Investors Directory

AppWorks is a Taipei, Taiwan-headquartered venture capital firm and startup accelerator founded in 2009 by Jamie Lin, who continues to lead the firm as Chairman & Partner. What began as the AppWorks Accelerator in 2010 has grown into a four-fund venture platform managing roughly US$350 million, with a self-reported network of 660+ active portfolio startups, thousands of founders, and tens of billions of dollars in cumulative portfolio valuation. AppWorks describes itself as one of the most active early-stage investors in "Greater Southeast Asia," a self-coined term reflecting its dual base spanning Taiwan and the wider Southeast Asian region. Its portfolio includes several of the region's best-known technology successes — Carousell, 91APP, Tiki, Dcard, ShopBack, and Web3 names like Animoca Brands and Dapper Labs among them. Its direct Philippine footprint is thin but real: its own investments page names one Philippine company, Clout Kitchen (an AI-powered creator-economy startup founded by three Filipino repeat founders), which AppWorks led at the pre-seed stage in 2024 — the firm itself notes its portfolio "underrepresents the Philippines relative to other regional markets like Indonesia and Vietnam."

Bain Capital Ventures is the venture capital arm of Bain Capital, founded in 2001 and operating out of offices in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Palo Alto. The firm manages approximately $10 billion of committed capital across ten core investment funds plus additional co-investment vehicles, and has backed more than 400 active portfolio companies spanning seed through growth stage. Its early investments include LinkedIn, DocuSign, Twilio, Rent the Runway, Flywire, and Redis, several of which went on to IPO — LinkedIn at a $7.8 billion valuation in 2011, Twilio in 2016, DocuSign in 2018, and Flywire at $3.5 billion in 2021. The firm's investment focus centers on enterprise software (SaaS), financial technology, data infrastructure, and cloud computing.

BEENEXT is a Singapore-headquartered, founder-first venture capital firm (office at One George Street) led by founder and CEO Teruhide Sato, a Japanese entrepreneur, alongside a leadership team of Managing Partners Dirk Van Quaquebeke, Hiro Maeda, and Hero Choudhary, and Operating Partner Nao Ito. This session could not independently confirm an exact founding year via a live source (BEENEXT is widely reported elsewhere as founded around 2015, but that figure was not re-verified against a primary source this session, so it is stated here only as commonly reported, not confirmed). The firm describes its portfolio as spanning roughly 180 companies across 17 countries and five continents, concentrated most heavily in India, Southeast Asia, and Japan, with additional activity in the U.S. It also runs a dedicated vehicle, the ALL STAR SAAS FUND, focused on Japan-based SaaS companies. Named portfolio companies include BharatPe, Instamojo, and Servify in India, and Akseleran and Ralali in Indonesia. Its own portfolio page includes "Philippines" as a region filter option, implying at least one Philippine investment exists or has existed in the book, but no Philippine company could be identified by name in the content actually accessible this session — flagged honestly as an unconfirmed connection rather than a stated one.

Benchmark is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm (headquartered at 140 New Montgomery Street) founded in 1995 by five equal partners: Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, Kevin Harvey, and Val Vaden. It is well known in the venture industry for a distinctive, deliberately flat partnership structure with no junior or senior partner titles and no CEO-like role — all partners share equal ownership and compensation, tied to investment performance rather than management fees. Benchmark specializes in early-stage investing, typically leading a company's first institutional round and taking a board seat. Its historical fund performance has been unusually strong: the firm's first eight funds (1995-2019) returned more than seven and a half times invested capital net of fees and carry, and later funds have continued to perform well. Notable investments and exits include eBay ($6.7M for a 22.1% stake in 1997), Uber ($12M for roughly 11% in 2011), Instagram, Dropbox, Snap, Discord, Twitter, Asana, Zendesk, Yelp, and Zillow. Benchmark has no confirmed Philippines-specific investment activity or presence.

