SEEDS Capital, the investment arm of Enterprise Singapore, has appointed 20 new local and global partners to co-invest in innovative Singapore-based deep tech startups.
Under the Startup SG Equity scheme, SEEDS will set aside SGD150 million over the next three years to catalyse another SGD300 million through its private sector partners.
With the new appointments, SEEDS now has a pool of 52 co-investors with strong technical and domain expertise, commercial knowledge, international networks, early-growth investment capabilities, and the ability to lead funding rounds, which will help startups scale successfully.
The new partners include 22Health Ventures, Antares Ventures, East Ventures, Eurazeo Global Investor, Global Brain, HIVEN, iGlobe Partners, K3 Ventures, Kurma Partners, Matter Venture Partners, MOL PLUS, Monk’s Hill Ventures, Paspalis Capital, Shift4Good, ST Engineering Ventures, Tin Men Capital, Trinity Innovation Bioventure Singapore, Valuence Ventures, Vickers Venture Partners, and Xora
New partners like Australia’s Paspalis Capital provide resources and global networks to support startups in exploring and entering new markets, for customer acquisition or diversifying supply chains.
For instance, Paspalis’ strong presence in Australia’s Northern Territory has provided SEEDS’ Spacetech investees like Equatorial Space Systems with opportunities to test-bed their solutions.
The new appointments also include local investors familiar with Singapore’s operating landscape, who can advise and mentor startups in areas like regulation and scaling. These funds can amplify their deployment in Singapore, contributing to the local capital pool and ecosystem development. Some of these include Vickers Venture Partners, iGlobe Partners, K3 Ventures, Antares Ventures, Monk’s Hill Ventures and Tin Men Capital.
“Despite the relative nascency of Singapore’s deep tech landscape compared to more mature startup ecosystems, we feel that the deep tech ecosystem here is reaching a critical point, thanks largely to the numerous government initiatives,” said Monk’s Hill Ventures Principal Arun Pai. “While we have made selective deep tech investments in the past, we are extremely excited about our current pipeline, which includes a significantly higher proportion of deep tech startups, with founders targeting diverse areas such as material science in agri-tech, advanced robotics, artificial intelligence for healthcare diagnostics, and next-generation semiconductor technologies across Southeast Asia.”
Deep tech startups, in particular, require more support, as they often face long technology and product development periods and require substantial capital investment, especially at the growth stage, for production lines, industrial scaling, or clinical trials. New partner funds like healthcare VCs Kurma Partners, 22Health Ventures and Trinity Innovation Biosciences Singapore; sustainability VCs Eurazeo and Shift4Good; as well as hard tech VCs Xora, Matter Venture Partners and ST Engineering Ventures are equipped with industry and technical expertise to better guide and support the development of these technologies.
“We are happy to see strong interest from the venture capital community, ranging from established Singapore-based funds to international funds with deep expertise and experience backing deep tech category leaders, as well as corporate venture funds looking to back promising startups here with synergistic technologies and business models,” said SEEDS Capital Chairperson Cindy Khoo. “SEEDS is committed to growing Singapore’s startup ecosystem and will double down on efforts to nurture a strong core of deep tech startups. We are excited to work closely with our new co-investment partners to further develop and scale the next generation of innovative, impactful technologies.”
To date, close to SGD3 billion has been invested in over 330 startups under the Startup SG Equity scheme. To better support the development of early to early-growth stage deep tech startups, SEEDS had also raised its co-investment cap from SGD8 million to SGD12 million for each deep tech startup.
