Diving into South East Asia’s 2020 Venture Capital Landscape
2020 Deep dive on the South East Asian Venture Capital Ecosystem
White Star Capital has published reports on key venture geographies including New York/US East Coast, Canada, The UK, Germany, France, Japan, and South Korea. Now, we are delighted to share our newest report covering the South East Asian Venture Capital ecosystem. This report focuses not only on SEA powerhouses, such as Singapore and Indonesia, but covers the full region — from Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines to frontier markets such as Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Brunei.
At White Star, our pace of investment in South East Asia is beginning to take seed. With the opening of our Hong Kong office this past year and the launch of our Tokyo office in 2018, we’ve dedicated investment resources to explore the burgeoning ecosystem throughout Asia. We also have an investment team member on the ground in Singapore, Sanjay Zimmermann, who is focused on sourcing deals out of the region’s startup funding hub.
In addition to sharing our excitement for SEA, the report digs into some key findings and insights around the VC landscape. South East Asia is the number 1 new region for investment this decade. Within the entire region, deal volume, size and value has risen over the last five years in every country. South East Asian cities are starting to appear on the global map of top cities for VC funding. Singapore, as a hub for VC funding in the SEA region has an important role amongst the most active cities for funding and deal volume globally. Jakarta also joins the list, driven by the spur of B2C driven investments in the region that are aiming to capture the 4th largest population in the world. Not to mention, there is a huge opportunity for more funds to come into the region — funding rounds pipeline of high-quality seed and Series A stage start-ups have been driven by a large number of <$100m funds. However, with the absence of larger funds to finance later stage Series B+ rounds, there remains a clear opportunity for international funds to build a presence and bring even more cross border connectivity to the region.
We are proud to have a presence in South East Asia and we look forward to continuing investing in the region’s most promising companies.
A large thank you to the many people who have contributed to this report, including Eric Martineau Fortin, Joe Wei, Shun Nagao, Sanjay Zimmermann, Eddie Lee, Alex Wilson, and Alexandre Witkowicz
Special thanks as well to each of the White Star SEA sentiment survey responders amongst the region’s VC and tech community as well as to contributions by Joseph Lassen and Grace Su Lei Naing from JL Capital and INSEAD’s Indevor respectively.
Please have a read and share widely!
If you have any questions or feedback on our report, please email RegionalReports@WhiteStarCapital.com.
About White Star Capital
White Star Capital is a global multi-stage technology investment platform that invests in exceptional entrepreneurs building ambitious, international businesses. Operating out of New York, London, Paris, Montreal, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, our presence, perspective, and people enable us to partner closely with our Founders to help them scale internationally from Series A onwards.
Find out more about how we venture beyond at www.whitestarcapital.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.
