Southeast Asia startup investments 2013: It’s all about e-commerce, fashion, and women

As the candle snuffed out on 2013, deals were still being announced even just before the arrival of Christmas.

While it has been a busy year for the startup scene in Southeast Asia, few attempts have been made to quantify the investment activity and take stock of what the numbers mean.

Tech in Asia is taking baby steps in that direction. We’ve been tracking data from the seed stage right up to private equity investments in the web and mobile space.

All in all, we followed 151 deals in Southeast Asia, out of which 87, or 58 percent, had disclosed investment sums totalling $645 million. Here’s what we’ve found:

1. E-commerce dominated, and the money is mostly going to fashion.

If you’ve been tracking the startup scene, you don’t need to crunch numbers to figure this out. Mobile commerce, in particular, has been a major theme in the tech scene in 2013, and given its initial successes, looks set to dominate headlines again in 2014.

But visualizing the data gives a better sense of the scale: Out of the $645 million plowed into internet companies, a massive $593 million, or 92 percent, has something to do with e-commerce.

Here, we’ve segmented e-commerce into several categories, including online retail, payments, C2C marketplaces, and flash sales. A deal can belong to multiple categories. The majority of e-commerce investments, it would seem, have gone into men’s and women’s fashion, with the latter dominating sales of course.

Online retail, which involves direct selling of goods to consumers, also form the majority of e-commerce funding, while flash sales are also taking in sizable chunks of money.

2. Rocket Internet’s total investments were about five times larger than the startup scene’s combined.

The figures above include money thrown into Rocket Internet, which accounted for $505 million of the investments into internet companies, while the rest came from venture capital firms, early stage funds, and angel investors. But even if we remove Rocket Internet, e-commerce is still huge, taking up $88.4 million out of $140 million, or 65.2 percent.