Singapore’s Vickers Venture Partners closes biggest fund yet at $230m

Vickers co-founding partner and chairman Finian Tan. Photo credit: Vickers Venture Partners.

Singapore-based VC firm Vickers Venture Partners has closed its fifth fund, it announced today. With almost US$230 million in pledged capital – US$40 million of which is held in an oversubscribed Chinese yuan vehicle – it is one of the largest VC funds yet to be raised and operated out of Southeast Asia.

Like its predecessors, Vickers’ Fund V runs the gamut in terms of the sectors and technologies it invests in. Vickers chairman and co-founding partner Dr Finian Tan told Tech in Asia in an interview that the global fund is organized along geographic lines, with Southeast Asia and India, China, and what the firm refers to as “global tech” – its “deep tech”-focused, US-based operation – each expected to account for roughly a third of the available capital.

Tan said that the new fund has already made a range of investments since the announcement of its US$63.5 million first closing back in July last year.

These include both brand new ventures and follow-on investments in some of the firm’s existing portfolio companies, he said. Southeast Asian startups to have benefitted from Fund V include forex trading platform Spark Systems, consumer insights app Snapcart, and gym class booking platform GuavaPass.

Plugging the gap

The perceived lack of mid-stage growth funding for Southeast Asian startups has been highlighted time and again, with venture capital in the region tending to flow towards early-stage deals or a handful of late-stage mega-transactions.

Tan indicated that Fund V is intended in part to address what he described as Southeast Asia’s funding “barbell”. While he said that the new fund will invest across the board from seed rounds to later stages if it sees opportunity, it is targeting deals that would typically fall in the series A to C range in the region.

“There are a lot of early stage funds – US$30 million, US$50 million, US$80 million funds – that have recently sprouted,” he said. “And then at the late stage you have strategics like Tencent, Alibaba, SoftBank Vision – the big boys, including private equity, coming in” to do transactions in the tens of millions of dollars. “When it comes to US$50 million to US$500 million funds – it’s empty,” he added. “You need those guys to come in and fill the gaps. So that is a great opportunity, and it is timely for some of these high performing funds, like ours, to raise larger ones.”

Vickers is one of several VC firms to have identified the potential in the region’s mid-stage gap. Gobi Partners’ founder Thomas Tsao also spoke of a “funding barbell” when launching his firm’s latest Southeast Asia vehicle back in August. Gobi’s Meranti ASEAN Growth Fund has a fundraising target of US$200 million, and is aiming to make investments of US$5 million to US$20 million in around 15 to 20 companies at series B and C.

Big money

Vickers’ earlier funds have been rated by asset management information service Preqin as among the world’s best in terms of return on investment. It’s the only Singaporean firm to appear in the top quartile on Preqin’s list of consistent top-performing VC fund managers.

Vickers timeline. Image credit: Vickers Venture Partners.

Vickers’ Fund V is larger than all of the firm’s previous funds put together – and Tan reckons it may be the largest non-government-linked VC fund to have been raised in Southeast Asia.

Vertex Ventures – which is part of Singaporean sovereign fund Temasek Holdings – yesterday revealed that it closed its third Southeast Asia and India-focused VC fund at US$210 million, which Bloomberg reported as the region’s largest yet. This marked the first time that Vertex had raised funds from investors other than its parent Temasek, adding Thailand’s Kasikornbank as a limited partner.  

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from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/vickers-fund-v-close-230m
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