Indonesian Telkom-backed MDI Ventures and Finch Capital has announced the first close of its $40-million joint debut fund, Arise. The fund has gathered commitments from third-party corporate investors, family offices, and high-net-worth backers. One of the fund’s backers is Indonesia’s publicly traded ICT firm PT Metrodata Electronics Tbk.

The announcement confirms the DealStreetAsia report published earlier this week.

Arise aims to back 25 “real businesses” that are building interesting tech in ASEAN over the next three years. After the first close, Arise is in the process of executing new investments. The fund targets at least five deals by the end of 2021.

Co-helmed by Aldi Adrian Hartanto’s MDI Ventures and Hans de Back’s Finch Capital, the fund is focused on startups at post-seed and pre-series A-stages. It is looking at ticket sizes ranging from $250,000 to $3 million per round.

Based in Indonesia, Arise will look into the regional funding gap for early-stage tech companies. Going beyond writing cheques, the fund seeks to invest in startups early, even before the founders fully solidify their ideas and teams, provide access to strategic go-tomarket partners via its corporate LP network and long-term capital through its affiliated sister funds, including MDI Ventures, Centauri Fund.

“Despite the significant influx of high-quality founders over the last decade, a disproportionate allocation of capital makes the situation more challenging for promising entrepreneurs to secure investments during the region’s economic slowdown,” Aldi Adrian Hartanto, Partner at Arise said in the statement.

Hartanto adds, “Startups backed by Arise should ideally go on to receive investment from Centauri at the Series A stage, MDI Ventures at Series B and later stages, and finally – in some cases – see a meaningful exit via acquisition with Telkom Group as one of the potential buyers or IPO.”

“We’ve seen many seed-stage companies struggling to access the right markets, which is reflected by a lack of traction,” says Hans De Back, Managing Partner at Finch Capital. “Our role is to solve this problem with immediate go-to-market avenues by collaborating with our network of enterprise partners such as Metrodata and portfolio companies. In this way, we can enable companies to grow much faster and set them up stronger for Series A.”

Finch Capital, which focuses both on European and ASEAN markets, announced the first close of its third European Fund earlier this year. MDI Ventures, with $830 million in AUM, provides startups with a wide range of opportunities to get plugged into Indonesia’s Telkom Group of businesses in telecom, multimedia, property, financial services, and a network of other state-owned enterprises.

(Cindy/DealStreetAsia)