Building for Impact and Inclusion in Southeast Asia’s Local Context - Bangkok 2024

[Music] so thank you everyone um I think we have a very good turnout today uh despite all of the traffic in Bangkok and sunny weather so very lovely to have you again and this is the very first panel of uh the morning of the funding the comment and we have uh a lot of the amazing builders in the space and I think I'm very proud that we also can gather a lot of Builders from Southeast Asia as well for this event so maybe can we just give each of you like um maybe 30 seconds if you can do lightning introduction about you and what you are doing in the space uh starting with isana sure hello hey hi I'm tisana for a CEO and co-founder of noo so um noo started off with a mission that we we wanted to um reduce the wealth inequalities in Thailand so the problem now in Thailand is that Tha and also asan we see a lot of economic growth access to credit but with that uh uh together um we start to see that lots of um the labor who have access to credit they started to have a um a bad credit especially in in Thailand we have um a problem of um the 90% of the household debt to the GDP and nobody is born to to solve that problem so what we do is that we we are um providing financial literacy and financial skills to the blue color world workers and um together with their financial access and um we so far we have been working with over 190 companies large corporates in Thailand to provide this um Services as a financial welfare to to their workers yeah thank you thank you V mo hi everyone uh Mo from Thailand so my journey in agriculture in Thailand started about four years ago when Co happened here uh it's a company called happy Grocers if anybody is from Bangkok you may have heard of it before cuz we are literally like almost everywhere but uh yeah so we started with a mission that if we could create a market for a conscious consumer that are interested in sustainably Grown organic products then we would be able to convince Farmers to convert into organic and then about a year ago we realized that if we really want to make a radical change a scale in Thailand we really need to engage with uh conventional Farmers so economic crops and that's when we started to spin off to happy ground where we work specifically with B and supporting corporate to deploy this solution at scale so we're talking about uh Supply chains that have about 10 to 50,000 Farmers with a land of around at least uh 64,000 hectares of land across Thailand and yeah so this is where a lot of technology and digital solution comes into our work from regardless um system for us to collect data on the ground so that we can create predictive modeling to understand better what what it look like if we would uh deploy solution like biar across their supply chain so that we can convince uh corporates to be able to confidently adopt new solution to decarbonize the supply chain and that's what we are doing um hi uh I'm Arch uh I'm from Thailand as well actually I wear two hats uh the first one is uh I founded a social Enterprise in Thailand about 10 years ago called social Giver and it's a way to revolutionize fundraising uh by uh converting uh lifestyle lifestyle spending uh into uh funding for social projects so how that looks is from the uh Viewpoint of consumers uh is we actually have like a a deal website uh where people buy uh gift cards from businesses um but the gift cards actually we we get for free from the businesses um and when you make a purchase uh you actually donate the money to social projects so we work with uh uh hotels restaurants bars activities events um so essentially you know you can stay a night at a hotel and fund a child's education for a year um things like that um so we supported a range of causes and we work with over 500 businesses now uh the second one is more uh a web 3 project that I recently started uh called wild chain and uh it's uh wildlife conservation using blockchain and games so essentially like we're trying to gamify the giving experience and we're inspired by uh games like uh Pokémon go and tamagachi and uh what we want to do is we want to have people adopt digital pets uh that help raise funds uh for um endangered animals uh that actually live uh in the wild um so how that looks is um you actually have like a a sanctuary uh where you hatch magic eggs and uh these eggs hatch into different uh animals with different Rarities um and as you raise them in your sanctuary and as you beautify your Sanctuary uh you can plant trees you can uh grow your sanctuary and these in-game actions actually translate to real world impact so as you're planting a tree in the game we plant a tree in the real world as you expand your land we protect um fragile ecosystems uh that need help protecting so uh wild chain is you know only just starting we haven't officially launched yet but um yeah all right thank you everyone uh so this is Nicole I'm uh the local partner to funding the commin this time and we run a web 3 Builders community in Asia called APAC Dow uh I'm half tie half Vietnamese uh practicing on my thae at the moment but definitely very keen to spend more time here uh so now I mean we only have 25 minutes of the panel so I would appreciate everyone uh you know going straight to the point be very concise about what we're going to be discussing because one of the topic that we would like to discuss is definitely relates to what you are building in the space and your personal story of where how you are getting here so I think the first question I would like to ask you is you know uh you have already given us the context of how you start the business but we want want to understand how you come here as a person you know like what is your moot Mo motivation uh like personal motivation to do this and do you think that what you are doing is very unique to Thailand or it's you know it can be something that people in other countries would be able would might come across at some