Private equity and venture capital investor Heritas Capital is betting that disruptions caused by the pandemic will have re-shaped behaviour to sustain the digitalisation of healthcare and education systems.
The Singapore-based investment arm of shipping and industrials group IMC Group recently launched its second venture fund (Heritas Venture Fund II) with a target corpus of $30 million to back about a dozen startups in the health tech, edtech, and foodtech sectors.
It is also launching a $150-million private equity growth fund, Heritas Growth Fund III, to invest in businesses that will include later-stage tech companies.
Heritas Capital has hitherto been investing in non-tech businesses, including in Q&M Dental Group, a Singapore-based chain of dental clinics, from its first PE fund; and Timberland Medical Centre, a private hospital in Kuching, in east Malaysia, from its second PE fund.
In 2018, from its first venture fund, it led a $9.75 million pre-Series A funding round in Holmusk, a digital health and analytics startup. Other companies in the venture portfolio include insurance platform CXA Group, biotech startup Hummingbird Bioscience, and foodtech startups Alchemy and SilverConnect.
From its second PE fund, Heritas Capital invested in Indonesian telehealth startup AloDoktor in 2019, and most recently, in Indian telemedicine startup MFine.
Tech businesses are expected to make up half of the portfolio of its third PE fund, Heritas Capital’s CEO Chik Wai Chiew told DealStreetAsia in an interview.
“To be clear, even the so-called traditional businesses are going to infuse more tech into their operations,” Chik said, noting that Q&M, for instance, is using artificial intelligence to plan treatments.
Chik joined the firm in 2016, after stints at Temasek Holdings in Shanghai, and Tembusu Partners. He was also at the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research, where he was responsible for commercialising biomedical and engineering deep tech ventures.
Edited excerpts of the interview:
