Wavemaker Ventures

wavemaker

Empowering innovations

in Enterprise, Deep Tech,

and Sustainability

Empowering
innovations in
Enterprise,
Deep Tech, and
Sustainability

We are Southeast Asia’s leading Early-Stage VC, backing Enterprise, Deep Tech, and Sustainability startups. We invest in undervalued companies with innovative solutions to meaningful problems in the region.
200+
companies invested in
US$500M
total assets under management
94%
of active portfolio contributing to UN Sustainable Development Goals
5
industry awards received
Our founders possess unique industry or technology insights, which they leverage to build scalable, defensible businesses, driving lasting positive change in their communities.

Our Founders are...

Authentic and Trustworthy

Bold and Impact-Driven

Ever-Curious and Insightful

Action-Oriented and Resilient

Authentic and Trustworthy

Bold and Impact-Driven

Ever-Curious and Insightful

Action-Oriented and Resilient

Wavemakers

Providing family-owned stores direct access to manufacturers

  • Partnered in 2017 for their Seed round
  • Secured US$110M total to date, the largest-ever funding for a B2B platform in the Philippines
  • Awarded VC Deal of the Year by SVCA in 2021
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Solving Southeast Asia's affordable housing shortage

  • Partnered in 2022 for their Series A round
  • Secured US$80M in latest round, with a notable 3:1 debt-to-equity ratio
  • Awarded VC Deal of the Year by SVCA in 2024
 
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Empowering underserved wholesale and retail SMEs in sales & supply chains management

  • Partnered in 2012 for their Seed round
  • TradeGecko was acquired by Intuit in 2020 for US$80M, considered one of the largest exits in Singapore since the COVID-19 pandemic
  • Awarded VC Exit of the Year by SVCA in 2021
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Pioneered a reputable beauty e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia

  • Partnered in 2012 for their Seed round
  • Luxola was acquired by LVMH in 2015 and rebranded as Sephora Digital, becoming the French luxury group's e-commerce arm for Southeast Asia
  • Awarded VC Exit of the Year by SVCA in 2016
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Defending against financial crimes before they happen

  • Partnered in 2015 for their Seed round
  • Secured US$40M in Series B funding in 2022, bringing their total funding to US$55M
  • Works with some of the world's largest banks and insurance companies, including Standard Chartered and HSBC—customers turned investors
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The world's first low-carbon, low-waste packaging system for premium spirits and wine

  • Partnered in 2020 for their Seed round
  • Closed US$10M in Series A funding in 2023
  • Growing presence in 25 countries in Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the US, with partnerships with major spirits players, including Pernod Ricard and Diageo
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Transforming the long-stay co-living experience in Southeast Asia

  • Partnered in 2018 for their Series A round
  • Now the region's largest long-stay proptech with nearly 10K rooms
  • Raised over US$8M pre-Series B in December 2023
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Protecting enterprises against cyber attacks with world-class offensive security expertise

  • Partnered in 2021 for their Seed round
  • Raised over US$10M in pre-Series A funding in 2022
  • Partnered with leading cybersecurity providers in Europe and Asia-Pacific such as M.Tech, Ekco, and AZ
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Powered hyper-personalised customer interactions for enterprises

  • Partnered in 2015 for their Series A round
  • Wavecell was acquired by US-based 8×8 for US$125M, making it one of the largest exits in Southeast Asia in 2019
  • At the time of acquisition, Wavecell had 200 telecom partners and processed over 2 billion messages annually for 500+ enterprises
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We offer seasoned perspective, a vast trusted network, and unhurried time to see our ventures through and realise their potential.
ER Rollan Growsari

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ER at Growsari's MFC
2026-06-08 12:30 Spotlights

Walk down almost any street in the Philippines and you will find one. A sari-sari store (the word means “variety” in Tagalog) is a neighbourhood fixture: a small window cut into the front of a home, stocked with sachets of shampoo, instant noodles, soft drinks, and cooking oil. With more than 1 million of these shops operating across the country, they account for roughly 60% of all FMCG sales, a trillion-peso market. Yet FMCG companies knew remarkably little about what went on inside them.

