Kickstart Ventures targets 12 startup investments

By Beatriz Marie D. Cruz, Reporter

KICKSTART Ventures, Inc., the corporate venture capital arm of Globe Telecom, Inc., is on track to fund at least 12 startups by the end of the year, with a growing focus on electronic commerce and artificial intelligence (AI).

“We invested in seven companies in total this year,” Joan Yao, general partner at Kickstart Ventures, told BusinessWorld in an interview. “These are follow-on investments.”

The firm has backed startups across industries such as cybersecurity, food and beverage, e-commerce, telecommunications, AI and business-to-business e-commerce.

Since its founding in 2012, Kickstart has invested P2.15 billion in Philippine startups. Its portfolio now includes about 70 local and foreign companies, among them Pickup Coffee, coins.ph, Kumu, Skillshare, RuralNet and edamama.

The venture firm said its local portfolio has generated about 600 jobs and raised $305 million (P17.4 billion) in follow-on funding. Five Philippine startups in Kickstart’s portfolio have since expanded overseas, while 17 of its funded companies have entered the Philippine market.

Kickstart primarily invests in early- and early-growth stage startups that aim to solve real-world problems. For the rest of 2025, the firm is looking more closely at AI-driven ventures.

“A lot of the opportunities we’re looking at right now is in the theme of ‘from automation to augmentation,’” Ms. Yao said. “We’re looking at how AI can augment human capability, and how AI tools can help make work more efficient in different business contexts.”

She noted that investment prospects include startups working on financial inclusion, healthcare solutions and climate resilience.

The funding push comes amid a downturn in Philippine startup equity financing. A joint report by Kickstart and Singaporean business news platform DealStreetAsia showed that startup equity funding in the country had fallen 55% to $86.4 million as of end-June from a year earlier.

By deal value, the country trailed Singapore ($1.21 billion), Vietnam ($275 million) and Malaysia ($196 million).

It only surpassed Indonesia ($78 million) and Thailand ($10 million), while Cambodia did not disclose figures.

Across Southeast Asia, startup equity investment fell by 20.7% year on year to $1.85 billion, the lowest in six years.