Daily Briefing: MAS warns wealth managers on wooing Hong Kong businesses; igloohome secures $20.4m in series B funding

And check out which agritech startups are getting the most funding.

From Reuters:

Singapore has cautioned wealth managers against aggressively marketing their services or making other efforts to woo clients to the city state by capitalising on rival Hong Kong’s political turmoil, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Officials from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) made the request last month to wealth managers, including DBS (DBSM.SI) and a unit of Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp (OCBC.SI).

The central bank told bankers it wanted to ensure wealth managers in Singapore were sensitive to the situation in Hong Kong and did not design campaigns specifically targeting business from Hong Kong.

The move comes as Hong Kong has been thrown into turmoil by a proposed extradition bill - declared dead this week by its CEO Carrie Lam - that for the first time would have allowed China to seek extraditions from the city, sparking demonstrations that attracted at least a million protesters.

Some tycoons in the Chinese-controlled territory have moved funds, or considered doing so, given provisions in the bill that would have allowed China to potentially freeze funds or other assets in the city.

Read more here.

From DealStreetAsia:

Singapore-based smart access solutions startup igloohome has raised $20.4m (US$15m) in its Series B funding round co-led by existing investors Insignia Ventures Partners, Wavemaker Partners, and SEEDS Capital.

The round was joined by Kickstart Ventures, TH Capital, Pine Venture Partners, On Asset Management, Innoven Capital, Singtel Innov8, and Great Noble International. igloohome provides smart lock and lockboxes that integrate with a mobile app, allowing users to manage their homes and properties remotely.

Its products also work offline, using encryption and synchronisation, similar to an internet banking token.

With the fresh capital infusion, igloohome has launched a suite of smart access solutions, iglooworks, for enterprise customers, primarily in the real estate and infrastructure sectors, the company said.

Read more here.

From e27:

The e27 startup database recorded at least 20 active agritech startups operating in Singapore.

Amongst these firms, two of them have raised millions of US Dollars, namely Chemopower Technology and Overdrive IoT.

Chemopower Technology, which raised $13.6m (US$10m) in series A funding round from undisclosed investors in 2016, provides efficient and cost-effective solutions to identify chemical compositions via novel approaches. The services that it offers include Data Analysis Service, Herb Data Inquire Service, and Universal Chemical Analyses Platform.

Meanwhile, Overdrive IoT, which secured $3.9m (US$2.9m) in series A funding round from Tin Men Capital in 2019, manages the information flow from a multitude of sensors, ranging from complex machines such as an automobile to a simple mobile device.

Read more here.

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia