Eight Roads launches $275m China tech fund
Eight Roads Ventures, the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity International, has launched a China-focused technology fund worth $275 million. The parent company is the sole LP.
The fund will invest in Chinese companies and cross-border deals with a strong focus on enterprise, financial, and consumer-facing technology. It will make 20-25 early-stage deployments with an aim to actively support start-ups with scaling issues including talent acquisition and geographic expansion.
“The beauty of our platform is that we don’t fundraise and so, if we find good opportunities at any size, as long as we believe in it and it’s great technology, we can make that investment,” Jarlon Tsang, managing partner at Eight Roads Ventures Asia, told AVCJ. “And when we make that investment, we often think about how we can support that company through multiple fundraisings – not just the one. Investments in some of our longer holdings can be anywhere between $20-50 million."
The launch of an IT-focused fund represents part of an ongoing specialization strategy to improve the GP's competitiveness as more money enters the start-up ecosystems in China and across Asia. It follows the launch of Eight Roads’ debut China healthcare fund last year with a corpus of $250 million.
This coincided with the launch of the firm’s second dedicated Japan fund at around $223 million. The first Japan fund was set up at about $204 million in 2015 and an India fund launched at $250 million in 2008.
Eight Roads operates via offices in China, Japan, India, the UK, and the US with a team of about 70 investment professionals. Its current portfolio encompasses more than 175 companies, about 30 of which are Chinese. In total, it has backed at least 85 Chinese companies to date across healthcare and a range of IT-related segments.
The firm was active in China as recently as last month with participation in an early-stage investment in cloud computing specialist ForceClouds Software and an expansion round for biotechnology company Hua Medicine.
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