IFC injects $2m in SeedPlus to fund early stage startups in Asia

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IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, today announced a US$2 million equity investment in SeedPlus, a seed stage venture fund based in Singapore, to support early stage technology entrepreneurship in Asia.

SeedPlus is a collaboration between four investment firms – Jungle Ventures, Infocomm Investments, Accel Partners, and RNT Associates.

It reportedly has a fund size of US$20 million, though the firm told Tech in Asia last year that the actual size is still being finalized.

The IFC put an extra US$2 million on top. The investment falls under its Startup Catalyst program (ISC), which supports early-stage companies, the firm said in a press release today.

Investment out of SeedPlus are typically in the range of US$500,000 to US$1 million per startup.

IFC’s investment will help SeedPlus support up to 20 early stage companies.

SeedPlus recent investments include Moglix, an Indian B2B ecommerce platform specializing in industrial equipment, and Mimetic.ai, the Singaporean startup responsible for creating Evie, an artificial intelligence (AI) scheduling assistant.

The fund is run by three operating partners — Michael Smith Jr, who was CTO at streaming service HOOQ, former Spotify product manager Gabriel Lundberg, and Tiang Lim Foo, who led Evernote’s market development in Asia Pacific. The three had joined Jungle Ventures in May 2016.

It’s not IFC’s first investment in one of Jungle Ventures’ funds. It has previously committed US$10 million to Jungle Ventures’ second fund, along with a US$10 million co-investment vehicle, which looks specifically at tech companies in emerging markets of Southeast Asia.