SingTel pays $6m for Airgateway stake
By DENESH DIVYANATHAN

SINGTEL Ventures, the venture-capital arm of Singapore Telecom (SingTel), has plonked its biggest single investment into a Singapore company to date, paying some $6 million for a 24 per cent stake in AirGateway.com.

AirGateway is a leading wireless access protocol (WAP) search engine and applications provider in Asia.

Services it offers include its Orktopas WAP search engine, WAP gateway and a suite of WAP applications including mail and news services. The investment will enhance SingTel's ability to serve its mobile customers better, said the telco giant's director of corporate development Andrew Buay.

"We are excited about AirGateway's work in WAP technologies and applications."

"These will certainly complement SingTel's wireless data strategy and help us better serve our mobile customers in Singapore and the region.''

AirGateway chief executive Quak Ser Khoon was equally thrilled by SingTel's investment.

"It will help us to build on our first-mover status and establish us as a dominant aggregator of WAP content and traffic,'' he said.

Among some of the new product applications under development are WAP-enabled stock trading and ticketing.

AirGateway will launch its full product suite later this month.

Said its chairman Ng Hock Ching: ""AirGateway's Orktopas search engine as well as several of AirGateway's products are available and easily accessible to mobile users via every mobile operator's network in Singapore.''

Incorporated only in March this year, AirGateway hopes to set up regional offices over the next six to nine months to realise its vision of becoming Asia's leading WAP search engine and WAP applications provider.

It expects turnover in the Singapore market alone to exceed $8 million next year.

Set up last February, SingTel Ventures manages the telco group's $175 million venture fund.

To date, it has invested a total of $120 million in 27 start-ups worldwide.

Its investments include stakes in Nasdaq-listed CommerceOne, Efficient Networks and InterTrust Technologies.