Monk’s Hill Ventures launches $80m Southeast Asia fund

The fund will invest in early-stage, and Series A and B technology start-ups across Southeast Asia, as well as supporting start-ups from other parts of the world that want to expand into Asia.

The fund will be run by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs, including Peng T. Ong, who founded Interwoven and co-founded Match.com, which were listed on NASDAQ and sold to IAC, respectively; Kuo-Yi Lim, who previously managed a $200 million Asia fund for Infocomm Investments; and Stefan Jung, who founded Rocket Internet's Lazada and Zalora in Southeast Asia.

Thomas Clayton, who has raised over $180 million for his own start-ups, will serve as a special advisor.

"There are clearly two big gaps in the market. One is the much talked-about Series A funding gap. However, the more significant one that we see is the lack of seasoned entrepreneurs, with deep operating experience, as investors-people who can roll up their sleeves and really help entrepreneurs," Ong said in a statement.

Monk's Hill is one of the six local venture capital firms that secured a total of S$60 million in investment grants from the Singapore government last month. This is the second batch of funds supported through the Early Stage Venture Fund (ESVF) initiative, which was first introduced in 2009 and run by the National Research Foundation (NRF).

The capital is intended to facilitate S$120 million in VC fundraising, with the government contribution matched on a 1:1 basis by other investors.

In recent years the government has introduced several VC funding initiatives as part of its ambition of turning Singapore into a technology hub for Southeast Asia. The latest phase of the ESVF is intended to address the insufficiency of investing at the Series A stage and taking the companies from revenue generative to profitable.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Venture
• Technology
• Fundraising
• Southeast Asia
• Singapore
• Venture
• Fundraising
• TMT