Fund focus: Beenext targets a world beyond the mirrors

Singapore-based Beenext Capital Management has raised five funds in the past five years, steadily growing its LP base from an intimate circle of entrepreneurs and high net worth individuals to a network of US institutions, Japanese corporations, and global family offices. Meanwhile, the start-up portfolio has ballooned to 180.

Perhaps the VC firm's key differentiator is the idea that the expansion of this mix of partners and counterparties has been an end in itself rather than a context for raising ever-larger funds.

Beenext's debut closed at $80 million in 2015 and was supported by a $30 million follow-on vehicle for the most successful investments. Since then, there has been an instinct to keep its flagship successors to around the $100 million mark. The philosophy has been more about capacity for cross-pollination than for deployment. Portfolio networking, LP collaborations, and increasing internationalization were therefore pursued as core priorities in the latest vintages.

Beenext closed two funds this week: a $110 million vehicle to be invested half in India and half across Southeast Asia; and a $50 million fund dedicated to software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in Japan. "We're trying to be interpreters, navigators, and translators between founders and LPs by becoming a business creation community," says Nao Ito, an operating partner at Beenext and co-founder of Japanese e-commerce platform Beenos.

Beenext was spun out of Beenos in 2015 after a successful dip into start-up investing that included a stake in Indonesia's Tokopedia. Beenos is an LP in the latest Beenext funds, a sounding board for portfolio entrepreneurs, and a regular co-investor with the firm.

"It's interesting to hear the feedback from founders in different markets and different kinds of businesses," Ito says regarding the community concept. "They're providing knowledge, experiences, and resources between them. There are mutual learnings and stimulating insights. They're learning from the world beyond the mirrors."

Target categories for the new funds include e-commerce, artificial intelligence, data science, and technologies related to finance, healthcare, agriculture, and education. Both funds will focus on early-stage companies, although the Japan vehicle, known as All Star SaaS Fund, will have the capacity to contribute to later-stage rounds.

The two funds were launched in tandem last year and received almost all their commitments prior to the coronavirus pandemic impacting relationship building and due diligence processes. The simultaneous timing was no coincidence; Beenext sees a loose twin-fund structure as a way to maximize the crossover potential of ecosystems in developing and developed Asia.

The most recent traction on this front includes a distinct shift toward India, which Beenext expects to be a global leader in post-COVID digitization. The country now accounts for about 40% of the overall portfolio. This exposure is hoped to benefit from a reciprocal osmosis with the Japan footprint, which has its own unique pressures to automate and go online.

"We see two different pillars of digitization in our experiences in Japan and emerging Asia," Ito explains. "We designed these two funds to have a local focus that can be brought to a global level."

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• Topics
• Venture
• Technology
• Fundraising
• Southeast Asia
• North Asia
• Japan
• Singapore
• Beenext Capital Management
• TMT
• SaaS
• enterprise software