Glife Technologies (Glife), a Singapore-based digital business-to-business (B2B) food and agritech company, said Tuesday it has raised SG$11 million ($8.13 million) Series A funding led by Heliconia Capital, a wholly owned investment subsidiary of Temasek Holdings.
The funding round was also joined by the Hibiscus Fund, a venture capital fund managed by Malaysia’s RHL Ventures and South Korea’s KB Investment, as part of the Dana Penjana Nasional (DPN) Programme by the Malaysian government.
Previously, Glife raised a seed funding round of SG$3 million ($2.22 million) led by Global Founders Capital. The latest funding brings Glife’s total funding up to SG$14 million ($10.35 million).
Glife said in a statement, the latest fundraise will facilitate its investment into Novitee, and extend its position as a vertically integrated solution provider for food and beverage (F&B) merchants in Southeast Asia.
Glife will also prioritise investment into artificial intelligence (AI) technologies as well as eye expansion into Malaysia and Indonesia in 2022, it said.
Glife also announced on Tuesday that it has invested into a partnership with Novitee, an omni- channel F&B tech solutions firm. The partnership will amalgamate Novitee’s technological expertise within the F&B industry with Glife’s strong network of farmers and merchants to evolve the company into a symbiotic data driven powerhouse and enhance its offerings as an end-to-end service provider for the ecosystem.
Glife also said, it will further pursue growth and expansion with plans to launch in Malaysia and Indonesia in the first quarter of 2022.
Furthermore, Glife will be strengthening its technology infrastructure via investment into AI and big data analytics software for restaurant management.
They will also be scaling the technology team to develop solutions for their growing pool of farmers and merchants.
According to the statement, Glife currently serves more than 1000 farmers and over 900 merchants across the region since its founding in 2018.
“We are extremely grateful for the support of our investors for this round of funding. At Glife, we recognise a long and fragmented supply chain between farmers and merchants and a lack of visibility and alignment between supply and demand,” said Glife Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Justin Chou.
According to him, the Series A funds will allow the firm to improve its tech enabled supply chain distribution model and work closely with Novitee to create an efficient and effective solution for the ecosystem – enabling them to move one step closer to feeding the entire Southeast Asia region sustainably.
Meanwhile, Heliconia Capital Chief Executive Officer Derek Lau said the digitalisation trend, as well as agrifood supply chain and labour challenges, will continue to put innovative companies like Glife in a unique position to serve its customers.
“We hope to support Glife in its efforts to expand across the region,” he said.
Glife is an ambitious Southeast Asian technology start-up that uplifts the regional food and agriculture industry with vertically integrated solutions designed for efficiency and scale.
Spanning the seed-to-table supply chain of fresh produce and plant protein to full stack restaurant digital technologies, the one-stop digital platform will allow food and beverage merchants to have higher visibility of the entire logistics flow of their produce via easily adoptable holistic digital innovations.
Glife aims to drive towards the sustainable growth of the food industry in the region as a single end-to-end solutions provider that connects stakeholders across the food value chain.