Indonesia- and Southeast Asia-focused venture capital (VC) firm East Ventures on Friday announced a partnership with SV Investment, a private equity-venture capital firm headquartered in Seoul, to launch a new fund with a target corpus of $100 million.
The fund aims to open the investment corridor between the Southeast Asian and Korean venture ecosystem, including capital investment, knowledge transfer, and network sharing, according to a press release. It will invest across several key sectors or industries such as biotech & healthcare, future mobility, green technology, media & content, and others, the release added.
“This fund represents a powerful synergy between East Ventures’s deep expertise in the Indonesian and Southeast Asia startup ecosystem and SV Investment’s rich experience in the South Korean market. Together, we aim to unlock the immense potential of the Southeast Asia-South Korea corridor, nurturing and accelerating the growth of startups within the region,” Roderick Purwana, Managing Partner at East Ventures, said in a statement.
The new fund, called East Ventures South Korea Fund, aims to facilitate Korean tech startups and companies in attracting foreign capital, promoting overseas venture company IPOs, and exchanging valuable expertise and know-how between the ecosystems.
In addition, within the Southeast Asian venture ecosystem, it is expected to provide investors with an opportunity to preemptively invest in Southeast Asian technology companies that are likely to grow in the process of evolving from consumer platform-based services to technology-intensive services.
“This collaboration will open up a gate for both Korean and Southeast Asian tech startups who have been pushing hard to scale up in the global market and represent our commitments to support them continuously,” David Junghun Bang, Managing Partner at SV Investment, said in the statement.
Founded in 2009 in Indonesia, East Ventures has invested in over 300 seed and growth-stage tech companies. It was the first investor in Indonesia’s largest e-commerce platform Tokopedia and largest travel platform Traveloka, as well as an early investor in some of the largest Southeast Asian companies such as Waresix, Xendit, Sociolla, and ShopBack.
SV Investment was founded in 2006 and is one of the fastest-growing Korean venture capital firms, making leading investments in game-changing companies including HYBE (BTS’ management agency). SV Investment currently manages more than $1.5 billion in assets invested across the company’s PE-VC funds.
As part of the company’s global initiative which currently spans across the US, China, and Southeast Asia, SV Investment established offices in Singapore and Jakarta and started its investments in the region in 2020.
Korean investors are seen doing many co-GP models in Indonesia of late, with the most recent being South Korea’s KB Investment joining hands with Telkom’s corporate venture capital firm, MDI Ventures. In September, KB Investment invested $200 million in MDI Ventures’s new early-stage fund, Ascent Fund III.