If you follow Southeast Asian funding, you’re probably familiar with iSeed SEA. Some of the startups the fund has invested in since its launch in 2020 include Dat Bike, Skuad and Upmesh. However, what you may not know is that iSeed SEA is a solo GP fund. Now that the solo GP is over, AngelList alumnus Wing Vasiksiri is back with a new fund, called WV Fund II.
The second fund brings Wing Vasiksiri’s total assets under management to $14 million. The central thesis of iSeed SEA and WV Fund II is to bridge the gap between Southeast Asia and Silicon Valley, as most of Vasiksiri’s network and many of his LPs are in the US. This means investing in startups early stage from a wide range of sectors. , and introducing them to LPs or operators in the US, or bringing them on board as co-investors.
Vasiksiri typically writes checks between $100,000 and $500,000, depending on whether or not he is the primary investor and the valuation stage of a business.
The 30 startups in Vasiksiri’s portfolio have raised a combined total of more than $85 million in follow-on funding from a who’s who of investors, including Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, AlphaJWC, AC Ventures, East Ventures, Jungle Ventures , Openspace Ventures, Monks Hill Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures and MDI Ventures. Some examples of his investments include Humble, HD, Virtual Internships, Mio, Of the, personalinc, rukita and CBT.
Investors in Vasiksiri’s second fund include institutional LPs such as Republic Capital, EGR Partners (the family office of Elisabeth de Rothschild), Kamco Invest and Central Pattana. Individual LPs include Duo founder and CEO Dug Song, Albert Wenger and USV managing partner Susan Danziger, Doordash and Square executive Gokul Rajaram, former Airbnb China COO Kum Hong Siew, and Dropbox, Discord and Github operators.
The solo GP model is new to Southeast Asia, but has gained ground in Europe and the US, where Elad Gill, Lachy Groom and Josh Buckley are examples of investors managing their own funds.
Vasiksiri told TechCrunch that solo GP funds first started in the US with angel investors who were receiving allocations for good deals and proprietary networks, and wanted to institutionalize their investment. So they raised capital from other sources to invest on a larger scale.
Prior to launching his own funds, Vasiksiri worked in operations at AngelList, where he approached AngelList India founder Utsav Somani, who now serves as one of his advisors and is the founder of the iSeed micro-fund. The two thought about launching AngelList in Southeast Asia, but then the pandemic got in the way of their plans. However, they continued to speak with investors and founders and were enthusiastic about the trends they were seeing in the region. These included relatively high GDP per capita, a growing middle class, and more people going online. The first generation of startups were going public, including Grab and Bukalapak, and the downstream capital problem was being solved by funds like Tiger.
Vasiksiri said the benefits of a solo GP pool include speed and transparency, as he is the sole caller and can commit to a round in a matter of days or even hours.
“This model has advantages and disadvantages, but I think the biggest advantage is that the shape of your relationships with the founders is drastically different when the relationship is completely with you. There is no kind of hierarchy in that,” he said. “You think of a traditional fund, what a founder does is talk to the analyst, the tier one associate, maybe talk to a partner, and then talk to the IC or GP. Often the founder tells the same story.”
However, with a solo GP pool, the GP fills all of those roles. “You can dig deeper, you can really build a more authentic, genuine relationship with the founder by spending more time with them. I think it completely eliminates the main/agent problem.”
Another benefit is that a lone GP can relate to the experiences of the founders. “I consider myself a founder too, only instead of starting a company, I started a fund. I think I have that great empathy for the entrepreneur’s journey, thinking about similar things and understanding how difficult it is to be a new entrant competing with the incumbents in this space.”
Being a solo GP is also useful when working with other investors because Vasiksiri is not struggling to get high allocations and has no ownership requirements. This allows you to collaborate rather than compete with other funds. “As he broadens his background, his collaborators and competitors change at every stage of the game,” he said. “I think I’m still disciplined and small, the size of this fund allows me to do things like openly share deals, avoid adverse selection of other funds and build other relationships in a win-win way.”
Vasiksiri targets Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia as its main markets and is also looking for opportunities in the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. Vasiksiri is sector agnostic, instead looking at the large contributors to GDP in each country. For example, this includes agriculture and aquaculture in Indonesia, so Vasiksiri invests in companies like Delos, a start-up that develops sensors and other technologies to help shrimp farmers increase their yields.
Other areas he is interested in include fintech, particularly payments and infrastructure, and gaming. “I think Southeast Asia is in a unique position for a big game publisher or game developer to emerge,” he said. “There are a lot of users here, especially with mobile games, and a lot of players are in Thailand, the Philippines, there is a lot of creative talent as well.” Climate technology is also another important sector, as Southeast Asia expected to become a net importer of natural gas by 2025and you need to transition to green energy.
While there are only a handful of independent GPs in Southeast Asia, Vasiksiri expects more to emerge as the ecosystem matures, especially as founders of successful startups become angel investors.
“I think a solo GP source could emerge if it becomes more institutionalized, from writing personal checks to fundraising,” he said. “This is the first generation of solo GPs here and I think as the ecosystem matures we will see many more.”
