Vietnam's FEBE Ventures launches $25m fund

FEBE – which stands for "for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs" – has confirmed a first close on the vehicle without disclosing the amount raised. LPs include founders, entrepreneurs, and family offices from Asia, the US, and Europe, as well as executives from LinkedIn, Goldman Sachs, and Jardine Matheson. 

The firm's co-founders - who are committing 10% of the fund corpus - are Eric Merlin, Jean-Marc Merlin, and Olivier Raussin. The latter, previously an executive at Google, YouTube, Microsoft and Yahoo, will be FEBE's managing partner. Most recently, he was a general partner at Project A Ventures, a Germany-based early-stage VC fund with around $480 million in assets under management.

Eric and Jean-Marc Merlin founded AppleTree Group, a retail and hospitality business that also makes start-up investments, in Vietnam in 1993. It is now headquartered in Singapore and operates in 21 countries with more than 4,500 employees. FEBE emphasized that while the new fund will leverage AppleTree's experience, it will operate as a strictly independent entity.

"Our main value proposition for entrepreneurs is that since we are ourselves entrepreneurs at heart, we fully understand founders' pain points and needs when building start-ups," Raussin said in a statement. "Our main mission is to help founders solve problems and scale their business quickly by sharing with them key learning from our past successes and failures."

FEBE will target entrepreneurs who want to become regional leaders, including Southeast Asian start-ups that want to enter Vietnam early and Vietnamese businesses that want to expand regionally. The firm made its first investment by joining a $13 million Series A round for Zenyum, a Singaporean company that makes 3D-printed dental products.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Fundraising
• Venture
• GPs
• Vietnam
• seed
• Technology