Map of the Money 4.0

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Money.

Map of the Money 4.0: Active Venture Capital Fund investing in Singapore

When everything started

Thursday 19 of February 2009, Meng Weng Wong published the first edition of the Map of the Money. Wait, we just said 2009. Yes, it was before unicorns like Lazada and Grab. Companies that had been started at that time in Singapore include Garena and Reebonz. The former is currently the most valued startup in Southeast Asia with a valuation above US$3.75 billion. It was also one year before AWS entered the APAC region and one year after the launch of the TIS Scheme in Singapore.

map-of-the-money-by-wongPrevious versions of the Map of the Money by Wong

The map was updated in 2012 and 2014 to reflect the evolution of the Singapore startup ecosystem. JFDI was launched by Meng Weng Wong and Hugh Mason as the first accelerator in 2010. Having welcomed 70+ startups over its six years of existence, JFDI has recently stopped its incubator activities. Most recently, Wong is focusing on disrupting the legal space with Legalese. Since then, the map hadn’t been updated but in the meantime Florian made a spreadsheet version called MAVA, allowing entrepreneurs to browse and filter the data. Arnaud helped along the way, improving the quality of the data.

How we did it

We (Arnaud Bonzom and Florian Cornu) decided to combine the best of both worlds, allowing the extensive data set to be played with through an interactive representation. Today, we are excited to release our new site: mapofthemoney.com.

We decided to verify the data by surveying 81 Venture Capital firms, allowing us to have accurate data on 65 Venture Capital funds with their size as well as their minimum and maximum size of their respective first checks. Last but not least, this gave us the ability to display the 25% percentile and 75% percentile via an adapted version of the box and whisker diagram.

Thinking of how the map will be used, we made it interactive, bringing to bear a more visual interaction with the data and allowing entrepreneurs to have the extract the full set of data via Airtable.

Lastly, our methodology was based on the past investments made by Venture Capital Firms in the last 12 months or for new funds, the ability to invest in Singaporean startups. With dozens of accelerators around, they have not been included in this edition as they would warrant a whole study on their own.

What we learned

Over the last 2 years, the Venture Capital landscape has changed and we can see it via 6 major trends:

  1. American VCs joined: with 500 Startups – 500 Durians for Southeast Asia (US$26M), 500 TukTuks for Thailand (US$12M) and 500 Vietnam for Vietnam (US$10M). As well as Sequoia Capital (Southeast Asia) with $960M for India & Southeast Asia.
  2. New Seed VCs: 500 Startups and SeedPlus (SeedPlus is a network of networks between Jungle Ventures, PwC, Google, Accel Partners and Infocomm Investments. Allowing, therefore Jungle Ventures to be active in both early stage and for Series A and beyond).
  3. Seed VCs graduated to Series A: Golden Gate Ventures, Jungle Ventures and Rakuten Ventures each of them started with or below $10M and now are closing a second fund between US$50M and US$100M.
  4. The Series A stage matured: Monk’s Hill Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Venturra Capital.
  5. Ignition of the Series B stage: B Capital Group.
  6. New Corporate funds: CapitaLand Limited, Challenge Ventures, DeClout Limited, Garena Ventures, PSA unboXed, Razer Ventures, SPH Fund, Wilmar International Limited and YCH Group Pte Ltd.

These changes reflect the maturation of the ecosystem with several key milestones in terms of acquisitions as well as major investments made in the last 24 months:

  1. First acquisition of Google in the region with Pie (acqui-hired).
  2. Zopim acquired by Zendesk for US $30M.
  3. Luxola acquired by Sephora (LVMH group).
  4. Non-Stop Games acquired by King.com for US $90M.

Major investment rounds and the increasing involvement of large corporations and Private Equity firms:

  1. Lazada raised US $1B from Alibaba in exchange of a controlling stake.
  2. Go-Jek raised US $550M from investors including Sequoia Capital, Rakuten Ventures, NSI Ventures and KKR.
  3. Singpost raised US $250M from Alibaba.
  4. Property Guru raised US $130M from Emtek Group and Square Peg Capital.
  5. Grab raising US $600M to US $1B

Last but not least, Singapore is an island of Unicorns in Southeast Asia with 4 out of 5 unicorns:

  1. Garena (Singapore).
  2. Grab (Singapore).
  3. Lazada (Singapore).
  4. Razer (US/Singapore).
  5. Go-Jek (Indonesia).

5 things should I know before fundraising

  1. 16 Definitions of the Economics of VC
  2. Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist
  3. Pitch Deck Examples
  4. Bringing Transparency to seed investing…
  5. Southeast Asia convertible note – kiss terms

All the best for your fundraising, and please let us know if you have any feedback. We are already working on the next version.

Last but not least, for a weekly update of the Funding and M&A landscape in Asia you can subscribe here.

Florian & Arnaud

Thank you, Dmitry Levit, Vishal Harnal for your support while developing the Map as well as Gwendolyn Regina Tan and PRecious Communications for the preparation of the release.

Disclaimer: Arnaud is currently working for 500 Startups and Florian has worked for Majuven – both active Venture Capital Firms.

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