Indonesian healthtech firm pivots towards a profitable path

In On the Rise this week, we look at how Klinik Pintar found the right market fit and why alt-proteins have VC firm Good Startup going in for seconds. [Read from your browser]( On the Rise 🚀 Welcome to On the Rise! Delivered every Tuesday via email and through the Tech in Asia website, this free newsletter breaks down the biggest stories and trends in emerging tech. If you’re not a subscriber, get access by [registering here](. Written by Aditya Hadi Pratama Journalist Hello {NAME} If you celebrate the lunar new year, have a good one! For many, a new year means new beginnings, so if you’ve been wanting to start something, perhaps now is the right time. Let me share a little personal story here. After studying computer science at college, I tried to pursue a career as a developer at a big chemical company. However, the role is far from what you'd expect from being a developer at a tech startup nowadays. At the company where I worked, the approval process for tech-related projects tended to be really slow, especially for initiatives with no direct connection to the core business. After several years, I realized that there wasn’t much room for me to grow, and the only thing that made me stay in that jobs was the certainty of a monthly salary until retirement. Then an exciting opportunity came along: be a tech journalist to cover the up-and-coming startup scene. It seemed like a gamble since I needed to start from scratch, but it could pave a new career path that would allow me to grow. At around the same time, I learned what the term [sunk cost]( means, which was really helpful as I took the next step in my journey. Long story short, I decided to “pivot” my career from a developer at a large corporation to a startup journalist at Tech in Asia. That’s why I can relate with this week’s Big Story, which is about an Indonesia-based startup called Klinik Pintar. The firm started out by digitalizing hospitals, but soon redirected its focus to clinics. It also tried several business models like software as a service to a marketplace for medicines before deciding to directly manage clinics. As a result, Klinik Pintar has steered itself towards profitability. Speaking about shifting paths, this week's Making Waves features Jayesh Parekh, who ran funds at Tiger Global and Aavishkaar Capital before calling it a day. He came out of retirement in 2020 to co-lead Good Startup, a VC firm focused on alt-protein sector. The investor shares some insights on why he's optimistic about the industry despite flat sales and the recession. -- Aditya  --------------------------------------------------------------- THE BIG STORY [This Indonesian healthtech firm checked out of hospitals to run clinics]( Klinik Pintar’s journey evolved from digitalizing state-owned hospitals to ultimately modernizing and managing small clinics. ---------------------------------------------------------------  MAKING WAVES  [Recession Run: Alt protein to be $200b industry this decade, says Good Startup]( Jayesh Parekh, managing partner at Good Startup, explains why he is bullish on investing in alt proteins despite a global slowdown in sales. ---------------------------------------------------------------  AI ODYSSEY Promising AI projects we’re noticing. This AI project can compose music from images OpenAI's ChatGPT has taken the world by storm just a month and half after its launch. ChatGPT 3, the latest version of the generative AI chatbot, certainly can do exciting things, from writing a piece of code or pointing out the errors in it to composing a poem only based on a few prompts. Needless to say, it has generated a lot of talk about the benefits and dangers of AI. But that’s not the only piece of impressive generative AI which came out at the end of 2022. [Riffusion]( which can compose music with just text prompts, was launched in mid-December. The AI uses [spectograms]( - visual representations of a sound clip - instead of audio itself to make music. Based on a user's prompt, the AI project generates images that have the qualities of the spectogram it matches. For instance, if you type “jazz piano mixed with reggae,” it will create an image of squiggly lines that Riffusion reads as an audio track. It does this with the help of a collection of spectograms that have been tagged with keywords related to the style of music they represent. The name Riffusion comes from “Stable Diffusion for real-time music generation.” The model's creators - Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros - experimented and fine-tuned Stable Diffusion, a top text-to-image generative AI project, to read spectogram images. That said, Riffusion is still in its early days, and it isn’t the only AI music composer in town. There’s Harmonyai’s [Dance Diffusion]( which is backed by Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI, and Google’s [AudioLM](. However, these AI projects use different methods to make music. -- Collin  ---------------------------------------------------------------  NEWS YOU SHOULD KNOW Also check out Tech in Asia’s coverage of the emerging tech scene [here]( 1️⃣ Global investment firm B Capital Group has closed its Growth Fund III at around [US$2.1 billion](. It plans to invest in the series B rounds and beyond of up to 35 portfolio companies over the next three years. 2️⃣ Blackpanda, a Singapore-based cybersecurity company, has raised [US$15 million]( from Primavera Venture Partners and GAW Capital Partners, among others. 3️⃣ KKday, a Taiwan-based travel platform, announced that its revenue [has doubled]( in 2022 compared to a year earlier. Its gross merchandise value last year also surpassed pre-Covid levels. 4️⃣ Indian deeptech firm Chara has raised [US$4.75 million]( in a pre-series A funding round led by Exfinity Ventures Partners. The startup builds software and hardware that electric vehicle manufacturers can use to make rare earth-free motor technologies. 5️⃣ Mayani, an agritech firm based in the Philippines, has secured [US$1.7 million]( in a seed funding round led by Silicon Valley investor AgFunder. The startup has more than 139,000 farmers and over 11,000 customers on its platform. ---------------------------------------------------------------  FYI  1️⃣ [Samantha vs. Samuel: How investors can address the funding gap in Japan]( Across the world, the funding gap between female-led and male-led startups is striking. It’s time for investors to focus on their portfolio’s diversity. 2️⃣ [Why indoor tracking technology is set to take off]( With the potential to transform sectors as diverse as healthcare and grocery logistics, real-time location and sensor solutions are set for rapid growth. --------------------------------------------------------------- That’s it for this edition - we hope you liked it! Do also check out previous issues of the newsletter [here](. Not your cup of tea? You can unsubscribe from this newsletter by going to your “edit profile” page and choosing that option in our preference center. See you next week! 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