Golden Gate Ventures

Building a company is hard. We’ve been there. And we want to make it easier. We join founders early on their journey and we stay by your side as you build, navigate the ups and downs, and go on to do great things. We’re a community of B2B SaaS experts, founders and operators here to support you every step of the way. Forum Ventures is the leading early-stage fund, program and community for B2B SaaS startups. Founded in 2014 as Acceleprise, we’re on a mission to make the B2B SaaS journey easier, more accessible and successful for early-stage founders, through pre-seed and seed-stage funding, high touch programming, corporate perks and introductions, and an active SaaS community. Forum For Founders, our pre-seed program, provides founders with $100k in funding and 15 intense weeks of talks, events, mentorship and 1:1 guidance focused on go to market and fundraising. Forum Seed, our seed fund, backs exceptional SaaS startups at the seed-stage both from within and outside of our pre-seed program. With over 250 portfolio companies, Forum founders have gone on to raise from NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, Uncork Capital, 8VC, Founders Fund, Menlo Ventures, Canaan, Bowery Capital, Susa Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, SV Angel, True Ventures and many more. Our private peer community for Innovation executives -- The Innovation Forum -- brings together like-minded intrapreneurs from all backgrounds to share best practices, insights, and advice, and support one another. In addition to our incredible peer community, members get access to industry trend reports, collaborative events, emerging technology, and startup introductions.

We are a leading tech Venture Capital (VC) firm in Southeast Asia, in areas such as B2B, Data/AI, and Software. We invest across Southeast Asia, mainly at Series A & B. We look for entrepreneurs with the mindset and capabilities to build regional or global companies, with technology advantages, fast execution and agility in the unknown.

Cocoon Capital is a leading, early-stage venture capital firm investing in Southeast Asian enterprise and deep tech startups. We engage deeply with our portfolio companies, acting as trusted advisors. We strive to give founders the necessary resources to accelerate their businesses and personal growth in a holistic environment. How do we work with you? As an active, early-stage investor, we allocate substantial time to each new company post-investment by only doing 6 new deals each year. We act as your trusted advisors supporting you in all aspects of running a business. To help you grow, we put special emphasis on your and your co-founders’ personal development. We enjoy that you are proactive and clearly state what you need from us; in return we will work relentlessly to deliver. We always seek to build long-term partnerships so that we can support you in both good and bad times. How do we source deals? Always on the lookout for the best founders in Southeast Asia, you can find us at events, conferences, demo days and at our monthly mentoring sessions that we do around Southeast Asia. We look for resilient and focused founders who are not afraid to fail forward. Our own founding experience has taught us that a seed-stage startup is a work in progress, so we are more interested in where you are going than where you are at right now. What are we looking for?Strong teams: The best teams have the right mix of deep knowledge & the ability to hustle their way through.And they enjoy working together, understand that success takes time, and can manage risk and stress. Real commitment: We are relaxed and informal but we can also be pretty straight shooters if required. As hands-on investors, we enjoy working committed teams who are ready to listen, learn and test. Exit potential: We generally invest in companies where we believe an exit could happen in 6 to 8 years. This means your market size has to be large enough and that there has to be potential buyers of your business. Scalability: Whether a copycat or an original idea, your business needs to be scalable in a sufficiently large market and be able to reach critical mass within the next 5 years. Enterprise focus: We believe investors do a better job if they stay focused. Therefore, we primarily target enterprise & deep tech companies. We believe these verticals have the largest chance of success in the current market environment. Singapore holding: While we invest in startups across Southeast Asia, companies have to agree to incorporating a holding company in Singapore before we close the deal. How does it work?Apply: We only consider applicants that have gone through our online registration system. Investment amount: We typically invest from S$500k to S$1m, depending on how much your company needs for an 18-month runway. Time frame: If your pitch deck interests us, you’ll be contacted for a follow-up meeting. We will then do due diligence on all the information provided and if everything goes well, we will sign a term sheet. The process then typically takes 8 to 10 weeks until the investment is completed. Keeping it confidential: We commit to keeping your application and all information shared with us confidential. However, we only sign non-disclosure terms as part of our term sheet and will not sign a separate NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) prior to that. This is standard practice across most institutional investors. What are the terms? Ownership stake: We don’t have any strict ownership requirements but we usually target to own more than 20% of the business after the first round of investment. Leading the round: We invest in a limited number of start-ups each year with a high degree of involvement in leading and coaching the teams. We therefore prefer to lead the seed rounds we participate in. Board seat: We always require at least one board seat for all our seed investments. However, we still find that most of our work with our portfolio companies happens outside the board room.

