Energy & Technology

KUALA LUMPUR: Atome Financial, Southeast Asia’s leading digital financial technology platform and part of Advance Intelligence Group, has secured a three-year term loan facility from EvolutionX Debt Capital (“EvolutionX”) and is concurrently working with a syndicate of investors to fully utilise the accordion feature of the facility which can increase the total amount to up to US$100 million. The new facility will drive expansion of the company’s profitable regional credit portfolio and support the  launch of new products such as savings, lending, insurance, and Atome Card (Pay Later Anywhere) in markets including Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Atome Financial, which comprises Atome Buy-Now-Pay-Later (“BNPL”) and Kredit Pintar, a leading Indonesian leading digital lending platform, posted impressive business performance for FY2023 with operating income nearly doubling to US$170 million from the year before. A key success factor was the profitability of its BNPL business, driven by a 40% year-on-year surge in GMV to US$1.5 billion and 130% y-o-y growth in revenue, despite FY2023 being a period of capital market contraction and macroeconomic headwinds. The positive momentum carried into FY2024, with Atome Financial announcing in April that it had turned profitable in the first quarter of 2024. Atome Financial is part of Singapore-headquartered Advance Intelligence Group, which is backed by top tier investors such as SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Warburg Pincus, Northstar and Singapore-based global investor EDBI. Rahul Shah, Partner at EvolutionX, said: “We have been impressed by Atome Financial’s management team and support from long-term investors and partners, underpinned by strong focus on risk management and operational efficiency, which has resulted in sustainable and profitable business growth. The launch of innovative and fit-for-market solutions like the Atome Card (PayLater Anywhere) and lending products demonstrates their ability to expand offerings while leveraging local market expertise. This is our first fintech investment in Southeast Asia, and we’re excited to support Atome Financial in their ongoing journey to improve financial inclusion and access to mobile-first financial services in large under-served markets in Southeast Asia.” Jefferson Chen, Group co-founder and CEO of Advance Intelligence Group, said: “With Atome Financial having reached profitability earlier this year, we’re excited to partner EvolutionX for our next stage of growth. This new facility recognises Atome Financial’s  operational excellence and platform value as we look to accelerate the momentum of our digital financial services business, the expansion of regional strategic partnerships like TikTok Shop and Lazada as well as the launch of the new Atome Card, savings and lending products across key Southeast Asian markets.”

New Relic, the all-in-one observability platform for every engineer, announced it is integrating its platform with NVIDIA NIM inference microservices to reduce the complexity and costs of developing, deploying, and monitoring generative AI (GenAI) apps. Now, customers can use New Relic AI monitoring to gain comprehensive visibility across the AI stack for applications built with NVIDIA NIM, all with a simplified setup and while ensuring data security. This complements the robust security features and ease of use of NVIDIA NIM’s self-hosted models, which accelerates generative AI application delivery. Together, New Relic integrated with NVIDIA NIM can help customers adopt AI faster and achieve quicker ROI. Observability is Mission Critical to Deploying Cost-Effective, High-Performance Models  Organisations are rapidly adopting generative AI to enhance digital experiences, boost productivity, and drive revenue. Gartner predicts that over 80% of enterprises will use GenAI or deploy GenAI apps by 2026. Quick deployment and faster ROI are crucial for organisations to gain market advantage and Observability is the key. It offers a holistic, real-time view of the AI application stack – across services, infrastructure, and the AI layer – to ensure efficient, reliable, and cost-effective operation. “In today’s hyper-competitive market, organisations cannot afford to wait years for AI ROI,” said New Relic CEO Ashan Willy. “Observability solves this by providing visibility across the AI stack. We are pioneering AI observability by extending our platform to include AI apps built with NVIDIA NIM. Combining NVIDIA’s AI technology with our expertise in observability and APM gives enterprises a competitive edge in the AI race.” “As Asia Pacific organisations brace for huge growth in generative AI users within the next five years, it is crucial for organisations to ensure they have visibility into their AI apps,” said New Relic Chief Architect, APJ Peter Marelas. “Our support for NVIDIA NIM allows organisations to understand how their NVIDIA NIM deployments are