CHINA:
1. Alibaba, JD.com, Pinduoduo help revive sales of farm goods from Hubei after coronavirus lockdown
2. Luckin Coffee Plunges 75% As Private Investigation Reveals Falsified Accounts
3. Kuaishou reports 500,000 new active merchants accounts as result of commercial push
4. Smartisan Founder Sells 110M RMB Worth of Goods in Live Douyin Broadcast.
5. Chinese AI firm Intellifusion 云天励飞 raises nearly $141m in pre-IPO round
6. ByteDance co-leads USD 14 million investment in robot cleaner startup Narwal Robotics
7. SAIF-backed chatbot maker Xiaoneng 小能科技 closes USD 17.6 million Series C
8. Chinese Self-Driving Start-up QCraft 轻舟智能 Completes Seed Funding Round
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MOBILE-ONLY MARKETS:
1. KK Fund rolls out program to help founders meet investors virtually
2. Indonesian VC firms Convergence and Agaeti merge to form AC Ventures
3. Vietnam fintech startup Finhay raises funding from Acorns co-founder, others
4. Myanmar digital content firm BIT closes 7-digit series B round
6. India: Edtech firms struggle to capitalise on surge in users amid COVID-19 outbreak
7. The Bengaluru-based Enterprise fintech firm Recko banks $6m in Vertex-led round
CROSS-BORDER:
1. Stay home and karaoke: Tencent’s JOOX sees usage spike in Southeast Asia
2. Singapore’s Mapletree raises $1.8b for first US-European logistics fund
3. Huawei officially launched “Huawei Pay” for digital payment in Singapore
OVERSEAS:
1. U.S. gig workers seeking coronavirus jobless benefits hit bureaucratic wall
2. Coronavirus threatens to knock South Korea off 5G leadership perch
3. Israel approves USD 180 million grant package to support local tech industry
4. Insight Partners Closes $9.5B Growth Equity Fund XI, Its Biggest To Date
5. New York City bans Zoom in schools, citing security concerns
6. Amazon to delay Prime Day event due to coronavirus, outlines cloud risks
7. Cisco’s Webex draws record 324 million users in March
8. Facebook launches desktop version for Messenger as video calls surge
9. Crypto exchange Binance to buy data website CoinMarketCap
10. WeWork troubles deepen as SoftBank pulls $3 billion tender offer
11. Germany’s Xpension pension platform raises €25M in a Series C growth round
12. Nordic challenger bank Lunar adds €20M to its Series B
13. OctoML raises $15M to make optimizing ML models easier
14. Emergent BioSolutions gets $14.5M in federal funding to expedite COVID-19 plasma therapy development
15. Internet of Elephants launches Wildeverse, an AR game about endangered animals and conservation
16. Telehealth Startup SteadyMD Raises $6M Series A
17. Valispace raises $2.4M to become the ‘Github for hardware’, joins fight against COVID-19
Image Credits: Pandaily