Month: June 2018

The largest payment app in South Korea, Toss, has pulled in $40 million in fresh investment from Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and Sequoia China.

The deal for Viva Republica, Toss’s parent company, comes just over a year after it raised $48 million from payment giant PayPal and others. There’s no valuation for this newest round, but we do know that it is a ‘bridge’ intended to bring new investors in and help accelerate the business for a large raise further down the line. (It is also the first Korean investment for both GIC and Sequoia China.)

Not that the business seems to need much more impetus for acceleration, growth is already strong. Viva Republica says that Toss’s registered user base has doubled over the past year to each eight million consumers, while it claims the app is processing $10 billion in transaction volume per month. The company forecasts that its annual transaction run rate will surpass $18 billion.

Back in 2016 when we reported on the PayPal -backed round, founder and CEO SG Lee — a dentist until he saw the potential for a mobile payment service — told us that Toss had begun to introduce additional services beyond peer-to-peer payments. That’s included consumer financing products, like loans, micro-insurance and cross-border payments.

Toss doesn’t have Korea to itself, its main rival is Kakao, the country’s most popular messaging app. In recent times Kakao, a $7 billion company, had opened business units in a range of industries including ride-hailing, content and payment. Its Kakao Pay business is backed by Alibaba, and it plugs into Kakao the chat app to allow peer-to-peer transfers with other consumer finance services.

Lee, the Viva Republica CEO, previously said he doesn’t fear Kakao since in his mind it is creating a b2b business while Toss is focused wholly on the consumer experience. Now it has a couple more seasoned backers in its corner too, courtesy of this new investment.

from TechCrunch

Razer, the gaming hardware company that went public in Hong Kong last year, is resuming its investment strategy after it led a $3.3 million deal for Australia-based Esports Mogul.

Esports Mogul is, as the name suggests, focused on e-sports. The company operates a platform for organizing e-sports competitions — called Mogul Arena — and a gaming news website. The firm is focused on Asia and Latin America and it went public in Australia via a reverse listing that raised it $7 million.

The new money will go towards developing Mogul Arena for mobile, and funding user acquisition and monetization pushes, Esports Mogul said.

Razer already works with Esports Mogul, and now this deal will increase the collaboration which will focus on integrating Razer’s payment system, which itself was created by the recent acquisition of MOL, according to both companies.

Others in the round include Singapore’s Cloud Alliance, which develops software systems for gamers. It recently raised $15 million from an ICO and it said it plans to work more closely with Esports Mogul and Razer going forward.

Esports Mogul said the round was over-subscribed, with existing investors and local Australian institutions also taking part. The deal is priced at AU$1.8 per share, which represents a 20.55 percent discount on the company’s volume-weighted average share price over the last 15 days. Esports Mogul shares were priced just below $2 when it joined the ASX in late 2016.

from TechCrunch

The ongoing shift of emphasis in the cyber security industry from defensive, reactive actions towards pro-active detection and response has fueled veteran Finnish security company F-Secure’s acquisition of MWR InfoSecurity, announced today.

F-Secure is paying £80 million (€91,6M) in cash to purchase all outstanding shares in MWR InfoSecurity, funding the transaction with its own cash reserves and a five-year bank loan. In addition, the terms include an earn-out of a maximum of £25M (€28,6M) in cash to be paid after 18 months of the completion subject to the achievement of agreed business targets for the period from 1 July, 2018, until 31 December, 2019.

F-Secure says the acquisition will enable it to offer its customers access to the more offensive skillsets needed to combat targeted attacks — specialist capabilities that most companies are not likely to have in-house.

It points to detection and response solutions (EDR) and managed detection and response services (MDR) as one of the fastest growing market segments in the security space. And says the acquisition makes it the largest European single source of cyber security services and detection and response solutions, positioning it to cater to both mid-market companies and large enterprises globally.

“The acquisition brings MWR InfoSecurity’s industry-renowned technologies to F-Secure making our detection and response offering unrivaled,” said F-Secure CEO Samu Konttinen in a statement. “Their threat hunting platform (Countercept) is one of the most advanced in the market and is an excellent complement to our existing technologies.”

As well as having experts in-house skilled in offensive techniques, MWR InfoSecurity — a UK company that was founded in 2002 — is well known for its technical expertise and research.

And F-Secure says it expects learnings from major incident investigations and targeted attack simulations to provide insights that can be fed directly back into product creation, as well as be used to upgrade its offerings to reflect the latest security threats.

MWR InfoSecurity also has a suite of managed phishing protection services (phishd) which F-Secure also says will also enhance its offering.

The acquisition is expected to close in early July, and will add around 400 employees to F-Secure’s headcount. MWR InfoSecurity’s main offices are located in the UK, the US, South Africa and Singapore.

“I’m thrilled to welcome MWR InfoSecurity’s employees to F-Secure. With their vast experience and hundreds of experts performing cyber security services on four continents, we will have unparalleled visibility into real-life cyber attacks 24/7,” added Konttinen. “This enables us to detect indicators across an incredible breadth of attacks so we can protect our customers effectively. As most companies currently lack these capabilities, this represents a significant opportunity to accelerate F-Secure’s growth.”

“We’ve always relied on research-driven innovations executed by the best people and technology. This approach has earned MWR InfoSecurity the trust of some of the largest organizations in the world,” added MWR InfoSecurity CEO, Ian Shaw, who will be joining F-Secure’s leadership team after the transaction closes. “We see this approach thriving at F-Secure, and we look forward to working together so that we can break new ground in the cyber security industry.”

The companies will be holding a webcast to provide more detail on the news for investors and analysts later today, at 13:30 EEST.

from TechCrunch