South Asia

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The Mirae Asset Financial Group started in 1997 with Mirae Asset Global Investment and Mirae Asset Capital. The group's business interests focus on asset and wealth management, investments, and insurance. It has also invested in a range of companies, from logistics firm Shadowfax to AmazeVR. In 2018, it established a joint venture with Naver Corporation, one of South Korea's leading tech companies, and set up the Asia Growth Fund with $940m committed to VC investing in the region. The joint venture has backed Southeast Asian ride-hailing giant Grab, Indonesian e-commerce platform Bukalapak, and Singapore-based credit scoring firm FinAccel.

SoftBank Ventures Asia, founded in 2000, is a subsidiary of SoftBank Korea and part of the SoftBank Group. It is SoftBank’s early stage venture arm, with a geographical focus in Asia, the US, Europe and Israel. It was previously known as SoftBank Ventures Korea.SoftBank Ventures Asia links early-stage startups with SoftBank’s wider network of partners and businesses, which include Yahoo Japan and Alibaba (both of which SoftBank has stakes in), components manufacturers ARM and nVidia, and Indonesian e-commerce platform Tokopedia, which SoftBank has invested in. Outside of its focus areas of AI, robotics and IoT, SoftBank Ventures has invested in companies like sports analytics company bepro11, telehealth service Alodokter, and property rental management Mamikos.

STIC Investments is a South Korean private equity firm. It primarily invests in local companies and M&As, but has also branched overseas with its investment in EV Hive.

Lynx Asia is an investment advisory firm based in Singapore. Its investments cover a broad range of industries, from retail and real estate to energy and manufacturing.

Formation Group aims to create a bridge between Silicon Valley and Asian technology companies. It currently has three offices, in the US, South Korea and Singapore. So far it only has six known portfolio companies, including ride-hailing firm Gojek, grocery shopping company Honestbee, and retail experience technology firm Memebox.

NAVER is a South Korean internet company that runs the country’s top search engine, as well as other internet services. One of its subsidiaries, LINE, is based in Japan and operates a popular instant messaging app.

Aspex Management was founded in 2018 by Hermes Li Ho Kei who was previously the executive MD and Head of Asia Equities at Och-Ziff Capital Management, aka OZ Management. Prior to joining OZ in 2011 Li worked at Goldman, Sachs & Co in Hong Kong.The London School of Economics graduate is now the chief investment officer at Aspex. The Hong Kong firm focuses on equity investments in Pan-Asia, specializing in sectors with long-term market growth potential and companies undergoing structural changes.Aspex led the $64m funding round for South Korean fintech unicorn Toss in August 2019. The P2P money transfer service platform Toss is created by Viva Republica backed by PayPal. Other participants in the round included existing Toss investors Kleiner Perkins, Altos Ventures, Singapore's GIC, Sequoia Capital China, Goodwater Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.In May 2020, Aspex also invested in another startup Market Kurly, a grocery-delivery service provider that became South Korea’s latest unicorn via the Series E funding round that secured $328m led by DST Global. In July, Aspex also joined the $900m Series C+ funding round of Xpeng Motors, Tesla’s EV rival in China.

Zeng Yongjun holds a master’s degree in computer science from the Central South University. Before co-founding Xiaoe Tech, he worked at Tencent as a T3 level engineer, focusing on the R&D of big data platforms and applications.

Accelerating Asia focuses on Asian startups for its three-month intensive acceleration program. The Singapore-based investor was founded in 2018 and focuses on diversity investments, with 40% of its portfolio companies being led by women.The firm invests up to S$200,000 in participating pre-Series A startups. All of the program’s startups receive S$50,000–75,000 with an additional investment of up to S$150,000 for top performing companies.To date, the early-stage VC has invested in 25 startups. Recent investments in 2020 include stakes in Bangladeshi mobility platform Shuttle and Indonesian startups KaryaKarsa and MyBrand.

During her time as a consultant at McKinsey from 2012 to 2014, Yada Piyajomkwan worked with governments from the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) on financial inclusion. The topic became her focus of study when she enrolled at the Stanford Graduate School of Business’ MBA program as a Fulbright scholar. After earning her MBA, she and fellow Stanford alumnus Anderson Sumarli established online investment advisory startup Ajaib.

Aavishkaar (‘invention’ in Hindi) was founded in 2001 as an early stage investor to help build sustainable enterprises in India’s underserved regions. Its VC portfolio, valued at over US$ 155 million, covers key industry sectors including sanitation, healthcare, agriculture and technology. Its Aavishkaar Frontier Fund was created in 2015 to invest in South and Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

With currently over $21bn of AUM, Baring Private Equity Asia (BPEA) was started in Hong Kong in 1997 by Jean Eric Salata, as the regional Asian PE investment arm of UK-based Baring Private Equity Partners. With $300m in its first fund, it focused on riding China’s economic rise spurred by the country’s market liberalization. In 2000, Salata led a management buyout of BPEA and continues to head the firm today as CEO and Founding Partner. BPEA has invested in more than 100 companies, across healthcare, logistics, IT services, media, education, financial services and retail. It is one of the largest independent PE firms in Asia and has eight offices across the continent.With offices in China, India, Japan, Australia, and Singapore, it currently has around 43 portfolio companies, almost all Asia-based, across multiple business segments in tech and non-tech startups, especially in bricks-and-mortar education establishments. It also makes acquisitions, including most recently of US outsourcing services company Virtusa in February 2021.Other recent investments include in the June 2021 $85m Series C round of Portuguese home physiotherapy tech solution SWORD Health, the world’s fastest-growing musculoskeletal solution, and in the November 2020 $198m Series D round of Chinese computer coding for kids edtech Codemao. 

Serial entrepreneur Zhang Yiyun is a graduate of South China Institute of Software Engineering, Guangzhou University. Zhang started his first business at aged 13, and made his first million in senior high with an online hacker training platform (100,000 paying members). Koudai Jianzhi is his 5th business venture.

Armed with a bachelor’s in Automation from Central South University, Yang Luyu is a serial entrepreneur since 2005, whether in e-commerce, education, design and scrum. He was the product management director at eBaoTech, where he met Alex Zhu, who became his co-founder at Musical.ly.

<!--td {border: 1px solid #ccc;}br {mso-data-placement:same-cell;}-->Errol Damelin is a South African-born, Israeli/British entrepreneur. He co-founded Wonga.com, the UK's largest payday lender. He received his master's degree from Boston University.

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