MDI Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of Indonesia-based, state-owned telecommunications company Telkom Indonesia, is planning to raise between $300m and $500m for its second fund, DealStreetAsia reported yesterday.
The news was revealed by Budi Gunadi Sadikin, deputy minister at Indonesia’s state-owned enterprise ministry, who was speaking at the Devcon/Indonesia Digital Economy Summit 2020 event held by software provider Microsoft.
“The commitment that I will give as part of the ministry is that I will push and approve of Telkom’s second fund,” Sadikin said. “The size will be around $300m to $500m.”
MDI Ventures was launched in 2016 and said later in the year it expected to allocate $25m in funding to startups per year over a four-year period. It subsequently increased the size of that first fund to $150m and has exited Whispir and Geniee through initial public offerings.
Kenneth Li, managing director at MDI Ventures, told DealStreetAsia last month that it plans to launch both a seed-stage investment vehicle and a late-stage fund over the course of 2020.
The unit formed a $40m investment vehicle in partnership with Singapore-headquartered telecoms operator Singapore Telecommunications in May 2019 and launched a fund with KB Investment in September called Centauri Fund that, as of December, was expected to close at $150m.
