Venturra Discovery Eyes for An Investment Opportunity in Vietnam

Venturra Discovery Venture Capital aims for an investment opportunity in Vietnam. As Raditya Pramana, Venturra Discovery's Partner said, they've planned for investment this year.

To date, Venturra Discovery has invested in Medigo, Ekrut, Club Alacarte, and Antler. Raditya said to have plans for three companies that cannot be revealed yet in Vietnam, Singapore, and Jakarta.

He said Vietnam is now facing the phase when Indonesia had its early digital business in 2014. It was marked by the rise of smartphone users. Statista research wrote only 34% of the total population in Vietnam are using smartphones, it's to increase by 45% in 2023.

"Only a bunch of people wants to invest, and none were able to deploy series A and B type of money. Nowadays, the market is growing, purchasing power is increasing, and local investors are getting active in Vietnam. The most important one, we have positive investor appetite," he said to DailySocial.

In terms of business, the VC under Lippo Group is still aiming for investment in the consumer tech sector, the marketplace in particular. Raditya said, as the market just growing, Vietnam is yet to show domination in the digital industry with a relatively small business category.

Thus, in selecting its portfolios, the company is to replicate a vertically integrated marketplace strategy once implemented while investing in Indonesian e-commerce.

"We'll see from the e-commerce horizontal, then identify some categories big enough to be a stand-alone. The category must have two from three criteria, social facilitation and transaction, extremely high margin, and high repurchase rate," he added.

Targeting healthcare and property tech segment

Was founded in September 2018, the company focused on seed funding to Pre Series A in Southeast Asia. At the launching, Venturra Discovery prepared a $15 million investment targeting 30-40 portfolios.

"Next year, we're targeting 10 companies. However, we're more likely to be opportunist for our focus is specific rather than involved in too many portfolios," he said.

Venturra Discovery, besides the marketplace, also aims for other business categories with a bigger deal in the future, such as healthcare and property tech.

"In terms of B2B business model, it's not really our focus. The business has to compete with the global vendor. For example, the Software-as-a-service (SaaS) for corporate we've found in Indonesia, the product is not ready to compete. We also have a lack of talents," he said.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian