Jungle Ventures to close $100-mn funding by December

Investors include Kumar Malavalli, Temasak, Featherlite and Thakral Group

Jungle Ventures, a venture capital company focused on India and Southeast Asia, will close its second fund of $100 million (Rs 650 crore) by December, for investing in start-ups in e-commerce, financial technology and enterprise software.

Jungle counts Tata Group’s chairman emeritus, Ratan Tata, as an advisor. It has so far raised $65 mn for the second fund, from investors such as Singapore’s Temasak  and family offices of the Thakral group in Singapore and  Bengaluru’s Featherlite Group. Kumar Malavalli, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who founded Brocade Systems, has also invested in the fund.

The remaining amount would be raised by December, said Amit Anand, co-founder and managing partner of Jungle Ventures.

In the first fund of $10 mn, Jungle had made 23 investments, including 13 companies it had incubated. It has seen three exits and returned 50 per cent of the capital it raised to investors.

“Investors feel more excited in the second fund as we generated a 366 per cent internal rate of return (IRR),” said Anand.

Founded by Anurag Srivastava and Amit Anand in 2012, Jungle's portfolio includes companies such as India-based LivSpace, Pokkt and Zipdial (acquired by Twitter), Singapore-based Travelmob (acquired by Nasdaq-listed HomeAway) and CrayonData, Malaysia-based iMoney and CatchThatBus, Thai-based Pomelo Fashion and Australia-based Edrolo.

"The way you look at the macro level, emerging markets are still under-capitalised. We could deploy more money in emerging markets, as there are still a lot of problems to tackle. Cstomer maturity is still not high, talent is still a concern," said Anand. "India, when compared to China and the US, is still far behind. There is appetite for more capital."

In the second fund, Jungle has invested in Livspace, MoMo and Trade Gekho out of Singapore, Catch that Bus (a Redbus clone) in Malaysia, and ABRA, a payments firm in the US, focused on Asia.