This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on September 11, 2023 – September 17, 2023

Venture capital firm 500 Global has successfully raised US$143 million (RM667.95 million) across its largest Southeast Asian early-stage fund to date, 500 Southeast Asia III, LP (500 SEA III).

Limited partners (LPs) across its early-stage and growth investment vehicles include a sovereign wealth fund, public and private pension funds like Khazanah Nasional Bhd, Kumpulan Wang Persaraan and Employees Provident Fund. A university endowment, family offices of prominent global investors, and portfolio companies valued at over US$1 billion from the firm’s first Southeast Asia early-stage fund have invested as LPs as well.

500 SEA III is the firm’s third Southeast Asia-focused early-stage fund, with each successive fund having nearly doubled in size since 2014. Originally targeted for US$75 million, the fund closed at US$100 million with over half of the fund coming from returning LPs. The fund will focus on investing in businesses and artificial intelligence-enabled technologies that advance rural digitalisation, sustainable cities, human and machine productivity, healthcare, food security and financial inclusivity.

The fund aims to invest in 100 pre-seed to Series A start-ups, providing first checks between US$250,000 and US$500,000 across Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia.

The firm’s past Southeast Asia investments have included US$5 million to US$20 million checks in Series C to D rounds of portfolio companies such as Carousell (2018), Carsome (2021), and most recently eFishery (2023), and has in the past invited its LPs to co-invest alongside it in select opportunities.

“With a global portfolio of over 2,800 companies across more than 80 countries, we believe that the founders in Southeast Asia will benefit from one of the few truly global venture platforms with deep local roots and in-market expertise. We’re confident that with access to insights, connections and capital, this can help the next generation of Southeast Asian founders build global tech giants,” says Christine Tsai, CEO and founding partner of 500 Global.

Venture capital firm Vynn Capital has partnered with Marubeni Malaysia, a subsidiary of Marubeni Corporation, a renowned Japanese trading and investment conglomerate, to support and empower innovative entrepreneurs, start-ups and businesses in Malaysia and beyond.

Key highlights of the partnership include business synergy from Vynn Capital’s strong portfolio of investments in various sectors, coupled with Marubeni Malaysia’s resources and access to global markets. The collaboration also aims to facilitate Marubeni Malaysia’s entry into local markets, foster business expansion and explore opportunities for regional growth. Moreover, both parties will also invest in cutting-edge technologies and business models.

This collaboration will drive the development and implementation of innovative solutions, promoting sustainable economic growth in Malaysia. Some of the areas identified are mobility, electrification and sustainability-themed opportunities.

Malaysia’s Sim Leisure Group has partnered with Australia’s Haven XR Holdings Pty Ltd to unveil the world’s first HavenXR Centre, a cutting-edge facility offering fully immersive cinematic experiences.

Set to launch in Malaysia and Singapore in 1Q2024, the HavenXR Centre will leverage location-based virtual reality to transform traditional movie-watching into an interactive experience, allowing movie-goers to not just watch but become an integral part of the movie itself.

Sim Leisure is an international theme park developer with over 300 international theme park projects worldwide. Haven XR, a joint venture under the banner of Josephmark and Tribus345, specialises in extending the boundaries of reality through cutting-edge development.

The partnership also encompasses academia through the establishment of a comprehensive virtual reality design studio for research and development and a work-integrated learning programme for design students will be established at the University of the Sunshine Coast campus in Queensland, Australia.

In a bid to democratise artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, Alibaba Cloud has introduced a pair of open-source large vision language models (LVLMs), namely Qwen-VL and Qwen-VL-Chat.

These models possess the capability to understand images, text and bounding boxes within prompts. The LVLM models are also equipped to support multi-round question-answering in both English and Chinese.

Qwen-VL capabilities extend to understanding image inputs and text prompts in English and Chinese, responding to various images with open-ended queries and generating image captions.

Qwen-VL-Chat compares multiple image inputs and engages in multi-round question-answering. The AI assistant is able to generate poetry and stories based on input images, summarise content and solve mathematical questions in images.

The models can assist the visually impaired with online tasks and have the potential to revolutionise interactions with visual content.

Alibaba Cloud has shared the model’s code, weights and documentation with academics, researchers and commercial institutions worldwide. This contribution to the open-source community is accessible via Alibaba’s AI model community ModelScope and the collaborative AI platform Hugging Face. For commercial uses, companies with over 100 million monthly active users can request a licence from Alibaba Cloud.

Foreign travellers prefer long-term stays in Malaysia, according to Airbnb’s data. Demand for long-term rentals on the platform grew from 11.6% to 18.6% from 2019 to 2022.

This data has been instrumental in enabling Airbnb and the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) to collaborate in the DE Rantau Programme. Both parties have inked a memorandum of understanding to jointly enhance Malaysia’s growing digital nomad ecosystem.

The partnership is determined to identify digital nomad-friendly Airbnb listings, with an estimate of over 2,000 listings to be approved by MDEC at the end of the year.

