As Southeast Asia’s funding winter for startups abates, it presents new opportunities for seed stage investments, says Amit Anand, cofounder and managing director of Singapore-based venture capital firm Jungle Ventures, speaking to Forbes on the sidelines of the Forbes Global CEO Conference held in Bangkok last month.

“Seed funding is booming in Thailand and the Philippines so we want to do more there,” says Anand, 47, citing findings by Jungle Ventures’ inaugural First Cheque Report released in November.

The report, which covers early stage investment trends in Southeast Asia and India, indicates that Thailand’s share of venture capital deals increased to 4% this year from 3% in 2021, while that of the Philippines rose to 6% from 5% over the same period.

However, both countries still lag behind the rest of the region, which is dominated by Singapore, which accounted for over half of the deals this year, followed by Indonesia with 15% and Vietnam and Malaysia with 10% each, according to the report. Anand says the investment environment is stabilizing after both investments and deals started decreasing post-2022; as per the report, annual seed capital raised across India and Southeast Asia now stands at $1.5 billion, down from the peak of $3.2 billion raised in 2022. The deal count, meanwhile, has more than halved from 2,600 to 1,200.

Jungle Ventures, which specializes in early and growth stage investments across Southeast Asia and India, has assets under management of over $1 billion. Its portfolio of 50 investee companies includes four unicorns: home décor and furnishing platform Livspace; Indonesian consumer lending app Kredivo; Moglix, an online seller of industrial tools; and AI-driven software development platform Builder.ai.

Anand says startups in the Philippines and Thailand are attracting investors because the rapid development of digital infrastructure in both countries has enabled startups to launch internet-based apps even in remote rural areas. To further unlock this potential, he says, governments need to make the process of incorporating a business simpler and funding more accessible.

While scouting for opportunities in the Philippines, Jungle Ventures met local founders, investors and ecosystem enablers in Manila. “We’re in the final stages of negotiations with our first Philippines-based investment,” he says. In Thailand, the firm has invested in fashion retailer Pomelo.

“We would have done more investments in the [Southeast Asia] region if there was a better IPO market.”

Anand says India and Southeast Asia will remain attractive markets as they have the potential to offer VC investors with double-digit returns. In terms of sectors, He adds consumer-related startups remain promising, along with those in education, healthcare and finance.

Jungle Ventures has completed nearly a dozen exits since it was founded in 2012 by Anand, a former tech executive, and tech entrepreneur Anurag Srivastasa, with a modest $10 million fund. The firm was an early investor in Malaysian video streaming service iFlix, which was acquired by Chinese billionaire Ma Huateng’s online gaming company Tencent Holdings in 2020 for an undisclosed amount. In the same year, Jungle Ventures and other investors sold Mumbai-based consumer lending platform PaySense to PayU, a digital payments gateway backed by South Africa’s Naspers, in a deal valued at $185 million.

“We would have done more investments in the [Southeast Asia] region if there was a better IPO market,” he says. For example, Kredivo canceled a $2.5 billion SPAC deal in 2022 due to unfavourable market conditions. India, on the other hand, has a red-hot IPO market these days, says Anand, making it an attractive listing destination. Unicorns LivSpace and Moglix are planning to relocate their domiciles to India and list their companies there, he adds.