The bridge opens, Golden Gate Ventures invests in TradeGecko, RedMart, Coda Payments

The folks behind Singapore and Silicon Valley-based venture fund, Golden Gate Ventures, have been working the ground in Southeast Asia for the past year. Partners Vinnie Lauria, Jeffrey Paine and Paul Bragiel have been on the road mentoring and judging Startup Weekends, speaking at various conferences and also organizing many of their own.

In that time, the GGV team tells us that they have logged over 500,000 kilometers in flight distance and met with more than 400 teams, out of which a few have caught their eye. Today, they are announcing its first three investments into: online sales and inventory management platform – TradeGecko, online grocer – RedMart, and mobile billing company, Coda Payments. And they are looking to do more than 10 new investments in the coming year.

On the strong focus on e-commerce in this first wave of investments from GGV, Founding Partner Paul Bragiel, says that e-commerce is only a starting point for the fund and that they are “actively looking across content sites, apps, and B2C services and in places where other funds are not represented”. He continues, “Many people I talk with in the Valley think Asia is just China and India but we see a huge booming market across the region.”

Together, TradeGecko, RedMart and Coda Payments means that GGV’s portfolio is already part of the growing e-commerce industry across Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, but more importantly, they are part of the rise of Asia’s internet class at large.

Vinnie Lauria, Founding Partner at GGV, explains their investments and the team’s commitment to Southeast Asia, “…because they plug us into a market of more than half a billion people. Southeast Asia sees 650,000 new internet users come online each month. Smart mobile devices are the future in this part of the world and our portfolio puts us right at the heart of the mobile space.”

While TradeGecko and RedMart both currently primarily deal in the online space and are products that are more immediately globally understandable, Coda Payments is unique in that it links the cash-centric nature of emerging markets in Southeast Asia to its high mobile usage. In a region where many customers lack credit and debit cards, the payments company offers a convenient way for customers to make purchases online using their pre- or post-paid mobile accounts.

Golden Gate Ventures is not the only fund who believes in Southeast Asia nor the only fund who has invested in these three startups.

RedMart is backed by well-respected investors and advisors, such as Toivo Annus (Skype Co-founder), Jason Ackerman (Co-founder and CEO of online grocer FreshDirect.com in US), Boon Ling Yee (Singaporean, former Commercial Director of Tesco China), and Anne-Ev Juette-Enzmann (former Marketing Strategy Director at Tesco Thailand).

And Singapore and New Zealand-based TradeGecko is a graduate of the first ever run of Southeast Asia’s first Y-Combinator/TechStars-style seed accelerator, JFDI.Asia‘s bootcamp earlier this year.

JFDI is also important to GGV on another aspect: dealflow. While these first three investments were made under the Technology Incubation Scheme of Singapore’s National Research Foundation and targets seed stage companies, for younger companies that are pre-launch or still at the idea-stage, Golden Gate Ventures keeps an eye on these startups through its strategic alliance with JFDI.

The latter’s second 100-Day Bootcamp (that comes with a SGD 25K (USD 20.5K) investment) will start in February 2013. Applications are still ongoing and the JFDI team has already started screening the potential entrepreneurs joining the pack.

With the progress that these startups are seeing: RedMart “fast approaching profitability”, TradeGecko’s new app marketplace and Shopify integration, and Coda Payments’ investment validation with Japanese internet conglomerate, GMO Internet Group, the GGV team is hopeful and looking to invest aggressively in 2013 and predicts a “number of breakout successes over the next few years” for the Southeast Asian region.