Sinarmas supports Ardent Capital's Southeast Asia expansion

The new funding will be used to expand Ardent's Labs model across the region. Operating in a similar fashion to a VC accelerator, the Labs division tests promising business ideas in a variety of critical areas to determine their viability; promising entrepreneurs who work with the Labs team are installed as founders of projects that are deemed investable. These projects are then launched and funded as independent companies.

The Labs division was launched in 2013 and is intended to be the largest division within Ardent, with over 30 team members in Thailand and Indonesia.

Prominent graduates include aCommerce Group, a Thailand-based e-commerce services provider for brands, retailers and manufacturers. It is intended to help companies scale up. In June, aCommerce received $10.7 million in Series A funding led by Inspire Ventures. Ardent also took part, as well as Sinarmas, NTT Docomo, Sumitomo Corporation, Asia Pacific Digital, CyberAgent (CA) Ventures and JL Capital.

"With this money that we raised right now, we're going to double down on the Labs side. That's where we had most success so far," Adrian Vanzyl, Ardent's CEO, told e27. He added that future investments will be made across four areas: sourcing and management, fulfillment and logistics, retail, and customer acquisition. These four areas comprise what Ardent refers to as an "e-commerce stack."

E27, a media platform focused on start-ups, is also an Ardent investee, although through the ventures portfolio rather than the Labs division.

"Ardent's focus on building scalable infrastructure and leveraging it to empower multiple e-commerce ventures with high speed and cost efficiency fits very well with our aspirations in the digital space," Roderick Purwana, a director at Sinarmas, said in a statement.

Ardent's first round of external fundraising came last year, with Siemer Ventures, Recruit Strategic Partners and GMO Venture Partners participating alongside company management and a number of Southeast Asia-based entrepreneurs.

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• Topics
• Early-stage
• Investments
• Venture
• Southeast Asia
• Technology
• TMT
• Southeast Asia
• Venture
• Ardent Capital
• Indonesia