Jungle Ventures Founding Partner Amit Anand (left)
Singapore-based Jungle Ventures said today it has hit the first close of its fourth fund at US$225 million.
The VC firm targets to raise US$350 million for this fund, which it claims is the largest early-stage fund to be launched in Southeast Asia this year.
As reported by Techcrunch, most of the existing limited partners, including Temasek, IFC, DEG, and some Asian and global family offices, invested.
Upon the disbursement of Fund IV, Jungle Ventures plans to invest in 12 to 13 startups from seed to Series B. The ticket size will range from US$1million to US$15 million.
Founding Partner Amit Anand told Techcrunch that Fund IV aligns with Jungle Ventures’s pace of raising a new fund every 2.5 to 3 years since its inception in 2012. He added that Jungle has shown a strong track record, with companies from its 2016 Fund II paying about 7x on the fund today.
Jungle counts FinAccel, B2B e-commerce unicorn Moglix, beauty e-commerce platform Sociolla, and Vietnam’s merchant platform for micro firms KiotViet, among its high-profile investees.
Also read: KKR, Jungle Ventures join Vietnam’s merchant platform KiotViet’s US$45M Series B
Anand also emphasised his close interest in social commerce startups. This is demonstrated through Jungle’s follow-on investment in Indonesia-based social commerce startup Evermos‘s US$19.5 million Series B last month.
Anand added that Jungle’s LPs have co-invested US$400 million co-investments in its portfolio companies so far.
“We typically invest in a company when it has a little bit of a product-market fit in its home market, and then we can help regionalise the business,” Anan said. “We’re one of the oldest funds in the region and we haven’t seen as good a time as today to be in the tech ecosystem in Southeast Asia.”
Besides focusing primarily on Southeast Asia, the VC firm also invests in India. As stated by Anand, Southeast Asia and India have a strong cross-pollination of talent, ideas, learning, and capital.
In recent years, growing exit announcements from companies such as Indonesia’s Bukalapak and GoTo, Malaysia’s Carsome, Thailand’s Builk One Group, and Vietnam’s VNG and Loship, have set the tone for the hyper-interest of global investors in the region.
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Image credit: Jungle Ventures
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