Jungle Ventures raises $100m fund for Southeast Asia and beyond

Singapore-based venture capital firm Jungle Ventures announced today it has completed fundraising for its second fund, achieving its target of US$100 million. That’s ten times larger than Jungle’s previous US$10 million fund, which closed in 2012.

It had raised around US$65 million in September 2015.

Jungle Ventures founding partner Amit Anand tells Tech in Asia part of the new fund has already been deployed, in investments like Thailand’s Pomelo, Singapore’s Tradegecko, and Indonesia’s FinAccel.

The VC doesn’t reveal the total amount that has been invested from the new fund so far.

New investors include Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s National Research Foundation, and European media company Hubert Burda Media. Family offices like the Kewalram Chanrai Group and Khoon Hong Kuok have also joined in.

Amit says that 70 percent of the fund is composed of institutional capital from both regional and global players.

The way forward

The investment firm will lead in larger series A and B rounds. It will target primarily Southeast Asia but also companies in territories like India and Australia, especially if it can help them expand to this region. Its current deals range from US$3 to 5 million per company.

Armed with its new fund, Jungle will look to support its portfolio companies in later stages as well by participating in further rounds.

The VC will look for “global and regional category leaders,” according to managing partner David Gowdey. The firm will continue to focus on ecommerce – particularly on companies that try to build their own brand rather than sell third-party ones, in the vein of Pomelo. It will also look at marketplaces and at fintech companies.

Fintech areas of interest include businesses tackling consumer credit, as this ties into the VC’s ecommerce play. Credit and access to it is one of the “building blocks” of ecommerce, David explains.

Track record

Jungle has seen exits mainly via acquisitions. Successful deals include Indian marketing startup Zipdial, bought by Twitter in 2015, and Spacemob founder Turochas “T” Fuad’s traveltech startup Travelmob, acquired by HomeAway in 2013.

While Amit doesn’t comment on returns on specific deals, he says the average return on investment from successful exits has been four-fold. Because the acquisitions happened in a short timeframe, the internal rate of return (IRR) was 300 percent. IRR is a metric that measures the profitability of potential investments.

Together with three other investment firms (Infocomm Investments, Accel Partners, and RNT Associates), Jungle launched a seed fund called SeedPlus in May, looking for companies “targeting large addressable markets with the ability to expand globally.”

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This article by Michael Tegos originally appeared on Tech in Asia, a Burn Media publishing partner.

Feature image via Tech in Asia.