Bessemer Venture Partners traces its roots to 1911, when Carnegie Steel co-founder Henry Phipps Jr. spun out Bessemer Securities (initially $20 million in assets) from the Bessemer Trust he had established to manage family assets; its venture capital arm eventually became the independently operating BVP, with Bessemer Securities remaining as parent/backer. BVP is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with international offices in India, Israel, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom, having expanded internationally starting in 2000 into India, Israel, Latin America, and Europe. As of 2022, BVP managed approximately $20 billion in assets under management with 151 employees, and Venture Capital Journal ranked it the 3rd-largest venture capital firm by total fundraising over the most recent five-year period as of 2024. In September 2022 the firm closed its first buyout fund, BVP Forge ($780 million), alongside its 12th early-stage fund ($3.85 billion), reflecting diversification beyond traditional early-stage venture investing into growth-stage private equity. No Philippines-specific investment activity was confirmed from available sources, though BVP does have an active presence in India and other parts of Asia.

Cento Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage Southeast Asian startups that have already reached initial product-market fit, with a particular concentration on companies building digital financial services — credit, settlements, insurance, and payments infrastructure. The firm is headquartered in Singapore, with additional offices in Seoul, South Korea and Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, and current partners including Dmitry Levit, Ali Fancy, and Yuan Lee Chung. (Note: this session could not independently confirm Cento Ventures' exact founding year through a live, fetchable source — stated honestly rather than guessed; should be confirmed directly before publishing if precision on that fact matters.) The firm's portfolio spans fintech and adjacent digital-economy sectors across the region, including payment processor 2C2P, digital consumer-finance platform Jirnexu, fashion e-commerce company Pomelo, telehealth-adjacent Medical Departures, and trade-financing platform Aqwire, alongside bets in F&B SaaS, logistics, and recruitment technology.

Creador is a growth-stage private equity firm founded in 2011 by Brahmal Vasudevan, who continues to lead the firm as CEO, headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (Menara BRDB, Bukit Bandar Raya). The firm has raised roughly US$3.1 billion in committed capital across six funds since inception (Creador I through VI, ranging from a US$130 million debut fund in 2011 to a US$930 million sixth fund closed in 2024) and reports having deployed more than US$2 billion into approximately 63 portfolio companies. It maintains a genuine regional office network — Kuala Lumpur (HQ), Singapore, Bangkok, Mumbai, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, and a Philippine office in Bonifacio Global City, Taguig (Unit 2306, Philippine Stock Exchange Tower). Creador's confirmed Philippine investment is DALI Everyday Grocery, which the firm describes as "the Philippines' pioneer and leading hard discount retailer," invested in 2022. Its broader portfolio spans consumer and retail (MR.DIY across Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines; Tealive), financial services (Cholamandalam, City Union Bank, BFI Finance), healthcare (Hermina hospital chain in Indonesia), and other regional consumer names (Somany Ceramics, CTOS Digital, Sapphire Foods, Long Chau pharmacy in Vietnam).

💰 Check size: Over $5M

Crestone Venture Capital is a fintech-focused venture fund founded in 2019 by Kai Schmitz and Inanc Balci, with an Asia office in Makati alongside its Washington, D.C. and Sao Paulo offices, a deliberately global structure built around one specific thesis rather than one specific country. Crestone looks for the same underlying pattern across very different emerging markets: large, young, digitally-native populations with fast-growing GDP and urbanization but still-low penetration of formal financial services, and it backs the fintech infrastructure and embedded-finance companies built to close that gap. In the Philippines specifically, its confirmed portfolio includes Peddlr, a digital ledger and point-of-sale app that helps small sari-sari-store-style merchants manage inventory, bookkeeping, and a B2B marketplace in one place, and OneLot, which is building the software, data, and financing layer for the country's roughly $13 billion used-car dealership market. Both are the kind of unglamorous, high-volume, financial-inclusion-adjacent businesses that fit Crestone's stated thesis exactly, rather than headline-grabbing consumer apps.

