Tech platform Starboard raises US$3.5 million in pre-Series A round led by Monk’s Hill Ventures

DIGITAL entity management platform Starboard has raised US$3.5 million in pre-Series A funding led by Monk’s Hill Ventures.  Other participating investors include Actium Partners, Iterative Capital, Lyte Ventures general counsel Bruno Poh, Eu Yan Sang International’s chief financial officer Lelaina Lim, as well as UOB executive director Michael Tor.  In a press statement on Thursday (Sep 1), Starboard said the funds raised will be used to expand its engineering, operations and customer success teams to support users in Singapore, South-east Asia and the US. Starboard’s platform, which is available on both web and mobile, aims to support founders with corporate, compliance and financial matters that pertain to conducting business in global markets.  Its services include accounting, bookkeeping, compliance, payroll as well as visa applications, among others.  One of its targets is also to approach traditional corporate service providers (CSPs) in Singapore as potential clients of the platform, which automates workflows for corporate entity management and governance. Starboard believes doing so would increase productivity and reduce errors by CSPs.  Peng T Ong, co-founder and managing partner of Monk’s Hill Ventures, sees Starboard’s operations of codifying knowledge work and synthesising company data as a solution to “dramatically increase the total output per employee”.  He believes Starboard founder and chief executive Melvin Yuan “laid the groundwork towards becoming one of the largest and most efficient corporate services firms”.  The company has already onboarded a portfolio of clients from high-growth startups to small to medium-sized businesses and asset managers. It has also expanded its operations in Silicon Valley to enable clients from Singapore and South-east Asia to manage their US subsidiaries.