CDP Institute

Society Pass Inc (SoPa), a Vietnam-based loyalty and ecommerce firm, announced the completion of restructuring Leflair’s Vietnam operations with the spin-off of Leflair Group. As a result of this corporate restructuring, the Leflair Group is set to become Southeast Asia’s next lifestyle retail super distributor nexus, evolving from a single discounted platform to a lifestyle retail ecosystem, providing shoppers with an integrated and unique shopping experience from online to offline.

SoftBank Latin America Fund announced today that it is spinning out its early-stage Latin American investment arm into a new autonomous entity, dubbed Upload Ventures. The new fund will back early-stage companies in the region at a pace of about $100 million per year. The Latin America Fund remains intact, according to the source, who said it will continue to deploy funds. Originally, it had raised $5 billion and once that was deployed, it planned to invest another $3 billion in LatAm startups.

Just as in the 90s there was too much conversation around the Web and doing things online, we are now living in an era where the hottest buzzword are Web3, DeFi and decentralization. Latin America has become a hotbed for new DeFi and Web3 companies. With abundant tech-skilled talent, a history of unreliable centralized institutions, and the disruptive startup culture that has boomed for at least a decade, the region is particularly positioned to be a disruptive lab for the next generation of Internet companies.

Kenyan startup Neural Labs is using AI-enabled medical imaging to facilitate real-time diagnosis of various respiratory, heart and breast diseases and pathologies.

South African startup TallOrder, a developer of advanced cloud-based point of sale (POS) solutions for the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market, is working on expansion to Europe and the United States (US) after banking US$3.1 million in funding in January.

Kenya’s Elloe, a conversational e-commerce startup, has raised US$1 million in pre-seed capital as it bids to expand across emerging markets.

Infosys a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, acquired oddity, a Germany-based digital marketing, experience, and commerce agency. The move strengthens Infosys’ creative, branding and experience design capabilities, and demonstrates its continued commitment to co-create with clients and help them navigate their digital transformation journey.

For about 30 years, the Indian subsidiary of Pepe Jeans relied largely on partners and intermediaries to reach consumers. But now, with the aim of building a truly customer-centric business, the brand is going down the D2C route. Cultivating a personal relationship with consumers and communicate directly with them is the end goal of the company.

Salesforce is partnering with BPCL to fulfil the vision of ‘One BPCL’ by uniting all business units through a single, shared customer view. This will help in anticipating customer needs and delight them at every turn.

Alida plans to launch a data centre in Sydney in winter 2022 in order to provide enhanced data services as well as scale to serve more customers operating in the Oceanic region. Having an onshore data centre will help it not only to better meet the needs of customers in Australia and New Zealand but also enhance the data collection process and efficiently meet clients’ regional compliance requirements.

Indie agency Optimising has become a preferred search engine optimisation (SEO) vendor for global e-commerce platform Shopify, joining its Shopify Plus Partner Program after a lengthy screening process, citing its good client relationships, trust and genuine approach.

TotallyAwesome is the world’s first programmatic solution aimed at younger people in the APAC region, engaging with users contextually via apps, websites and games in an attempt to provide brand-safe environments for teens. The platform aims to deliver over 300 million monthly active online users under 18 across Asia Pacific, without collecting any personal information or data.