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.