The problem, as Growsari co-founder Reymund “ER” Rollan put it bluntly, was chaos. After careers at Procter & Gamble, BCG, and Unilever, ER had seen the disconnect from both sides. Most sari-sari stores were simply not on FMCG distributors’ radar: the basket sizes from small neighbourhood shops were too small to make the trip worthwhile, so distributors focused their attention on larger retailers instead. And the shop owners themselves were left to fend for themselves. Restocking was the most immediate pain: to keep shelves filled, a shop owner had to close up for the day, take public transport to a wholesaler or supermarket, buy what they could carry, and haul everything home, only to earn a thin margin for all that effort. Large retailers with bulk orders, by contrast, were serviced directly by manufacturers and distributors at significantly lower prices. Nobody had bothered to solve it.

Growsari footprints

Solving the Procurement Problem

The first thing Growsari fixed was the most obvious: how shops buy their stock. Through SariMart, a B2B marketplace built into the Growsari app, shop owners can browse hundreds of FMCG products and place an order from their phone. Goods arrive the next day with no minimum order required.

More than the convenience, the real change is in the pricing. By aggregating the orders of thousands of sari-sari stores, Growsari was able to negotiate and buy in bulk directly from FMCG manufacturers and distributors, accessing those same lower prices, and pass a meaningful share of those savings on to the shop owners. For the first time, a small store could stock its shelves at prices that made the business genuinely worthwhile.

Sari-sari owner
Sari-sari owner using Growsari app. Photo courtesy of Growsari.

Solving the Delivery Problem

Buying in bulk is one thing. Splitting those deliveries into thousands of individual shop orders – each a different mix of products, in small quantities – and delivering them the next day is quite another. This process, known as bulk-break fulfilment, is expensive if done poorly.

This is where Tranko, Growsari’s logistics arm, became critical. Rather than relying on third-party couriers, Growsari built its own delivery network purpose-built for sari-sari store volumes. 

The key insight was density: the more stops a driver can make on a single route, the lower the cost per delivery. Tranko worked to concentrate enough ordering shops in each area to make routes genuinely efficient, eventually achieving far more drops per route per day than a traditional distributor would manage.

Growsari's micro fulfillment centre
The scene at one of Growsari’s micro fulfillment centres. Photo courtesy of Wavemaker Partners.

The Conveyor Belt

From early in Growsari’s journey, Wavemaker Partners’ Managing Partner Paul Santos had imagined what the business could become. Wavemaker was Growsari’s first institutional investor. Paul called it the “conveyor belt:” build a reliable route reaching thousands of shops every week, and that same infrastructure could carry far more than goods. It could carry money and information, too. The hard work of building SariMart and Tranko was what made that possible.

“We can deliver products, collect cash, and exchange information,” ER explains. “Once that conveyor belt is there, the question is: what else can you add on top?” The answer was financial services. This is where Growsari’s model becomes even more powerful.

Every order a shop places through the app is a data point. Over time, these build up into a detailed picture of how a business operates, and that track record, invisible to a traditional bank, is precisely what SariPay (Growsari’s financial services arm) uses to extend credit. Shop owners with a consistent ordering history can access buy now, pay later (BNPL) credit to restock, repaying in weekly installments. Beyond lending, SariPay gives shop owners a digital wallet, allows them to accept digital payments, and lets them earn additional income by topping up mobile phone credit or paying household bills on behalf of their neighbours. For many sari-sari owners, this is the first time they have had any formal financial product at all.

The three parts of the business reinforce each other. The more deeply a shop owner uses the platform, the more value they get from it. And the less reason they have to leave.

Focusing on the Shop Owner

Growsari’s early experiments looked different. ER and co-founder Shiv Choudhury began by building point-of-sale (POS) devices and data tracking tools so that FMCG brands could see what was selling. But shop owners had no reason to use them. There was nothing in it for them.

