After 25 investments in Southeast Asia, Golden Gate Ventures ups the ante with US$50M fund

Golden Gate Ventures’ founding partners (L to R): Jeffrey Paine, Paul Bragiel, and Vinnie Lauria.

Golden Gate Ventures is doubling down on the Southeast Asian startup ecosystem. The early-stage venture capital firm, based in Singapore, today announced a fresh US$50 million fund for the region.

Golden Gate Ventures’ second fund includes US$35 million from a host of prominent international investors and advisors, including Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook; Temasek Holdings, the Singaporean government’s investment arm; and Monitor Capital Partners, a Belgium-based asset management firm. Singapore’s National Research Foundation, Line messenger’s parent company Naver, and Far East Ventures are also contributing.

“Southeast Asia [has] been our focus since day one,” Vinnie Lauria, founding partner at Golden Gate Ventures, tells Tech in Asia. “When we first addressed Southeast Asia there was very little early-stage VC investment here with a Silicon Valley perspective, [whereas] China and India had tons of Valley-styled investors. That’s now changed for the better.”

To date, Golden Gate Ventures has made 25 investments across seven countries in the region. Lauria says new portfolio companies will benefit from the firm’s vast regional network and Silicon Valley connections.

According to data provided by Golden Gate Ventures, the firm’s portfolio has created more than 500 news jobs across the region and is projected to generate over US$60 million in revenue this year alone. The firm’s early-stage investments in C2C marketplace Carousell and property search portal 99.co later attracted follow-on investment by Silicon Valley powerhouse Sequoia Capital.

Golden Gate Ventures’ first fund was announced in February 2012, to the tune of US$10 million. Back then, the firm was focused on seed-stage investments in the US$50,000 to US$500,000 range. For fund number two, Lauria says the firm will remain focused on early-stage investments, but with potentially higher individual amounts: seed rounds up to US$1 million and series A rounds for startups raising less than US$5 million, but they will consider larger rounds as well.

Investment targets will stay the same, with a focus on consumer-facing products over enterprise. “Anything that touches the internet for scale,” Lauria adds. “Ecommerce, marketplaces, software-as-a-service, content, mobile apps, IoT hardware, and so on.”

Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures also unveiled a US$50 million fund for startups in Southeast Asia last month, but with a strong emphasis on those in Indonesia.

Golden Gate Ventures is bullish on Southeast Asia, further evidenced by a report the firm released yesterday that likens the region to China in 2005 and India in 2010. In the report, the firm says the region will become the “third pillar of growth in Asia” behind the aforementioned giants, with a projected 40-plus seed-stage investments in 2016 amounting to more than US$120 million.