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.

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.

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.

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.