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A spring up roster of vertical AI inauguration is issue in Southeast Asia to serve sectors tramp from seafood to finance . Singapore - based venture capital firmAntlerrecently made a bet on 37 of them , investing $ 5.1 million in aggregate for pre - seed deals . Antler also announce a partnership with Khazanah , Malaysia ’s sovereign riches fund .
“ If you look at the rest of the world , there ’s slew of horizontal AI and it ’s becoming devilishly competitive , ” Antler Centennial State - founder and managing mate Jussi Salovaara tells TechCrunch . “ What founders are increasingly count to solve in this part of the globe are practical job in different industries . ”
He adds that even though Southeast Asia does n’t have the talent kitty to ramp up something like OpenAI yet , they can take a client - first approach to AI apps , clear pain in the ass points unique to different sector and mart .
Within verticalized AI , unlike trends are emerge in each land . For example , Vietnam has a large syndicate of technical endowment . Founders there who are exercise on a consumer startup usually focus more on the domesticated market at first , but B2B startup are more globally orient from the origin , Salovaara says . On the other handwriting , Indonesian startup tend not to target international expansion because their domesticated market is so large , but Antler trust to see more of them expand internationally .
One of Antler ’s investment isBorderDollar , which is building an invoice financing platform for cross - border logistics . Since funding social organization are different in Southeast Asia than the rest of the world , BorderDollar used their own training data point to construct a quotation scoring system .
“ You ca n’t really take something from the West and then just plug it in here and use that , ” enjoin Salovaara .
Another member of Antler ’s portfolio isCapGo , which Antler back in large part because of the founding father ’ background : CapGo CTO Chen Yu worked on machine learning at Grab and CEO Yichen Guo bring in a Harvard MBA and work at Citi , Almanac and VIPKid as a product manager . CapGo automatize data accomplishment for market research , a pain in the neck point Salovaara is familiar with because he used to crop at an investment bank .
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“ It ’s super ill-defined why you would throw eternal amount of human hours into researching a market when AI can do so much more effectively and expeditiously , ” he says , adding that CapGo ’s competitive moat is its power to progress data origin that are tailor first for Southeast Asia . It plans to expand into the rest of the Asia - Pacific region .
BothZoloandSeafoodywere make to clear problem in Southeast Asia ’s intellectual nourishment supplying chain infrastructure . Based in Malaysia , Seafoody was founded by Eleen Kee , Samantha Ooi and Zach Leong . Kee , its chief executive officer , comes from a house that has worked in the seafood industry for several coevals . Seafoody is focused on using AI to eliminate middlemen in the seafood provision mountain range and sell now to occupation . Zolo , meanwhile , is also simplify the food supply chain by using AI to bowdlerize the order management process , which normally entails a batch of back - and - forth between supplier and eating house on WhatsApp .
Another inauguration Salovaara highlight is Malaysia - basedCoex . It use AI to digitise project claims and bills of quantity , so approvals , communication and cook materials can all be performed more quickly . “ Construction is evidently one of the most linear and old school industry , so this is for the most part a play to optimise capital efficiency and operational efficiency , ” says Salovaara .
build a vertical AI startup comes with its own challenges . For example , the right team has to be put together and include not only a technical founding father with the right expertise , but also someone who empathise the industry they are aim very well . They also postulate the right data for training . But once a vertical AI startup comes together , Salovaara say they can progress a very deep militant moat .
“ If you want to bring up funding for a quote unquote ‘ hardcore ’ horizontal AI out of Southeast Asia , it would be dispute , peculiarly to enter into a subspecies with a company based in Silicon Valley , ” he supply . “ Trying to vie with a place that has more talent or a well funding substructure in this space , especially at the recent stage , is still quite difficult . So these perpendicular play are the way to go . ”
