Genesia Ventures launches US$80M fund for startups in Japan, Southeast Asia
Tokyo-headquartered VC firm Genesia Ventures has announced the launch of its second fund worth US$80 million, which aims to invest in seed-stage startups across Japan and Southeast Asia.
Genesia Venture Fund Ⅱ has already raised US$45 million, and expects to make the final close at the end of September 2019.
Headed by Soichi Tajima, the fund’s key investors include major companies and institutional investors, such as Mizuho Bank and Mizuho Capital (Mizuho Financial Group companies), TFHD Open Innovation Program (operated by Tokyu Fudosan Holdings), Marui Group, mixi, and JA Mitsui Leasing.
Takahiro Suzuki, previously CEO of Indonesian VC firm CyberAgent Ventures, has joined Genesia as a General Partner. Genesia has already been making preparations for a representative office in Jakarta.
The fund’s focus areas will be the domain surrounding digital transformation by the fusion of real business and IT (finance, healthcare, medical, real estate, construction, manufacturing, agriculture, etc.), the domain surrounding new economy/digital media content (C2C, sharing economy, cloud sourcing, and decentralised platforms and the domain surrounding new media and content formats such as video, AR, VR, MR, etc.), and domain surrounding frontier technologies (AI, robots, drones, low-earth-orbit satellites).
Genesia’s first fund made investments in 47 early-stage startups (35 in Japan and 12 overseas, as of the end of December 2018).