With several early-stage focus VC firms such as Chiratae Ventures, Stellaris, WaterBridge among others announcing closure of larger-than-expected funds last year, Jungle Ventures too is joining the list in 2022 .
Singapore-based Jungle Ventures has raised $600 million to deepen its commitment to India and South-East Asia. This also marked the final close of its fourth South-East Asia and India-focussed fund, Fund IV, bringing the total assets under Jungle Ventures’ management to over $1 billion. The funding includes $450 million in the main Fund IV and $150 million in additional managed commitments.
The breaching of the $1 billion mark means that Jungle Ventures, which counts Indian unicorns such as Moglix and Livspace as its investee companies, is the first independent, Singapore-headquartered VC firm to invest across India and South-East Asia, to reach the goal. Over 50% of the total commitments in the new fund have come from existing investors including Temasek, International Finance Corp (IFC), Dutch investor FMO, and German development finance institution DEG.
Going forward, the fourth fund will continue Jungle Ventures’ “concentrated portfolio” approach and aims to make around 15-18 key investments across India and Southeast Asia over the next 2-2.5 years. According to Amit Anand, founding partner, Jungle Ventures, 50% or more of the new fund could go to investing in Indian startups.
Fund IV’s current investments include digital bank Timo, back-office operating system Sleek, D2C consumer electronics player Atomberg, Web3.0-based social-crypto-community platform for women Eveworld, and employee retention SaaS platform inFeedo.
The final close of the fourth round puts it much higher than its initial target corpus of $350 million. It is also strong progress from the $10 million the VC firm had started in its first fund, and today, it has about 60 portfolio companies along with an enterprise value of over $12 billion on $250 million of invested capital, with a loss ratio of less than 5%. If that is not impressive enough, the VC firm has announced a unicorn from its portfolio every quarter in the last 12 months.
Founded by Amit Anand and Anurag Srivastava back in 2012, Jungle Ventures was the first Singapore-headquartered VC to invest across both Southeast Asia and India. Today, its portfolio includes companies across a varied range of categories.
These include vertical e-commerce (Pomelo Fashion, Sociolla, Reddoorz), social commerce (Citymall, Evermos), fintech/insurTech (LeapFinance, Vayana, Turtlemint), B2B enablement (Kiotviet, Deskera, Waresix), electric vehicles (Datbike), SaaS (Builder.ai, BetterPlace), and brand aggregators/D2C brands (Believe, Hypefast).
Apart from Jungle, 2022 has seen several high profile early-stage funds announcing rather larger fund closures. VC firms such as Arkham Ventures, Prime Venture Partners, and Accel India raised millions.
