SINGAPORE, 6 NOVEMBER 2024 – Wavemaker Impact, Southeast Asia’s first climate tech venture builder, today launched its first White Paper titled “Portfolio Acceleration: Getting Companies Seed Round Ready”.
Portfolio Acceleration is the process through which VC funds help their portfolio companies (“portcos”) accelerate growth to maximise impact and returns in the shortest possible time. While there is abundant literature on later-stage growth – such as Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman and High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil – far less is available for early-stage companies and VCs.
At Wavemaker Impact, we believe that every inflection point in a company’s growth journey is critical, particularly when backing passionate founders solving real-world problems like climate change. Considering that failure rates for startups can reach 70% to 80% at the pre-Series A stage, we were prompted to investigate: Can we systematically help early-stage companies reach a proven market opportunity more quickly? To explore this, we conducted a study on Portfolio Acceleration to uncover fresh insights and advance an area we believe has long been underexplored.
The whitepaper presents new insights and findings on growth catalysts for early-stage companies within the venture capital space. This report details the insights into a set of observations, which we call the “3Ps of Portfolio Acceleration”:
- Product-Market Fit (PMF) – Achieving PMF is key for the first growth spark. Most, if not all, of the interviewees linked their own or their portfolio companies’ growth inflection points to achieving PMF.
- People: Founder is Key – Founders alone hold the key to finding PMF; good founders run high-quality experiments to test their PMF hypotheses.
- Providing Strategic Clarity – Founders’ primary request was guidance in navigating ambiguity. They specifically described strategic advice as helping clarify current and future priorities amid the noise and distractions.
The report is the product of a 6-month study, drawing interviews with over 50 industry practitioners within Southeast Asia’s VC space in the first half of 2024. Interviewees included entrepreneurs, exited founders, fellow VC funds, and accelerators.
“Our aim is to build on the foundational work of industry veterans like Eric Ries and John Mullins by supplementing existing knowledge with real-life examples and reflections from VC peers and startups in the rapidly growing Southeast Asia region,” says Ben Ong, Venture Builder at Wavemaker Impact. “We hope the findings summarised in this whitepaper provide some thought-provoking insights for both startup founders and fund managers, so that the VC community can continue enabling talented entrepreneurs to solve meaningful problems at speed and scale.”
To read the full report, download the white paper via this link.
About Wavemaker Impact
Wavemaker Impact is the climate-tech venture build VC Fund of Wavemaker Partners. Launched in 2021, the fund co-founds sustainability startups with proven entrepreneurs, with the goal of building a portfolio of companies by 2035 that has the potential to reduce 10% of the global carbon budget by 2035. Every startup that Wavemaker Impact builds is a ‘100×100’ company — with the potential to abate 100 million metric tonnes of CO2e and generate US$100 million revenue per year. Its US$60 million debut fund focuses primarily on Southeast Asia and includes from limited partners such as the United States International Development Finance Corporation, British International Investment, Triple Jump, JG Summit, and Qarlbo Energy. For more information, visit wavemakerimpact.com.
For media enquiries, please contact:
Marella Putri
Analyst, Communication
Email: marella@wavemaker.vc