Intro

As long as businesses exist, there will also exist the global need for qualified specialists helping those businesses to grow. The Business Development industry deals exactly with that task, providing consulting services, business process outsourcing practices, setting subscription services, and performing a range of other duties demanded worldwide. The industry grows fast in the countries with newly establishing economies; for instance, Asia Pacific occupied a 16% share of the global consulting market back in 2012-2016 and showed the most rapid increase compared to North America and EMEA regions. The article and the diagram feature the top 6 investors in the Business Development sphere listed according to the total number of rounds they participated in. Together these VCs and corporate investors took part in 9 seed stages over the last two years. This number makes up slightly less than 1% of all Seed rounds in the Southeast Asian Business Development industry over the same period.

Southeast Asia: 6 Most Active Seed Investors in Business Development Field
data provided by Unicorn Nest

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Key takeaways

  • Funds Geography - Half of the funds listed are based in Indonesia, more specifically - in Jakarta and Surabaya. The other two firms come from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and one - from Makati, Philippines. All VCs put money into the country of their origin, so the investment focus falls on the same three countries - Indonesia, then Malaysia, and the Philippines.
  • Industry Focus - Most commonly, the listed investors put money into Finance startups, such as Indonesian Ayoconnect. Their investments also cover Medical Service, Industrial, and EdTech fields, with Zenius Education (Indonesia) being an example of the latter sphere.
  • Important Years - Half of the listed VCs made the most deals in 2020. Two previous years, 2019 and 2018, were also productive for the rest of them.
  • Investments - With the minimum and maximum being 2 and 60, respectively, all funds from the sample have different numbers of rounds per year. On average, they participated in funding 19.8 times and became lead investors 7.3 times. The highest number of lead investments is possessed by ScaleUp Malaysia and equals 21; the lowest value in this category is 1 for IdeaSpace Foundation. One fund on the list never acted as a lead investor. 13.0 and 3.5 are the respective median values for the two mentioned types of investments. For the described sample, lead investments differ from the average by -71.0-29.0 percentage points, with an average of -8.29 and an intermediary value of 6.01. Such statistics indicate that some funds act as lead investors less often than others.
  • Typical Rounds - As for the number of investors, funds in the sample have no clear preferences about that. Usually, the size of the round is not higher than 100 thousand, but there are firms that have an average round size of 5-10 million. Portfolio companies' multiplicator values are not subjected to any trend as well. They vary from 0.05 to 0.43, being equal to 0.0 for some of the sampled VCs.
Summing up, the lion's share of seed funding in Southeast Asia's Business Development industry stems from the funds of three countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. With less than 100 thousand or 5-10 million round size, the listed firms participate in around 20 rounds per year on average and tend to invest in Finance, Medical Service, Industrial field, and EdTech.