Jungle Ventures, a Singapore-based venture capital (VC) firm that has invested in several Indian startups, has raised $240 million for its third fund. The firm will invest in innovative technology and digital-driven consumer businesses across Southeast Asia from this fund.
For its previous two funds in 2013 and 2016, it had raised $12 million and $100 million, respectively.
Jungle Ventures’ portfolio covers digital consumer brands focused on millennials in Southeast Asia, digital platforms for transforming small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and global technology leaders born in Asia.
According to a press statement from Jungle Ventures, more than 90% of the capital for the third fund came from institutional investors from North America, Europe, West Asia and Asia. These investors include DEG, Germany’s development finance institution; IFC, a member of the World Bank Group; Bualuang Ventures, a corporate VC fund of Bangkok Bank; Dutch development bank FMO; Cisco Investments and Singapore’s Temasek, among others.
The Jungle Ventures III fund includes $40 million raised in separately managed account commitments, the statement added. The firm has already invested in five companies spread across Southeast Asia, such as Engineer.AI, Sociolla, SweetEscape, KiotViet and Waresix, from the new fund.
Around 40% of the money raised for each of the previous two funds was invested in India, Anurag Srivastava, co-founder and managing partner of Jungle Ventures, said in a phone interview.
Jungle Ventures has backed Indian startups, such as Moglix, Tookitaki, ZipDial, Mobikon, Livspace, Engineer.AI and Vayana, and helped some of them expand across Southeast Asia or globally.
“We invest in really strong Indian companies which have a good opportunity in Southeast Asia or a global perspective. If you look at Moglix, Livspace, or Mobikon, we invested in these companies when they were India-based, but a lot of them have now expanded to Southeast Asia,” he said.
The firm invests $8-15 million in a company, on an average, he said. “We are continuously focused on doing between 10 and 15 deals per fund. These are Series A and Series B (rounds). Our first cheque is usually $3-4 million, and we continue to follow on with those companies in subsequent rounds,” Srivastava said. “Seven of our early-stage investments from our second fund, have grown to over $2 billion in portfolio valuation, up more than 10-fold over the last four years,” Srivastava added.
“The traditional view of Southeast Asia is that it’s a fragmented region of countries with more differences than similarities. Thanks to rising internet penetration, demographic shifts and mobile-technology adoption over the last decade, the region is now home to a fairly homogenous addressable market of more than 250 million cyber-sophisticated young people comparable to any ‘developed’ market. We saw the tide shifting and focused on companies that demonstrated an early leadership position in one market,” said Amit Anand, co-founder and managing partner, Jungle Ventures, in the statement.
Jungle Ventures was the earliest institutional investor in Southeast Asian companies such as travel and hospitality startup RedDoorz, fashion e-tailer Pomelo Fashion, and Kredivo, an online consumer lending and payments platform in Indonesia, the statement added.
Jungle Ventures also led a $60 million investment in Deskera, a cloud-based business software provider, based in Singapore.
Source: Mint