point uh maybe with Tana first if you could um take that question so so to to tell you about the story about how how I started Noble roll um so I I was um having a class in in in in my graduate school um about the social businesses and that time I as was my first time to learn about like how social business could actually provide like um the having um balancing the purpose and and profit together and that time I feel like I have a privilege of like me getting a scholarship to study in in Japan and and while the rest of um like around 80% of the people couldn't even grad graduate from from um uh gr undergrad undergraduate school so I was thinking like I want to go back to Thailand and do something for my country but luckily so um that time um my family business um my my dad he called me back to to to the uh to the family business while I was um doing a consultant in Japan and um I was shocked by the amount of how much my my family um business employees are in debt so that was the starting point of like starting of noo so um I started to understand what happened so they have like a okay decent amount of of salary already um at as a um operational workers but they have a a an access to the credit card and cash card and loans for almost like um 50% of U 50 times of their salary so that that time I started say okay what is happening they get access to finance but they don't have any um control or management on their own Financial um um management at all so that is um the first time I started to seek out like how could I find a solution to help them from being in debt to being in wealth right so um then and luckily um in 2018 there was a um dap accelerate program and I I after have been doing this um pilot project for for some times I apply this this project as a uh as a um in in the accelerator and then um luckily I I got chosen to to to become um in in accelerator and uh three months past and they had pushed us to find the first um customer where um our first believer were the um one of the largest food chain company in Thailand called barbecue Plaza if you have um had a chance to even it here um so so that's the first time we started up noo so noo is actually coming from the word no credit bureau uh so we're helping the people who who are uh having a you know bad credit history or cannot access to to um credit at all um to be able to get their second chance if they have failed once and then give them a a um like a believe that they could actually change their life right so what we do actually is uh we we provide um first of all the financial literacy and also financial planning for the low-income workers so think about like the the financial planning it only happens to the people with wealth right but if you are poor you don't have any money nobody's going to care about your financial um Health right so so we provide this kind of a tools to help them diagnose their um Financial Health and also providing them with the debt management planning for for this low-income workers to know how they should be paying off their debt so that they could get off um you know all all those debt trap at soonest and how they could actually move them themselves from being dead to to have like start savings so is there something particular to Thailand you think yes as I mentioned that earlier that um so in Thailand we see a very big problem of household debt right and if you take a look into that you know the 90% of GDP of the household debt um is uh contributing to Consumer loan and why is it serious is because um consumer loan is that doesn't provide assets or doesn't help you to to grow your income right so so we and and when you try to take a look at like how they come up with this uh with this big amount of loan it's actually coming from the mismanagement of of their um their finance and also another thing is also from they don't have any financial literacy or financial skills to actually manage their own Finance okay okay yeah we're talking about touch a bit on literacy which I think is very important in education as well and I think that that would maybe open up some areas for Mo and AR to discuss about what they're doing because apparently doing good is not easy at some point when people don't know that it's good so in your case what what what are you doing you know to actually be able to really communicate the message and get it come across to the people that it actually matters so so um okay sorry okay U maybe I can go next uh yeah so thanks for the question maybe I can answer it from the perspective of what's missing in the agriculture sector in Thailand what are challenges why most of the Farms are not adopting reg generative agricultural solution yet um I would say that maybe I started from like fastball War 2017 first how I got into the whole agriculture sector was when I I was a student uh so MIT was here for like a International Development design Summit in 2017 and that was the first time that I get to work with 80 people from 14 countries all technical people and I was just like cute little intern with my co-founder and see that there's actually a gap to bridge these International talents to local farms and uh that kind of inspired our work in 2020 when we started happy grocery as a respond to co of the F to table grocery delivery we took that experience to really understand about what's actually missing in the food ecosystem that allow Farmers to be able to effectively convert into a regenerative farm so access to Market is one thing but it's actually a solution that's scalable and also the financing mechanism that would allow them to go through that process and in Thailand subsidy from government doesn't exist when it comes to regenerative agriculture transition so that's when we see the swiet spot where if we can convince corporates that work with tens of thousands of farmers to buy in with our solution then they could be the one to fund this because most of the factories for example Sugar factories cafa factories or rice meal