Vertex closes Southeast Asia, India fund at $210m
Vertex Ventures, the VC arm of Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, has closed its latest Southeast Asia and India fund at $210 million, exceeding the $150 million target.
The fund close was first reported by Bloomberg and has since been confirmed by AVCJ.
The firm held a first close on Vertex Ventures SEA III in November of last year. It claims demand was strong enough to reach the hard cap of $250 million but decided to be disciplined on fund size - this is the first time the Southeast Asia and India team has raised capital from third-party investors - and proceed to focus on investing, said Kee Lock Chua, CEO of Vertex Ventures.
Commitments came from the likes of Thailand's Kasikornbank and Taiwan's Cathay Life Insurance, which agreed to commit $15 million in the vehicle. Vertex's previous two Southeast Asia and India-focused vehicles were fully funded by Temasek-owned Vertex Venture Holdings (VVH) – the anchor LP to all Vertex global family funds. VVH's contribution to the latest fund amounted to less than half the total corpus, Chua said.
With teams in Singapore, Taiwan and India, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India targets at early-stage technology start-ups operating in on-demand mobile services, e-commerce, financial technology, enterprise software, online-to-offline services. The firm plans to allocate 75% of the corpus to Southeast Asia and the remaining 25% to India.
Vertex was an early investor in ride-hailing services platform Grab, dating app Paktor, and luxury goods e-commerce website Reebonz. Recent investments include Singapore-based remittance payments start-up Instarem, Indian industrial internet-of-things company Flutura, and Validus, a platform through which small and medium-sized enterprises can secure short-term loans.
In addition to Southeast Asia and India, Vertex operates local firms in Silicon Valley, China, and Israel. VVH received $600 million from Temasek in 2015 to invest in its family funds.
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