Sanjay Zimmermann
New York based, Venture Capital firm with investments throughout North America and Europe has conducted a deep dive on the South-East Asia Venture Capital landscape and plants its first flag in the region with an investment into Dahmakan’s $18Mn Series B round. Dahmakan is the fastest growing, vertically-integrated food delivery start-up based in South-East Asia, providing an affordable, convenient, everyday food delivery experience to millionsacross the region.
White Star Capital has published reports on key venture geographies including New York/U.S. East Coast, Canada, The UK, Germany, France, Japan, and South Korea. Now, we are delighted to share our newest report covering the South-East Asian Venture Capital ecosystem. This report focuses not only on SEA powerhouses, such as Singapore and Indonesia, but covers the full region—from Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines to frontier markets such as Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Brunei.
At White Star, our pace of investment in South-East Asia is beginning to take seed. With the opening of our Hong Kong office this past year and the launch of our Tokyo office in 2018, we’ve dedicated investment resources to explore the burgeoning ecosystem throughout Asia. We also have an investment team member on the ground in Singapore, Sanjay Zimmermann, who is focused on sourcing deals out of the region’s start-up funding hub.
In addition to sharing our excitement for SEA, the report digs into some key findings and insights around the VC landscape. South-East Asia is the number one new region for investment this decade. Within the entire region, deal volume, size, and value has risen over the last five years in every country. South- East Asian cities are starting to appear on the global map of top cities for VC funding. Singapore, as a hub for VC funding in the SEA region has an important role amongst the most active cities for funding and deal volume globally. Jakarta also joins the list, driven by the spur of B2C-driven investments in the region that are aiming to capture the 4th largest population in the world. Not to mention, there is a huge opportunity for more funds to come into the region—funding rounds pipeline of high-quality seed and Series A stage start-ups have been driven by a large number of<$100Mn funds. However, with the absence of larger funds to finance later stage Series B+ rounds, there remains a clear opportunity for international funds to build a presence and bring even more cross border connectivity to the region.
"Within the entire South-East region, deal volume, size and value has risen over the last five years in every country, making it the number one new region for investment this decade"
One of the central themes of the report on SEA was grounded in the powerful demographic and economic shifts leading to a young and rapidly growing middle-class population that would increasingly be transacting online. This revelation has driven a lot of investment into SEA e-commerce start-ups and is one of the trends that White Star is looking to bet on. On top of this trend, White Star has also built an expertise in investing in food related start-ups which operate complex and state of the art central kitchens and food subscription models. The fund led investment rounds into companies such as Freshly in the U.S. and Butternut Box in the UK. Both have had tremendous success with Freshly’s ready to eat meal subscription service having grown to over 100Mn subscribers and ButternutBox’s online pet food service raising over $25Mn Series C led by L Catterton.
We were therefore very excited to be introduced to the Dahmakan and learn about the company’s unique approach across the region—an affordable large volume food delivery focus on the mass-market segment. Currently operational in Malaysia and Thailand, customers can order chef-made meals to be delivered to office and homes using the website and mobile apps. The product offering constantly changes with 40+ new dishes monthly from a growing database of 2,000+ tested dishes starting at a price point of $3.
By combining the entire value chain, Dahmakan controls all aspects of the customer experience from food product development to last mile delivery from “satellite” distribution kitchens. “By combining the entire value chain and removing the middleman, we capture the higher quality and better operational efficiencies needed to be able to offer our customers a better value product,” describes Jonathan Weins, CEO.
Their approach is very much a large volume, mass production model that provides economies of scale that most other restaurants or cloud kitchen operators are unable to achieve. This also allows it to achieve unit economics and profitability that drove our belief in their business model to outperform and become one of the leaders within the segment.
This is reinforced by the close relationship between the founders—Jonathan Weins, CEO, Jessica Li, COO and Christian Edelmann, CTO which reminds us of the Freshly and Butternut Box management teams and provides us with confidence in their ability to persevere through hard times and to outperform in good times.
We are very pleased to close our first deal in South-East Asia as part of Dahmakan’s U.S.$18Mn Series B round, investing alongside great partners such as Rakuten Capital, JAFCO Asia, the GEC-KIP Fund, Woowa Brothers, the former CEO of Nestlé Germany, Partech Partners and Y Combinator. We are excited to start this journey together with Dahmakan as it expands across the region.
