It took Takahiro Suzuki multiple trips to India over a period of two years to be understand the nuances of the startup ecosystem in India. The head of CyberAgent Ventures (CA Ventures), Jakarta office is among the multiple legacy early-stage funds from east Asia which are testing the Indian market.

These investment firms view the current slowdown in funding in India as an opportunity to test their India thesis through coinvestments. At an average investment size of $1 million, the new crop of investors plan to build a report card of the Indian startup ecosystem over the coming year before raising a larger corpus funds from their parent companies.

“We have partnered with Japanese and Singaporean investors mostly. These are relatively new investors, spread across the spectrum of wanting to co-invest as early as seed/angel rounds with us and then usually as a second investor at Series-A and then all others prefer to be co-investors usually with a India-centric fund at Series-B and Series-C,” says Karthik Reddy, Managing Partner at Blume Ventures which has a corpus of $60 million as part of its Fund-II.

Blume has coinvested in DataWeave and IDfy with Beenext and is evaluating a few deals with Tokyo headquarter Dream Incubator which is also a Blume LP.

Japan’s Incubate Fund, which has driven early-stage investments in over 200 companies so far, is in the final process of structuring its India fund which will invest in technology and internet startups in India. “I became a part of the Incubate Fund about three months back and have been an entrepreneur in India before. As part of the fund, we will focus on seed rounds and we make it mandatory for founders to invest in their own companies,” says Nao Murakami, General Partner at Incubate Fund India, which plans to invest up to $300,000 in 10-15 companies over the next few years.

For CA Ventures, which is backed by the internet conglomerate CyberAgent, the investments will come from CA Asia Fund-1and will be overlooked by the Jakarta office for proximity to India. “We plan on investing from $500,000 to $1million in a single investment, in pre-Series-A to Series-A rounds. We can follow on the investment up to $3 million, depending on the progress,” says Takahiro Suzuki, adding that the company will raise an-India focused fund depending on the traction of its portfolio companies

Source: The Economic Times