s Head of Asian Credit, said, “GoWork is taking the brick and mortar aspect of the co-working concept further, as well as consistent measures to enable young businesses to reach their highest potential. We look forward to GoWork offering optimal operational efficiency for all start-ups as well as corporates.”

India’s co-working space, still a relatively new business category locally, is worth $390 million — a fraction of the $30 billion office and commercial real estate business.

GoWork competes with a number of firms including hotel lodging startup Oyo, which last month entered the co-working spaces business with the launch of Oyo Workspaces. For the expansion, it acquired local player Innov8 for a sum of about $30 million to immediately establish presence in 10 cities in India with more than 20 centers. 91Springboard, Awfis, GoHive, and the global giant WeWork are also competing for a slice of the $390 million market.

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Automotive marketplace Carro acquires Indonesia’s Jualo, extends Series B to $90M

Carro, an automotive marketplace and car financing startup based in Singapore, said it has raised $30 million to extend and close its $90 million Series B financing round and acquired Indonesia-based marketplace Jualo as it looks to further scale its business in Southeast Asia.

The Series B round, for which Carro raised $60 million last year, was funded by SoftBank Ventures Asia, government-linked global investor EDBI, Dietrich Foundation, and NCORE Ventures.

Hanwha Asset Management as well as existing investors including Insignia Ventures, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group, Singtel Innov8, Golden Gate Ventures, and Alpha JWC also participated in the round. The three-year-old startup has raised over US$100 million from investors.

“There was an overflow of interest in our Series B round, which we initially closed towards the end of last year. We had a lot of quality strategic investors coming to the and therefore decided to extend the round. The round is now officially closed,” Aaron Tan, founder and CEO of Carro, told TechCrunch.

As part of the announcement, Carro said it had acquired Jualo.com, one of Indonesia’s fastest-growing marketplaces where sellers trade new and used goods in over 300 categories including cars, motorcycles, property, fashion, and electronics. Jualo has amassed 4 million monthly active users and facilitated transactions worth $1 billion last year.

Carro, which operates in Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia, said more than $500 million worth of vehicles were sold last year on its platform, up from $250 million in 2017 and $120 million the year before.

Carro has already expanded in terms of services. Initially a vehicle marketplace, it launched Genie Finance and has also forayed into insurance brokerage and road-side assistance. Last year, it introduced a service that completes vehicle sales in 60 minutes — Carro Express. In March this year, Carro launched its first subscription-based car service in Singapore to offer consumers additional flexibility.

Tan said that Jualo, which operates in several more categories than Carro, will continue to operate under its original branding.  “Our aim with Jualo.com is to double down and grow the Jualo.com business; with a strong focus and emphasis on the automotive sector,” he said.

Carro, which sees more than 70% of its transactions come from outside home Singapore, will reveal expansion plans to new markets and more acquisition deals later this year, Tan said. The subscription service will also be extended, he added.

Carro is rivaled by a number of startups, including BeliMobilGue in Indonesia, Carsome, iCar Asia and Rocket Internet’s Carmudi, although with its new raise in the bank Carro is the best-funded by some margin.

iCar Asia, which is managed by Malaysian venture builder Catcha, raised $19 million in late 2017. Last year, Carsome — which covers Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand — raised a $19 million Series B, BeliMobilGue — Indonesia-only — raised $3.7 million and Carmudi landed $10 million.

In the case of Carmudi, the business has retrenched itself. At its peak it covered over 20 markets worldwide across Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, but today its focus is on Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

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Scale AI and its 22-year-old CEO lock down $100 million to label Silicon Valley’s data

Big artificial intelligence companies are promising an automated future but many of their products rely on the labeled training data coming from Scale AI, a startup that highlights machine learning’s intimate bond between human contractors and algorithms.

The three-year-old startup announced Monday that it had closed a $100 million Series C round of financing led by Founders Fund with participation from Accel, Coatue Management, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Thrive Capital, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and Quora CEO Adam d’Angelo. A report in Bloomberg details that this funding will bring Scale’s valuation past $1 billion.

“In general, AI and machine learning is just growing so quickly as a field, that it’s appropriate to raise this amount that will allow us to capitalize on our ambitions,” the company’s 22-year-old executive Alexandr Wang told TechCrunch in an interview. “We don’t want to be in the business of constantly needing to raise capital, so ideally this is the last fundraise for us.”

