If, like me, you came of age in India in the early noughties, chances are you didn’t dabble in stocks with your first pay cheque. We inherited our financial wisdom from a generation that swore by the safety of bank deposits, or gold. To most of us, stocks, bonds and derivatives felt like a world apart—esoteric, unfamiliar, and best left to experts.
Ask today’s twenty-somethings, though, and chances are they bought their first shares well before their first payday.
Wealthtech apps—Zerodha and Groww in India, Ajaib and Stockbit in Indonesia, and Finhay in Vietnam, to name a few—opened the doors of the stock market to a whole new generation of tech-savvy youngsters. Egging on the newbies, was a cottage industry of ‘finfluencers’ on Instagram and YouTube that made investing look like a walk in the park—almost as easy as scrolling through their feed.
But information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, they were soon to learn as the benchmark Sensex is now down 15% from the lifetime high it scaled in September last year.
As equity markets across Asia reverse course from the post-COVID euphoria, many Gen Z-ers are getting their first crash course in investing—the hard way. The newbies are the worst hit by the sell-off, as my colleague Vibhuti Sharma reported from India this week.
How will the new economic reality—of Trump tariffs, slowing growth, weak consumer spending, and foreign capital outflows from Asia—reshape the ecosystem for startup IPO-hopefuls, and investors seeking exits?
In Indonesia, too, IDX-listed e-commerce giant Bukalapak said this week, after reporting its earnings for Q4 2024, that it is refraining from giving a profit guidance for this year given the macroeconomic uncertainties and the volatility of the stock market.
On Tuesday, the IDX was forced to halt trading following a 5% fall in the Jakarta Stock Exchange Composite Index (JCI), triggered by high foreign capital outflows. Global investors have turned nervous over the Indonesian government’s spending on the free meal programme, speculation regarding the resignation of the country’s finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, and global factors such as US trade tariffs.
Beyond the volatility in the equity markets, several other key events in private equity, venture capital and startup space made headlines this week.
Before we move on to them, please take a moment to see the first batch of speakers for our flagship Asia PE-VC Summit in Singapore this year.
Newsletters
This week we released the second edition of our monthly newsletter, GreenStreet, which focuses on climate impact investments in Asia Pacific.
Women and girls are disproportionately affected by climate change, especially in non-urban areas where extreme weather events stop or affect women and girls from carrying out tasks outside of their homes, such as chores and farming.
This means more women must be included in innovations to tackle climate change. However, a report by PwC found that in the first nine months of 2024, sole female founders in this sector secured just over 5% of total deals and just over 1% of total funding.
We spoke to women executives from Triple P Capital, Circulate Capital, Sarona Asset Management and others to understand the gravity of the issue.
Meanwhile, in the latest edition of Beyond the Buyout, our weekly newsletter dedicated to private equity developments across APAC, we explored the current fundraising environment in India that favours fund managers with successful exits and the factors turning small- and mid-cap funds into ‘zombies’ in SE Asia and China.
Startup funding and other corporate news
We got wind this week that the merger discussions between Grab Holdings and GoTo may not involve the Indonesian company’s fintech division GoTo Financial. GoTo is said to be in advanced discussions with a Japanese investor to spin off and sell GoTo Financial, which includes the digital wallet GoPay and the BNPL service GoPay Later. Meanwhile, Grab is said to have appointed one of the Big Four firms to conduct an audit of GoTo.
Indonesian coffee chain Fore Coffee is preparing to launch an IPO later this month and list on the local bourse in early April. The East Ventures-backed firm is looking to raise up to $23 million from the share sale. Shares of Fore Coffee will start trading on the IDX under the ticker ‘FORE’ on April 11. Fore Coffee has also announced plans to enter the doughnut business in Q3 2025 as part of its expansion strategy.
UK-based private equity (PE) giant Apax Partners is in talks to invest in India’s SmartShift Logistics Solutions, which owns on-demand intra-city logistics unicorn Porter—a major player in India’s intracity logistics space.
Validus Vietnam, a unit of Southeast Asia’s SME growth financing platform Validus, has discontinued its lending services in the country and will focus only on debt collection due to a delay in the issuance of the regulatory sandbox/licence. It will evaluate disbursing new loans only once regulatory clarity has been achieved.
Indonesian agritech startups Beleaf Farms and AgriAku are said to have reduced their workforce by around 30% over the past several months. Beleaf has reportedly reduced its workforce from 125 to 85 across all departments to streamline operations in a challenging market. AgriAku has also likely laid off 20-30% of its employees over the past nine months.