After six months of rethinking and conversations with Paul Santos, the answer became clear: lead with the shop owner. Make their life meaningfully better and the data and reach that brands needed would follow naturally. That became the lens for every decision from that point on.

This was not the obvious path. Most businesses at the time went after the biggest shops – large orders, simple logistics, fast growth. Small sari-sari stores were the opposite: tiny orders, complicated logistics, owners with barely enough cash to stock two or three days of goods. That is exactly where Growsari chose to go.

Discipline Over Optics

The mid-2010s funding boom created enormous pressure to grow at any cost. Growsari felt it. “We thought we weren’t growing fast enough compared to others,” ER admits. “But we kept fundamentals in order, grew conservatively, and kept profit in mind.”

Growsari’s more careful approach has produced a resilient business: low acquisition costs, fast payback, and strong retention once a shop places its first few orders. Revenue has grown strongly year-on-year, margins are healthy and improving, and the business is on a clear path to profitability.

Part of what makes this possible is that Growsari did not simply take sales away from existing distributors. Growsari focused on the smaller shops that nobody was properly serving. By doing so, it gave brands something new: visibility into a part of the market they had previously been unable to reach.

Three things make this hard to replicate:

HARD TO COPY OPERATIONSThe system Growsari has built to split bulk deliveries into individual shop orders, and to run efficient delivery routes through dense neighbourhoods, took years and significant investment to develop. A competitor starting today could not replicate it quickly.
SHOPS ORDER THEMSELVES95% of orders now come through the app without any salesperson involved. This means Growsari can serve a vast number of shops without the cost of a large sales force – a structural advantage that grows over time.
THE MORE SERVICES, THE STICKIEROnce a shop is ordering goods, receiving payments digitally, and borrowing money through Growsari, switching to a competitor means giving up all three at once. Shops that use all parts of the platform almost never leave.

What Remains Hard

Scale surfaces new problems. Running a reliable national supply chain, maintaining product availability from FMCGs, deepening app usage across a large, diverse merchant base, and expanding financial services carefully are central operational challenges as the business grows.

1. Keeping deliveries reliable at scaleRunning a delivery network that reaches hundreds of thousands of small shops across an entire country – reliably, every week – is genuinely difficult. Warehousing, transport, and the final stretch to each shop all need to work smoothly together, and improving that consistency is an ongoing priority.
2. Coordinating with suppliersGrowsari depends on consumer goods brands to keep products available and deliveries flowing. As order volumes grow, making sure the right goods are always in stock requires ever-closer coordination with the companies that make them.
3. Deepening how shops use the platformOnce a shop is ordering goods, receiving payments digitally, and borrowing money through Growsari, switching to a competitor means giving up all three at once. Shops that use all parts of the platform almost never leave.
4. Growing financial services carefullyLending money to small businesses is a significant responsibility. Expanding that part of the business quickly whilst making sure loans are repaid and all regulations are met is one of the more complex challenges ahead.

The Road Ahead

Growsari now reaches more than half of all towns and cities across the Philippines. 

A pilot in India has shown early promise, with strong app adoption, positive contribution margins, and encouraging signs that the model can work beyond the Philippines.

Expanding abroad requires significant investment and careful execution. But the core idea is not unique to any one market: gather up the fragmented purchasing power of thousands of small shops, deliver FMCG goods reliably, and layer on financial services over time.

ER describes the long-term ambition simply: to become the most efficient way to reach everyday consumers in the Philippines, and eventually across Southeast Asia. 

If that happens, goods, money, and credit will flow into communities through a network of neighbourhood shops, creating local jobs, empowering independent delivery drivers, and giving shop owners access to financial services for the first time.

UN Sustainable Development Goals that Growsari Contributes to

Growsari SDG 5 and 8

What once looked like a chaotic tangle of shops is now a coordinated system. “Our success is genuinely tied to the success of the small businesses we serve,” ER says. “If they don’t grow, we don’t grow.” That alignment is the foundation of everything.

