Gobi, Mavcap launch $14.5m ASEAN seed fund
Gobi Partners and Malaysia Venture Capital Management (Mavcap) have launched a MYR60 million ($14.5 million) fund that will make seed-stage investments across Southeast Asia.
Five deals have already been completed. Four are Malaysia-based companies, though some have entered other markets in the region: Nuren Group, a wedding and maternity products e-commerce site; restaurant search engine Offpeak; service-on-demand platform RecomN; and YouthsToday, a marketing and events business that targets young people (pictured). The fifth investee is Triip.me, a crowdsourcing tour site.
These companies fall within the Gobi-Mavcap ASEAN SuperSeed Fund's relatively broad internet and mobile technology remit, which includes advertising, big data, cloud computing, media, e-commerce, financial technology and the internet of things. It will commit an average of MYR2 million to 25-35 companies - predominantly in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore - over a three-year period.
The fund will be managed out of Gobi's Kuala Lumpur office, with Thomas Tsao, co-founding and managing partner at Gobi, Kay-Mok Ku, the firm's Singapore-based partner, and Mavcap CEO Jamaludin Bujang sitting on the investment committee.
"We believe that the ASEAN equivalents of BAT [China's Baidu, Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings] will emerge in the not too distant future and contribute to the region's growth and prosperity. We hope to identify and invest in these companies at an early stage, leverage our experience and guide them to success," Ku said in a statement.
Gobi, which is headquartered in Shanghai, has raised seven funds since its inception in 2002, and the SuperSeed Fund will be its second dedicated ASEAN vehicle. The first, Gobi ASEAN, was established in 2010 with backing from Singapore's Media Development Authority. The firm has invested in more than 130 companies in China and ASEAN across all its funds.
Mavcap was formed by the Malaysian government to support the development of the domestic information, communications and technology industry. In addition to making direct investments, it has created 12 venture capital companies and made LP commitments to vehicles run by independent managers. In 2014, Mavcap launched a corporate VC program with telecom conglomerate Axiata Group.
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