Shaw Soo Wei Joins Gobi Singapore Fund as Venture Partner
The China-Singapore venture fund Gobi Partners has announced the appointment of a new venture partner for the Gobi Singapore Fund in the form of Shaw Soo Wei (pictured right). Ms Shaw is an experienced media executive as well as someone who’s steeped in the Singaporean entrepreneurial scene, recently working as a consultant to businesses in the region and getting some of them into the mainland China market.
Revealed exclusively to Tech in Asia by Gobi Partners this morning, Shaw Soo Wei becomes the second such venture partner after Dextrys’ James Tong. Her knowledge of both her home country and the China market – in both the private and public sectors – will be put to use at Gobi helping startups to expand across the region. Gobi invests in early-stage IT and media startups and manages over US$300 million in potential funds.
Shaw, in a statement issued upon her appointment, described the Gobi Singapore Fund as “a leading investor in cross-border opportunities in China and Southeast Asia.” Outlining her role, she explained:
As Chinese and Southeast Asian media companies start to expand beyond their home markets, my focus will be identifying early-stage investment potential and key leaders in disruptive innovation.
Ku Kay Mok, a partner at Gobi Singapore, lauded the new venture partner by describing her as an “experienced executive with strong connections with the media sector.” Mok added:
As we continue to invest in consumer-oriented digital media startups, she will be instrumental in identifying media trends and opening doors towards business and market opportunities as these companies scale and work with existing content providers and other traditional media players.
The last time we saw Gobi Partners in action was just last month when a game studio that it had invested in was sold at a very tidy profit. That sale saw Gobi claim that it has now achieved 60 percent in internal rate of return (IRR), a quantitative measure of a fund’s profitability of investments.