East Ventures closes sixth fund at $75m
East Ventures has closed its sixth fund for early-stage Southeast Asian start-ups at $75 million. It had initially targeted $30 million.
“We could have raised more but we wanted to maintain certain disciplines in this euphoria era,” Willson Cuaca, a managing partner at East, said in a statement. “It is important to the ecosystems that the value creation velocity matches with valuation expectations and this will translate to how our fund performs to our stakeholders; founders, business partners and LPs.”
LPs include Pavilion Capital, Adams Street Partners, and Temasek Holdings, as well as Sinar Mas Group, Triputra Group, and Emtek Group. A number of high net worth individuals also contributed, including Meituan-Dianping CEO Wang Xing, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and Razer co-founder Kaling Lim.
The fund will make seed and Series A-stage investments across a range of IT-related sectors with a strong geographic focus on Indonesia, which East sees as a favorable demographic environment. When the fund was launched in September 2017, East claimed to be a shareholder in more than 70% of the companies in Indonesia that had raised Series A funding.
Indonesian investments from Fund VI to date include Wahyoo, an app that helps food stall operators digitize their businesses, Cicil, a credit assessment platform targeting university students, and Advotics, a data analytics provider. Investments around the region include Singaporean biotech player Nalagenetics and AllSome, a Chinese parcel tracking service focused on Southeast Asia.
East closed its fifth fund in 2017 at $27.5 million and set up a $150 million vehicle the following year known as EV Growth alongside Sinar Mas and Yahoo Japan. The firm also leverages access to an Indonesian co-working space called CoHive, which received a $13.5 million investment earlier this year from Korea’s Stonebridge Ventures.
Founded in 2010, East operates across offices in Singapore, Jakarta, Tokyo and San Francisco. It has invested more than 160 companies to date, among them regional segment leaders such as Traveloka, Tokopedia, Grab, Go-Jek, ShopBack, and Ruangguru. In most cases, East has been one of the first investors in these companies.
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