Jungle Ventures, one of South-East Asia’s largest early-stage venture capital firms, has closed its third fund, Jungle Ventures III. The firm raised a total of $240 million, which includes $40 million raised in separately managed account commitments, for investment in innovative technology and digital-driven consumer businesses across South-East Asia, the company said in a statement.

Investors in the venture range from endowments, funds of funds, and development financial institutions to strategic family offices and leading technology players. The investors include DEG, Germany’s development finance institution, IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, Bualuang Ventures, a corporate venture capital fund of Bangkok Bank, Dutch development bank FMO, Cisco Investments, and Temasek, among others.

This fund raise is double that of the 2016 fund raise and almost 60 per cent of the capital has come from outside Asia. Further, more than 90 per cent of the capital came from institutional investors spanning North America, Europe, West Asia, and Asia, with new investors accounting for nearly 70 per cent of the fund-raise and returning investors for the remaining.

Amit Anand, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Jungle Ventures said: “The traditional view of South-East Asia is that it’s a fragmented region of countries, with more differences than similarities.”

Thanks to rising Internet penetration, demographic shifts and mobile-technology adoption over the last decade, the region is now home to a fairly homogeneous addressable market of more than 250 million young people, comparable to any ‘developed’ market.

Jungle Ventures has investments in start-ups such as Engineer.ai, travel and hospitality start-up RedDoorz, fashion e-tailer Pomelo Fashion, which announced a $52-million series C funding round in September, and Kredivo, Indonesia’s consumer lending and payments platform, which raised $30 million in series B funding last year, among others.

Jungle Ventures Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Anurag Srivastava, added that seven of its early stage investments from the second fund, have grown to over $2 billion in portfolio valuation, up more than 10-fold over the last four years. “This is noteworthy because we make only 10 to 15 key investments in each fund and no single company is responsible for delivering a disproportionate share of this growth,” he said.

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