they already give loans to Farmers um then it would be a chance for us to scale um solution like bosar for example so um the key solution we working on here is called bosar have you guys heard of this term before amazing I'm just going to do a quick recap that so what we do in Thailand is that we turn uh agricultural or uh industrial bow West so like uh coconut H coffee husk um rice St or uh sugar can Lea sugar bagas something like that into a type of shal that's really good at absorbing nutrients it acts like a sponge that would allow Farmers to gradually reduce the use of synthetic chemical fertilizer increase the water holding capacity of the soil and longterm would allow them to basically be less reliant on things like nitrogen fertilizer for example because the soy is overall more healthy so what we do is that we form a team of PhD scientists working specifically on soy science to really go down on the farm right now we are working with augar company Up In N saan which is the nor of Thailand close to my hometown uh from P by the way um and what we do is that we go on the ground really looking at um proving to Farmers that biowa actually have tangible outcome like tangible outcome where we put PR and see exactly how much return investment in get and how much healthier the soil can become or how much more carbon we can put more into the soil so something that we discovered that's missing before we jump into working on this all stuff is that there are solution out there that are doing predictive modeling for agricultural yield but most of the time they would use things like satellite data and and it works really well with like large scale farm but in Thailand we have a really unique uh characteristic of our farm where sometime it's just like 3 Acre 5 acre 10 acre so and it's not like a straight Square uh shape and so most of the time when you have let's say 10% error it means a loss of like 5 million US dollars of the company and so when we got in touch with this sugar company they expressed to us that okay we don't have the capacity to collect ground data outside of what we already doing on day-to-day basis you're going to need to have to like help us do this and then we would love to work with you and that's when we started to look into iot automated ground data collection but also taking the actual Sol sample to collect the data as well um and yeah so this is like actually still in early phase uh if anybody want to learn more we'll be happy to talk about it But to answer your questions around if this is similar to the context of other countries so Thailand is really unique where we most of our economic crops including rice cassava rubber Palm what and Maze uh these are crops that the most of the tropical countries also grow so my investor kind of like hey you need to like do uh bigger like assessment of how big the market is and kind of fors me to look into what are the possibility for us to apply this solution into and when we discovered that actually we can use utilize the data in Thailand to predict as well what it would look like to apply biosa in countries that have similar climate profile but uh I guess that's my answer to your question I think that definitely touch on a very interesting topic about scaling I think we were going to go back to that uh because that definitely I I think that definitely in the in the impact Goods uh impact social goods public space people always thought about like scaling but the question is when is a time and you know how would you be able to do that properly you know to be able to actually uh still deliver the main the key mandates that you are doing um so I think we've been we've been talking about you know of course like noburo and Happ roses you've been working I think dealing with corporates as well as you know the the Grassroots people how to be able to bridge both of them um and I guess maybe like when we turn to Wild chain is another story where basically I think you are working with a different set of audience and stakeholders so maybe can you share with us a little bit on what kind of key target audience that you working with and uh whether what you are doing might be replicable to other countries yeah um so actually wild chain we um our our primary T I think like we we're trying to get everyone more interested in general in uh wildlife conservation and nature conservation um and we felt like uh one of the ways to do that would be to uh create this this uh gamified platform right and it turns out like to be more and more of a game as we moved along I think like initially when we started out it was uh it was just going to be like nfts um and then uh it was like oh how do we make this more interesting um more engaging and then it's like oh we need to build some more game features in here and there and then oh it became a sanctuary and now you take care of a sanctuary in your mobile phone um so I think like yeah I think when when we started it was supposed to be a lot simpler um and and you know as as we developed it it it was like more just adding things to make it more and more interesting um so so for us uh we we started with uh the problem in mind um I think a few years ago a lot of people probably saw that you know this uh un came out saying like we only have 12 years left to prevent ireverse ible climate change and that's what you know got us started to think about like okay how are we going to solve this um and I think for us it's always been uh about like how do we get uh the general public more interested um and more engaged and how do we uh offer a tool that anyone can uh use uh to to uh make a difference and something that can basically integrate into people's uh daily lives um so uh our solution was to kind of bridge into the gaming and uh blockchain markets um and one of the ideas behind Wild chain was uh to have uh nfts that were limited by the number of uh actual Wildlife populations so if there were uh let's say 400 wild asses left in the world uh there would