Venture capital firm 500 Global announced the successful close of $143 million across its largest Southeast Asian early-stage fund to date, 500 Southeast Asia III, L.P. (500 SEA III), and its growth investment vehicle for Southeast Asia. The new early-stage and growth vehicles demonstrate the team’s commitment to supporting founders in Southeast Asia from pre-seed to pre-IPO.
Launched in 2016, Desygner has a base of 32 million users worldwide. It is growing rapidly with a million new users a month and has also attracted major corporations, including Oracle, Microsoft, and Shutterstock. Now, the self-funded company is prepared to go after Melbourne-based and heavily funded Canva, which is estimated to be worth AU$39 billion (US$26.5 billion).
GX Bank Berhad (GXBank) announced that it is the first of the five digital bank licence applicants to obtain approval to commence operations in Malaysia. GXBank is a subsidiary of GXS Bank – the digital bank joint venture between Grab and Singapore Telecommunications (Singtel), as well as a consortium of Malaysian investors including Kuok Group.
Amperity has launched Lakehouse CDP, which delivers CDP functions within “lakehouse” data stores including Snowflake and Databricks. Amperity tools for data modeling, data quality, identity resolution, generative AI, segmentation, and performance measurement will send all results to a company’s own lakehouse rather than a separate Amperity-managed database. Modules can be used independently but the real benefit here is that Amperity is one of the few “composable” CDP vendors who offer a complete set of pre-integrated CDP functions.