M Capital Management, a Singapore-based venture capital firm, announced today that it has closed its first fund, M Venture Partners (MVP), for $30.85 million. It initially plans to invest about $500,000 in about 40 early-stage startups of Seed and Pre-Series A. M Capital Management founded by Mayank Parekh, whose investment experience includes launching Grange Partners and leadership positions at Southern Capital Group and McKinsey & Company, and Joachim Ackerman, former managing director of Google Asia Pacific.
Other senior members of the team include Dr. Tanuja Rajah, former Entrepreneur First’s launch manager and Chethana Ellepola, former research director at Equity Stockbrokers. MVP, a sector-agonist fund, has already invested in 11 companies, including 3D Metal Forge, one of which publicly listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.
Other portfolio companies include behavioral health coaching startup Naluri; Impact Credit Solutions, a service company for AI-enabled lending and credit; XEN Capital, an alternative investment fundraiser; and cipher cancer clinics, which focus on making oncological care more affordable and accessible in India. Parekh told TechCrunch that M Capital Management introduced because “we believe there is enough room in our region to develop early-stage investment space. A decade ago there were very few unicorns.”
This has changed even more in recent times, not only because of the obvious progress in bringing the previous lower or unrefined population online, but also because they have made better progress across the region with the support of institutional VCs in Singapore and in that case. Funding needed, support from government agencies, the emergence of local accelerators and a rapidly growing network of angel investment agencies. Parekh added that he expects more unicorns and ” soon corns” to emerge (or companies expect to be able to evaluate unicorns in the near future).
As a preliminary level, sector-agonistic investors, Parekh said, the focus of MVP is on founders, especially those with “descendants of professional experience and strong academic backgrounds”. Naluri CEO Azran Osman-Rani, for example, was previously the founder of AirAsiaX, guiding it from its initial public offering in 2013 in six years. MVP will focus on most Singapore-based startups because it invests primarily in B2B or B2B2C firms. “We need a fertile ground to launch their business model with the top corporate or business partners of our selected startups,” Parekh said. “It simply came to our notice then.
It is the center of the world’s leading companies and it is uncommon for them to create opportunities for new technologies or catastrophic ideas.” He added that most of the MVP portfolio firms have “regional or global aspirations, benefiting Singapore as the main launch platform,” he added. MVP has already invested in Malaysia and India and is actively looking at companies in Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia.
