Openspace completes first close on Southeast Asia VC fund

The GP confirmed a first close happened at the end of June but declined to confirm the amount. Additional information came from sources familiar with the situation. Separately, Openspace is expected to launch a growth vehicle – primarily for follow-on rounds involving companies in its first two funds – later in the year. The firm has yet to set a target, the sources added, but the capital will come from existing LPs.

Re-ups account for 80% of the commitments in the first close on Fund III, for which marketing began in February. The coronavirus pandemic slowed progress, but LPs have become increasingly comfortable leveraging technology solutions to conduct certain due diligence efforts remotely.

The LP base is expected to be more diversified than for Fund II, with pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, and family offices among those represented. They come from Australia, Japan, Korea, and Singapore, as well as from the US and Europe. Previous investors in Openspace funds are said to include Temasek Holdings, StepStone Group, San Diego City Employees Retirement System (SDCERS), and Duke University. The firm declined to comment on LPs in Fund III.

“We are excited to have the support of our LPs to keep targeting the Openspace tech opportunities of Southeast Asia. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the importance of technology in our region in solving issues such as access to online health, food security and supply chain and new forms of safe entertainment. We are keen to keep up the cadence of investment during this period,” Shane Chesson (pictured), a founding partner of Openspace, said in a statement.

Several existing portfolio companies have performed strongly as digitization of business models accelerated in response to COVID-19. Among them are Biofourmis, operator of a health analytics platform that is currently being used to support quarantine monitoring efforts in Hong Kong and Singapore; Indonesian healthcare technology provider Halodoc; TaniHub, an agriculture-focused online marketplace and lending platform in Indonesia; and Kumu, a live streaming business based in the Philippines.

Perhaps the change is most visible in Whispir, a cloud-based communications platform that automates interaction between businesses and customers. The company, which went public on the Australian Securities Exchange in June of last year, has seen its stock gain more than 250% since April.

Established by Chesson and Hian Goh, Openspace closed its debut fund at $89 million in 2015. It found early success with Gojek, which has since grown into a ride-hailing and online-to-offline (O2O) services platform worth around $10 billion. The vehicle’s net IRR was 38% as of the first quarter, placing it in the top quartile versus global peers. Fund II closed at the hard cap of $135 million in 2018.

The firm employs 23 people – representing 10 nationalities – across offices in Singapore, Jakarta and Bangkok. It primarily targets Series A and B rounds for companies with B2C and B2B technologies seeking to access local, regional and global markets. Openspace claims to differentiate itself by prioritizing start-ups and categories that have not attracted substantial VC investment and then offering substantial in-house operational support, including data-driven market analysis.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Venture
• Technology
• Fundraising
• GPs
• Openspace Ventures
• TMT
• Venture