The Realisation of the Catalyst for Change

Today I saw a flurry of Linkedin posts from one of our cohort companies from Fund I about a new initiative they were doing with Electric Vehicles in the last mile delivery space.

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When we first started looking at startups at Accelerating Asia Ventures 6 years ago (Happy birthday btw!) the idea of Electric Vehicles was simply that: an idea.

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As the market sentiment for Electric Vehicles grows we have started to see more and more startups come through the selection process at Accelerating Asia offering services to either provide EV Fleets, Manage EV fleets, improve EV services etc.  As the market develops we will see increasing numbers of new entrants solving a nascent industry’s problems that we don’t even know exist yet. This is one of the things I like about being involved as an LP at Accelerating Asia, we get a front seat get to meet the disruptors and innovators of nascent industries like this.

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While the Electric Vehicle market grows and evolves I expect that we will also see the usual cycles: A wave of disbelief, more entrants validating the idea is real, the market getting crowded, legacy incumbents realising they’re too slow to adapt and then seek to acquire market share, and the smaller players look to merge and consolidate their positions to defend and grow their own market share.

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In our own portfolio companies, the ones with fleets are starting to adopt EVs and it’s heartening to see that the countries that they operate in are also incentivising the deployment of EV fleets to mitigate climate change and reduce pollution in congested cities amongst other things.  The EV Fleet management companies and software providers in our portfolio are also seeing huge growth and take up of their services because of this confluence of government incentives, a maturing technology, and infrastructure.  At the fund we can really see how we are enabling change to happen across all sectors, economies, and demographics, and whilst some industries will take an impact, we enable these new ones to flourish and create employment opportunities for the new generations to come.  The only problem is in how we train the next generation for jobs that don’t even exist yet…. (spoiler alert: we also have a startup addressing that problem too!)

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By enabling investment in these early stage startups we are really beginning to see the realsation of what we do at Accelerating Asia Ventures:  “We invest in humanity’s greatest catalyst for change - entrepreneurs”