<a href="https://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/se-asia-deals-march-30-234144/" target="_blank">Thai edtech startup Conicle raises $3 million and other SE Asia deals DealStreetAsia has put together</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">DealStreetAsia</font>

Thai edtech startup Conicle raises $3 million and other SE Asia deals DealStreetAsia has put together - DealStreetAsia

The Wharton School

University of Iowa

College of Engineering, Guindy

Co-Founder & CTO at TazaPay

TazaPay is a dynamic Singapore-based fintech start-up dedicated to facilitating seamless cross-border payments. We provide comprehensive solutions, including checkout, payment links, and escrow services, aimed at simplifying international transactions while mitigating risks for both buyers and sellers in the online marketplace. We successfully secured Series A funding from key investors, including Sequoia.

•	Spearheaded the development of the MVP, laying the foundation for our ground-breaking fintech solution. Designed and architected the product as a cutting-edge, cloud-native application, ensuring scalability and efficiency. Drove alignment across teams for using a scalable integrated architecture to facilitate more cross-vertical initiatives
•	Led the growth of our engineering team to >50 dedicated engineers. Developed L&D programs to accelerate onboarding and maximize growth. Successfully groomed 4 engineers into engineering leads, empowering them to effectively manage their respective teams.
•	Drove exponential business growth, elevating our monthly TPV from $0 to $300M, maintaining a monthly double-digit growth rate. 
•	Navigated complex regulatory landscapes in Canada and Singapore, securing multiple essential licenses and ensuring full compliance with regulatory frameworks in these countries.
•	Led funding efforts and secured a US$3.2M seed funding from Sequoia in Dec 2020 and US$1.8M in Mar 2021 to accelerate our regional growth.
•	Member of the CTO advisory group of our investors, offering strategic insights to support their portfolio companies.
•	Served as a mentor to numerous CTOs and Heads of Engineering in Southeast Asia, actively participating in the regional start-up ecosystem.

Tazapay

Co-Founder & CTO

Automaton.com

Founder

•	Played a pivotal role in orchestrating the company's transformation from an airline into a technology-driven enterprise during the pandemic. Successfully proposed to transform AirAsia mobile application into a multifaceted ‘Superapp’, incorporating diverse verticals (e.g., Airlines, Hotels, Ride Hailing, Food Delivery, Grocery, Payments), enabling AirAsia to successfully transition into a thriving digital company.
•	Collaborated with other AirAsia subsidiaries (e.g., Teleport and BigPay) to streamline their technology strategies. 
•	Established an effective interview process and a competency evaluation framework to facilitate the recruitment and onboarding of engineering talent, ensuring a skilled and cohesive workforce.
•	Conducted thorough technical due diligence for the acquisition and integration of 3 technology companies.
•	Chaired and managed the AirAsia Technical Leadership Forum.

AirAsia MOVE

Chief Technical Advisor

•	Advised the C-Level team on how to transform an AI consulting firm into a tech company developing and selling products to multiple customers. 
•	Supported the internal tech team to build and launch 2 products: Quilt Create (AI-powered ads and image generator) and Quilt Sphere (AI-powered data analytics engine).

Quilt.AI

•	Orchestrated the seamless migration of their application from a monolithic Django framework to a microservices architecture based on Golang, enhancing scalability and performance. Defined software engineering best practices and implementing robust DevOps processes for the backend team.
•	Designed and implemented a career ladder framework for engineering, product, data, and UX teams. This framework outlined roles, responsibilities, and competencies for each level, providing a structured path for internal career growth and serving as the hiring framework.
•	Initiated a search team with multiple vendors, reviewed candidate resumes, conducted interviews, and ultimately contributed to the successful hiring of a full-time CTO. Collaborated with the newly appointed CTO, providing guidance on personnel, processes, and product knowledge, ensuring a smooth transition.

Carousell Group

•	Hired as Chief Technical Advisor (Acting CTO). Worked on designing and developing a brand-new Circles-X Digital MVNO platform based on the MVNO stack built for Circles.life Singapore. 
•	Developed architecture and micro-services-based platform for Circles-X using Golang, which helped Circles sell the platform as service to Telcos worldwide to launch Digital only telco service targeting younger generation.
•	Created a career ladder framework for engineering, product, data and UX team which for each level enumerated the roles, responsibilities, and competencies.

Circles

•	Led the transition of Boost, a digital money wallet application, from outsourced BCG to in-house development.
•	Expanded an internal technical team into a team of >120 developers to rebuild the application and its underlying platform. Successfully unified the application by transitioning it from 3 legacy systems into a single platform.
•	Pioneered the development of a credit lending product, leveraging alternative credit scoring systems to cater to unbanked and underbanked customers in Malaysia. This initiative resulted in Boost Finance emerging as one of Axiata Digital's fastest growing and most profitable businesses.
•	Secured a strategic partnership with Bangladesh Trust Bank to establish Trust Axiata Digital Company. Drove the successful launch of Boost in Bangladesh under the brand TADA, quickly gaining significant market share.

