Artem Ventures Managing Partner Low Zhen Hui
In 2022, Artem Ventures closed the TIM Ventures fund from multinational insurance company FWD Group. Over its first year of deployment in 2023, the fund achieved key milestones, including curating and investing in 12 startups actively working on social impact and financial inclusion issues.
It also created and ran value creation programmes for startups and the wider ecosystem aimed at capacity building and sustainability development.
“We draw from our corporate venture fund and fund-of-funds backgrounds to invest in promising startups at a nimble pace while incorporating high standards of governance in overseeing our startups and operating our funds. Being cognizant of our corporate LPs’ interests allows us to invest with a view of marrying their financial and strategic objectives through startup investments,” Artem Ventures Managing Partner Low Zhen Hui says in an email interview with e27.
“We are also likely the only, or one of the only, VC firms that adopt International Private Equity and Venture Capital guidelines in valuing our investees according to their liquidation rights, financial performance, and market comparable movements.
Artem Ventures is a VC fund management company currently managing a fund in partnership with FWD Group that invests in early-stage fintech and insurtech companies.
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In selecting a potential investment, the company looks at factors such as the startup’s ability to deploy or adopt a strategy to drive impact towards the environment, society, and governance. Artem Ventures has vetted more than 750 companies and helped its portfolio secure further funding, market access, mentors, and advisors.
The company’s principles and approach to its investee companies focus on enhancing their capacity and capabilities to ensure the business can be sustainable and founders can adapt to any business cycle quickly. In this interview, Low explains exciting insights about the Malaysian startup ecosystem and the opportunities that Artem Ventures aims to seize.
The following is an edited excerpt of the interview:
What insight about the Malaysian startup ecosystem can you share with us?
Malaysian founders embody entrepreneurship passion coupled with strong resilience. If you re-examine past investment trends, Malaysia has never received the same fervent attention that markets like Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam have at various times.
This meant that our ecosystem is largely funded by local investors while foreign capital passed us by, forcing our startups to make every Ringgit work harder to achieve their goals.
What challenges are faced by startups in Malaysia? And how do you support your portfolio companies in getting through it?
One of the challenges that Malaysian startups generally face is insufficient capital to scale outside the country.
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While Malaysia is a fantastic starter market for startups (high internet connectivity, strong awareness of digital platforms, diverse population, large talent pool, and good ecosystem support), startups that have primarily raised funds within Malaysia eventually run into a chicken-and-egg issue around the Series A or B stages: they need capital to scale across the region, but their growth plan or traction is not convincing enough for foreign investors to put money behind.
Aside from our network of investors outside Malaysia, we aim to solve this innate issue by helping our founders develop a growth plan focused on regional expansion to land an attractive exit eventually.
What will be the most important trend in Malaysia this year? How do you plan to tap into the opportunity it provides?
We are still eyeing the fintech space as issues such as financial inclusion remain largely unaddressed. Embedded fintech will be an important tool for companies with market access to underserved communities and robust data collection and analytics capabilities to assess thin-credit users better.
What major plan do you have for Malaysian startups in 2024?
We are working on our next fund to invest in more tech and also non-tech sectors. We aim to inject more growth capital into the market and extend hands-on capacity building to more startups within our ecosystem.
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Image Credit: Artem Ventures
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