By Justin Niessner

US institutional investors are warming up to Southeast Asia’s hard-hit VC market, sensing anopportunistic opening amid a macro reset, according to Jeremy Tan, co-founder of Singapore-based Tin Men Capital.

“There are institutional investors who got burned in the last round who are probably more hesitant, but there are pockets of capital that have never been burned before, and they’re keen to explore, especially given what’s they’re seeing in the US now,” said Tan.

Tan described a US market still experiencing fallout from the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in 2023, where investors are increasingly struggling with asset debasement and seeking growth in foreign markets with minimal geopolitical hangups.

VC fundraising for Southeast Asia-based managers amounted to USD 413m in 2025, down 78% on the annual average for the prior 10 years and the lowest 12-month total since 2014. This has been largely attributed to a pullback by US-based LPs, historically the region’s largest foreign investor across asset classes.

“Now that we’ve gone through this reset, a lot of the driftwood has been removed, and you have an increase in momentum of money and corporate investors associated with manufacturing and supply chain and logistics. That’s where the real economy gets built, and they understand that,” Tan added.

“A lot of investors from the middle of the US, the industrial US, are now leveraging on that to get value creation here, not just in AI [artificial intelligence] models but in the infrastructure layer below that. These folks come with a very clean slate. They tend not to be the first movers. This is the right time for them to come in because they’ve used this playbook before.”

Tin Men has moved to tap the perceived groundswell with the appointment of Arielle Thompson, formerly of Crescent Capital and Goldman Sachs, as global head of capital formation. Thompson is Cleveland-based and claims a significant Midwest network but downplayed the idea of a fundraising push specifically targeting the subregion.

“[The Midwest] is very industrious. They understand supply chains and maritime. Understanding the product or the portfolio is not the challenge,” she said. “It’s being able to talk all the way through the supply chains and how this is impacting at a global level.”

Tin Men, a B2B technology specialist, raised about USD 30m for its first fund in 2018. Tan described the vehicle as “top performing in Southeast Asia” despite some pandemic-delayed distributions. One agreed but still pending exit is expected to return half the fund.

Tan said Fund II, which closed on USD 41m in 2022, has been 30% returned to investors. “Our DPI[distributions to paid-in] is 30x that of the median of Southeast Asia and 3x that of the US for the same vintage,” he said. “The B2B focus has paid off and paid off during volatile times.”

Tin Men has not formally launched Fund III, but Tan noted that fundraising activity will get underway after the last Fund II deployments are transacted in the next few weeks. He sees USD 75mUSD 100m as a suitable target range, citing rising valuations and business model sophistication in the Southeast Asian start-up space.

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