performing in real-time.” “As enterprises race to adopt generative AI, NVIDIA NIM can help businesses quickly deploy applications in production,” said NVIDIA Director of AI Software Amanda Saunders. “New Relic’s integration with NVIDIA NIM enables IT and development teams to optimise their AI applications by rapidly observing and responding to operational insights.” New Relic Speeds Faster ROI for AI Applications Built with NVIDIA NIM AI applications can complicate tech stacks, increase security concerns, and be cost prohibitive. New Relic AI monitoring provides a comprehensive view of the AI stack, along with key metrics on throughput, latency, and costs while ensuring data privacy. It also traces the request flows across services and models to understand the inner workings of AI apps. New Relic extends its in-depth monitoring to NVIDIA NIM, supporting a wide range of AI models including–Databricks DBRX, Google’s Gemma, Meta’s Llama 3, Microsoft’s Phi-3, Mistral Large and Mixtral 8x22B, and Snowflake’s Arctic. This helps organisations deploy AI applications built with NVIDIA NIM confidently, accelerate time-to-market, and improve ROI. Key features and use cases for AI monitoring include: Full AI stack visibility: Spot issues faster with a holistic view across apps, NVIDIA GPU-based infrastructure, AI layer, response quality, token count, and APM golden signals. Deep trace insights for every response: Fix performance and quality issues like bias, toxicity, and hallucinations by tracing the entire lifecycle of AI responses Model inventory: Easily isolate model-related performance, error, and cost issues by tracking key metrics across all NVIDIA NIM inference microservices in one place Model comparison: Compare the performance of NVIDIA NIM inference microservices running in production in a single view to optimise model choice based on infrastructure and user needs. Deep GPU insights: Analyse critical accelerated computing metrics such as GPU utilisation, temperature, and performance states; understand context and resolve problems faster. Enhanced data security: In addition to NVIDIA’s self-hosted model’s security advantage, New Relic allows you to exclude monitoring of sensitive data (PII) in your AI requests and responses. New Relic deepens its 60+ AI integration ecosystem with NVIDIA  This integration follows New Relic’s recent addition to NVIDIA’s AIOps partner ecosystem. Leveraging NVIDIA AI’s accelerated computing, New Relic combines observability and AI to streamline IT operations and accelerate innovation through its machine learning, and generative AI assistant, New Relic AI. New Relic offers the most comprehensive observability solution with 60+ AI integrations including NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA Triton Inference Server software. New Relic AI monitoring is available as part of its all-in-one observability platform and offered via its usage-based pricing model. Get started by contacting your New Relic account representative or signing up for a free account.

MALAYSIA: Boomi™, the intelligent integration and automation leader, today unveiled its vision for the company’s future, along with strategic acquisitions and key product announcements at Boomi World 2024. With more than 20,000 global customers and a network of approximately 800 partners worldwide, Boomi is leading the industry towards the future with a focus on integration and automation, API management, and data management, all made more important and powerful than ever with the emergence of the AI economy. In his keynote, Boomi CEO Steve Lucas emphasised the transformative impact of integration platform as a service (iPaaS), spotlighting its pivotal role in enhancing speed, agility, and effectiveness across business operations. Lucas explained how Boomi’s iPaaS streamlines connectivity — seamlessly linking people, systems, devices, and applications — for building stronger relationships and enabling swift, informed decision-making through real-time data access. But Boomi recognises the opportunity to take connectivity even further, and to bring connectivity solutions to more companies in more areas of business and IT. “Connectivity,” Lucas pointed out, “remains a critical challenge for almost every organisation. The chief culprit is digital fragmentation, a byproduct of digital shifts that, paradoxically, lead to digital silos and disjointed technical architectures that leave the average enterprise now juggling over 364 applications and numerous API gateways.” The emergence of the AI economy has further highlighted the challenges of digital fragmentation. “AI thrives on reliable, secure, and current data, yet too often, this data is fragmented, difficult to govern, and not securely managed,” Lucas noted. “What companies urgently need is a unified, enterprise-scale platform that not only bridges APIs, applications, data, and AI models, but also accelerates digital transformation.” To address these pressing challenges, Boomi