DataMasque Co-founders: Grant de Leeuw (CEO) and Greg Daniel (CFO)
2026-06-05 06:00 News

AUCKLAND, 05 June 2026 – DataMasque, the data de-identification and synthetic data platform, today announced it has raised US$4 million in funding led by Wavemaker Ventures, the early-stage fund of Wavemaker Partners, with existing investors OIF Ventures and Icehouse Ventures doubling down. Strengthening its board, DataMasque also appointed co-founder of Instaclustr (acquired by NetApp) and seasoned investor Peter Lilley, as well as co-founder and managing partner of Wavemaker Partners Paul Santos, as it scales across key markets. 

The DataMasque team has tripled headcount and achieved 6x ARR growth since its seed round in late 2023. Its growing global customer roster includes New York Life, ADP, Best Western Hotels and Resorts, One NZ, TAL, and government agencies across New Zealand, Australia and the US.

Every large enterprise is grappling with how to leverage sensitive data, including customer records, call transcripts and more, in a safe way to adopt AI. AI transformation depends on access to this data, yet feeding it into AI systems risks catastrophic breaches and regulatory exposure. 

DataMasque solves both sides. Its platform allows organisations to use their most sensitive data for AI innovation while retaining full fidelity and integrity without it ever leaving their own infrastructure. Already, global enterprises across regulated industries are leveraging DataMasque to fine-tune generative AI models at a speed and scale previously impossible.

“Enterprise AI projects are increasingly blocked by data access. This funding validates the need for synthetically identical customer data to feed into AI models or use to evaluate, test and train AI,” said Grant de Leeuw, Co-Founder and CEO of DataMasque.

The funding will accelerate DataMasque’s mission to give highly regulated organisations the ability to leverage their most valuable data assets without increased risk. 

“As enterprises feed more data into AI systems, they need a way to protect sensitive information without compromising datasets used for testing and analytics. DataMasque’s platform solves that. The company has helped customers to mask data 7x faster, reducing traditional masking workflows from days to hours,” said Paul Santos, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Wavemaker Partners. “The strength of its value proposition has enabled the company to win multiple customers in BFSI, government, and telecommunications globally, and we are excited to partner with DataMasque for its next chapter of growth.”

Isabella Rich, Partner, OIF Ventures, said: “When we first invested in 2023, few enterprises had recognised the sensitive data problem that the DataMasque team saw. Today, it’s blocking nearly every serious AI rollout. Grant and the team are building the data infrastructure layer for enterprise AI, and we’re proud to be doubling down.”

Bex Gidall, Principal, Icehouse Ventures, said: “With a lean team based largely in New Zealand, DataMasque has managed to win highly competitive enterprise deals against far better-resourced global competitors. At a time when companies are trying to work out how to deploy AI safely, we think they’re exceptionally well-positioned. Yes, there are major tailwinds behind the space, but tailwinds alone don’t win contracts like the ones DataMasque has secured.”

New Capability, New Market Opportunity

Alongside the funding, DataMasque has launched a first-of-its-kind capability that unlocks unstructured data – such as call transcripts, emails and logs – for AI and analytics. The vast majority of enterprise data sits in this unstructured form, largely untouched because the privacy risk has been too high. 

DataMasque offers a unified platform connecting both structured and unstructured data, opening up an entirely new category of data that organisations can now safely activate for AI. 

Singapore has established itself as one of the world’s most advanced environments for AI governance – and the banks, insurers, and multinational companies headquartered in the city state need to ensure AI investments operate within clear data governance boundaries. This is backed by deliberate policymaking over the past two years:

  • In 2024, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and AI Verify Foundation launched the Model AI Governance Framework for Generative AI. Built with input from more than 70 organisations including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, it extends Singapore’s existing governance standards into the era of large language models. 
  • In the same year, the Personal Data Protection Commission also issued advisory guidelines on the use of personal data in AI systems, and separately published a guide to synthetic data generation to help organisations build AI-ready datasets within PDPA obligations.
  • In early 2026, IMDA published governance guidance for agentic AI, placing Singapore among the first jurisdictions globally to address autonomous AI systems in formal regulatory frameworks. 