A location note up front: CVC's true global headquarters is in St Helier, Jersey (a European/Channel Islands jurisdiction), which has no matching option in this directory's location schema. Rather than force an inaccurate Philippine or generic-Asia location, this entry uses CVC's actual Asia-Pacific regional headquarters — Hong Kong (Suite 3503, Two Exchange Square) — flagged explicitly here so this isn't mistaken for the firm's real global HQ. CVC traces its roots to 1981 as Citicorp Venture Capital, spun off as an independent firm in 1993 under founder Rolly van Rappard, and is now led by CEO Rob Lucas; it has been listed on Euronext Amsterdam since April 2024 and reports roughly €212 billion in assets under management (mid-2026) across private equity, credit, secondaries, and infrastructure strategies, with over 1,500 employees and around 30 offices worldwide. CVC has a genuine, substantial, and sustained Philippine investment track record — one of the deepest of any firm profiled in this batch. Confirmed Philippine deals include a roughly 15% stake in Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC) for about US$115 million (2011); an investment in Fast Logistics Group to support Philippine expansion (2020, exited 2026); backing for Landers Superstore's branch-network expansion (2021); and, most recently, a majority 63.94% stake in hospital operator The Medical City (TMC), completed via tender offer in September 2025 through the roughly US$4.5 billion CVC Capital Partners Asia V fund. It has also invested regionally in Southeast Asia, including a 15% stake in Indonesian hospital chain Siloam International Hospitals (2016).

💰 Check size: Over $5M

Do Ventures is a Vietnam-headquartered venture capital firm describing itself as a leading early-stage investor across Vietnam and Southeast Asia, led by Managing Partners Vy Le and Archer Goh alongside an investment team that includes Venture Partner Thuc Vu. The firm's own materials reviewed for this profile did not disclose an exact founding year, headquarters city, or total fund size, though regional trade press confirms the firm is currently investing out of a Fund II, which received a US$10 million commitment from an Australian government impact-investment vehicle specifically earmarked to support early- and growth-stage SMEs. Do Ventures has also positioned itself as a policy and research voice in Vietnam's startup ecosystem, serving as lead research partner for Vietnam's "Innovation & Private Capital Report 2026." The firm's disclosed portfolio spans a wide range of Vietnamese and regional technology companies including Coolmate (consumer/e-commerce), Bizzi (fintech/spend management), Finhay (wealth-tech), Manabie and VUIHOC (edtech), MFast and Palexy (retail/fintech-adjacent tech), and Metub (media), reflecting broad early-stage activity across Vietnam's fast-growing digital economy rather than one narrow vertical.

Endeavor Catalyst is the rules-based co-investment fund of Endeavor, the global nonprofit network that supports high-growth entrepreneurs across more than 50 markets worldwide. Rather than sourcing its own independent deal flow like a typical VC fund, Catalyst invests exclusively alongside other lead investors into companies founded by entrepreneurs who have already been selected into the Endeavor network — a structural model designed to help make Endeavor's global operations more financially self-sustaining while giving its portfolio founders access to growth capital. The fund manages more than $540 million in assets under management, has made over 400 investments across 35+ countries, and has recorded 37 exits to date. Catalyst's disclosed portfolio includes well-known global names such as Brex, Bitso, Cabify, Bukalapak, Blueground, Asaas, and Altruist, with 71 of its backed companies having reached unicorn ($1 billion+) valuations. Its investment activity spans fintech, B2B software, commerce, healthcare, and marketplace/proptech companies across Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the United States and Canada. An exact founding year and headquarters address for the fund specifically were not confirmed in sources reviewed for this profile.

Founders Fund is a San Francisco-based (Letterman Digital Arts Center) venture capital firm founded in July 2005 by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek — all early PayPal alumni. The firm manages approximately $17 billion in assets as of 2025 and has become known for a distinctly contrarian, "hard tech" investment identity, having expanded from primarily early-stage venture investing into late-stage and growth deals from 2019 onward, deploying increasingly large checks per company in its later funds. It opened a Miami office in 2021 and has made a growing number of investments in European and Asian startups. Founders Fund's portfolio spans SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries, Facebook, Airbnb, Spotify, Stripe, Neuralink, and DeepMind, reflecting a shift over time from consumer internet bets toward defense technology, space, semiconductors, biotech, and artificial intelligence. It has been described as having perhaps the most formidable defense-technology portfolio in Silicon Valley. No Philippines-specific investment activity was confirmed from available sources.