Tech startups in Southeast Asia to break through $1 trillion in valuation by 2025

August 10, 2021 | 16:09

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Jungle Ventures estimated the combined valuations of Southeast Asia’s technology startups at $340 billion in 2020, with forecasts to reach $1 trillion by 2025.

Tech startups in Southeast Asia to break through $1 trillion in valuation by 2025

Given accelerating growth and huge potential, Jungle Ventures – one of the largest independent venture capital firms based in Singapore – predicts that Southeast Asian tech startups could reach a collective valuation of $1 trillion by 2025.

Jungle Ventures currently invests in a series of fast-growing startups, including home décor and furnishing marketplace Livspace, Indonesia’s largest beauty platfrom Sociolla (which is also operating in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City), as well as South Asia’s largest procurement provider for manufacturing, repair, and operating suppliers Moglix, among others.

The fund looked at publicly available information on 31 startups with a minimum valuation of $250 million. It also made provisions to account for issues like many venture capital transactions not being publicly disclosed, CNBC reported.

“I was a little bit surprised, but then also not,” said Amit Anand, founding partner at Jungle Ventures. “The actual number could potentially be much bigger than $340 billion.”

He also believed Southeast Asia has a “last mover advantage” – where startups could learn valuable lessons from notorious failures of international peers in the US, China, or India, CNBC reported.

Southeast Asia is home to some 400 million internet users, 10 per cent of whom went online for the first time in 2020.

Previously, a report by Google, Temasek Holdings and Bain & Co., showed that the digital economy in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand (the largest economies in the region) could reach $300 billion by 2025.

Southeast Asian startups reportedly raised a record $6 billion in the first three months of 2021.

By Tri Lam

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