Our strategic alignment with AWS and cloud expertise provides unrivaled growth opportunities to early-stage businesses Our experienced management team has an intricate understanding of the challenges early-stage companies face at each stage of their journey. Our core value proposition is centered around a strategic alignment with AWS, complimented by our own in-house technical and commercial cloud expertise. This powerful combination provides unrivaled growth opportunities to early-stage businesses, transforming visions into reality. Our value proposition has been designed to offer value-added, programmatic services, encompassing the following areas: Technical: Access to a deep bench of cloud specialists who can be instantly deployed to help in areas such as information security, compliance, workload migration, cost and infrastructure optimisation, plus much more. Commercial: Enterprise go-to-market expertise and access to a carefully curated community of global Enterprise decision-makers. We go beyond surface-level Enterprise introductions to provide tangible growth opportunities through bespoke Innovation workshops. AWS Expertise: Underpinning the above is our in-depth knowledge of AWS teams, services, products, and programs, which foster the connections required for seamless growth.

Our purpose is to empower the most ambitious founders to build legendary tech companies in Indonesia. Our DNA Arkblu Capital is a multi-asset private investment firm with a primary focus on the venture capital asset class in Indonesia. Since our inception we have partnered with the most ambitious and talented, and the most respected and sharpest, tech founders and venture capital investors across the region. Our mission is to identify, invest in and support the most ambitious and talented founders building the best early-stage tech companies serving the rapidly growing middle class of Indonesia. We exist to empower the most ambitious founders who are using tech to build legendary companies in Indonesia. We continually strive each and every day to build a more vibrant tech and startup ecosystem across the region for the betterment of society at large. Our valuesAlways Founders First: We exist to serve the founders of our portfolio companies. Our founders are our top priority – and they always will be. Always Go Big, Go Bold: We back founders who dream big. The seemingly impossible thinkers. Revolutionaries within established industries. Visionaries within their space. These are the founders we partner with. Always Elevating Society: We believe founders are at the forefront of elevating society. We deeply empathise with founders solving society’s most pressing challenges, and who are able to empower the masses through technology. Always Earlier Than Most: We partner with founders earlier than most. We have been the first partner for more than half of our portfolio company founders, when their companies were just a visionary idea – and these have been our best partnerships to date. Always One Team, Many Voices: We believe success is primarily a function of teamwork. We believe no single person has a monopoly on good ideas. We believe in cultivating innovation through collaboration. Our offeringThe ‘Where’ Our primary focus is on Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world (275 million population and counting). We also invest in a select number of overseas companies that we strongly believe have the potential to make a positive impact on the lives of everyday Indonesians. The ‘What’ We partner with early-stage companies (pre-seed to Series A). Our focus is on companies that are using technology to serve the rapidly growing middle class of Indonesia. We invest across all tech sectors but deeply empathise with B2C/B2B2C business models. We write initial cheques of up to US$500,000. The ‘How’ We greatly welcome warm introductions from our network. Otherwise find us at an event in the ecosystem or drop us a line. Our commitmentOur circle: Our broader group is connected with trusted business operators in Indonesia. We partner with some of the most prominent venture capital firms across the region. Our rich and broad network is opened up to all companies who partner with us. Our capabilities: Our firm is led and supported by an A-star team with several decades worth of experience building and launching B2C companies and market-leading consumer products in Indonesia. Our advice is based on decades of proven operating experience and industry best practice. Our capital: We deploy private, patient, long-term capital. We are not a traditional venture capital firm needing to answer to limited partners. We are not bound by strict limited partnership agreements requiring us to ‘exit’ our investments within a short number of years. Our investment horizons are infinitely long. We are principal investors meaning that we have the ability to invest flexibly and partner with founders from idea to IPO and beyond.

