Amit Anand, co-founder and managing director of Jungle Ventures, a Singapore-based venture capital firm, said in an interview with Forbes on the sidelines of the Forbes Global CEO Conference that as the financing winter for new startups in Southeast Asia subsides, the seed stage Investment offers new opportunities.
“Seed funding is booming in Thailand and the Philippines, so we want to do more there,” Anand said, citing findings from Jungle Ventures’ first First Check Report released in November.
The report, which covers early-stage investment trends in Southeast Asia and India, shows that Thailand's share of venture capital deals increased from 3% in 2021 to 4% this year, while the Philippines increased from 5% in 2021 to 6%.
However, the two countries still lag behind the rest of the region, with Singapore dominating the market, accounting for more than half of this year's transactions, followed by Indonesia at 15% and Vietnam and Malaysia at 10% each, the report said. Anand said that investment and transactions began to decrease after 2022, and the investment environment is stabilizing; according to the report, annual seed capital raised in India and Southeast Asia currently stands at US$1.5 billion, down from the peak of US$3.2 billion raised in 2022.
Thai fashion retailer Pomelo is one of Jungle Ventures' portfolio companies.
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Jungle Ventures specializes in early-stage and growth-stage investments in Southeast Asia and India, with over $1 billion in assets under management.其投資組合由50 家投資公司組成，其中包括四家獨角獸公司：家居裝飾和家具平台Livspace；印尼消費貸款應用程式Kredivo； Moglix，工業工具線上銷售商；以及人工智慧驅動的軟體開發平台Builder .artificial intelligence.
Anand said startups in the Philippines and Thailand are attracting investors because the rapid development of digital infrastructure in both countries allows startups to launch Internet-based applications even in remote rural areas. To further unlock this potential, the government needs to simplify the business merger process and make financing easier to obtain, he said.
While scouting opportunities in the Philippines, Jungle Ventures met with local founders, investors and ecosystem enablers in Manila. “We are in the final stages of negotiations with the first Philippine investment,” he said. In Thailand, the company invested in fashion retailer Pomelo.
“We could have invested more in areas such as [Southeast Asia] If only there was a better IPO market.
Anand said India and Southeast Asia will remain attractive markets as they have the potential to provide double-digit returns to venture investors. In terms of industries, there is still hope for consumer-related startups, as well as those in education, healthcare and finance, he added.
Founded in 2012 by former tech executive Anand and tech entrepreneur Anurag Srivastasa, Jungle Ventures has raised $10 million in funding and has since completed Quit nearly a dozen times. The company was an early investor in Malaysian video streaming service iFlix, which was acquired by Tencent Holdings, the online gaming company of Chinese billionaire Ma Huateng, in 2020 for an undisclosed amount. That same year, Jungle Ventures and other investors sold Mumbai-based consumer lending platform PaySense to PayU, a digital payment gateway backed by South Africa's Naspers, in a deal valued at $185 million.
“We could have invested more in areas such as [Southeast Asia] If there was a better IPO market,” he said. For example, Kredivo canceled a $2.5 billion SPAC deal in 2022 due to unfavorable market conditions. On the other hand, India's current IPO market is very hot, making it an attractive listing destination, Anand said. Unicorns LivSpace and Moglix are planning to shift their domiciles to India and list their companies there, he added.
