Investors Directory

Seedstars is a Switzerland-based investment and acceleration platform founded in 2012 in Geneva by Pierre-Alain Masson, Michael Weber, and Adrien, three Swiss entrepreneurs, with Alisée de Tonnac joining shortly after as co-CEO and co-founder. It began as a global startup-competition circuit ("Seedstars World") run in dozens of emerging and frontier markets and has since grown into a broader investment platform, running seed and early-stage funds (including Seedstars International Ventures and, more recently, a dedicated Seedstars Africa Ventures fund that reported a US$42 million first close in late 2024) alongside its acceleration programs. The Philippines has a real, if modest, connection to Seedstars: "Seedstars Manila" is a recurring local leg of the global Seedstars World competition, which surfaces and pitches early-stage Philippine startups as part of the worldwide circuit. This is a competition/community touchpoint rather than confirmed direct fund investment into a named Philippine company — no specific Philippine investee was independently confirmed for this profile beyond the Manila competition itself.

Sequoia Capital is one of the world's most prominent venture capital firms, founded in 1972 by Don Valentine in Menlo Park, California, where it remains headquartered today. As of late 2025 the firm is led by joint managing partners Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, and it reports roughly US$56.3 billion in assets under management as of 2024 — placing it among the largest and longest-running venture firms in the world. Note for this profile specifically: Sequoia's own India and Southeast Asia investment arm formally separated from the firm in June 2023 and now operates independently under the name Peak XV Partners (led by Shailendra Singh and GV Ravishankar); this entry describes Sequoia Capital itself, the original U.S.- and Europe-focused parent firm, not Peak XV. Sequoia's investment history spans more than five decades of category-defining technology bets, from early backing of Apple (1978), Atari (1975), and Cisco through to modern-era investments in Google, WhatsApp, Airbnb, Stripe, YouTube, and Snowflake. The firm's track record is not without high-profile losses — it wrote down its roughly US$214 million investment in the cryptocurrency exchange FTX to zero following FTX's 2022 collapse, a widely reported setback for the firm.

💰 Check size: Over $5M

Vertex Ventures is the venture capital brand of Vertex Holdings, a Singapore-headquartered investment holding company established over 30 years ago as a venture arm connected to Temasek. Rather than operating as a single fund, Vertex is structured as a network of seven independently-managed regional and sector partnerships — Vertex Ventures US, Vertex Ventures Israel, Vertex Ventures China, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, Vertex Ventures Japan, Vertex Ventures HC (healthcare), and Vertex Growth — collectively managing roughly US$6.8 billion in assets with more than 100 investment professionals globally and over 300 active portfolio companies. The entity most directly relevant to Southeast Asia, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, is led by managing partners Kee Lock Chua, Joo Hock Chua, and Ben Mathias, is headquartered at Raffles City Tower in Singapore, and manages approximately US$1.5 billion. It has backed more than 90 companies including regional ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab, alongside other network-wide portfolio companies such as CyberArk, NIUM (formerly Instarem), Waze, and Desktop Metal.

Wavemaker Partners is a venture capital firm founded in 2012 by Paul Santos (Singapore) and Eric Manlunas (Los Angeles), grown out of the Draper Venture Network into a bi-coastal firm spanning Southeast Asia and Southern California. Its Asian fund focuses on enterprise, deep tech, and sustainability, with the Philippines as one of its core Southeast Asian markets alongside Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand. Since 2012, Wavemaker has backed more than 200 companies region-wide, with over $500 million in total committed capital and exits generating over $2 billion in enterprise value. It operates three fund strategies — Wavemaker Ventures (early-stage), Wavemaker Impact (venture building for climate/decarbonization), and Wavemaker Growth (growth-stage).

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.