Insignia raises $516m for latest Southeast Asia vintage

The early-stage investor said the fund was oversubscribed and closed at the hard cap. LPs include sovereign wealth funds, endowments and foundations, and family offices from Asia, Europe, and North America.

Insignia was founded by Yinglan Tan, who previously spent five years as a venture partner at Sequoia Capital India and before that worked for Singapore’s National Research Foundation. Fund I closed on USD 120m in 2018 and the firm raised USD 200m for a second vehicle the following year. The annex fund will make top-up investments in Fund I portfolio companies.

“We could have raised a much higher amount, but we have learned that smaller, tighter funds do better,” Tan said in a statement, adding that when Insignia raised Fund I, LPs were sceptical of whether Southeast Asia represented a large enough addressable market.

Southeast Asia-focused venture managers raised USD 10.6bn between 2017 and 2021, according to AVCJ Research. This compares to USD 2.9bn for the five years prior.

Approximately USD 3.5bn has been raised so far in 2022. Significant final closes include USD 850m for Sequoia’s first stand-alone Southeast Asia fund, USD 600m for Jungle Ventures as part of an India-Southeast Asia strategy, USD 550m for East Ventures’ latest early and growth-stage vehicles, and USD 200m for Openspace Ventures’ debut growth fund.

Referencing the current headwinds facing technology markets globally, Tan said he sees “a once-in-a-decade opportunity to capture outlier returns, as the winners become very obvious when the tide goes out.” He stressed that “winners cannot just be defined by valuations and scale but are ultimately companies with sustainable unit economics and concrete value creation.”

Insignia claims to have deployed USD 304.9m to date in companies that have gone on to achieve a cumulative enterprise value of more than USD 46bn. Its loss ratio is less than 2%, while portfolio companies have attracted USD 7.7bn in follow-on funding.

Recent follow-on rounds have been raised by the likes of Rainforest, an aggregator of Amazon marketplace sellers, Indonesian consumer payments platform Flip, Indonesian social commerce business Super, and Philippines digital bank Tonik.

The firm’s portfolio also includes Indonesian investment app Ajaib, Southeast Asia automotive retail platform Carro, business intelligence provider Appier, and Indonesian super app GoTo. Appier and GoTo have both since gone public.

For Fund III, Insignia expects to be more active in “next-decade sunrise sectors” such as web3, climate tech, healthcare, and agriculture.

“The impact made by the biggest companies out of Southeast Asia in the past decade will be surface-level compared to the impact market makers of the next decade will be making,” Tan said.

“There is understated but critical alignment between the solutions coming out of these areas and longstanding problems in the region from end-to-end food sustainability to trust with institutions.”

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Fundraising
• Venture
• Technology
• Insignia Venture Partners
• Fundraising
• TMT