Insignia Ventures Partners targets sunrise sectors after raising $516m

Insignia Ventures Partners, a Singapore-based venture capital investor, said it will be more aggressive on “next-decade sunrise sectors” in the region after it announced raising $516 million for three venture funds.

The company said it will aggressively explore opportunities in web3, climate tech, healthcare, and agriculture.

“There is understated but critical alignment between the solutions coming out of these areas and long-standing problems in the region from end-to-end food sustainability to trust with institutions,” said its founding managing partner Yinglan Tan.

The venture capital investor announced the close of its latest funds totalling $516 million. This includes $388 million for the main fund IVPF III, $28 million for an Entrepreneurs’ pool that invests alongside the main fund, and Annex Fund I at $100 million.

These funds will focus on early-stage technology investments in Southeast Asia and comes as the firm celebrates five years of “building great companies.”

Like the prior funds raised by the Southeast Asia-focused early-stage technology venture capital firm, Fund III was oversubscribed and reached its hard cap for limited partner commitments.

Investors in the new fund span premier institutional investors including sovereign wealth funds, foundations, university endowments, and renowned family offices from Asia, Europe, and North America.

“We could have raised a much higher amount but we have learned that smaller, tighter funds do better,” Tan said, noting that when they were raising their first US$120 million fund, limited partners were initially skeptical of whether Southeast Asia was sufficiently large and addressable.

Since 2017, Insignia Ventures has backed unicorns like the Southeast Asia auto retail platform Carro, Indonesian digital investment platform Ajaib, AI for business intelligence company Appier which listed in Japan last year, and Indonesian tech juggernaut GoTo which listed in Indonesia this year; category leaders like the pioneering rural Indonesian fintech Payfazz (now Fazz Financial), the Indonesian commerce enabler Shipper, and the Philippines’ first fully digital bank Tonik; and fast-emerging pioneers like the Asia-first mental health tech company Intellect, conversational AI market leader WIZ.AI, and the open banking platform leading Southeast Asia’s open banking adoption Brankas.