Investors Directory

500 Global (formerly 500 Startups) is a global venture capital firm headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with over $2.3 billion in assets under management and investments in 2,900+ companies across 80+ countries. The firm has been active in Southeast Asia since 2012 and has backed more than 340 companies in the region. It runs a dedicated Manila-based vehicle, 500 Philippines Fund (2019 vintage), and Martin Cu, a former Ninja Van Philippines country head, joined as Partner in 2023 to lead Philippine coverage for the firm's flagship Southeast Asia fund. 500 Global's managing partner Vishal Harnal has publicly named the Philippines an "inflection point" market within the firm's regional strategy.

💰 Check size: $100K–$500K

A naming note up front: effective July 31, 2025, ACA Investments Pte. Ltd. — the Singapore-based entity of the Japanese ACA Group, in strategic alliance with Daiwa Securities Group since 2018 — formally changed its name to Felicity Global Capital Pte. Ltd. This profile is written under the name the firm is generally known by (ACA Investments), with the rename noted honestly rather than silently updated, since most public deal records and press coverage still refer to it as ACA Investments. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Singapore (8 Temasek Boulevard, Suntec Tower 3), the firm describes its mission as "bridging Japan and Southeast Asia," combining Japanese capital and corporate relationships with growth opportunities across Southeast Asian and broader Asia-Pacific markets. ACA Investments has a genuine, confirmed Philippine investment: it participated in Sprout Solutions' (a Philippine HR-tech/payroll SaaS company) US$10.7 million Series B round in 2023, alongside Cercano Management, SoftBank Ventures Asia, AFG Partners, GSR Ventures, and others. Its broader portfolio spans Japan and Southeast Asia across fintech, media, biotech, healthtech, e-commerce, and deep tech, including SmartNews, Gojo & Company (microfinance), H3 Dynamics, FreeD Group, iPrice, InstaPay, bitFlyer, and HealthMetrics — reflecting a growth-stage, sector-agnostic mandate rather than a narrow thesis.

Altara Ventures is a Singapore-based venture capital firm established in 2020, headquartered on Floor 28 of 9 Battery Road in Singapore, and led by a team of general partners including Chairman Koh Boon Hwee alongside Dave Ng, Seow Kiat Wang, Gavin Teo, and Tan Chow Boon. The firm reports roughly US$130 million in assets under management and describes its leadership as operators-turned-investors, with prior experience scaling companies such as Omni, Zynga, and Zuora to IPO, and a collective track record of generating more than US$1 billion in IPO proceeds across earlier ventures before formally launching Altara. Altara maintains an unusually wide on-the-ground presence for a fund of its size, with offices or investment activity spanning Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, India, Hong Kong, South Korea, and the United States. Its disclosed portfolio directly includes the Philippine digital bank Tonik, alongside PropertyScout, Staffinc, Buy&Ship, Netbank, PolicyStreet, Kyan, Clevai, Allra, Hyperlounge, and Klinik Pintar — reflecting genuine, confirmed investment activity in the Philippine market, not just regional proximity.

Amasia is a thesis-driven venture capital firm founded in 2013 by Ramanan Raghavendran and John Kim, headquartered in Burlingame, California, investing globally in the US, Southeast Asia, India, Europe, and Latin America. Its Philippine connection is real but concentrated in a small number of deals rather than a dedicated local fund: Coins.ph, a Manila-founded fintech, was Amasia's first-ever investment (since exited), and in 2024 the firm was among the investors in a $6.5 million pre-Series A round for Hive Health, a Manila-based SME health-insurance startup that later acquired one of the Philippines' oldest HMOs.

Core Capital is a Manila-based venture capital firm founded in 2018 by partners Jason Gaisano, Ken Ngo, and Carlo Chen-Delantar, with five partners and nine or more confirmed investments to date. Its flagship investment vehicle, the Gobi-Core Philippine Fund, is co-managed jointly with Pan-Asian VC firm Gobi Partners — already a separate entry in this directory — which makes Core Capital the Philippine general partner behind that joint fund rather than a fully independent, unconnected firm. Confirmed portfolio includes Humble Sustainability, a circular-economy/sustainability company, and Edukasyon.ph, a Philippine education-and-careers platform.

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.

Foxmont Capital Partners is a Philippines-focused venture capital firm founded in 2018, investing in early-stage, tech-enabled startups from seed through Series A (and, with its newest fund, up to Series B). Since inception it has deployed more than PHP 1 billion across two earlier funds. In 2025, Foxmont announced a $30 million first close for its third fund, anchored by the Dutch Good Growth Fund (DGGF) — the first development finance institution commitment to a Philippine-focused early-growth fund — with Grab Holdings also participating. More than half of that first close came from Philippine family offices.

Future Now Ventures is an independent, Makati-based early and growth-stage venture capital firm founded in 2014 by John Orrock. It has made 32 investments to date, with one portfolio company reaching IPO and four acquired — a track record that predates much of the Philippines' recent startup-funding wave. Confirmed portfolio includes AutoDeal, an online car marketplace; HR and payroll platform Salarium, which the firm backed in 2016 (Salarium later shut down in 2023, a real, honestly-disclosed outcome rather than an ongoing success); recruitment platform Kalibrr; and flexible workspace marketplace FlySpaces.

Gobi Partners is a Pan-Asian venture capital firm founded in 2002, with roughly US$1.5-1.6 billion in assets under management and investments in more than 350 startups across 15+ Asian markets, including several unicorns. In the Philippines, Gobi Partners operates through Gobi-Core Philippine Fund, a joint venture founded in 2018 with local firm Core Capital (founding partners Jason Gaisano, Ken Ngo, and Carlo Chen-Delantar), headquartered in Manila. In 2023, Gobi-Core became one of the first firms officially accredited as a Co-Investment Partner of the Philippine government's Startup Venture Fund, a joint DTI-NDC initiative with a US$10 million allocation under RA 11337.

ICCP SBI Venture Partners is a joint venture between ICCP Venture Partners — the Philippines' longest continuously operating venture capital firm, tracing back to 1998 — and SBI Holdings, a major Japanese financial services group. Based in Makati, the firm had made 31 investments as of November 2023, combining ICCP's decades of local market experience with SBI's regional capital and network. Confirmed portfolio includes Philippine sari-sari store platform GrowSari, Singapore-based AI recruitment platform X0PA AI, and Singapore-based proptech marketplace Propseller — reflecting a mandate that reaches beyond the Philippines into wider Southeast Asian technology deals.

Insignia Ventures Partners is a Southeast Asian early-to-growth-stage venture capital firm founded in 2017 by Yinglan Tan, a former Sequoia Capital partner, headquartered in Singapore. The firm has raised over $800 million in assets under management across multiple funds, including a $516 million close in 2022, and has made roughly 160+ investments in about 89 companies. The firm is particularly active in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Its confirmed Philippine investments include Tonik, Southeast Asia's first all-digital "neobank," licensed by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, and First Circle, an SME trade-financing platform, where Insignia participated in an $8.6 million Series B round in 2024 alongside IFC and Endeavor.

Kaya Founders is an early-stage venture capital firm based in Makati, Metro Manila, founded in 2021 by operators-turned-investors Paulo Campos (former CEO, Zalora Philippines), Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng (CEO, Summit Media), and Ray Alimurung (former CEO, Lazada Philippines). The firm runs a stapled dual-fund structure -- a "Zero to One" pre-seed fund and a "One to Ten" seed-to-Series A fund -- and closed its second fund at US$25 million (about P1.47 billion) in November 2025. It has built a portfolio of 40+ startups since founding.

💰 Check size: $100K–$500K