Two of Asia’s major venture capital markets are poised for a bonanza following the correction from the 2021 peak, while Southeast Asia continues to suffer from dimming investor sentiment, according to startup founders at DealStreetAsia’s Asia PE-VC Summit 2025 in Singapore last week.
India’s blockbuster listings are creating a smoother exit path for fund managers as firms rush to monetise stakes and look to return capital to investors like Accel, the backer of Urban Company, a startup that recorded the most subscribed IPO in its size group this year following a $216-million listing on Friday.
“In the end in 2024, India had about $26-27 billion of exits for the VC ecosystem, compared to the previous five years when it was about $25 billion. In one year, we had a huge exit in the pipeline in the VC ecosystem,” according to Prashanth Prakash, Founding Partner of Accel India, one of Flipkart’s earliest investors.
“This year, we have around 25 new IPOs lined up, of which about 6-7 are portfolios of Accel,” said Prakash.
Accel’s portfolio company Swiggy, known as India’s number two in the quick commerce segment, made a $1.4-billion debut on the National Stock Exchange of India late last year.
“There are multiple decacorns that will IPO in the next six months. I would say the total IPO value could be $60-70 billion this year,” Prakash said.
The upbeat sentiment highlights the strong appetite from traders for IPOs in India, which has emerged as one of the world’s most active markets for new listings, recording over 100 new listings in the first half of 2025. Payments firm PhonePe, which is part of Flipkart, is reportedly planning to raise $1.5 billion ahead of its float, per a Bloomberg article.
Yet, the surge in India’s IPO activity is now being challenged by Hong Kong, where the market has rebounded impressively this year.
Boosted by new listings in Hong Kong, China’s venture capital market is showing signs of a recovery after a prolonged slowdown that saw global investors retreat amid geopolitical tensions. Over the past 12 months, deal activity and exits have begun to rebound—marking the first signs of liquidity returning to the market.
The comeback is driven by government policies to spur investment and by the so-called ‘DeepSeek moment,’ which underscored the potential of Chinese entrepreneurs, according to Granite Asia’s Jixun Foo, who sits on the board of Alibaba and Baidu as one of their earliest investors.
“The market is seeing this recovery and we have a pipeline of companies [looking to IPO]. There is a pent-up supply right now,” Foo said. “The queue is actually quite long.”
Earlier this year, Granite Asia-backed robotics startup Geekplus made its first-time share sales in Hong Kong, consisting of 161.4 million H shares priced at HK$16.80, with a total value of approximately HK$2.7 billion.
But startup investors in India and China are not only finding liquidity through capital markets.
“The reality is that when the capital market is up, you also see a lot more M&A. A lot of our portfolio companies are being approached for M&A right now because it’s all about the equity value and liquidity that investors can capture and how they can use that to accelerate their own growth inorganically via M&A,” Foo said.
Similarly in India, Prakash said that strategic acquisitions tend to happen when the buyers become bigger.
“Once these companies become $5-10 billion in the public markets, there’s a healthy M&A that’s starting… Once the good IPOs happen, the whole ecosystem kind of gets going,” said Prakash.
But the narratives in India and China are standing in contrast of Southeast Asia, a region that has not seen a liquidity event for venture capital-backed firms at the size of Grab Holdings’s IPO since 2021 and is anticipating a thin pipeline this year.
“The confidence [in Southeast Asia] obviously has been dampened a bit in recent years and times. There haven’t been major rounds of financing, exits or IPOs with the exception of a few buyouts,” Foo said, adding that he sees early promise in AI startups, especially in agentic AI talent moving to Singapore and making some early-stage investments, even though it’s still too soon for clear success stories.
Among these companies are Singapore IP unicorn PatSnap, backed by SoftBank and Tencent, which announced $100 million in annual recurring revenue with 20% year-on-year growth in 2023. Founded in 2007, the firm now has global offices across London, Tokyo, and Canada.
Prashanth agreed that he also sees global founders setting up base in Singapore to build for international markets, and they’ve started looking at some of those opportunities, though the liquidity would be unlocked in his home market.
“But for exits, we still want to see if we can domicile the company in India so that we can exit to the Indian market. Otherwise, we’d have to flip it back from Singapore to India before we exit. We want to see this market as an extension of the Indian opportunity and [ask if we] can then get liquidity in India,” he said.
Overheated valuations
India’s initial wave of the latest IPO boom has seen startups chase sky-high valuations, often outpacing their fundamentals. Retail demand has buoyed listings, but many stocks that debuted earlier this year trade below offer price.
“The initial IPOs were overvalued, nobody knows how to price them well. Bankers always oversell and entrepreneurs love to participate in those huge valuations,” Prakash said.
But that situation has now changed. “A lot of them have been corrected. There’s a very interesting phenomenon in India today because of all these post-IPO corrections. If you list a new software company, for example, it will be listed at a discount to the current public valuations in the comparable peers.”
Fifty-five companies have listed on Indian exchanges so far in 2025, but 37 of them (67%) are now trading below their issue price, according to Trendlyne.
Meanwhile, valuations of new Hong Kong stocks and their post-listing performance are further boosting a venture capitalist’s confidence.
“If you look back at the Hong Kong IPO market for the last 12-18 months, the post-lock up performance has been, on average, up 20% from IPO price, usually after the six-month lock-up ends. The performance of the IPOs now is also giving confidence back to the investors who participated in them,” Foo said.
“If you look at the blended multiples of the tech companies, which is comparing tech to tech for Hong Kong, is about 18x. The US is about 40-50x, so I’d say that it’s not crazy valued to the point that it is overheating. IPOs coming out are at reasonable price valuation, still.”
