Asia Partners’ Rippel on trends accelerated by Covid and the building of unicorns in the region.

In March this year, Singapore-based growth equity investment firm Asia Partners closed its inaugural fund at US$384 million in commitments.

During the WiT Travel Roadshow, Episode 2, we sat down with Oliver Rippel, Founding Partner at Asia Partners to hear what trends he foresees for travel tech companies in the region, and why he still believes that this is the Golden Age for technology in South-east Asia.

While emphasising the great human tragedy brought on by the pandemic, and the impacts on disposable income from a subdued economy, Singapore-based Oliver Rippel notes that for tech in the region, the impacts were actually neutral to positive.

“We have seen great acceleration of offline to online migration [in] areas like e-commerce, health tech, etc. And also on the business side we have seen acceleration of digitisation efforts within companies, all of those are very positive for the ecosystem”.

Asked whether Covid had necessitated a re-evaluation of the bullish predictions that Asia Partners made in 2019, Rippel thinks not. Asia Partners recently publicly assessed themselves against those predictions, and in half of the eight predictions, he believes that they have been “about right”, referring to the other four as a “work in progress”.

In its predictions, Asia Partners said the region would produce more than 20 additional billion-dollar value tech companies 2029. Of these, it believes the next decade will see at least half of them pursuing an IPO, while new and existing tech companies will create an additional US$400 billion dollars of incremental equity value.

Citing youthful demographics, and improvements both in corporate governance and ease of doing business, Asia Partners further predicted that 70% of the winners will be regional platforms, and 30% of them will be Indonesia focused.

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