unveiled key announcements at Boomi World, including: New Boomi Enterprise Platform Vision Boomi has expanded and deepened the capabilities of the Boomi Enterprise Platform with: Next-generation API management for the AI economy  An AI agent framework that provides out-of-the-box AI agents, pluggability for 3rd party AI agents, as well as the ability to automate AI orchestration workflows Enhanced data management to support data quality, data lineage, and metadata management Next-Generation API Management for the AI Economy Joining Lucas onstage, Matt McLarty, CTO at Boomi, explained that “companies today suffer from API sprawl: API gateways are everywhere, and there’s no effective global view or management dashboard for discovering, governing, and securing them, let alone rationalising API investments and promoting best-in-class APIs for adoption. The AI economy requires next-generation API management (APIM) that accounts for a fragmented APIM landscape and can handle the demands of enterprise-grade scalability and security that AI workloads place on APIM solutions.” To solve this problem, Boomi announced the acquisitions of APIIDA’s federated API management business and API management assets from Cloud Software Group. Both acquisitions accelerate Boomi’s roadmap for providing solutions to the most pressing API management challenges that companies face today, allowing enterprises to rapidly and securely deliver business value through API products in one end-to-end enterprise platform. Boomi AI Agent Framework To accelerate innovation in the AI economy, Boomi introduced the Boomi AI agent framework, a set of integration and no-code development capabilities that enable business and IT users to run AI agents built by Boomi or Boomi partners, and to build and run their own AI agents to solve pressing integration and automation requirements. Boomi introduced four new agents built into the platform that make use of the new AI agent framework, including: Boomi Answers: Agent for providing prescriptive help Boomi DataDetective: Agent for classifying data fields, protecting sensitive data like personally identifiable information (PII), and tracking where data is being moved Boomi DesignGen: Agent for autonomously building integrations Boomi Scribe: Agent for automatically documenting existing and built-by-AI integrations In addition, the Boomi AI agent framework is open to third parties, and supports pluggable AI agents, allowing customers to integrate third-party AI agents into the platform via APIs or Boomi GPT. In his Boomi World keynote, Lucas announced a strategic OEM agreement with Vianai Systems, a leading provider of conversational AI solutions for finance, and demonstrated one of the first third-party AI agents, Boomi FinTalk powered by Vianai. Customers can seamlessly connect to Boomi FinTalk powered by Vianai via Boomi GPT, leveraging Boomi’s AI agent framework. Using Boomi, the agent connects to sources of financial data in ERP systems, databases, documents, customers’ data lakes, and other data, and enables users to ask questions of their data through a natural language interface to discover and analyse financial data and trends in real-time, for immediate actionable insights. “Technology and business leaders have struggled to leverage the power of generative AI in their enterprises due to the very real issues of accuracy and security, relevance to business users with domain-specific requirements, and the inability to query both structured and unstructured data and systems in natural language,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, Founder and CEO, Vianai Systems. “With Boomi FinTalk powered by Vianai, we are solving these issues with Boomi’s vast integration capabilities and Vianai’s conversational AI application for CFOs and finance users, enabling real-time, accurate, and actionable insights to drive business transformation.” Trusted Data Management Boomi also announced Boomi DataHub, a trusted data foundation for operational, analytical, and AI workloads. A high velocity, high quality data access layer, Boomi DataHub provides master data management, integration pipelines, and a framework that will expand over time to provide other data management capabilities, including enterprise scale movement and standardisation of data for AI and analytics initiatives. “Centralising data has proved to be a dead end for companies,” said Lucas. “A better approach is to build connectivity, governance, and automation into the IT resources companies already have, taking advantage of AI to make this work faster and easier than ever before. With the Boomi Enterprise Platform, we’re giving customers the foundation they need for connecting and managing all their data, and for accelerating AI and API development. Using Boomi, customers can say goodbye to the digital fragmentation that’s been undermining their digital transformation efforts, and finally get the comprehensive visibility, control, and automation they need.”