Venture capitalist firm Jungle Ventures closes $600-million fund

Singapore-based Jungle Ventures on Wednesday raised $600 million towards the close of its fourth fund. This includes $450 million in the main fund and $150 million in additional managed commitments.

The venture capitalist (VC) firm, which invests across Southeast Asia and India, has already made investments with the new corpus in Singapore’s Sleek, Vietnam’s first digital bank Timo, Indonesia’s Desty and India’s direct-to-consumer electronics brand Atomberg, and many more across sectors.

Asked what sectors would be the most attractive for Jungle Ventures going forward, founding partner Amit Anand said Web3 and social commerce. “These are definitely interesting times we are living in, you know the whole concept of decentralisation and more equitable internet is no longer what just geeks talk about, it is almost becoming the only way a business should be built in the future. We think a lot more capital from us is going behind these areas where you are going to use concepts like web3 and social commerce and build more equitable business models. We have done this in the past, but this will be a huge play for us,” Anand said.

Existing investors Temasek, IFC, FMO and others have committed over 50% of the new fund. Jungle Ventures also welcomed new investors like Mizuho Bank, the StepStone Group, global sovereign funds and family offices — especially from West Asia, Anand added.

With the latest fundraise, Jungle Ventures’ assets under management (AUM) reached over $1 billion. This makes Jungle the first independent Singapore-headquartered VC firm to achieve the feat, the company said.

From this fourth fund, Jungle aims to make a projected 15-18 key investments across India and Southeast Asia and said India is the single largest in terms of capital exposure for Jungle and the firm will aim to channelise over 50% of the new funds to the region, up from 25-30% as the Indian market continues to look more attractive and the problem with access to capital far behind.

Currently, the Jungle portfolio includes names like Kredivo, Livspace and Moglix across various sectors.
Founded in 2012 by Amit Anand and Anurag Srivastava with a $10-million debut fund, the firm has seen a steady increase in its AUM since then.