Viki founders launched venture builder to help 100 Southeast Asian Entrepreneurs
Jiwon Moon and Changseong Ho, the creators of Viki, a video streaming service located in the United States, have formed a venture fund to invest in Southeast Asian entrepreneurs.
E-commerce, community, fintech, O2O, biotech, healthcare, foodtech, and sustainability are among the areas in which TheVentures Singapore (TVSG) plans to invest.
“We aim to help over 100 high-growth startups incorporate or relocate to Singapore within the next five years,” said Changseong Ho, co-founder of TVSG.
TVSG will establish a new incubation system to enhance early-stage, high-growth tech firms in terms of intellectual property, business models, and global development plans, using Singapore as a base camp.
“The country [Singapore] is well positioned with an ecosystem that is driven by finance and innovation, which helps to facilitate the cross-pollination of businesses and technologies internationally,” said Jiwon Moon, co-founder of TVSG.
The goal for the duo is to emulate TheVentures’ success in South Korea, which has been supported by blue-chip LPs and investors such as Kakao, NCSoft, and Com2Us. Since 2014, the business has invested in over 100 companies, with a portfolio worth more than $1 billion.
When Ho and Moon were at Harvard and Stanford, they started Viki in Silicon Valley. After six years of operation, Rakuten purchased the company for an estimated $200 million in 2013.
In addition to TVSG, the partnership also operates Impact Collective, a community-driven effect investing programme that assesses firms’ social impact.
In the future, Moon and Ho want to build Community Alliance Network (CAN), a SaaS tool for entrepreneurs without an in-house IT staff, and CANnovate, a SaaS-powered startup incubation programme for entrepreneurs in the community, education, and commerce sectors.
