Ardent Capital CEO Adrian Vanzyl on Indonesia and doubling down on winners

Adrian Vanzyl, co-founder and CEO of Ardent Capital

Co-founder and CEO of Ardent Capital Adrian Vanzyl says that half of aCommerce’s recent US$5 million investment came from Ardent.

“We are so confident in the future of this business, we have doubled down on it again,” Vanzyl tells Tech in Asia in an interview. “Indonesian growth is outpacing our expectations, which is a good thing. But it also means we need to scale faster than we thought. […] The money is going into staff – more people at all levels – more infrastructure, and more technology.”

If you’ve been keeping up with your daily dose of tech news in Indonesia, it would be a surprise if you hadn’t heard of aCommerce – the ecommerce enabler is one of the largest in Southeast Asia. What you may be less familiar with, however, is Ardent Capital and how it gave birth to aCommerce less than two years ago from its own in-house company tester and builder, Ardent Labs.

“We believe, and our internal data supports this belief, that Indonesia will be the largest ecommerce market in Southeast Asia by the end of this year,” says Vanzyl firmly. “We came to this conclusion around a year ago.”

A brief history

Vanzyl has been building internet companies for more than 20 years, having started his career as an operations guy and CTO of two Silicon Valley companies that went public at billion-dollar valuations. Without giving out names, Vanzyl adds that he’s also been directly involved with selling a company to Microsoft for US$260 million. From there, Vanzyl’s career shifted toward investing, and he worked for Blumberg Capital, an early stage venture fund in San Francisco, for more than a decade. Roughly eight years ago, Vanzyl was introduced to Paul Srivorakul and Piers Bennett, who today are his fellow co-founders of Ardent Capital.

Vanzyl says, “I helped them with the Admax business, which grew into the largest ad network in Southeast Asia, and sold [it] to Komli.” Today, Srivorakul and Bennett also serve as Group CEO and CFO of aCommerce respectively. Ardent Capital claims to have made 15 investments across seven countries until now. “We ended up with a very interesting hybrid model for Ardent with two components: Ardent Capital and Ardent Labs,” Vanzyl adds.

See: aCommerce snaps up $5M in preparation for series B round

Venturing in and out of the lab

According to Vanzyl, Ardent Capital is the traditional investment arm that hunts for promising entrepreneurs. It makes seed and early series A investments, and takes a minority stake – typically 20 percent or less for US$200,000 to US$400,000. Vanzyl says Ardent Capital supports but makes sure not to control companies it invested in.

There is a big difference between Ardent Capital and Ardent Labs. “Labs is not a typical incubator at all, compared to [for example] Y Combinator or Techstars,” says Vanzyl. “An entrepreneur can’t typically pitch to us, and join our ‘program.’ Instead, we hire people, and we start as majority owners.” If a project falls under the Ardent Labs umbrella, it will be funded completely to the tune of US$3 million to US$5 million, according to Vanzyl.