Malaysia’s state-owned private equity fund Ekuinas has made a strategic investment in Bluesify Solutions, a domestic cybersecurity firm. Bluesify, established in 2012 by Izman Ibrahim and Faroze Mohd Salleh, provides cybersecurity services, including 24-hour managed detection and response.
Filum AI, an AI-driven customer experience management (CXM) platform, raised $1 million in a seed round from South Korean VCs Nextrans and TheVentures, and Vietnam’s VinVentures, among others.
LP-GP News
For this week’s LP View column, we spoke to StepStone Group executives David Huang and Vincent Hsu about the future of the PE secondaries market in Southeast Asia. They said a strong primary market fuels secondary activity, but in Asia—mainly due to China—a shrinking investor pool is constraining both.
Staying on topic, competition in India’s secondary market is heating up, driven by the country’s healthy economic growth and shifting capital inflows from China, which are fanning valuations, said Paul Robine, founder and CEO of the Hong Kong-based secondaries TR Capital in an interview.
360 ONE Asset, a backer of Indian unicorns such as Swiggy and PharmEasy, has so far garnered $810 million in commitments for its thematic funds focused on technology, financial services, industrials/manufacturing, healthcare and consumer sectors. “Sector-focused funds help with better deal sourcing, deal evaluation, and co-investing,” said the firm’s chief investment officer Sameer Nath.
Malaysia’s big state-linked funds Employees Provident Fund, Khazanah Nasional, and Permodalan Nasional Berhad will commit an additional $27 billion to private companies, including startups, over the next five years.
Venturi Partners launched its second fund, aiming to raise $225 million with a final close expected by mid-2026. Talking to DealStreetAsia, Managing Partner Rishika Chandan said the firm will follow the investment strategy of Fund 1, which largely focused on India with opportunistic investments in SE Asia.
Endiya Partners has closed its third venture capital fund at $100 million, backed by the IFC and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
Meet Capital, the Singapore-based early-stage corpus of the investment arm of Meet Ventures, has rolled out its maiden fund with a corpus of $10 million, targeting early-stage, tech-enabled startups across Southeast Asia.
Global private markets investor Pantheon has secured the final close of a new GP-led secondaries fund with total commitments reaching $1.1 billion. Pantheon Secondary Opportunities Fund II (PSOF II) is nearly double in size than its predecessor.
Asian family offices are scouting for new alternative opportunities, which could lead to a rapid increase in allocations to private credit, said Hugh Chung, chief investment officer at the digital wealth platform Endowus.
Despatch from China
Our China bureau released two deep-rooted analyses on venture studios and M&As in the country this week.
Limited partners, particularly high-net-worth individuals and family offices, in Hong Kong are warming up to venture studios as slow VC exits continue to weigh on investors’ confidence in traditional blind-pool funds. Venture studios co-create with founders and partners to turn ideas into scalable and investable businesses. They build companies from the ground up, provide financial support, and help with day-to-day business operations. Exit challenges, unfulfilled returns, and lack of transparency in committing to traditional blind-pool funds amid market volatility have spurred the growth of venture studios in Hong Kong.
In a separate analysis, we explained how China’s consumer and retail sectors have witnessed a resurgence of M&As in recent months even as overall M&As in the country fell to multi-year lows last year. As market consolidation in consumer and retail gains traction, the overall M&A activity by volume in China is projected to grow by double-digits in 2025. Experts say China has entered a big era of small M&A deals.
OTPP, one of Canada’s largest pension funds, plans to close its Hong Kong office as it seeks to optimise its footprint in APAC. Some Hong Kong-based employees will be offered to relocate to Singapore while others will leave the firm as the pension giant winds down on-the-ground operations over the coming 18 months.
Interviews
This week, we published several interviews that appeared in our two recent reports on female startup founders in India and Southeast Asia.
While Vietnam-based agritech platform Techcoop’s Hao Diep shared her experiences on being a female startup founder in Southeast Asia and raising funds for her company, Shauravi Malik and Meghana Narayan, co-founders of India’s Wholsum Foods shared their experiences on gender-based biases at the workplace.
Anuya Nisal, Founder & CEO, Serigen Mediproducts said female founders are often held to higher standards, while Manisha Raisinghani, the solo founder of the Indian SaaS startup SiftHub, said having male co-founders would not have made a difference.
Sucharita Mukherjee, the co-founder of the fintech firm Kaleidofin said it is harder for women founders to raise capital.
In a similar interview, not part of the reports, the founders of the Philippine health insurance startup Hive Health said female entrepreneurs should not allow gender biases to undermine their confidence in building companies that deliver significant societal value.
The stock markets may be unpredictable, but we’ll surely be back next week. Thanks for reading and see you then!
