Rakuten Capital’s Saemin Ahn is ‘pessimistic’ on Southeast Asian VC: Good startups are getting ‘a lot less oxygen’
Source: Fortune ·
The managing partner of Rakuten’s venture arm says the region’s startups lack the scale and exits to justify U.S.-style checks.
From the source
Saemin Ahn made his name betting on Southeast Asia. Now, as the region starts to pull itself out of a years-long venture funding slump, he’s not sure the old model works for the region anymore. “I’m pretty pessimistic about the prospects of venture capital investment in Southeast Asia,” Ahn, who leads international investments for Rakuten Capital, the corporate venture arm of Japan’s Rakuten Group, tells Fortune. “The way firms scale and succeed in Southeast Asia has a very different velocity curve [than the U.S.], which isn’t very compatible with venture capital.” Just five years ago, Southeast Asian digital companies such as Grab and Sea won large funding rounds from investors like Baillie Gifford and Hanwha Asset Management. While the share of total venture funding remained small, observers were hopeful that Southeast Asia’s young, digitally-savvy population would fuel the next generation of internet unicorns. Things are much cooler now. In the first nine months of the year, only…