Scale, whose army of humans annotate raw data to train self-driving and other AI systems, nabs $18M

Scale has around 100 employees, according to Wang, but its limited full-time staff is a small fraction of the human-power behind the services Scale offers. The startup has nearly 30,000 contractors aiding in the labeling process. “The humans are pretty critical to what we’re doing because they’re there to make sure that all the data we provide is really high quality,” Wang says.

Companies provide Scale with data via their API and the startup puts its resources to work labeling the text, audio, pictures and video so that its customers’ machine learning models can be trained.

The startup’s customers include Waymo, OpenAI, Airbnb and Lyft.

For a customer working with autonomous driving data, Scale’s services may mean taking collected video frames and manually segmenting out individual cars, humans or other obstacles. For another customer, it can mean making common sense language connections to ensure natural language processing models can understand language in context.

The “human insight” can help minimize labeling bias and give customers data that is more precise and more accurate though, as with just about all AI startups, the hope is that these insights will gradually usher in a future where reliance on these humans-in-the-loop will be lessened. In the meantime, Scale sits atop an army of contractors that might hold the key to bulking up Silicon Valley’s machine learning intelligence.

“AI companies will come and go as they compete to find the most effective applications of machine learning. Scale AI will last over time because it provides core infrastructure to the most important players in the space,” Founders Fund partner and former Trump advisor Peter Thiel said in a statement.

U.S. Treasury just designated China as a currency manipulator, so expect more economic shocks

The U.S. Treasury has just taken the extraordinary step of designating China as a currency manipulator, something no administration has done since the days of Bill Clinton.

With the action, the trade war between the U.S. and China has entered a new phase that will likely see both countries stepping up both their rhetoric and actions in the trade dispute that has now dragged on for over a year.

As a result of the ongoing hostilities between the U.S. government and China, the flood of investment dollars that once came from Chinese technology companies and investors into U.S. technology companies has slowed. Acquisitions and investments made by Chinese companies have been unwound over concerns from the Committee of Foreign Investments in the U.S. and tariffs slapped on Chinese imports have hit U.S. stock prices (including in the technology sector).

Tech stocks walloped as China retaliates in the latest salvo of its trade war with the US

The news of Treasury’s move comes less than 24 hours after the Chinese government announced a complete halt on U.S. agricultural imports. More significantly, the Bank of China has let the country’s currency slide in value against the U.S. dollar to above the seven-to-one figure that was considered a line-in-the-sand for trade.

Given the escalation, economists’ fears that global markets could slip into a recession within the next nine months are more likely to be realized, according to reports from Morgan Stanley, quoted by CNBC.

“We take its literal message of planned tariffs quite seriously. There’s a pattern of responding to insufficient negotiation progress with escalation,” Morgan Stanley said in an analyst report.

The move to label China as a currency manipulator means that the U.S. will plead its case before the International Monetary Fund to take steps to curb what Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called “the unfair competitive advantage created by China’s latest actions.”

If anything, China’s actions have actually been to prop up the country’s currency in the face of internal pressures to break the seven-to-one floor that had previously been set on the Renminbi’s value versus the dollar. China’s economy is slowing — in part due to tariffs imposed by the U.S., but also because economies in Europe and Asia are slowing down, which is hitting exports in the country. Indeed, much of the current growth in China’s economy has been fueled by debt-financed big infrastructure projects.

That could change as Chinese goods become cheaper thanks to the falling value of the nation’s currency. However, as Axios notes, what China is doing doesn’t actually fall under the definition of currency manipulation as it’s legally defined.

Because to be a currency manipulator a country needs to spend 2% of its gross domestic product over a 12-month period on currency manipulation. If anything, China was boosting the yuan in the face of calls to reduce its value until the President called for sanctions last week.

Even if the country’s currency devaluation does juice exports, it could have unforeseen consequences on China’s infrastructure spending and could backfire as a tool in the ongoing trade dispute.

A weaker currency means that Chinese consumers and businesses have to pay more for goods and services that are dollar-denominated. It also means that while the country is awash with cash, it could lose its competitive edge in a fight to lure top talent to the country. Losses in spending power could push the developers and programmers the country needs to transition from a manufacturing-focused economy to look elsewhere.

Stock markets are already taking note of the new U.S. action on trade. Futures show the Dow trading down about 350 points and the Nasdaq and S&P 500 indices both trading sharply lower.

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