Angel investor clubs are hot in the US, and now they’re growing in Southeast Asia

Elite angel investor clubs are a new trend in the US, as shown by Entrepreneur Magazine’s list of its top 10 favorite groups. Angel investment clubs are made up of high net-worth individuals who have banded together with an appetite for investing in promising companies. Many clubs don’t allow their members to be passive participants, and so they have to invest in order to hear presentations about emerging ideas from passionate entrepreneurs.

In Los Angeles, there’s Tech Coast Angels and in Seattle, there’s Alliance of Angels. In New York, we can find Golden Seeds and Chicago has the Hyde Park Angel Network.

What all these groups seem to have in common is that their members are increasingly optimistic about tech firms, but remain unaffected by the valuations and hype that get thrown around Silicon Valley. Angel groups also seem to show a preference toward entrepreneurs who have previously built up a company to relative success, as opposed to first-time founders with novel ideas.

See: 5 reasons to become an angel investor in Indonesia today

Right time for angels

As the startup and investment scenes in Southeast Asia are heating up, these angel investor clubs are popping up across the region.

Shinta Dhanuwardoyo, one of Indonesia’s most well-known serial entrepreneurs and angel investors, believes angel investing in the archipelago is just what the doctor ordered. Dhanuwardoyo is the founder and CEO of Bubu, a Jakarta-based web development firm established in 1996, which also claims to be one of the very first internet companies in the nation. Dhanuwardoyo is also known for her role in IDByte-X, a digital conference and investment workshop organized in partnership with Angel Labs, an angel investing bootcamp for wealthy folks around the world.

Dhanuwardoyo cites a Harvard Business School report that says angel funded startups have a higher chance of survival than other startups. For this reason, she is now putting together a club for international high-net-worth individuals who are interested in becoming angel investors in Indonesian tech startups, a group envisioned to be similar to Angel Labs.

“A number of times, I have been approached by friends both in Indonesia and Silicon Valley who are interested in investing in Indonesian tech startups,” explains Dhanuwardoyo. While her upcoming initiative is a relatively new idea in Indonesia, it’s not the first of its kind in the region.

In no particular order, here are five angel investor clubs in Southeast Asia that caught our eye.

1. BANSEA