Thailand’s RISE and Israel’s OurCrowd have launched a $50 million venture fund aimed at investing in early-stage deeptech startups in Israel and Southeast Asia.
According to a statement, the Rise OurCrowd Exponential (ROCX) Fund is Thailand’s first Israel-focused venture fund. It will invest in 20-30 companies across areas such as cybersecurity, AI, healthtech, semiconductors, quantum computing, climatetech, agtech and foodtech.
ROCX’s fund deployment period will be over 2-3 years. The fund is anchored by a major Thai institution and will be managed by a team of VC experts from both Thailand and Israel.
Asia still comprises a small but growing portion of OurCrowd’s overall portfolio and network. The Israel-based venture investing platform has deployed $2.2 billion in capital so far into 420 portfolio companies and 50 funds globally.
Roughly 10% of OurCrowd’s overall portfolio are startups and funds which are not from Israel or the US. The Asian region is a substantial sub-section within 10%, according to OurCrowd’s founder & CEO Jon Medved.
Apart from Thailand’s RISE, which focuses on corporate innovation building in Southeast Asia through ventures SeaX Ventures, OurCrowd has also backed regional names like Southeast Asian venture debt firm Genesis Alternative Ventures, Singapore-based AI startup Cyfirma, Indonesian payroll provider, and Southeast Asian coffee chain, Flash Coffee.
“As Israel’s most active early-stage investor and a 10-year track record of fostering collaboration between hundreds of our portfolio companies around the world with thousands of multinational corporations across dozens of countries, our focus with the ROCX fund and our partnership with RISE is to bridge Thailand and greater Southeast Asia with emerging Israeli technologies at an unprecedented scale,” said OurCrowd founder & CEO Jon Medved.
Dr. Kid Parchariyanon, Co-founder and CEO of RISE said, “RISE is dedicated to fostering the growth of corporate innovation and global startups by facilitating powerful collaborations with leading corporations across Southeast Asia, creating mutually beneficial partnerships that drive growth and market expansion.
This new fund, together with OurCrowd will invest in the most cutting-edge deep technologies both Israel and Asia have to offer, and put them to work in creating maximum impact and changing lives, from life sciences to agriculture, from Artificial Intelligence to cyber security and beyond,” he added.
OurCrowd is known to be one of Israel’s most active venture investors. Through its platform, the firm enables over 225,000 registered investors to co-invest in companies across various sectors and stages with minimum starting cheques of as little as $10,000.
Since its inception in 2013, OurCrowd’s startups have recorded 63 exits including multiple IPOs including Beyond Meat, Lemonade, Innoviz and Arbe. Several notable acquisitions include JUMP (acquired by Uber); BriefCam (acquired by Canon); and Argus (acquired by Continental).