Investors Directory

Openspace Ventures (now operating under the broader Openspace Capital name) is a multi-strategy asset manager founded in 2014 and focused on Southeast Asia. It is co-headquartered in Singapore and Jakarta, with additional offices across the region including a presence in Manila, and manages roughly $800 million in total committed capital across six funds spanning early-stage, growth-stage (OSV+), and a crypto-focused fund (Ocular). In the Philippines, Openspace is best known for co-leading Kumu's approximately $15 million Series B round in mid-2021 alongside SIG, joined by returning investors Kickstart Ventures, Foxmont Capital Partners, and Summit Media. Its broader Southeast Asian portfolio includes Gojek/GoTo, Kredivo, Halodoc, and Pickup Coffee.

Plug and Play Philippines is the local National Startup Accelerator Program run under a formal, two-year partnership between Plug and Play, the Silicon Valley-founded global innovation platform active since 2006 and connected to over 35,000 startups and 500-plus corporate partners worldwide, and the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), publicly launched in Makati in April 2024. Rather than an independent Philippine-founded fund, it exists because the government sought out a global accelerator brand to run a formal local program, targeting roughly 40 startups a year across two six-month cohorts, focused on AI, cybersecurity, software development, animation, agritech, and food technology. DFNN Inc., a listed Philippine tech company, joined as a private-sector partner, testing incubating companies' products and contributing seed funding alongside DTI-referred sponsors. Participants receive mentorship and limited direct equity funding, plus access to Plug and Play's global network, reported by the firm at roughly billion in accessible capital — a genuinely different value proposition from a fund writing its own large checks, stated plainly here rather than oversold.

QBO Innovation Hub is the Philippines' first public-private partnership platform for Filipino startups, established in 2016 through a joint effort by IdeaSpace, J.P. Morgan, and two Philippine government agencies, the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Rather than investing directly as a fund, QBO functions as a connective hub: it links entrepreneurs to capital sources, mentors, and structured growth programs, and has supported more than 700 Philippine startups since its founding. It also runs recurring ecosystem-wide initiatives such as the annual Philippine Startup Week, which showcases a Top 100 startups cohort (its 2023 edition was publicly recognized).

A sourcing note before the profile itself: an initial search led to a different, seemingly inactive site (sierramadre.vc, describing a vague "Industrial Evolution" thesis with almost no accessible content) — cross-checking confirmed this is likely an unrelated or dormant project, not the real entity behind this name in the Philippine market. The firm actually matching "Sierra Madre" as an investor here is Sierra Madre Advisers, a Makati-headquartered private equity firm founded in 2015 (per PitchBook) and led by Managing Partners Danny Lizares, Martin Lorenzo, and Alasdair Thomson, who together describe roughly 60 years of combined operating and investment experience. Its office is at 1F First Lucky Place, 2259 Chino Roces Avenue Extension, Makati. Sierra Madre is explicitly Philippines-focused, branding itself "Investing in Philippine Potential," and backs founder-led and family-owned Philippine companies with flexible capital for growth, succession, buyouts, or carve-outs. Its named portfolio spans logistics (Ximex Delivery Express), staffing/technology (TeamQuest Technology), accounting/business services (Frontline Accounting), technology (Shellsoft Technology, Courxera Holdings), agriculture (Excelsior Farms), and hospitality (Mosaic Hospitality Solutions). The firm reports 15+ successful exits and states a 100% founder-retention rate across its portfolio.

The Startup Venture Fund is a direct government investment vehicle created under the Philippines' Innovative Startup Act (Republic Act 11337), administered by the National Development Company (NDC), an agency under the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Capitalized at ₱250 million and launched in November 2021, it makes direct co-investments into qualifying Filipino startups alongside accredited private-sector co-investment partners — a distinct role from partners such as IdeaSpace or Gobi-Core Philippine Fund (both separately listed in this directory), which are private co-investment partners of the fund rather than the government fund itself. A confirmed direct investment example is a ₱11 million commitment into SolX Technologies, a Philippine solar-energy startup, made in June 2024.

