FOMO Saturday

Hello Demo,

There’s a startup for just about every aspect of your daily life.

This week’s biggest deals have got us covered from backend to bedtime – from Supabase keeping apps running in the background and Terra Charge keeping electric vehicles topped up to Lumio having the entertainment sorted once we’re finally home.

And when it’s time to call it a night? There’s Romansive, which caught my attention for a slightly more personal reason.

Now that I’m, ahem, older, I seem to need a supplement for everything: joints, stress, sleep – you name it. I might just have to look into its “nighttime energy drink.”

Build, move, sleep, repeat.

You can find all other important investment deals from the last few days in our weekly funding news wrap-up.

Let’s dive into the biggest deals and M&As that have recently taken place.

— Lilian

🇸🇬🇺🇸 Based in Singapore and the US, Supabase runs an open-source backend platform for building applications on Postgres. The firm has raised US$150 million in series E money from CapitalG, GIC, IronArc Ventures, and Square Peg.

🇯🇵 Terra Charge is a Japan-based company focusing on EV charging infrastructure. It has bagged approximately US$64 million in debt funding from Minato Bank, Mizuho Bank, Resona Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.

🇸🇬 OneByZero is a Singapore-headquartered firm that helps enterprises integrate AI into existing systems and workflows. It has raised US$20 million in a series A round from Jungle Ventures.

🇮🇳 Lumio, a consumer tech brand operated by India-based Circuit House Technologies, has raised US$12 million in series A money from 3one4 Capital, Blume Ventures, and Stellaris Venture Partners.

🇰🇷 Based in South Korea, Romansive develops science-based sleep solutions. The firm has secured approximately US$3 million in series A funding from Lotte Ventures.

Here’s the complete list of this week’s funding chart: 37 deals worth over US$300 million.

🇸🇬 CloudsineAI is a web and generative AI security company headquartered in Singapore. It has seen its majority stake acquired by V-Key, a digital identity and mobile app security firm, for an undisclosed amount.

🇮🇱 Inferize is an inference optimization company based in Israel, which is located in West Asia. The firm has been acquired by AI cloud company Nebius for an undisclosed sum.

This startup bridges handwriting, voice, and AI

Image credit: Notewise

Students and professionals document their ideas across phones and tablets, often including files such as images, voice recordings, and PDFs. Manually sorting these notes and attachments can be tedious, so Singapore-based Notewise is building a single canvas to organize them.

• The gap: Capturing information is easy, but making sense of it isn’t. Handwritten notes, lecture recordings, and PDFs end up scattered across devices, and notes become static storage that needs manual sorting.
• The fix: Notewise is a whiteboard-style canvas that lets users write, record, and import documents in one place. Its multimodal AI transcribes audio, recognizes handwriting, summarizes documents, generates quizzes, and cross-references everything users capture.
• The pitch: The bootstrapped startup charges a monthly or annual subscription fee, with a one-time purchase option for core note-taking. It has surpassed 8 million downloads and won Google Play Best of 2024.

This article is part of our Startup Spotlight series. To get your startup or portco covered, fill out this survey.

Image credit: Timmy Loen

Fundraising often involves reaching out to several contacts, many of whom founders might not have dealt with before. To provide some transparency to this process, we created Glasswall, a platform for founders to give feedback and recommendations on investors. Check out the full list here.

• ✅︎ “Best investor ever! I cold-emailed Nicolas at a friend’s suggestion, and he replied ASAP. I got on a call a day later, and three days later, he flew from SF to VN. Five days later, we got a commitment. He’s been with us every step along the way, and he would be the person we would call first for everything. Nicolas is a world-class investor and supporter.” – Read more
• ❌ “An old-school traditional PE mindset trying to be a VC. Extensive due diligence, multiple site visits, multiple investment committee rounds, then pass. Reasons for passing could have been determined from the first pitch deck provided.” – Read more
• ✅︎ “The Investible team was incredible in terms of being transparent where we were in the process, and the information they asked for in the due diligence made sense and also helped us founders in thinking about our business and KPIs strategically.” – Read more

Lists of most active investors in the region

China | India | Indonesia | Japan | Singapore | Southeast Asia

List of top-funded startups in Asia

China | India | Indonesia | Israel | Japan | Hong Kong | Singapore | South Korea | Vietnam

1️⃣ Hard sell

The key to getting employees to use AI? Stop selling it as a productivity hack. Stanford researchers found that workers engage more when AI is framed as a way to make their jobs more meaningful, not just faster. Read this Stanford HAI piece to learn more.

2️⃣ Memory hog

The AI boom is hungry for chips – and your next cheap smartphone may be paying the price. Data centers are driving up demand for memory, squeezing some of the world’s most affordable phones out of the market. This Rest of World piece looks into an unexpected casualty of the AI race.

3️⃣ Tillywood calling

We’ve chatted with AI agents, but have you ever interviewed an AI actress? In this podcast episode, Masters of Scale talks to Tilly Norwood and her creator to unpack whether synthetic performers could democratize entertainment or turn Hollywood on its head.

4️⃣ Entering cell data

AI wants to cure diseases, but here’s the catch: There’s no “internet of cells” lying around for models to learn from. Reuters zooms in on the race to build the biological datasets needed to make AI-driven drug discovery a reality.

5️⃣ Keeping it human

AI can help make music, write emails, and speed up work. But automate too much, and you risk losing the human touch. Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava looks at what’s still worth keeping human in this interview by The Verge.

Today’s edition was written by Lilian Tang. It’s edited by Mina Deocareza.