AMIT ANAND

Anand was an operator before he was an investor, building and working with tech companies across Asia. In 2012 he co-founded Jungle Ventures in Singapore.

The debut fund was small, just $10 million. Back then Southeast Asian venture capital barely existed, and betting on the region felt fringe.

He raised a $100 million fund in 2016, then $240 million in 2019, then a $600 million vehicle later on. That took Jungle past $1 billion in assets and made it one of the biggest early-stage firms in the region.

Not bad for a fund that started with pocket change by venture standards.

Jungle Ventures backs founders across Southeast Asia and India, and treats the two as one connected market. Its portfolio includes Livspace, an online home interiors company that became a unicorn.

It backed Moglix, a business-to-business commerce platform for industrial goods that also crossed a billion-dollar valuation. It got into Kredivo, a fast-growing consumer lending fintech in Indonesia.

Anand also likes buying into companies he already admires by purchasing shares from earlier investors. He has said 30 to 40 percent of the portfolio was bought that way, off other people's cap tables.

Anand invests like a builder, not a stock picker. He wants a handful of companies he can pour time and money into, not a giant scattered portfolio.

Jungle often puts in two to three times more capital per company than a typical fund. The idea is to own more of fewer winners and help them become regional leaders.

He is obsessed with cross-border scale. A great Indonesian company that could also win in India or Vietnam excites him far more than a local champion stuck in one country.

Livspace is one of Jungle's signature wins. Jungle backed the online home interiors company early, when digitizing something as messy and physical as home renovation sounded like a stretch.

Livspace grew across India and Southeast Asia and crossed a $1 billion valuation, becoming a unicorn. It was proof of Anand's cross-border thesis in action, a company scaling across the two regions he treats as one.

For a fund that started with $10 million, backing a billion-dollar company was exactly the kind of outcome he was built to chase.

The honest risk in Anand's whole approach is concentration. Jungle bets big on a small number of companies instead of spraying money across hundreds.

That works beautifully when the picks are right. When one of those large bets stumbles, it hurts far more than a single miss in a diversified fund.

Loading up in Indonesia is the same double-edged sword, brilliant if the market keeps booming, painful if it stalls. Anand has been right often enough to keep raising bigger funds.

But the strategy only stays smart as long as the concentrated bets keep paying off.

Anand is fixated on building companies that last, not quick flips. He looks for founders with huge ambition, the kind who want to build a category leader worth hundreds of millions or billions, not sell early for a few million.

He treats Southeast Asia and India as a single opportunity and pushes his companies to expand across borders. He also believes a fund should be a real partner in the hard moments.

Helping founders hire, strike partnerships and raise money is the job, not just cutting a check.

Anand keeps his private life private, which fits his low-key style. What is public is his second home, Singapore, where he has been based for well over a decade building Jungle Ventures.

He operates at the crossroads of two worlds, his Indian roots and his Southeast Asian base. That dual view shapes how he invests.

Colleagues describe him as a builder at heart, and the founder community across the region is, in a sense, the family he spends most of his time with.

Anand's sharpest lessons came from operating, not from a classroom. He spent years working in and around Asia's tech scene before starting Jungle Ventures in 2012.

That hands-on time taught him how companies actually get built and broken across different markets. It is why he pushes founders on execution, not theory.

The real education was watching businesses try to scale across borders, long before he was the one funding them.

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