Fund focus: SeedPlus focuses on LP selectivity

Seed-stage investing is all about patience – in fundraising as well as during the long company development process. SeedPlus Singapore, a Southeast Asia-focused investor run by Jungle Ventures, exercised this insight by taking more than a year to curate the LP base for its S$25 million ($18 million) debut fund.

Investors in the newly closed vehicle include the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Accel Partners India, Eight Roads Ventures, SGInnovate, Cisco Investments and RNT Associates, a fund associated with Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of the company that controls Tata Group. Each LP has a different motivation – for example, while IFC was looking to add Asia exposure to its global seed program, Cisco’s aim was to foster more direct technology partnerships.

“All these partners are fairly complementary to each other; you won’t see a Cisco competitor or a Tata competitor in the fund,” says Amit Anand, a founding partner at Jungle. “We’ve handpicked partners that can bring value to portfolio companies, but can also collaborate with each other and collectively help these companies.”

The glue that binds these backers together is a common outlook on the promise of regional technology entrepreneurship. SeedPlus will invest primarily in Southeast Asian start-ups in the artificial intelligence (AI), financial technology, cybersecurity and software-as-a-service (SaaS) fields, committing up to S$1 million per company. Accel, Infocomm Investments, Google and PwC will partner with Jungle in this effort, following a targeting criteria based on the potential for global-scale industry disruption and willingness to work closely with mentors.

The fund made its first investment in August, backing Singapore-based AI-enabled electronics company Mimetica. Since then, it has also invested in Singaporean home healthcare booking service Homage, alongside 500 Startups and Golden Gate Ventures, and joined Jungle and Accel in a round for Indian e-commerce platform Moglix.

The strategy for developing this portfolio is closely tied to the efforts to diversify the LP base. There is a recognition that growing companies with long gestation cycles in Southeast Asia is more complex than in developed markets, and as such, a variety of inputs are necessary. With this in mind, the SeedPlus team was designed to be run by partners who have operating experience in the region as well as with global tech companies. This includes an emphasis on backgrounds in areas such as product development, engineering and go-to-market.

“It’s probably the first VC fund in the region with that kind of deep operating experience, especially at the seed stage,” says Anand. “Companies at that stage require a lot more handholding, and it has to come from people who have taken products to market. We’ve seen the benefits of that. Start-ups tell us it’s an honor working with a team that understands what entrepreneurs are going through.” 

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Venture
• Early-stage
• Technology
• Singapore
• Jungle Ventures
• TMT
• seed