DataMasque exists to help enterprises meet these requirements.

With the funding, new board expertise, and expanded product capability, DataMasque is positioned to become the data infrastructure layer powering enterprise AI adoption globally.

ENDS

About DataMasque
DataMasque is a sensitive data discovery and masking platform that enables enterprises to generate synthetically identical customer data for AI training, testing, and analytics. Founded in New Zealand and operating globally, DataMasque serves regulated enterprises across financial services, insurance, hospitality, and the public sector. The company is backed by Wavemaker Partners, OIF Ventures, and Icehouse Ventures. For more information, visit datamasque.com.

Featherless.ai co-founders - Eugene Cheah and Wesley George
2026-05-01 01:00 News
  • This financing was co-led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures, with participation from BMW i Ventures.
  • Featherless.ai enables developers to deploy production-grade AI instantly, bridging the gap between open-source weights and enterprise-grade reliability.
  • Meets the critical demand for jurisdictional control and data privacy with sovereign AI.

SAN FRANCISCO, 30 April 2026 — Featherless.ai, the fastest-growing platform for running open-source AI, has secured $20 million in Series A funding to give enterprises a new path to AI independence. The round was co-led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures, with participation from BMW i Ventures, Kickstart Ventures, Panache Ventures, and Wavemaker Ventures.

Featherless.ai, which offers a production-ready alternative to proprietary compute environments, will use the capital to scale its global infrastructure, launch a dedicated marketplace for specialised open models and deepen its technical integration with diverse hardware architectures to continue driving down the cost of AI inference. 

Currently, as the fastest-growing Hugging Face inference partner, Featherless.ai supports over 30,000 open models, from language and vision to audio, enabling developers to deploy production-grade AI instantly. It is a neutral layer for AI, unaligned with any hyperscaler, any chipmaker or any proprietary ecosystem. By hosting its core infrastructure in the US and EU with a global team across Canada, Europe, the US, Singapore and Australia, Featherless.ai is meeting a critical demand for sovereign AI, to respect jurisdictional boundaries and data privacy. 

A core part of the Featherless.ai mission is hardware diversity. Through a strategic collaboration with AMD, Featherless.ai ensures that the world’s most popular open-source models run natively on the AMD ROCm™ software platform. This provides a competitive, auditable alternative to proprietary hardware systems, giving businesses a structural cost advantage.

Featherless.ai also aims to protect the industry from the dangers of AI monopolies. By ensuring that state-of-the-art models remain accessible outside proprietary ‘walled gardens’, Featherless.ai provides developers with the creative flexibility to build the next generation of applications. 

Featherless.ai’s technical authority is built on deep research. The founding team created RWKV, a breakthrough open-source architecture designed to challenge the traditional dominance of transformers

Eugene Cheah, CEO and co-Founder of Featherless.ai, said: “When a few dominant players control the entire stack, it stifles competition and limits what developers can imagine. We’re building the infrastructure that makes open-source AI practical and reliable at scale, ensuring that enterprises can build on a foundation they actually own rather than one they merely rent. 

“This investment signals a turning point in the AI market. While the first wave of adoption was defined by proprietary, closed-door ecosystems, we provide a neutral ground for a second phase where companies can own and run their own models without being tethered to a single cloud provider or a restricted tech stack.”

Sagi Paz, Head of AMD Ventures, said: “Featherless.ai is at the forefront of a critical new phase in the development of the AI industry. By providing a strong foundation for open-source AI, it helps expand access and supports a more competitive and diverse ecosystem. We are delighted to support Featherless.ai on their journey.”

Kasper Sage, Managing Partner at BMW i Ventures, said: “As AI adoption accelerates, enterprises want more control over performance, cost, and where their data lives. Featherless.ai is making leading open models production-ready at scale. Being able to use a variety of different models is key for future enterprise AI use cases. Featherless.ai is a key enabler for making this a reality.” 

