Samreen Ahmad · · 1 min readSEA venture debt opportunity to grow 4x in 5 years: Lighthouse Canton
Lighthouse Canton director Ankit Agrawal (left) and global head of asset management Sanket Sinha / Photo credit: Lighthouse Canton
Lighthouse Canton, a Singapore-based global investment firm, expects the venture debt opportunity in Southeast Asia to grow 3x to 4x in the next five years.
While US$30 billion was loaned to VC-funded startups in the US between 2019 and 2021, Southeast Asia saw an extremely low US$1 billion in debt funding in 2021.
“In more mature venture ecosystems, such as the US and Europe, venture debt has risen to 15% to 20% of the total VC funding, whereas this proportion is less than 2% in India and Southeast Asia,” said Sanket Sinha, Lighthouse Canton’s global head of asset management.
To address this gap, the firm has partnered with Alta, a digital marketplace for alternative assets, on a venture debt strategy. The partnership will provide Alta’s investors access to the venture debt asset class.
Lighthouse Canton plans to provide debt capital to startups with proven business models across Southeast Asia and India. It raised US$19.1 million in January at the first close of its venture debt fund and has started deploying capital to five companies in the fintech, healthtech, proptech, and consumer tech sectors.
See also: Is RBF an alternative to traditional loans and venture capital?
Editing by Miguel Cordon and Arpit Nayak
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