The state of venture capital in Asia

The tech hype reached its frenzied peak in 2015. Venture capital soared to record new heights, with series A to late-stage financing almost tripling in a year amidst mind-boggling valuations.

It’s a unique time in history, one which we’re keen to dig deeper into. So we sliced and diced public funding data compiled by Tech in Asia’s research team, breaking down the numbers by country and industry.

For simplicity’s sake, we’ve included private equity investments in this dataset. Here are our findings.

Trends

Here are the patterns we spotted from the data (note that we only have exact funding amounts for two-thirds of deals in 2015, a transparency level consistent with the year before):

Rocket Internet: a herald for ecommerce?

Daraz is an ecommerce company that secured a US$40 million round, massive by the standards of Pakistan’s young internet industry. That’s more than half of all venture capital investments in the country.

Daraz is also a Rocket Internet company.

This scene looks familiar. Rocket Internet, a German company known for its rapidly-expanding ecommerce businesses, made spashly investments in Southeast Asia in 2013 with hundreds of millions in Lazada and Zalora. It single-handedly kickstarted the region’s ecommerce wave.

Rocket seems to excel in entering nascent markets with few competitors to aggressively seize market share. Its efforts have yet to bear lasting fruit though, and it might need another three years to do so in Southeast Asia. Pakistan will take longer.

The rise of mega rounds in Asia

We saw tech companies close deals at unprecedented amounts. Within the year, China’s Didi Kuaidi collected a humongous US$3 billion, India’s Flipkart raised US$750 million, and Southeast Asia’s GrabTaxi sealed a US$350 million deal.