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John Amari · · 5 min readMeet Genesia Ventures’ new general partner who made an early bet on Tokopedia
Japanese venture capitalist Takahiro Suzuki knows a thing or two about startup investment in Japan and Southeast Asia, and how to pick winners from a crowded field.
Suzuki was formerly the CEO of venture capital firm CyberAgent Ventures Indonesia (CAV Indonesia), where he was in charge of Singapore and Indonesia investments. In October 2018, he joined Genesia Ventures as its general partner.
Takahiro Suzuki, general partner at Genesia Ventures / Photo credit: Genesia
When he led CAV back in 2011, Suzuki made a seed-stage investment in Indonesia-based ecommerce site Tokopedia, a unicorn company that was founded in 2009.
It might have surprised many at the time, since the ecommerce space was crowded with unicorns such as Japan’s Rakuten and China’s Jingdong.
But that didn’t dissuade Suzuki. If anything, he realized that internet marketplaces were ready for primetime seed infusions. And in hindsight, he was right.
“As unicorns dominated internet marketplaces around the world, whether it was the United States, China, Japan or South Korea, I looked for a marketplace business in Asia,” Suzuki tells Tech in Asia.
Finding unicorns
Tokopedia today is a unicorn company that’s setting records. The startup, for example, was the first platform of its kind to receive US$100 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and SoftBank.
That said, did Tokopedia’s runaway success come as a surprise for Suzuki?
“We invested in them in the hope that they would become a unicorn, but I couldn’t imagine that they [actually] would,” Suzuki confesses. “I was surprised that they did because there are so many players in this market.”
Having hit the jackpot with Tokopedia, one wonders if Suzuki’s win was merely a lucky strike.
It turns out that the Indonesian ecommerce platform’s success is only one of several home runs under Suzuki’s investment portfolio.
“When I was at CyberAgent Ventures, I invested less than US$10 million in 14 startups in Indonesia and Singapore. With those investments, I realized more than 4x returns through four exits,” he explains. Suzuki, however, declined to confirm the names behind those exits.
Of those initial investments, 10 are still going concerns, and most of them are at the series B or series C funding rounds.
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‘We hoped that they would become a unicorn, but I couldn’t imagine that they actually would,’ he says of the Indonesian marketplace.
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