retail startups
Indonesia’s Asos-style fashion app Sorabel to shut down
Modeling itself on fast-rising shopping apps like Asos and Boohoo, Indonesia’s Sorabel wanted to bring affordable fashion to shoppers across the archipelago while at the same time…
Food, retail startups on course for record-breaking year
Southeast Asia’s food and retail tech startups have collectively raised $350 million from investors so far this year, putting them on course to break 2019’s tally of $423……
Rocket Internet has a coffee startup now
Rocket Internet, the German startup factory that had a big impact on the early days of Southeast Asia’s tech industry—creating Lazada, Zalora, Foodpanda, and Easytaxi, to name…
Indonesia’s Starbucks rival Kopi Kenangan brews up $109m funding to build empire
Indonesia’s coffee startup Kopi Kenangan has just attracted its biggest ever funding round, netting $109 million from major investors. It adds to the $28 million Kopi Kenangan has…
Meet the Harvard grad who left ‘big pharma’ for his own startup
Farouk Meralli has what is surely one of the oddest starting up anecdotes in the tech industry. “It’s a funny story,” he chuckles. Basically, it went like this. The…
Gojek escalates cashless payments battle with startup acquisition
After eight months of rumors, ride-hailing giant Gojek just revealed it has acquired Moka, an Indonesian startup that makes internet-connected payment systems for stores and…
4 years on, cashierless stores are full of empty promises
The hype around cashierless stores started in 2016 with Amazon’s concept for its Go supermarket, and then shifted to fast-moving Chinese startups that turned Amazon’s idea into a…
