Peak XV Releases a new batch of Startups; Korean VCs & the UAE are love at first sight
October Week 4: Oct 22 - Oct 28
Welcome, Asia Startup enthusiasts
Have you seen Peak XV's new accelerator startups? The rebrand from Sequoia Capital SE Asia hasn't slowed them down - the quality is so high, even Jian-Yang's "New Pied Piper" wouldn't have made the cut (from HBO's Silicon Valley).
And what's sparking the romance between Korean VC firms and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) investors? Let's find out!
In today’s edition:
Peak XV releases new cohort of 14 startups
Korea’s IMM & LG Group form alliances with UAE investors
Singapore’s AutoCodeRover is building AI Software Engineers
More Asia Startup News
🔥 Peak XV releases new cohort of 14 startups
The scoop: The India and Singapore-based venture firm Peak XV (formerly Sequoia Capital SEA) has publicly released profiles of 14 early-stage technology startups from the 10th cohort of its Surge accelerator. The program provides up to $3 million in seed funding and currently runs two batches per year.
Fun facts:
1 Beauty and Wellness startup: Amaani (UAE).
2 Finance startups: Ambak (India), SalarySe (India).
5 Artificial Intelligence startups: Auquan (India), Brainfish (Australia), OrbitShift (India), Parseable (India), Tailcall (India), Wobot (India).
2 Content Creation and Media startups: Clout Kitchen (Philippines), Dubbing AI (Singapore).
2 Healthcare startups: Dezy (India), The Health Factory (India)
Why it matters: Peak XV is one of Asia's most important venture firms, with roughly $9 billion in assets under management (AUM) and an additional $2 billion yet to be deployed. The Surge accelerator highlights a recent development among VC firms, where many have shifted to becoming "full-stack" - essentially operating at all three layers of the VC ecosystem: accelerators, early-stage venture, and late-stage venture.
💸 Korea’s IMM & LG Group form alliances with UAE investors
The scoop: According to a Korean VC insider, Seoul-based IMM Investment Corp. has partnered with the UAE's Shorooq Partners to launch a $100 million joint fund. The alternative investment firm IMM, which manages $6.5 billion in assets, is the latest Korean player to establish strategic ties with UAE investors.
In a similar move last May, LB Investment Inc., the former venture capital division of LG Group, established a joint venture with UAE-based AIM Global Foundation. The partnership aims to create a venture fund of up to $1 billion, backed by UAE-based limited partners, with LB Investment taking the lead on fund management.
Fun facts:
In the first half of 2023, South Korean VCs invested 20.7% of their total funding in foreign companies, marking a significant trend towards international engagement.
About 32% of South Korea's industrial conglomerates now have corporate venture capital arms, in addition to their “fund of fund” strategies
This year, The South Korean government has allocated $2.6 billion for the startup sector, focusing on loans, grants, and direct technology investments.
Why it matters: This showcases South Korea's focus on creating deep economic ties with other nations through venture capital partnerships. The deals reflect a growing trend of Asian VC firms partnering with Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to gain access to larger capital pools.
🧠 Singapore’s AutoCodeRover is building AI Software Engineers
The scoop: Let me introduce you to AutoCodeRover, an autonomous agent software system, that ranks among the top 5 AI coding agents worldwide (according to industry benchmarks). The technology was developed by a group from the National University of Singapore, the project has evolved from a widely-cited white paper into a fully-fledged startup company.
From the information I’ve gathered, the team is currently building "AI Software Engineers" for enterprise use-cases. The closest comparison would be Cognition Labs' Devin (a US-based company backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund).
The team:
The CEO & Co-Founder is a Ph.D from the National University of Singapore, and has numerous publications in journals like ICSE, PLDI, TOSEM, and IEEE CLOUD.
The Two Co-Scientists & Co-Founders are 3rd year PhD student at National University of Singapore. One of them was previously a software engineering intern at SEA Group & the other is a graduate from Tsinghua University in China.
The CTO & Co-Founder is a 2nd year PhD student at the National University of Singapore, and a graduate of a Top 2 CS University in the Netherlands
The Advisor & Co-Founder is an NUS Chair Professor of Computer Science
Bull case: The future of autonomous coding agents is incredibly bright - especially for companies targeting Asian enterprises, where the market isn't yet saturated like in the US, where many enterprises are overwhelmed with pitches from AI startups. Furthermore there are significant productivity gains to be captured across developers & business use-cases, particularly in Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, and other regions in Asia, and this team could help lead the charge. With their highly technical team and lots of ambition, I'll be rooting them on!
Bear case: When the team first announced their white paper in April, this space was relatively uncrowded, with their solution and Cognition Labs' Devin as major players - AutoCodeRover being the open-source version with arguably superior performance. Now, two Y Combinator companies (Honeycomb and CodeStory) seem to have caught up according to the SWE-bench assessment, which is the industry standard for coding agent evaluations. However, it’s worth noting, that I’m much more bullish than bearish as I see this space being large enough for many outlier startups ツ
🇯🇵 Korea NewsScatter Labs, a South Korean generative AI startup backed by $11 million from SK Networks, has surpassed 1 million users just six months after launch. Their product, Zeta, lets people create personalized AI characters and engage with highly customized interactions, similar to America's Character.ai.
SK Group's Hynix Division, the world's second-largest memory chip maker by revenue, reported a quarterly operating profit of $5.1 billion, compared to a loss of $1.24 billion a year ago.
🇸🇬 Singapore NewsNUS, better known as “The National University of Singapore”, entered into a $50 million dollar partnership with Vietnam’s tech conglomerate FPT to develop a new AI research lab at the university
🇯🇵 Japan NewsTesla has partnered with Japan's largest electronics store chain, Yamada Denki, to sell its Powerwall home battery system. The retailer operates more than 1,000 stores across the country.
Shohei Ohtani is competing in the MLB World Series with the Dodgers. One of his investments, an early-stage data analytics startup called Rapsodo that focuses on baseball and golf analytics, has seen a 300% increase in internet traffic since the MLB playoffs began.
🇮🇳 India News Neysa, a Mumbai-based startup building cloud infrastructure for AI, has raised $30 million from Matrix Partners India (which recently raised a $525 million India-specific fund).
🇨🇳 China News Deep Blue Aerospace, a startup located near Shanghai, has announced plans to begin taking passengers to space in 2027 for $200,000 a ticket - an experience similar to Virgin Galactic's spaceline or SpaceX's rideshare program.
Researchers from the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence have released OmniGen, a new image generation model that has catapulted near the top of HuggingFace's model leaderboards. This is reportedly the first AI model capable of handling multiple image generation tasks (text-to-image, image editing, style transfer, etc.) in a single, simplified system, rather than requiring separate specialized models or add-ons for each task.
