Venture capital firm Jungle Ventures raises $240 million for third fund

Jungle is scouting for companies in India which have an opportunity to scale their business into Southeast Asia and globally

Jungle Ventures, one of Southeast Asia’s largest early-stage venture capital firms, closed its third fund, Jungle Ventures III by raising a total of $240 million. It includes $40 million raised in separately managed account commitments, for investments in innovative technology and digital-driven consumer businesses across Southeast Asia.

Investors range from endowments, funds of funds, and development financial institutions to strategic family offices and leading technology players. These include DEG, Germany’s development finance institution, IFC, a member of the World Bank Group and Bualuang Ventures, a corporate venture capital fund of Bangkok Bank.  Dutch development bank FMO, Cisco Investments and Singapore’s Temasek are other investors in the fund.

“We continue to be focused on Southeast Asia and India. We take concentrated bets and are carefully looking for market-leading companies in India which have an opportunity to scale their business into Southeast Asia and globally,” said Jungle Ventures co-founder and managing partner Anurag Srivastava.  “Seven of our early-stage investments from our second fund, Jungle Ventures II, have grown to over $2 billion in portfolio valuation, up more than 10-fold over the last 4 years. This is noteworthy because we make only 10 to 15 key investments in each fund and no single company is responsible for delivering a disproportionate share of this growth,” added Srivastava.

Jungle mainly invests in three verticals which include consumer brands for the digitally native, digital platforms for transforming small and medium enterprises and global technology companies born in Asia. Some of Jungle's notable investments in India include Livspace, Moglix, PaySense, Engineer.Ai, Tookitaki and Klinify. 

Jungle raised more than double the amount of its previous fund, Jungle Ventures II (2016), with nearly 60 per cent of committed capital coming from outside Asia. More than 90 per cent  of the capital came from institutional investors spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, with new investors accounting for nearly 70 per cent of the fundraise and returning investors for the rest.

“The traditional view of Southeast Asia is that it’s a fragmented region of countries with more differences than similarities,” said Amit Anand, co-founder and managing partner of Jungle Ventures.  “Thanks to rising internet penetration, demographic shifts and mobile-technology adoption over the last decade, the region is now home to a fairly homogenous addressable market of more than 250 million cyber-sophisticated young people compared to any ‘developed’ market. We saw the tide shifting and focused on companies that demonstrated an early leadership position in one market,” he said. “Then we supported these companies with capital, expertise and resources to help them become regional category leaders.”

Jungle Ventures was the earliest institutional investor in a number of category leaders in Southeast Asia. These include travel and hospitality startup RedDoorz, fashion e-tailer Pomelo Fashion, online consumer lending and payments platform Kredivo and software firm Deskera. 

In the past, Jungle has got at least six exits from its portfolio firms including mobile marketing company Zipdial which was acquired by Twitter and travel company Voyagin which was bought by e-commerce firm Rakuten.