Axiata Digital

•	Responsible for all aspects of product and services development of Grab, worked closely with the C-level team, business heads and local teams 
•	Grew the engineering team from 20 Engineers to 600+ engineers and launched 5 new Engineering Centers in  Beijing, Seattle, Bangalore, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh to support our business growth and better attract leading software engineers – increased our talent acquisition by 20%
•	Upgraded our tech to help in scalability and ensure that our product could handle the exponential growth (from few thousands to multiple millions of rides/day); e.g., ideated and led the migration from monolithic application to distributed services and new booking service to launch multiple differentiated services in multiple cities/countries
•	Maintained 99.9% availability consistently while breaking records for QPS for 100+ consecutive weeks
•	Launched multiple product/services that had huge impact on the business – worked closely with local teams to understand market specifics 
        •	GrabCar (Private car hailing service) 
        •	GrabBike (Two wheeler ride hailing service to help with highly congested Southeast Asian metropolises) 
        •	GrabShare (A pooling service which increased the supply of seats to business) 
        •	GrabPay (Payments service that goes beyond Grab services payment) 
        •	Fred (Fraud detection Service)

Grab (formerly GrabTaxi)

VP of Engineering

•	Headed engineering for Amazon Mobile Platform. Managed engineering teams in multiple geographies for Amazon Mobile business (100s of engineers spread across Seattle, Beijing, Tokyo, and Bangalore). Worked across 100s of feature teams across Amazon which are part of Amazon retail.  
•	Worked on building reusable mobile components that allowed features teams to focus only APIs to bring their features to Amazon mobile ecosystem. This moved helped move Amazon from primarily a browser based ecommerce organization to multi-screen ecommerce organization.
•	Launched mobile apps for Amazon Prime, Amazon Seller, Amazon Prime Video, Kindle, Amazon Music, etc.

Amazon

Head of Engineering, Amazon Mobile Platform

•	Headed Amazon Mobile Shopping Application Lead product strategy, feature deﬁnition, and implementation, for mobile shopping applications worldwide. Manged 200+ engineers in in Seattle, China, Japan, and India.
•	Build app experiences designed for mobile devices in the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, and China, which supported the growth of Amazon’s retail business revenue from mobile grew from single digit percentage to more than 50%.

Senior Engineering Manager, Amazon Mobile Business

•	Manage and lead teams in the development of products for Startup Business Group (SBG) with a focus on incubating new ideas and businesses for Microsoft; currently in the process of incubating a  new business idea.
•	Managed SBG Mobility team, focused on developing ideas and products related to various mobile platforms including iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Nokia S40 and Nokia S60 phones.
•	Developed Microsoft OneApp platform and cloud infrastructure (http://www.microsoft.com/oneapp);  •	supervised team in creating new software application enabling feature phones commonly found in emerging markets to access mobile apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger and other popular apps and games; project was successfully graduated to Bing mobile product team.

Microsoft

Principal Development Manager  -  Startup Business Group

•	Supervised team of 28 software engineers in the development of Windows Powershell, the next generation administration framework for the Windows Operating System; increased Windows Server sales by 5-7% and improved customer satisfaction by 5%.
•	Directed long-term planning and business strategy for Windows PowerShell, addressing issues including how to balance short-term investment in the product to enhance current revenue versus long-term investment in new products that will drive future revenue stream.
•	Successfully marketed Windows PowerShell to Exchange Server Product (a billion dollar business), leading to Exchange’s full dependency on the product for their Exchange 12 release; presented technical details and worked with their product team members to identify and resolve roadblocks.
•	Managed Windows PowerShell product release, delivering versions 1 and 2 on time and within budget.
•	Promoted, demonstrated and sold product to executives through presentations, technical white papers, and marketing data sheets. 
•	Awarded Microsoft Gold Star for outstanding performance.

Principal Development Manager - Windows PowerShell

•    Managed 12 Software Engineers in designing and developing Content Management Server (CMS), utilized by Enterprise customers to manage large volumes of data in millions of documents; performed long-term planning and strategic development for product
•    Served as key contributor for merging CMS with SharePoint portal server into one unified product, resulting in increased sales revenue and achieving clearer communication with customers, sales force, and marketing due to increased functionality.
•    Grew product from $10 million to $80 million in revenue with the release of CMS 2002.
•    Achieved millions of dollars in revenue through work with marketing department to promote CMS product to customers; high-profile adopters included webmd.com, Volvo.com and Nestle.com.
•    Oversaw the release of three different versions of CMS, each release on time and within budget; led the demonstration of the technical details of the product.

Development Lead - Sharepoint Content Management Server

•	Managed five software engineers in the design and development of bCentral, an online portal for small business customers; built fully functional, efficient team from the ground up.
•	Grew customer base from zero to multi-millions, with product serving as Microsoft’s initial application of the software service business model.
• Planned, developed and implemented four different online services for small business customers:
        • SharePoint.bcentral.com, an online collaboration portal
        • Sitemanager.bcentral.com, an online web site creation tool
        • Cart.bcentral.com, an online shopping cart system
        • Dnr.bcentral.com, domain name registration service

Development Lead - bCentral Online Services

•	Designed and developed features for Internet Explorer 4, Windows 98 Operating System and Internet Explorer 5.

Software Design Engineer - Windows / Internet Explorer

•	Developed initial list of features based on market analysis and customer feedback.
•	Designed the overall architecture along with the other developers and features for the product.
•	Taught programming in Windows to other development team members.

Arul Kumaravel