Investors Directory

917Ventures (legal entity: Globe Capital Venture Holdings, Inc.) is Globe Telecom's venture-building arm, launched in 2019 and wholly owned by Globe. Rather than investing in external startups the way a typical fund does, it operates primarily as a venture studio — conceiving, building, and launching new digital businesses from within the Globe ecosystem — and has launched roughly 20 ventures to date. Confirmed ventures include GInsure, a digital micro-insurance platform; GCredit, a digital credit line embedded in the GCash app; and AdSpark, a digital advertising and marketing technology company. This venture-builder model is a meaningfully different mechanism from a typical external-investment fund, and is described honestly here as such.

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.

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.

Gentree Fund is the venture capital vehicle of the Sy family, the family behind the SM Group of Companies, operating under the Sy Family Office and led by third-generation family members. It began with roughly $40 million initially allocated and, per Nikkei Asia reporting, has been raising a larger vehicle in the $120-150 million range. Confirmed portfolio includes online baby and maternity marketplace edamama, Y Combinator-backed payments company NextPay, enterprise software firm Mosaic Solutions, supply-chain fintech AQWire, livestreaming platform Kumu (a startup already tracked in this site's own Startups directory), and India-based mobile esports platform Mobile Premier League.

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.

IdeaSpace is a Philippine startup foundation and venture arm established in 2012, backed by First Pacific, Metro Pacific Investments Corporation (MPIC), PLDT-Smart, Meralco, and Maynilad — companies associated with businessman Manuel V. Pangilinan. It runs founder-focused accelerator programs for early-stage Filipino tech entrepreneurs. Since 2012, IdeaSpace has supported more than 100 startups, mentored over 300 entrepreneurs, and deployed roughly PHP 180 million toward ecosystem-building. It co-founded QBO Innovation Hub in 2016 alongside J.P. Morgan, DOST, and DTI, and continues to run recurring annual accelerator cohorts (its 10th batch was unveiled in 2023). Its venture arm, IdeaSpace Ventures, is positioned within the MPIC/MVP Group ecosystem, spanning mobility, healthcare, logistics, fintech, energy, digital infrastructure, and media.

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.

JG Digital Equity Ventures (JGDEV) is the corporate venture capital arm of JG Summit Holdings, one of the Philippines' largest diversified conglomerates, spanning food, real estate, air transportation, banking, and petrochemicals. It was launched in 2019 to formalize the group's approach to digital and startup investment. Its confirmed portfolio spans Series A/B-stage Philippine and regional technology companies, including sari-sari store enabler GrowSari, consumer lending platform Cashalo, receipt-scanning rewards platform Snapcart, and Philippine digital bank GoTyme Bank (via a stake in parent Tyme Group). It has also backed India-based HR technology platform Darwinbox, reflecting a mandate broader than the Philippines alone.

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

Kickstart Ventures is the corporate venture capital arm of Globe Telecom, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Makati. It is the Philippines' largest corporate VC by track record, having participated in dozens of funding rounds across multiple countries and built a portfolio of roughly 70 local and international companies. Kickstart also advises the Ayala Corporation Technology Innovation Venture (ACTIVE) Fund. Its core differentiator is direct access to the Globe and Ayala corporate ecosystems — retail networks, logistics infrastructure, and telecom distribution — that it can plug portfolio startups into directly, rather than acting purely as a capital provider.

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.