only be 400 left uh in Wild chain um and that would create like a a a digital scarcity that's actually related to the real world um and people who would uh adopt these uh wild asses I don't know why I picked that animal um uh would uh would basically help to uh raise funds and protect uh uh these actual animals and if uh that their population grew they would have a chance to get an airdrop of uh you know these baby wild asses um but if the population went down then actually like some wild acids uh in Wild chain would actually die as well um so you could actually lose your nfts that way um so yeah all right that sounds very interesting definitely uh very keen to try that out especially if it's a more of a game than uh you know like a a preserving kind of mission but um I think that also brings back uh I think a very a key question that I would like to ask is that uh we talking about scaling and uh I think we would also have a bit of time left so I I want to ask number one do you think that your project is already like is ready to scale at this point if it if it is um what is needed you know in terms of the tech Stacks or non- teex Stacks that you would like to try out and uh you know maybe we can start from there and see what else is there anything that you would be able to partner up or collaborate with the people here in this room to make that happen maybe we can start with uh Arch first number one is it ready to scale no uh no but I think like we we are launching a global audience anyway okay uh but we realize that it takes a lot of time to develop a game that is truly engaging um so how how we decided to go about it is we actually have like a an alpha version out it's in the App Store but we just basically have not promoted it um and we're basically learning from from from our early adopters uh from people who I guess like any one who wants to try and help um they can download the game try it out and give us feedback in our Discord channels um and then we're from from the learnings that we're getting from a few hundred users that we have right now um we're basically just rebuilding and uh shaping things uh in order to be more ready for like a a bigger row out um yeah so so more like product pivoting and we're still trying to fit the product to the market okay okay all right how about you Mo yeah so uh in my work I think 80% of my work is like still in the face where we have to collect ground data and I think that is like our uh magic power I would say cuz like I think something that's missing I mean most at the time you would assume that farmers wouldn't want to adopt certain solution but in my opinion I think it's more that scientist and people who would enable this data collection are not keen to go down on the ground but with our team we have like a really big team of scientists and people that would work really closely with Farmers cuz I mean as muches is about weather data collections for example it's also about understanding the cultural aspect of what would enable Farmers to adopt or not adopt the solution as well let it be the financing mechanism or just whether it's going to be to seamlessly integrate into their daily life and I would say that that is our expertise but when it come to Tech I think I would like could really use the hel this room to like be more exposed to people with expertise that could be applicable to our work we have uh a Sol engineer in our team but I think when it comes to looking at like Global scaling of our product definitely we would love to be more connected to more Builders around the world as well to to make this happen together um for noo I think we we have moved from the product Market fit to to the growth go coming just early on the growth stage so we started to see like lots of corporates coming and coming to talk with us that they really want this solution um so but the difficult part on on like on boarding the the low income workers is that um we we're providing the financial management Financial tools for them to do the budgeting and uh learning and financial education right but they don't like learning they they they don't like to come and you know feeling like uh Finance is already very headache for them right so there's a lot of things we need to do on like on boarding this this group of people and what we're trying to do to to um on the scaling up so there's a part when we do the um data collection on their debt profile like the how many loans do they have and now we are still like semi using technology which is um all all those like OCR and and and um the the the AI that try to predict try to um uh help them help help the um debt counselor uh talks to the um to the workers of like how they could manage their finance and and they could see their debt planning on the application but still we still have people in in our process so that part we're trying to find like a solution especially for AI to actually help like a partial part of like you know onboarding those um workers onto our platform all right I think we are coming uh to the end of the panel uh so I I do have uh I I was able to learn a lot from you guys I think definitely if you anyone in the room is ke to learn more about how to engage the corporates as well as working with the Grassroots uh people um either through traditional product or through gamified experience I believe that all of our panelists here have very diverse experience to share and hopefully I think they have already given out some uh topics or things or areas that we can work together on you know whether it's Tech or non-tech product or whether it's about uh growing uh the product of growing user base on an international scale uh so hopefully that we will be able to reconnect with all of the panelists afterwards as well to learn about Thailand as well as how to grow the product in other parts of the world so again thank you so much for being here uh everyone and looking forward to reconnecting out to this thank you you [Applause] thank you [Music]