Venturra Discovery Aims for Investment Opportunities in Vietnam

Venture capitalist (VC) Venture Discovery aggressively targeting startup investment opportunities in Vietnam. According to Venturra Discovery Partner Raditya Pramana, his party has explored an investment plan there this year.

To date, Venturra Discovery has injected funding into Medigo, Ekrut, Club Alacarte, and Antler. Raditya said he was exploring funding for three companies that could not be named in Vietnam, Singapore and Jakarta.

He assessed that Vietnam is currently in a phase when Indonesia experienced digital business growth in 2014. One of them is marked by an increase in smartphone users. Statista's research noted that Vietnam's smartphone penetration in 2018 only reached 34 percent of the total population, and is estimated to increase to 45 percent in 2023.

"In the past, you could calculate the amount you wanted to invest, and none were able to deploy series A and B type of money. Now the market is starting to develop, purchasing power rose, and local investors in Vietnam became active. The most important, appetite investors very positive," said Raditya to DailySocial.

From the business category, this VC under the auspices of the Lippo Group is still targeting investment in the financial sector consumer technology, especially in marketplace. According to Raditya, in addition to just growing, the Vietnamese market has not yet shown a business category that dominates the digital industry because it is still relatively small.

Therefore, in choosing a portfolio in this category, the company will replicate the strategy vertically integrated marketplace that have been applied when investing in Indonesian e-commerce.

"We will see from horizontal e-commerce, then identify some categories that will be big as a stand-alone. This category must have two of the three criteria, namely social facilitation and transaction, extremely high marginsand high repurchase rate," he explained.

Target segment healthcare and property tech

Since its inception in September 2018, the company has focused on filling the gaps in funding from the early stages to Pre-Series A in Southeast Asia. When it officially launched, Venturra Discovery prepared an investment of $15 million with a target of 30-40 portfolios.

"For next year, our investment target in ten companies. But we are more opportunistic because we prefer to focus on the companies we are after rather than having too many portfolios," said Raditya.

apart marketplace, Venturra Discovery will also target several other business categories that are considered potential in the future, such as healthcare and property tech.

"For the B2B business model, we are not too keen on this business. This business must compete with global vendors. For example, the Software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors for corporates that we meet in Indonesia, their products cannot it's up to. We also lack talent in that area," he said.