MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines’ inflation rate spiked to a nearly 14-year high of 7.7% in October, as a confluence of global shocks and gaps in domestic policies trigger a consumer crisis. National Statistician Dennis Mapa said on Friday, November 4, that the 7.7% posted in October 2022 is the highest since December 2008’s 7.8%, when the world suffered a …

FINANCIAL markets in Vietnam, Asia’s fastest-growing economy, are in an unsettling slide as a crackdown on property lending, a falling currency and rising interest rates heap pressure on banks and rattle confidence. The Vietnamese dong and the benchmark stock index are heading for their worst annual performance since the 2008 financial crisis, with only Hong Kong and Russian stock markets …

Propseller, a Singapore-based proptech firm, has closed a transaction for a S$20.5 million (around US$14.5 million) property in Sentosa Cove, marking the company’s largest deal so far. Adrien Jorge, the startup’s CEO, said in a LinkedIn post that the deal is part of Singapore’s top 50 residential transactions for the year. He added that the revenue that Propseller made from …

SINGAPORE — A 10-minute drive from the central financial district in Singapore, Grab’s new nine-story headquarters that houses 3,000 employees shows how far the company has risen since its early days working from a small rental car office storeroom. “We would just grind it through,” said CEO Anthony Tan at the opening of the building in August. In line with …

Biotech startup Kyan Therapeutics has raised US$5 million in an oversubscribed pre-series A round led by Altara Ventures. The Singapore-based firm bagged the funds shortly after receiving positive findings from its clinical study on a guided treatment platform for patients with relapsed and refractory lymphoma. The fresh funds will be used to help the company establish a commercial lab, fund …

Wavemaker Impact and Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, along with Temasek and its subsidiary fund GenZero, are forging an agritech venture that will focus on accelerating rice decarbonization in Southeast Asia and the rest of Asia. The startup, whose name is still undisclosed, will build a platform that will identify the most effective strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in …

VC firm Square Peg Capital has raised US$550 million for its fifth fund focused on tech startups in Southeast Asia, Australia, and Israel. This brings the Australia-based company’s total capital raised to US$1.6 billion across its five funds. In a statement, the firm’s co-founder Paul Bassat said that US$350 million will go to early-stage startups while the rest will be …

HANOI — South Korean venture capital firm Nextrans is planning to launch a new $50 million Vietnam-focused fund next month to target the country’s tech startup ecosystem, DealStreetAsia has learned. The new vehicle will make individual bets worth up to $3 million, confirmed Le Han Tue Lam, Nextrans general manager. Nextrans, which is already one of the most active foreign …

CEBU, Philippines — Goodwater Capital, a U.S.-based venture capital firm that has been an active investor in Asia, has filed to raise a total of $1 billion for two new funds that will likely continue to invest in global early- and growth-stage consumer tecg startups. The filings come about a year after the company, which has backed many of the …

VIETNAM’S Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh is confident that the country’s growth will exceed expectations this year, and retain the title of South-east Asia’s fastest-growing economy through 2023, as it emerges from the pandemic. He expects gross domestic product (GDP) to rise 8 per cent in 2022 – faster than the median 7.3 per cent pace estimated in a Bloomberg …