Golden Gate closes $100m new fund, with Taizo Son’s Mistletoe joining in

Taizo Son onstage at Tech in Asia’s Startup Asia conference in Tokyo back in 2014 / Photo credit: tech in Asia

Singapore’s Golden Gate Ventures has closed its third fund worth US$100 million, attracting new investors like Mistletoe of Japanese billionaire entrepreneur Taizo Son, and Korea Venture Investment.

The oversubscribed fund will invest in Southeast Asian consumer internet and mobile startups – the VC’s focus since it started in 2011.

“The tech ecosystem of Southeast Asia […] has really hit an inflection point – annual investment is now measured in billions [of dollars]. That puts it on a global stage with the US, China, and India,” said Golden Gate co-founder Vinnie Lauria. “Yet there is a rawness that reminds me of Silicon Valley circa 2005, shortly before social media and the iPhone took off.”

Golden Gate is one of the earliest VCs in the region investing in the series A stage. Its portfolio includes buy and sell app Carousell and car marketplace Carro in Singapore, as well as healthcare platform Alodokter in Indonesia.

Its first two funds have seen internal rates of return (IRRs) of 48 percent and 29 percent, respectively, it said. IRR is an estimate of the appreciation of a fund’s assets. And their distributions to paid-in capital (DPI) – basically the returns that the funds’ limited partners make – are 1.56x and 0.13x, respectively. The first fund beats Cambridge Associates’ upper quartile DPI benchmark of 0.36x for a 2012 US fund.

The new fund was anchored by existing backers Singapore state investor Temasek, South Korea’s Hanwha, Naver, and EE Capital. Other new investors that participated were Mitsui Fudosan, IDO Investments, CTBC Group, and Ion Pacific.