Abby Hitchcock, Principal at Airbus Ventures, said: “The next wave of AI adoption will not be carried by a handful of general-purpose models, but by the millions of specialized, fine-tuned models already being built in the open. The challenge has never been whether those models exist; it’s whether they can be served reliably and at a cost that makes production deployment viable. Featherless.ai has solved the underlying architectural problem – loading models in seconds while keeping GPUs productively utilized – which is what finally makes the long tail commercially feasible. Our conviction in the team has only deepened since we first backed them, and we’re proud to help lead this next phase.” 

Joan Yao, General Partner at Kickstart Ventures, said: “Featherless.ai embodies what we believe about AI — it’s infrastructure, not a vertical. We backed them at seed because of their technical edge in inference, and this round reinforces our conviction that they’re building something durable in an increasingly competitive space.”

Prashant Matta, Managing Partner at Panache Ventures, said: “Featherless.ai is one of those very rare startups that combines incredibly innovative and practical technology with an important and worthy company mission. The risk of the AI industry ultimately becoming dominated by a few players from one country is very real – solutions such as Featherless.ai provide a crucial alternative pathway for development.”   


About Featherless.ai
Featherless.ai is a serverless inference platform. Its goal is to make all AI models available for serverless inference. The company provides inference via API to a continually expanding library of open-weight models enabling enterprises and individuals to harness the full potential of artificial intelligence without worrying about underlying infrastructure. For more information, visit www.featherless.ai 

About Airbus Ventures
Airbus Ventures is a conviction-led fund that backs founders building critical infrastructure. We invest in the backbone of national security and the conduits of global commerce, anchoring the industries and defense platforms that will define our future. 

About BMW i Ventures
BMW i Ventures is the independent venture capital firm of BMW Group. From offices in Silicon Valley and Munich, BMW i Ventures invests in early to growth-stage companies defining the future of automotive, sustainability, manufacturing, and supply chain. Since starting in 2011, the firm has $800M under management and has invested in over 75 startups, including CelLink, ChargePoint, GaN Systems, Motorway, Skylo, Tekion, and Xometry. For more information: https://www.bmwiventures.com.

About Wavemaker Ventures
Wavemaker Ventures is Southeast Asia’s leading venture capital firm specialising in early-stage investments in Enterprise, Deep Tech, and Sustainability. Since 2012, Wavemaker Ventures has invested in over 200 companies across the region, expanding its presence into South Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. As the early-stage fund of Wavemaker Partners, it has successfully raised 5 funds with over US$400 million in total committed capital and generated exits worth over US$2 billion in enterprise value. Portfolio exits include mobile point-of-sale system Moka (acquired by Gojek), cloud communications software company Wavecell (acquired by 8×8), inventory and order management platform TradeGecko (acquired by Intuit), and online payment solutions provider Red Dot Payment (acquired by PayU/Naspers). Notable portfolio companies include Growsari, Lhoopa, Silent Eight, and Zuzu Hospitality. For more information, visit wavemaker.vc.

About Panache Ventures
Panache Ventures is a leading early-stage venture capital fund with extensive networks across Canada and the US. Led by a team of experienced operators, Panache Ventures invests in visionary founders and helps them transform their ideas into successful high-growth companies. https://www.panache.vc

About Kickstart Ventures
Driven by its vision to shape a better future, Kickstart Ventures invests in tech startups that future-proof businesses and solve real-world problems through sustainable and holistic innovation. The corporate venture capital arm of one of SEA’s leading telecom companies, Kickstart Ventures has 71 investments in the US and other parts of the world, led by 140+ founders, and it advises the Ayala Corporation Technology Innovation (ACTIVE) Fund, the largest venture capital fund to come out of the Philippines.

