Inside Look at Seedstars International Ventures
We caught up with Patricia Sosrodjojo, GP at Seedstars International Ventures, an early-stage VC fund focused on emerging markets.
Recently, we caught up with Patricia Sosrodjojo who is General Partner at Seedstars International Ventures, an early-stage VC fund focused on emerging markets. The fund has invested in over 30 countries across Latam, Africa, MENA, CEE and Asia, backing ventures working to solve key societal challenges such as access to financial services, commerce, healthcare, and education. The fund is part of the Seedstars Group, founded in 2012 in Switzerland with a network covering over 90 countries.
Patricia has over 15 years of investing and management consulting experience across Asia Pacific and the U.S. Prior to joining Seedstars, she was a Venture Partner at AC Ventures, an early-stage VC in Indonesia, where she led portfolio management and value creation platform for the fund. Previously, Patricia was an Executive Director at Falcon House Partners, an Indonesian private equity fund, where she invested in high-growth companies in the consumer space. Earlier in her career, Patricia worked in the private equity arm of Lehman Brothers as well as global consulting firms such as Booz Allen Hamilton and L.E.K Consulting.
An advocate for greater diversity and inclusion in the investment sector, Patricia is active in the startup community and has been involved in initiatives on gender lens investing and impact investing. She holds a BA in Economics and International Relations from Tufts University and an M.A in Economic Development from The Fletcher School, Tufts University.
In this episode, we discuss:
How she came to be in this space
Initial vision, strategy, and evolving operating model of SIV, how it relates to the entrepreneurship support side
Key models/businesses within SIV's portfolio
Her thoughts on the Bangladesh ecosystem
Listen on Spotify.
💼 Actionable insights
If you only have a few minutes to spare, here's a summary of our key takeaways and highlights from the episode:
I think in private equity, we have this luxury of a measurable track record, right? So, in private equity I spent a lot more time looking at financial models and financial data. When I was doing PE, the companies would have been operating for at least five years. They were going up in that mid-stage growth where you know they've done well, but then they're really looking to expand into the next level. And, so you have this wealth of historical data. That's one big difference obviously with early stage where you know you don't really have that at all. Maybe you could look at some early indicators. Even though we are an early stage investor (we do pre-seed and seed), we do look for some traction within our companies because you always believe that you need to have the right fundamentals.
We are roughly distributed across Africa, LATAM, and MENA with a higher concentration in Asia, about 35% to 40%. This was done for a few different reasons. The first one is that we are covering more geographies in Asia. Secondly, I think it is more developed markets where we do anticipate that we might be investing in slightly larger checks. But, we do look at the diversification quite seriously and regularly. One of the beauties of being a global fund is that we have some flexibility in the allocations of investments. One of the key risks of investing in emerging markets is always macro, and as we all know, emerging markets come with volatility. So as a global fund, we are able to allocate and reallocate depending on how things are going in each of our markets.
We're definitely an impact investor. I think one of our key missions is really to help build ecosystems. I think it'd be quite difficult for us to do maybe a whole fund on super nascent countries. But because we do have the other exposure, we are able to look at some of the more emerging countries. So we're looking at [Bangladesh] very closely. I think if I were to look at it from the macro and the growth perspective, it looks quite good. We are quite excited that the country is at an inflection point of growth.
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