First, the good news. It’s still summer in Asia, with startup funding – including both early and late stages – almost doubling in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2015, according to the Tech in Asia Database.
The increase happened despite only a slight uptick in number of deals made.
China continues to roar ahead. Its total funding more than doubled, though late-stage funding appears to be drying up.
Now, the not so good news, especially for the non-Chinese: China’s dominance in Asia has become even stronger.
While China formed three-quarters of all VC investments in Asia in the first half of last year, this time it has gone up to 87 percent.
We still see growth throughout Asia though. Many countries, including Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Singapore, saw a rise in venture capital funding in H1 2016.
Southeast Asia, save for the Philippines, appears to have had a good first half.
Indonesia saw 7 times growth, but that’s due to the outsized influence of Tokopedia’s US$147 million round.
Now for the bad news. While many countries saw a decline in venture capital funding this time around, India was in a particularly bad spot. Its funding got cut by almost half:
Not everyone agrees with this assessment though. Startup intelligence firm Xeler8 reports that funding in India actually went up.
However, CB Insights data shows that India funding declined to US$1.99 billion from US$3.69 billion.
(CB Insights actually contends that Asian startup funding fell to US$14.6 billion from US$15.8 billion, although it appears to be tracking about a third of the deals we’re following. Perhaps it has different criteria for the type of funding they include in their dataset.)
Anyway, Korea may look like it has been hit hard, but Q2 2015 was an outlier due to a US$1 billion funding round for ecommerce site Coupang.
Overall, it looks like China is carrying Asia on its shoulders. And that will likely continue for the foreseeable future.
