Replacing the pen-and-paper

• 500-backed Philippines-based startup Peddlr has raised US$4.3 million in a seed funding round co-led by Patamar Capital and Crestone Venture Capital.
• This comes seven months after its launch in July 2021 and a US$500,000 pre-seed round in November of the same year.
• Peddlr offers digital accounting, bookkeeping, inventory management, and digital storefronts for MSMEs, said to be vital to the economy of the Philippines.
• The startup said it will use the fresh funds to accelerate user growth to reach one million MSMEs by the end of 2022. It will also expedite the rollout of its new app features and digital products tobenefit its users, especially sari-sari stores (Filipino convenience stores) and other micro-entrepreneurs.
• According to Peddlr, it has experienced organic exponential growth with around 350,000 downloads and 28,000 active Facebook group community members to date.
• Read the full article on e27.

Empowering mom-and-pop kiosks

• Teddy Oetomo, president of 500-backed Indonesian e-commerce unicorn Bukalapak, gave an exclusive interview to Finance Asia about how the company is working to advance financial inclusion.
• With over 70% of Bukalapak’s activities conducted outside of tier one cities, how does the company get traditional businesses to use apps? “Getting the first 10% signed up was the biggest challenge. We had to be on the ground to educate them,” Teddy said.
• To continue reaching out to more MSMEs, Bukalapak is looking beyond convenience stores and into other verticals such as hardware stores, materials stores, and smartphone stores.
• “We’re also developing initiatives to support offline female sellers. In Indonesia, it is typical for husbands to work in the city, while their wives run local village shops to supplement household income. If we want to enhance our business, we need to enhance the capabilities of all our sellers,” he concluded.
• Read the full interview here. Registration may be required.

Making learning accessible and affordable

• Out of 123 submissions globally, 500-backed Malaysian edtech startup Pandai was announced as one of the winners of the Octava Foundation Social Innovation Challenge.
• Powered by MIT Solve, a marketplace for social impact and social entrepreneurship by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the challenge seeks accessible and affordable edtech solutions focused on underserved K-12 learners.
• Pandai was selected for its platform that offers curriculum-based assessments comprising gamified questions. Its learning tools include videos, live help, study notes, flashcards, and virtual lab simulations.
• It generates comprehensive reports that show not only the student’s final grade, but also a complete breakdown of their performance based on various categories.
• Read more about the challenge here and Pandai’s submission here.