Duc Dao

Singapore-based Ant International gets Brazil payment-institution licence

Singapore’s Ant International has received a payment-institution license from Brazil's central bank, expanding its regulated presence in the country's payments market.

Vietnam seeks to restrict U16 players’ daily game time at 60 minutes, require parental control

Vietnam seeks to cap the daily playing time of under-16 gamers at 60 minutes and require parents to register their accounts, according to draft rules for online games compiled by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.

Singapore’s Hivebotics raises $6M led by Vertex to scale restroom-cleaning robots

Singapore-based autonomous robot builder Hivebotics has raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, to move its restroom-cleaning robot from pilot deployments into volume production.

Vietnam will not ban social media for under-16s, but requires parental oversight

Vietnam seeks to require parents to register and supervise social-media accounts for their under-16 children and ban under-13 kids from posting, commenting, or sharing on social media, under draft rules of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.

KKR to buy minority stake in Malaysia’s Avisena Healthcare, to expand flagship hospitals

The United States-based investment firm KKR has agreed to buy a minority stake in Malaysia's Avisena Healthcare, a private hospital operator.

Vietnam seeks developers for home-grown fleet of 40 autonomous street sweepers

Vietnam is calling for development of a home-grown fleet of 40 self-driving robots to sweep its city streets, the first project put out for tender by the national science fund Nafosted under a program to build strategic technologies.

Japan’s NETSTARS, Singapore’s imToken to jointly explore stablecoin payments at Japanese stores

Japan's cashless payment platform NETSTARS and Singapore-based imToken, a Web3 wallet provider, will explore collaboration toward the real-world adoption of stablecoin payments.

Singapore’s Bitdeer buys 200 acres in Texas for $100M for AI data-center expansion

Bitdeer Technologies Group, a Singapore-headquartered technology company for AI and Bitcoin mining infrastructure, has bought about 200 acres of undeveloped land in Milam County, Texas, for $100 million in cash, to expand its planned AI and high-performance-computing data-center operations.

Eric Cheng, co-founder and group chief executive of CARSOME

Malaysia-based car e-commerce CARSOME reports $8.3M quarterly EBITDA in Q2

CARSOME reported Q2 EBITDA of about MYR 33 million, up 38 percent year on year, as vehicle sales and gross profit increased across Southeast Asia.

Vietnam’s FPT to absorb Poland software unit of Japan’s Nippon Seiki, extends car-software service to Europe

The Japanese unit of Vietnam’s technology giant FPT will take on the Polish software-design operations of Japan's Nippon Seiki, extending an automotive-software partnership between the two companies from Japan and Vietnam into Europe.