Gobi reaches $256m target for Greater Bay Area fund

The fund - which hit a first close of USD 100m in June 2021 and had raised USD 120m as of February 2022 - will remain open for small cheques from additional LPs until year-end, he told Mergermarket, AVCJ's sister publication.

Alibaba Foundation, a private charity established using revenue from Alibaba Group, is the anchor investor. Additional contributions have come from family offices and corporates in Hong Kong and corporates in Southeast Asia.

Tang previously told AVCJ that broadening the remit to include GBA had facilitated commitments from a wider variety of Hong Kong investors interested in the cross-boundary strategy. Fund I, which launched in 2016 with a HKD 1bn corpus, was backed solely by Alibaba and concentrated on Hong Kong-based start-ups.

The new vehicle comprises debt as well as equity, with the hard cap for the equity portion set at USD 200m. Tang said the debt portion, put forward by strategic investors, is another funding option for start-ups. “The larger combined number was also meant to serve as a confidence booster for the ecosystem here, which has never had a fund of this size focused on it,” he added.

The fund is already about 30% deployed across 15 investments. Gobi expects to make between six and eight more by the end of this year, including a debut deal in Macau.

There are plans to invest in 30-40 companies, typically Series B rounds and beyond, Mergermarket reported last year. Areas of interest include deep technology, artificial intelligence (AI), industry 4.0, healthcare, sustainability, consumer, and financial technology.

Gaming and fintech are well represented in the AEF GBA Fund portfolio through Animoca Brands and Sandbox VR as well as payments platform Airwallex and insurance technology start-up OneDegree.

Other investments include messaging platform Sleekflow, sneaker marketplace Kicks Crew, biotech specialists Immuno Cure BioTech and Great Bay Bio, speech recognition start-up Fano Labs, chip designer Atom Semiconductor, e-commerce services providers NextSmartShip and Xingyun Group, and luxury watch trading platform WristCheck.

The first fund backed nearly 60 companies, of which genetic testing business Prenetics and last-mile delivery player GogoX have gone public.

Direct-to-consumer brand DayDayCook was poised to join them last year but pulled out of a planned merger with a US-listed special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). It is now planning a traditional NASDAQ IPO. DDC Enterprise, a digital publisher that operates the DayDayCook brand, is targeting an approximately USD 40m offering this year, Mergermarket reported.

The first fund also invested in the likes of crypto financial services provider Amber Group and autonomous driving technology developer AutoX.

Established in 2002 and headquartered in Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong, Gobi has USD 1.6bn in assets under management (AUM). It has raised 17 funds and invested in more than 380 start-ups to date. The firm operates out of 15 offices with a footprint that spans Asia and reaches into the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Fundraising
• Venture
• Technology
• Hong Kong (China)
• Greater Bay Area
• Gobi Partners
• Fundraising