India and Singapore will be the focus of Vertex Ventures' recently closed $210-million third fund, managing partner Ben Mathias told BloombergQuint in an interview.
Vertex Ventures, the venture capital arm of Temasek Holdings Pte, on Monday completed its biggest fundraising for Southeast Asian and Indian market, surpassing its initial target of $150 million. The Singapore-based fund is also exploring investment in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, and the money will be used for early-stage investments, Mathias added.
“We are focused on early stage startups and would like to lead series A and in some case Series B round of funding. We can do it ourselves or can co-invest as well,” he said, adding that average ticket size is around $2-5 million.
About half the fund's corpus is set aside for follow-on investments.
Vertex Ventures SEA III is also the first fund where the money has been raised from outside investors, Ben said. Bloomberg reported that investors such as Kasikornbank Pcl in Thailand and Cathay Life Insurance Co. in Taiwan participated in the fund.
Mathias said the firm has already made four investments from the fund and is close to making the fifth. “In total, we have made eight investments so far, four investments in India and the others in the South Asian market.”
The fund plans to continue their strategy of investing in companies in enterprise technology, financial technology and consumer internet space.
Vertex had huge a success with ride-hailing company Grab in Singapore, the most valuable startup in the region. Some of its Indian bets include Yatra, FirstCry and Housejoy.
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