Cheong Jin Xi, Founder and CEO of Aonic
2026-03-03 11:00 News

KUALA LUMPUR, 3 March 2026 — Aonic, a Malaysia-founded drone technology company operating across Southeast Asia, today announced that it has secured USD 10 million in new funding. The Series A funding round is led by Kairous Capital, a regional private equity and venture capital firm backed by Jelawang Capital, Malaysia’s National Fund-of-Funds through its Emerging Fund Managers’ Programme. The investment will accelerate Aonic’s regional and international expansion, deepen R&D, and scale its Malaysia-built drones, software, and services.

“Aonic is scaling a proven system,” said Cheong Jin Xi, Founder and CEO of Aonic. “We’ve spent years building the engineering, manufacturing, and operational foundations to support real-world, field-ready operations. This funding enables us to expand globally with the same level of consistency and reliability we’ve achieved in Southeast Asia.”

Aonic provides end-to-end drone solutions to modernise the agriculture and industrial sectors in Southeast Asia by addressing persistent traditional challenges: labour-intensive and hazardous work. By replacing manual spraying, Aonic helps farmers increase efficiency and yields. Based on internal performance data across participating farms, Aonic’s agriculture drones have been shown to increase farmers’ income by 50%, boost farm output by around 54%, and reduce water use for spraying by approximately 75% compared with manual methods.

To support this at scale, Aonic has built a fully integrated in-house ecosystem. It designs, engineers, and manufactures its own drones and proprietary software in-house, enabling the company to have full control over product performance, costs, and roadmap. Beyond technology, Aonic’s broader ecosystem also supports farmers through training, agri-drone financing, and agri-input retail, which aims to lower adoption barriers and deliver scalable and sustainable impact across agriculture and industrial operations.

With its strong after-sales service network of more than 50 3S (Sales, Service, Spare Parts) centres across Southeast Asia, Aonic provides responsive, on-the-ground support long after deployment. As one of the market leaders in the agri-drone segment in both Malaysia and Thailand, Aonic’s drones are widely adopted by local farmers for spraying operations in plantations and farms.

“We have been searching for transformative food and agri-technology for a long time, and Aonic is a rare Malaysia-based company that can deliver across Southeast Asia at scale,” said Adrian Hia, Partner at Kairous Capital. “The team pairs deep technical capability with exceptional execution and financial discipline, bringing measurable outcomes for farmers.”

Aonic has grown at a triple-digit CAGR since 2022, reaching more than USD 60 million in annual revenue. In addition, the company has been profitable since 2023, reflecting its disciplined execution and a scalable operating model.

Expanding Through Global Resellers and Distributors

Today, Aonic’s drones are sold and deployed in over 15 countries, with applications across agriculture, plantation management, inspection, and industrial services.

“Through this investment, Aonic will further strengthen its ability to invest more deeply in R&D for its proprietary drone capabilities and scale its manufacturing capacity in Malaysia for the next phase of growth,” said Hia.

As part of its next growth phase, Aonic is actively expanding its reseller and distributor network to bring its Malaysia-built drone ecosystem to global markets.

Driving Nation-Building and Smallholder Transformation

Alongside global expansion, Aonic continues to play a key role in modernising Malaysia’s agriculture sector. Through Aonic Flex financing, certified training via Drone Academy Asia, and integration with agri-inputs, Aonic empowers smallholders and large estate operators alike to adopt drone technology with lower upfront barriers and measurable productivity gains.

“Kairous Capital is a strong strategic fit because they understand our long-term vision and the realities of scaling an asset-heavy platform,” said Cheong. “Beyond capital, they bring later-stage growth expertise to help us scale operations and expand into global markets over the next five years.” 

With a strengthened capital base and a decade of groundwork since its founding in 2016, Aonic is now scaling its infrastructure and exporting Malaysian engineering excellence to help drive the next wave of agricultural and industrial transformation globally.

