Five sectors in spotlight
Finance and insurance, e-commerce, digital media and entertainment, logistics,and healthcare are poised to be the top five industries that attract the most venture capital investments in Southeast Asia during 2017-20.
“Venture funding in Southeast Asia is expected to reach US$40 billion over the next 10 years, fuelled by promising startups and growth businesses all over the region,” said Jeffrey Paine, managing partner and co-founder of Golden Gate Ventures, a Singapore-based venture capital fund.
As Southeast Asia’s 600 million people are building booming entrepreneurial ecosystems while its governments are supporting vibrant startup ecosystems, the venture capital market in the region shows high potential.
Mr Paine said Southeast Asia has the capability to become one of the technology hubs of the world.
Grace Sun Via, senior director for corporate strategy and development department of Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings, said creating a success startup ecosystem, it’s vital to help startups to access to capital to set up and grow their businesses.
Entrepreneurial ecosystem plus a talented pool of diverse startups are also essential to facilitate the industry growth.
Ms Via said Tencent continued to explore potential startups in Southeast Asia, particularly in Thailand where the company has strong presence in the Kingdom through partnerships with Sanook, music streaming Joox, and Ookbee.
“We will continue to explore opportunity in Thailand in fields of digital media and entertainment,” she said.
Polapat Paul Arkkrapridi, managing director for corporate venture capital unit of Digital Ventures Co, a subsidiary of Siam Commercial Bank, said the company is looking to pursue tech startup overseas as the number of tech startups in Thailand is limited.
Thailand’s tech industry is still in its infancy which provided high chance of failure of an investment that will get return.
Digital Ventures is focusing on investments in companies operating enterprise-related technologies, rather than consumer-related technologies such as blockchain-based infrastructure, cyber security system, big data analytic and artificial intelligent systems.
In Thailand, apart from fintech startups - insurance tech, education tech, travel and medical tech and property tech also showed high potential areas,” said Mr Polapat
He added regulatory departments also plays an important opreational role in driving the growth of tech startups, especially fintech.
A report of Techsauce, a leading source of all tech and business news in Thailand, said tech startups in Thailand could raise US$ 86 million in seed funding 2016, up by 159% in 2015.