CDP Institute

Soft Space Sdn. Bhd., a Malaysia-based fintech player, has announced it has raised $31.5 million in its latest funding round. With the additional capital from this funding round, the company is well positioned to continue its growth trajectory and achieve its goal of making payment acceptance accessible and affordable.

The fintech ecosystem in Latin America has seen tremendous expansion and established itself as a vital actor in addressing the region’s consumer financial demands and needs. Growing demand for online banking solutions, favorable demographics, and a sizable underserved population are driving the expansion of fintech activities. The four trends to shape the regional fintech ecosystem in the coming years are Neobanking, Digital Payments & E-Commerce, Insurtech, and Embedded Finance & Open Banking.

ActiveCampaign, the leader in marketing automation, email marketing and CRM, is putting down roots in Costa Rica and will have 100 employees in the hub within 12 months. Latin America is one of the company’s fastest growing regions, with local businesses growing through the power of ActiveCampaign’s platform every day. With offices in Brazil and Colombia already, ActiveCampaign is making a larger investment in the region by expanding engineering and customer teams to improve the global customer experience and operations of the business.

Google has announced its efforts to fight misinformation in India through its products, programs, and partnerships. Its new “About This Result” feature will let users evaluate the information and understand its source. The feature is available globally and in nine Indian languages, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, and Punjabi.

One Impression will use the fresh capital to expand product offerings, accelerate product development and grow its presence in international markets spanning from Southeast Asia and the UAE. The startup will also use the funding to make acquisitions in India and abroad.

Singapore-based Ad-Tech innovator, Infomo announced the successful completion of its M & A initiative with Dehradun-founded and based TorcAI Pvt Ltd (“TorcAI”). TorcAI is a world-recognised leader and innovator in artificial learning (“AI”) and machine learning (“ML”) technologies for the massive global digital advertising and marketing industries.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which spent $9.1 billion in Asia Pacific in the decade between 2012 and 2022, announced it plans to spend even more, $13.2 billion in the next five years to expand cloud infrastructure in Sydney and Melbourne.

Braze will acquire North Star, its Australia and New Zealand reseller, in 2024 to provide it a direct presence in the ANZ market and to incorporate local expertise. North Star’s customers include Canva and KFC Australia.

Indonesian e-commerce firm Bukalapak announced that it has acquired a majority stake in iPrice, a Malaysia-based price comparison platform. Through this strategic investment, iPrice has the opportunity to accelerate its growth by leveraging the synergies between the two groups.

While 2022 might have been a hard year for many in the agency and tech sectors, investment in advertising across Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan remained positive, jumping by almost US$55 billion in 2022 – an overall increase of 12%.

Mexican startup Pacto, a point-of-sale (POS) platform with integrated payments for restaurants and bars, announced a US$4 million seed round led by DILA Capital. The capital will be used to increase its engineering, product development, and customer service teams. With the new round, Pacto already has a total financing of US$6 million. It also has an alliance with Getnet Mexico.

Kaszek Ventures, one of Latin America’s first venture firms, has raised $975 million across two funds. Since 2011, Kaszek has backed more than 120 companies, which the firm says collectively have raised more than $15.5 billion in capital. Portfolio includes companies in a range of industries such as fintech, enterprise/SaaS, proptech, insuretech, health tech, edtech, e-commerce, food tech, climate tech, biotech and blockchain. They include Nubank, QuintoAndar, Kavak, Creditas, NuvemShop, Bitso, Gympass, Notco, MadeiraMadeira, Loggi, Konfio, Technisys, Kushki and Cora.