TENCO Capital describes itself as a corporate venture capital firm backing startups in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, headquartered at the TPI-Motortrade Building on EDSA in Mandaluyong City, Metro Manila. The firm's own materials reviewed for this profile did not disclose a founding year, named founders or managing partners, or fund size — though its office address suggests a connection to the Motortrade group of companies, a well-known Philippine motorcycle and vehicle retail conglomerate, without the exact corporate relationship being explicitly confirmed on the firm's site. TENCO positions itself as sector-agnostic, prioritizing founder alignment and execution capability over any single vertical. Its publicly listed portfolio spans consumer, edtech, media, and fintech ventures operating primarily in the Philippines.

The DOST-TOMASInno Center is a technology business incubator (TBI) established in 2019 through a partnership between the University of Santo Tomas (UST) and the Philippine Department of Science and Technology (DOST). It is based on UST's main campus in Sampaloc, Manila, and was set up to help turn UST-affiliated research and student/faculty-led technology projects into viable, investable ventures. As a DOST-backed TBI, TOMASInno Center is part of a national network of similar university-based incubators the DOST has funded across the Philippines to encourage science- and technology-driven entrepreneurship outside Metro Manila's usual startup hubs. UST is also building an annex facility, the UST-Dr. Tony Tan Caktiong Innovation Center, at its Santa Rosa, Laguna campus, intended to extend the center's incubation capacity.

UBX Philippines Corp is the fintech venture-building and investment arm of UnionBank of the Philippines (part of the Aboitiz Group), incorporated in late 2018 with a reported committed budget of roughly ₱500 million a year. It builds and invests in financial-technology ventures aimed at underserved Filipino individuals and small businesses, and later established a Singapore hub to extend its venture arm's regional reach. Confirmed portfolio includes SME lending platform SeekCap, rural-bank digital-infrastructure provider i2i, and micro-merchant platform Bux. UBX also led a funding round for PDAX, one of the Philippines' licensed cryptocurrency exchanges — a real, notable link to another platform already tracked in this directory's Startups section.

Villgro Philippines is a gender-smart impact incubator founded in 2017 and based in Makati, operating as the Philippine chapter of Villgro, an impact-investing organization with roots in India that runs country-specific programs across several emerging markets. Rather than writing occasional checks from a fixed fund, Villgro Philippines runs a direct incubation-and-investment portfolio that has grown to around 39 enterprises across health, education, agriculture, affordable housing, and women-and-girls-focused businesses, pairing capital with hands-on investment-readiness support. It also co-founded two pieces of investing infrastructure the local ecosystem lacked: Impact Pioneers, described by Villgro itself as the Philippines' first dedicated impact angel-investing network, built jointly with xchange; and WE Rise Community, an access-to-finance platform for women entrepreneurs. Its most recent initiative, AI4Health Asia, was launched with Canada's IDRC as the first accelerator of its kind in the region dedicated to responsible-AI health startups, focused on sexual, reproductive, and maternal health and on epidemic preparedness across South and Southeast Asia.

xchange is a genuinely Philippine, Manila-based philanthropic, impact-first incubator founded in 2011 by Rico Gonzalez (now Managing Director) and Nono Coliangco. It is a real capital-deploying organization, not purely an advisory shop — its LinkedIn profile describes it as providing seed capital alongside tailored mentorship to early-stage Philippine social enterprises — but its own site frames its work across three pillars ("Build Ventures," "Finance Ventures," "Advise Ventures"), making it more accurately described as a hybrid incubator/impact-investor than a conventional check-writing VC fund. Its current leadership team also includes Finance Director Rizza Mariano and Directors Erika Tatad and Love Gregorie Moral-Perez. xchange focuses on social enterprises addressing structural Philippine problems across four thematic areas it calls "Futures": the Future of Work (business/finance innovation, workforce transformation), the Future of the Planet (disaster resilience, food systems, regenerative solutions), the Future of Well-being, Health & Nutrition, and the Future of Education. No specific named investee/portfolio company could be confirmed from the pages accessible this session — its portfolio page returned a 404, so this entry cannot list concrete example ventures, which is a real gap rather than an intentional omission.