Daryl is currently an Investor at Trihill Capital, investing in early-stage startups across South-East Asia & Founder of The Next Batch.
He was previously at Hypotenuse AI (YC S20) and Deskimo (YC S21), wearing multiple hats across Growth, Product, Partnerships, Marketing and Analytics.
Guest Author: Daryl Lim
🙌 Welcome back to Startup Wednesdays, featuring #VCs, #founders & #operators here in South-East Asia. For this week, we have Paolo Limcaoco, Principal at Accion Venture Lab
đź’ What is a personal mantra you live by?
One that sticks with me as a Catholic will have to be Jeremiah 29:11 – For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. This keeps me grounded regardless of good and bad times & helps me believe that during tough periods, brighter days are ahead.
đź’ What criteria does the Venture Lab team use when selecting early-stage fintech companies for investment?
We look to understand the company’s theory of change – how the fintech startup will drive financial inclusion for our target customer segment – the underserved and underbanked. After that, it is fairly similar to other early-stage investors – strength of founding team, type of problem being tackled, innovation in the model, scalability of the solution, market size & overall economics.
đź’ What are common challenges that fintech startups targeting underserved markets face & how does your team support them in overcoming these challenges?
Some challenges that we have seen include (1) finding the right acquisition strategy, (2) acquiring the relevant data points, (3) dealing with lower ticket sizes/average order values, (4) figuring out costs related to serving the customers, and (5) developing solutions tailored to address the inherent complexities.
We do play an active role with our portfolio companies. We share learnings & insights from our decade of investing in emerging markets. We also have a post-investment team that comes in and works with our portcos on key issues and initiatives, including those mentioned earlier.
For example, we have resources on balancing tech & touch for acquisition & adoption, information on underwriting models that work & insights on key items such as AOV, logistics costs & effectivity of low-tech, embedded solutions.
đź’ How do you see the future of #fintech evolving in SEA?
The fintech sector in SEA is still poised for further growth, especially given the development and building blocks that have been put in place in recent years. I expect that the lines with other sectors to blur even further with fintech, through embedded finance truly becoming a cross-cutting enabler across different industries. We’ve already seen that in our investments in agri/aqua-tech, future-of-work, and manufacturing-tech startups that have a strong fintech component.
Also, we will continue to business models emerge in the key themes of open-banking/finance, climate & AI.
Lastly, just the next phase of development & innovation in key verticals such as #payments (after the maturation of B2C, seeing innovation in the B2B, cross-border & real-time settlement), #insurance (more embedded, value-chain models) & of course #lending (POS financing, BNPL, embedded).