###

About Aonic
Aonic is an end-to-end drone solutions provider, leveraging smart technologies to develop ecosystems within the drone industry and beyond across Southeast Asia. Anchored by its expertise in drones, its ecosystem provides tailored solutions to the unique needs of enterprises and end users across six integrated verticals consisting of agriculture, industrial, services, retail, academy, and lifestyle. Visit Aonic’s Website: www.aonic.com
Media Enquiries: [email protected]

About Kairous Capital
Kairous Capital is a regional private equity firm specialising in cross-border investments across Greater China and Southeast Asia with a focus on investing in disruptive technologies and technology-driven companies across both regions. Visit Kairous Capital’s Website: www.kairous.com

Eezee team
2026-02-24 11:00 News

SINGAPORE, 24 February 2026Eezee, a Southeast Asia–based procurement platform focused on enterprise tail-end spend, has raised a US$5 million pre-Series B round, led by Korea Investment Partners Southeast Asia, with existing investors such as Kickstart Ventures and Wavemaker Ventures doubling down. The oversubscribed round also included participation from several strategic investors. 

The fresh capital will be used to accelerate Eezee’s regional expansion and to deepen investment in its AI-powered procurement software, RFQBot and ProcureFlow. Eezee has officially launched operations in Thailand, marking its latest market entry in Southeast Asia, with existing operations in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The AI tools are designed to automate and optimize enterprise procurement workflows, particularly for long-tail, low-value purchases that remain largely manual and fragmented. Eezee helps businesses reduce procurement time from days to minutes, helping customers save 20% and more on costs. 

“Procurement remains one of the largest yet least optimized enterprise functions globally,” said Shane Ang, VP at Korea Investment Partners Southeast Asia. “Eezee has demonstrated strong execution and disciplined growth in a challenging and fragmented region, we believe its formidable combination of talent, data, and execution capabilities positions the company well in redefining how enterprises manage tail-end spend across Southeast Asia.”  

Established in 1986, Korea Investment Partners (KIP) is South Korea’s largest venture capital firm by assets under management. Leveraging a vast global network across its offices in Seoul, Singapore, Silicon Valley, Beijing and Shanghai, KIP has successfully backed industry-defining companies. Notable investments include Kakao, YG Entertainment, ABL Bio, and Moloco. 

The raise comes at a time when Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem has been impacted by declining funding volumes and heightened scrutiny around governance and fraud. Against this backdrop, Eezee says it has continued to see strong investor demand, resulting in the round’s oversubscription. 

Since the first quarter of 2025, Eezee’s growth has continued to accelerate quarter by quarter. The businesses in Indonesia and Malaysia have reached operational profitability, while RFQBot and ProcureFlow AI are undergoing a multi-market roll-out in the first half of 2026.  

“Procurement and supply chain workflows have changed little over the past four decades,” said Logan Tan, CEO and Co-founder of Eezee. “Recent advances in AI now make it possible to reimagine both the software layer and the physical movement of goods, combining automation with supply chain optimization to drive meaningful efficiency and cost outcomes. With this latest round, we’re seeing a more mature market, increased inbound demand and significantly less education required around Eezee’s offering. We’re honored by the trust placed in us by Korea Investment Partners, the support of our existing shareholders and new strategic investors as we work to transform procurement in this pivotal AI era.”  

With this latest round, Eezee expects to reach group-level profitability in the second half of the year, while continuing to scale its presence across Southeast Asia and expand its AI product offerings. 

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About Eezee
Eezee is a Southeast Asia–based procurement and supply chain platform focused on helping enterprises optimize tail-end spend through a combination of technology and supply chain capabilities. The company enables businesses to digitize and automate traditionally manual procurement workflows, improving cost efficiency, speed, and operational visibility. With growing adoption across the region, Eezee is building AI-driven tools to modernize procurement in one of the world’s least transformed enterprise functions. 

About Korea Investment Partners 
Korea Investment Partners (KIP) stands as the venture capital and private equity arm of Korea Investment Holdings, one of South Korea’s largest financial groups with businesses in securities, asset management, banking, credit finance, infrastructure and real estate. With a strong track record in identifying industry disruptors, KIP invests globally in early-stage to growth-stage companies across key technology sectors such as AI, Hardware, BioTech, Media, and FinTech.