On November 6, 2024, Integra Partners hosted our Annual Investor Day, bringing together founders and both existing and prospective investors from across the globe. We covered topics ranging from tips on successfully scaling a business, exit strategies in Southeast Asia, an update on our Win With Women program and founder presentations.

What Does It Take to Scale Successfully?

We were thrilled to have two accomplished founders from our Fund I portfolio, Patrick Gentry (Co-Founder and CEO of Sprout) and Jonathan Spry (Co-Founder and CEO of Envelop Risk), share their experiences in scaling their businesses.

Sprout is a Series B stage company that has succeeded in productizing and scaling its platform in the enterprise and MSME segments in the Philippines. Envelop Risk, a Series B stage company based out of the UK, was initially a cyber underwriting firm that has since evolved to become a leading cyber reinsurer globally. Some key takeaways:

Understanding the needs of your customers: Success begins with knowing your customers. Only by deeply analysing what customers value and their pain points can startups build products that solve real problems, creating a competitive edge. What Sprout has done in the Philippines was exactly this. Sprout took the time to understand pain points in HR and payroll processes, allowing them to build a product that is localized to the Philippines market, giving them an edge against global HR and Payroll processing companies. This helped spur their growth in the early days, but the journey to success did not stop there. Sprout continued to analyze customer behaviour and conduct surveys and interviews to gather feedback, iterating its platform along the way.

M&A for growth: M&A offers later stage startups a powerful strategy to drive organic and inorganic growth. Startups can gain access to new customer bases and enhance their product or service offerings by acquiring complementary assets or capabilities to fuel organic growth. At the same time, inorganic growth through acquisition allows startups to quickly scale by entering new markets. In the case of Sprout, the company has acquired JustPayroll Inc and Aiah AI, to complement its product offerings and is considering an acquisition target for regional market expansion.

Positioning the business for exit: Fundraises and valuation mark-ups are great, but the ultimate measure of success lies in achieving a cash exit. As founders of Series B and Series C stage companies, Jonathan and Patrick shared about the measures they took to position their businesses for exit as well as acquisition offers they received recently. To Jonathan, given Envelop Risk’s stage and valuation, he believes the higher the valuation of the company, the less likely it is to exit to a strategic acquirer given the high cash outlay required. In this case, an exit to a PE fund is a more viable option.

Entries to Exits: Finding the path to DPI in the SEA landscape

As VC investors, Integra Partners has always been exit-driven in the way we approach investment opportunities.

In line with our theme on navigating exit in Southeast Asia, our Managing Partner, Jinesh, shed some light on the different exit channels we consider and the opportunities we see in each of these channels. Some topics discussed include:

SEA is the next target for PE funds: Based on Preqin data, there is over $6b of dry powder available in 2024 that was raised by SEA-focused PE funds in 2021. This capital has been committed for over 3 years and GPs are under great pressure to deploy it in the next 1-2 years. Declining interest in China has redirected attention of Asia-focused PE funds to developed countries, such as Japan, given the maturity of companies there. These countries alone, however, cannot absorb all the leakage and developing countries in SEA will stand to gain a share as the number of companies eligible for PE deals continue to grow in the region.

Secondaries playing a key role in driving SEA VC exits: Larger secondary exits typically occur for companies that are more than 5 years old but secondary value is still a fraction of dollar raised. We see 3 main growth drivers to secondaries activities:

1. new sources of capital from increased launches of secondaries-focused funds (Lightspeed, Stepstone, Adams Street, Harbourvest etc),
2. dry powder nearing the end of commitment period and
3. bottoming interest rates will likely drive up secondary activities in the coming years.

While secondaries are a viable option, acquisitions remain critical to unlocking residual value for investors.

M&A remains a viable exit, particularly for fintech startups: Fintech has led M&A activity in the region in the last 4 years, contributing to >50% to M&A transactions. Corporates (i.e. strategics) came up to be one of the top acquirers in the region, which aligns with the bulk of our exit strategy for our portfolio companies. A great example of an acquirer is Visa, who has been seeking inorganic opportunities globally, as evidenced by its acquisition of Pismo (Brazil-based transaction and payment processing services).

Win With Women program update

Integra Partners started our gender lens program, supported by USAID, back in March 2023 with the aim to promote female participation in angel investing, venture capital and technology start-ups.

Our Partner, Jennifer Ho, shared that the program has hosted 9 female founders-exclusive events across 4 different countries (Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand), 5 of which were startup-related masterclasses, tech-ins and networking events. These events saw a total participation from 250 female leaders. Jennifer also announced that the USAID will be supporting an extension of the program. These exciting updates will be shared in the public domain shortly.

We were thrilled to be joined by the USAID team - Molly Dean, Taha Gaya and Taylor Bloch to make this announcement in person at the event and look forward to driving even greater impact through the program.

Founder presentations

We invited 5 of our portfolio company founders - Tubagus Syailendra from Chickin, Christilia Widjaja from YOUR, Jessica de Mesa from Kindred and Adnan Agha from ProCredit - to share their growth strategies and exit aspirations. In line with our theme of scaling businesses, we also had Rodrigo and Vishal from Sirius share about scaling Sirius’ operations in the LatAm region.

Chickin is an Indonesian-based AgriFintech startup providing access to credit and modern IoT solutions for small-scale poultry farmers, enabling better unit economics for farmers and insulating them from fluctuating live bird market prices. Read more about Chickin in our Why We Invested series.

YOUR is a financial wellness platform catering to the unique needs of Indonesia’s overseas foreign workers, starting with remittance.

Kindred is an Online-to-Offline women-focused integrated health ecosystem of virtual and in-clinic health services in the Philippines. Read more about Kindred in our Why We Invested series.

ProCredit is a SME lender in the Philippines serving companies with $2 to $20 million in annual revenues. Read more about ProCredit in our Why We Invested series.

Sirius provides an open and agnostic hybrid infrastructure, which enables enterprise-wide workflows through communication between different systems and siloes, cheaper operational costs and faster go-to-market for new products and services. Read more about Sirius in our Why We Invested series.

We are grateful to all of our existing and prospective investors, founders and friends for making this event a success. We look forward to hosting our next Investor Day in 2025.

More photos from Integra Partners Investor Day 2024 can be found here.