The DE Rantau initiative encourages digital adoption and professional mobility for local talent and foreign nomads by providing access to broadband connectivity, facilities and services that support the nomadic lifestyle. — By Grace Yap Ern Hui

Digital lending platform Direct Lending and Petronas AutoExpert have partnered to introduce a Shariah-compliant digital car service instalment plan to Malaysian car owners.

Through the partnership, Petronas AutoExpert has adopted the buy now pay later model to provide a competitive advantage to its chain of service centres and help ease the financial stress typically associated with car maintenance. Available at all 55 of its centres nationwide, car owners will enjoy increased flexibility in managing their car service and repair expenses by allowing payments to be spread over a maximum 12-month period.

With just three steps, applicants can secure financing by filling in their details, submitting their identification card along with the last three months’ bank statements and finalising the process by making the first payment, setting up monthly payments and signing the financing agreement — all to be done digitally via smartphone. Customers of Petronas AutoExpert can apply for this instalment plan by scanning the QR code displayed at the participating service centres.

Developer OpenAI launched a version of ChatGPT for businesses, highlighting security features and unlimited use of its large language model. There are no usage caps for its GPT-4 model, which includes various privacy features and provides improved analytics tools to help process complex data sets.

In a statement, OpenAI pointed to the use of its standard ChatGPT product within large organisations as leading to demand from businesses for a simple and safe way to implement the platform. OpenAI stated that it aims to bring on as many companies as possible in the coming weeks.

ChatGPT Enterprise offers customisations of its GPT model, with the company providing assurances on information security and pledging not to train models on client data. The company’s model is already available for enterprise use through Microsoft’s Copilot, which helps users generate various business tasks including word documents, presentations and emails.

Decentralised Gaming Ventures (DGV), a Web3 venture builder, has announced the addition of two strategic hires, Joseph Young and Alvyn Ng, to its dynamic team. Young is its new chief investment officer (CIO) and Ng is its senior marketing manager.

Young will work closely alongside CEO Samson Oh and COO Derrick Si. Young will be instrumental in acquiring promising web3 game studios, driving further fundraising rounds, and sharing his wealth of blockchain protocol, tokenisation and NFT-related experience with the wider team.

Ng will drive DGV’s publisher marketing efforts, setting the community management direction and leading go-to-market plans across its portfolio. These strategic appointments follow on from the web3 venture builder’s announcement of a seven-figure investment round in June.

The ability to detect fake news and headlines is easier said than done, especially among Gen Zs and millennials who are constantly online, as shown in the statistics provided by MIST, a 20-point misinformation susceptibility test by University of Cambridge.

The test shows that only 11% of 18- to 29-year-olds got a high score, whereas 36% of those aged 65 or older got a high score. Individuals who dedicate nine hours or more online showed poor scores at 15%, in contrast to those who spend zero to two hours online recreationally, at a high score of 30%.

The test has undergone experiments involving over 8,000 participants over the span of two years and was developed with the early version of ChatGPT. The credible-sounding false headlines the test consists of are produced with ChatGPT version 2.

“We encourage our fellow psychologists to embrace AI and help steer the technology in beneficial directions,” said MIST co-author Dr Friedrich Götz.

The two-minute test consists of either 20 or 16-point questions that consist of real and fake news headlines, which participants have to choose between “false” and “true”. At the end, participants will be given a resilience score and a description of their distrust or naivety as well as fake and real news detection scores.

“The MIST will allow us to verify the effectiveness of interventions to tackle fake news. We want to explore why some people are more resilient to misinformation and what we can learn from them,” said MIST lead author Dr Rakoen Maertens.

Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) is set to celebrate Malaysia’s digital economy with a nationwide event between Sept 25, 2023, and Nov 4, 2023.

This six-week experience will revolve around technology, featuring esteemed speakers and panellists from both local and international organisations, all working together to shape a tech-driven future.

For more information, contact MDEC Client Contact Centre (CliC) at 1800-88-8338 or [email protected].

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Plans for a 55,000-acre utopia by Silicon Valley elites have been unveiled on a website showcasing renderings. The utopia aims to be a new city that will be operated using clean energy and create thousands of new jobs alongside reliable public transportation. The group behind the efforts, Flannery Associates, has come under criticism over their shady agenda. Flannery Associates is backed by prominent Silicon Valley investors.

For a glimpse of more renderings, visit: https://californiaforever.com.

Venkat Iyer was living a fast-paced life in the IT world in Mumbai when he decided to stop and take a long, hard look at where he was headed.

Disheartened by his stressful existence in the city, he decided to give it all up and take up organic farming in a small village near Mumbai. But it wasn’t easy. With no experience in agriculture, his journey was fraught with uncertainty.

He soon went from negotiating tough clients, strict deadlines and traffic to looking forward to his first bumper crop of moong. As he battled erratic weather conditions and stubborn farm animals, he discovered a world with fresh air and organic food, one where he could lead a more wholesome existence. At times hilarious and other times profound, this book follows his extraordinary story. — Amazon

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