Ben Mathias | AVCJ | Fund 5 focus: Vertex emphasizes realisations

*This article was first published on *AVCJ.

Growth rounds for cashflow positive companies have facilitated most of Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India’s exits – and laid the ground for its recent USD 541m fundraise

Here are excerpts from the AVCJ article.

“When companies achieve a certain scale, they become interesting to private equity firms, but they need to be growing and have good cash flow,” said Ben Mathias, a managing partner at VVSEAI.

“We used to be viewed as old school because we kept emphasizing unit economics and cash flow. It has worked out well for us – private equity investors approach us for exits.”

“Most of those stock prices have crept back up this year in response to strong performance. The companies realised they had to get serious about profitability, they did that, and the market rewarded them,” he said. “There’s a window for IPOs in India now, and more companies are preparing to list.”

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is considered a must-have for software portfolio companies rather than a discrete investment strategy. “Just as every company became cloud-enabled, each one will introduce generative AI. The APIs [application programming interfaces] are opensource, so you can plug them in,” said Mathias. “Large language models (LLMs) are also being developed in local languages.” He said.

Read more about our Fund 5 announcement here.

For media inquiries, please reach out to Elise Tan at vvsea_communications@vertexventures.com.

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