B Capital, a fund founded by Eduardo Saverin — yup, known more popularly recognised as one of the facebook co-founders — and Raj Ganguly, a prominent investor who worked with Saverin on his previous Velos, has announced that it has successfully closed an initial $143.6 million according to US filings extracted by the WSJ.
The company, that has been based in Singapore and has an office in San Francisco, being lead by Singaporean national Gavin Teo from Comcast Ventures. This division of the company has allowed it to make its presence in the Silicon Valley. The company’s investments currently include logistics firm Ninja Van, which recently closed a $30 million round and digital health startup Evidation Health.
The main aim of the new fund is to supply capital into emerging markets in Southeast Asia and India. The founders believe that these regions would be raised a lot in their value if served properly. Saverin and Ganguly add that a particular challenging phase for a startup is during the raising of Series B and C fundings when not many investors are ready to share.
The fund strongly believes that innovation can come from anywhere and it is primarily aiming to invest in companies that can come up with innovative ideas and solutions.
Explaining how much potential the market has, the founders of B Capital write,
According to the IMF, India’s GDP stood at roughly US$2.1 trillion, with a 1.3 billion population. Southeast Asia as a region has 628 million people and commands a GDP of roughly US$2.4 trillion. To put things in perspective, the U.S. population is roughly 320 million people but has an enormous $18 trillion economy. Still, both India and Southeast Asia represent vast market potential. India is projected to grow at 5.9% between 2014 – 2018 and Southeast Asia at 5.4%. That is double the average U.S. growth rate of 2.5%.
According to Saverin and Ganguly, the first close has seen the fund pull in nearly 60 percent of its target money. Taking that into perspective, we can observe that the closing stock may be just under $250 million.
The founders further add,
B Capital, being located in both established and new innovation centers of the world, is uniquely positioned to cultivate such exchanges and learnings. And through our exclusive partnership with the Boston Consulting Group, we bring both our venture DNA and a true global network to help startups overcome their inflexion points and accelerate their growth curve.
