Eastern Asia: 20 Most Active Late Funding Rounds Investors in Content Industry

Intro

The industry of creating and managing content recently experienced fluctuations, as did the consumers’ demand for different products and services. On the one hand, certain parts of the Content industry, such as the development of discovery and delivery networks, show rapid growth and the extensive involvement of new technologies to improve customer’s experience. From 5G and AI-driven journalism to virtual reality, a wide range of state-of-the-art inventions are now actively reshaping the market worldwide. On the other hand, as Financial Express states, investments in the media and entertainment industry decreased, and fewer projects managed to attract money.

Nevertheless, the global digital content creation market is predicted to grow by 9.1% annually until 2025. In Eastern Asia, for instance, the Content industry still seems to be considered worth paying attention to. 96 funding rounds in the Content field, held by the twenty most active investors, account for 4.5% of all Late funding in Eastern Asia over the last 5 years. According to the number of times they participated, those investors can be arranged as follows:

Eastern Asia: 20 Most Active Late Funding Rounds Investors in Content Industry
data provided by Unicorn Nest

Key takeaways

• Funds Geography – Most of the funds (17) are located in China, another three – in Japan. 12 out of the top 20 companies are divided equally by Shanghai and Beijing, six firms in each of these cities. The list also contains VCs from Tokyo and Shenzhen. Although the main part of capital is invested in China-based startups, investors from the sample also contribute to projects from the United States, Japan, and Israel. Most frequently, however, the country of the fund’s and the startup’s origin appear to be the same.
• Industry Focus – The fields of most frequent investments for the funds are Finance, Telecommunications, Banking, and Mobile/Apps. Most of the capital is attracted by Finance startups, for instance, Figure and better.com (US).
• Important Years – The oldest corporate investor on the list, ITOCHU Corporation, was founded back in 1858 and is 163 years old. The newest one, ATM Capital, was established only four years ago, in 2017. A year after that, in 2018, 9 of the listed funds had the most deals, with 2017, 2019, and 2021 running up. Successful exits were mostly performed between 2008 and 2021; for some VCs, this happened in 2019.
• Investments – Most of the companies participate in two, sometimes in up to six rounds annually. The minimum and the maximum of rounds per fund are 3 and 620, respectively, with an average number of funding rounds (182.2) and a median (133.0) lying between those two numerals. The highest number of lead investments, 204, is around three times lower than that for the standard ones. Most commonly, firms listed participated as leading investors 23 times, and the average value for this indicator is 45.4. Index of difference of lead investments from the average, the difference’s average value, and median are between -17.99 and 29.0, 2.65, and 1.45, respectively.
• Typical Rounds – Usually, a round has 3-4 (sometimes up to 5) investors. Sizes of the rounds also vary: they can be either 5-10 or 10-50 million US dollars. The highest multiplier for portfolio companies of the listed VCs is 436100000.0, with a median of 0.2. On average, this multiplier’s value is much lower, only 34821052.93. Most commonly, this figure equals 0.0.

In conclusion, the absolute majority of Eastern Asia’s most active Content industry investors come from China and only a few – from Japan. Although according to some evaluations, investments in the field declined over the last few years, the 2019-2021 period has shown quite a lot of deals and successful exits for the listed funds. The rounds, held by VCs from the sample, usually have 3-4 partakers and size of $5-10M or $10-50M.