We're an early stage venture capital limited partnership championing the next generation of B2B technology startups in Australia and New Zealand. Investing in ambitious founding teams at pre-seed, seed and series A funding. An open letter to startups Hello, it’s nice to meet you. We are Black Nova VC, a team of founders, turned investors. We have successfully built and exited companies and we can empathise with what you’re going through. We get it. We get you. That’s why we believe we can help. We strive to develop long, enduring and strong relationships that last well beyond the exit. We will roll up our sleeves and become an extension of your team in a heartbeat when needed. But we will also give you the time and space to focus on building without getting in your way. We support our portfolio companies with our time, our network, our experiences and our multiple initiatives. Our support is enabled by capital, not the other way around. We are a thematic fund focused on B2B SaaS companies. Our specialisation allows us to go deep in specific areas to the benefit of our portfolio companies. We want our best ambassadors to be our portfolio companies. We understand that investing is a two way street and a strong culture fit and capabilities between a VC and the portfolio company is key to make the relationship successful. That’s why we invest time to get to know each other before deciding to work together. On that note, if you have an idea, a company ready to raise capital or just want to reach out to discuss anything, reach out to hello@blacknova.vc. Onwards and Upwards, The Black Nova VC Team We invest in out of this world founders, building companies in the B2B SaaS technology spaceGetting a foot in the door It all starts with the intro, and honestly, we don’t mind where it comes from. Whether it’s a hot, warm or even cold intro, we look forward to speaking with you. Meet us at events, online or, if you fit the B2B SaaS category and want to chat, you can even send us your pitch deck. It’s great to meet you! From here we take a look at your pitch deck and do some light due diligence to see if the stars align. If you fit the mandate and we think we can help we will set up a pitch meeting. If not we will send you a quick email to let you know that we won’t proceed further and why that is. The Pitch Great! The stars have aligned, next step, you will sit down (in person or virtually) with a member of the Black Nova team to tell us more about your business. Here we will ask questions to deep dive into the company. Part of the meeting is also for you to ask us questions; it’s always a two-way street. The deep dive continues as we conduct further due diligence on you and the business. We most probably need additional meetings at this stage but we always try to find the right balance between getting to know each other but not taking much of your time. At this stage we will ask you to share specific data with us relative to the stage you are at (we really try to keep our data requests to the bare minimum and not divert you from building). If at this point we decide to bow out, we will let you know and offer feedback. Alternatively, once we have finished the due diligence we will discuss the opportunity to partner with you over our Investment Committee. At the investment committee meeting we may invite you to ask our final burning questions and answer any more questions you may have. Decision Time The final stage! We don’t want to keep you waiting so we aim to have a decision for you as quickly as possible. We aim to complete the whole process, from first meeting to money in the bank- in 6-8 weeks max. However, the truth is that sometimes we may need more time than that. This is because ensuring there is a cultural fit is a top priority and this may take time. If we do not go ahead with investment for this round we will be sure to provide feedback and happy to jump on a call to discuss. If it’s a yes… congratulations! We are looking forward to working with you and seeing your business grow. Black Nova Investment ThesisWe invest predominantly in Australian and B2B SaaS companies at the pre-Seed, Seed and Series A stages. We are comfortable investing in pre-revenue businesses We are excited with the opportunity to write the first check for ambitious founders When making our decisions, we weight the following: Team Market Product Defensibility Technology