Foxmont Capital: Empowering Filipino Solutions to Filipino Problems

Foxmont Capital, a fund focused on the Philippines, ignites local tech innovation by investing in early-stage startups with Filipino connections. More than just funding, they offer mentorship, connections, and expertise, fostering companies that provide solutions to Filipinos like fintech, e-commerce, logistics, renewable energy,  and online education platforms. Driven by a diverse team, they actively shape the Philippine tech landscape, transforming the economy and empowering Filipino founders, one groundbreaking startup at a time. With that, why don’t you join me in learning more about Foxmont Capital Partners with its Managing Partner, Franco Varona

Can you share the journey and vision behind the founding of Foxmont Capital?

Back in 2018, when the founding partners of Foxmont decided to start the fund, there was a lot of internal conversation about the lack of funding and interest from foreign funds in the Philippines. Back then, there wasn’t much interest in putting early stage capital to work in the Philippines. Why was that? Why instead were countries like  Vietnam and Indonesia able to attract some early stage capital directly into their country’s startups. When we looked at that, we understood that there needed to be a filter at the country level - a fund that takes the first step of investing at the early stage. And when we looked at the skill sets of the partners- we realized that we might be best positioned to be that fund in the Philippines. It just worked really well.

Jesse (Maxwell) and I knew a lot of early stage founders in the country.  We also knew some of the larger industrialists in the country. Our other partner, Jelmer, focused on the financial side and fund management of the business. When we saw that there was strength in our partnership in filling each other's gaps and saw the gap in the entire ecosystem as a whole, we realized that we could try to close this gap ourselves: to close this gap in the Philippines. That’s how we came to be. and it's worked out conceivably quite well over the last few years.

What sectors or industries does Foxmont Capital primarily focus on for investments, and why?

We are a country focused and sector agnostic fund. The reason for that is because the whole intent of the fund is to support the ecosystem in finding the best founders to answer the most pressing problems for the Filipino people. We invest in Filipino solutions for Filipino problems. This ranges anywhere from fintech to e-commerce to insure-tech to med-tech and everything in between. As long as we think it answers a core problem to a Filipino, we will certainly take a very close look at that business, and hopefully invest.

How does Foxmont Capital differentiate itself from other venture capital firms in the market? What is your core mission/vision in relation to this? 

If you look at the Southeast Asian market, what you'll wind up seeing are three or four different types of funds. There is the regional generalist fund and they will invest in startups that they find is has high growth potential. There are many regional funds that are like that, but they don't focus on a country. There are regional sector specific funds, many of which that we've collaborated with as well, similar to the regional generalist funds. These are funds that are focused on verticals like D2C brands, fintech, e-commerce, or B2B SaaS. We are quite close to most of the industry specific funds as well that want to look for new investments in the Philippines. And then there are the country focused funds. Indonesia has about five of them, Vietnam probably has three or four, and I would say that the Philippines arguably has one or two of us. Everything else is conglomerate-run venture capital firms that have a different mandate as we do.

In essence, what differentiates Foxmont is: that we are making our decisions generally free of any corporate influence, we are country focused, and we are very hyper focused on the early stage of venture capital. We are pure investors and invest in great entrepreneurs for great businesses.

Can you highlight some successful investments or portfolio companies that Foxmont Capital has been involved with?

We consider many of our investments to be successful investments. We do a lot of work prior to investing with our due diligence, including market analysis, and finding and analyzing market comparables among others. We ultimately come to a decision on investing because we truly believe in the entrepreneur and the business that we've invested in. We think of the 39 investments that we've made so far as the best investments that we could possibly make.

One recent highlight would be our investment into Pickup Coffee. They have a lot of different kiosks all over the country. They are very aggressive and have received a lot of great investor and media attention from the region and internationally. Apart from that, they are already greatly known amongst Filipinos. We are great believers of the coffee business in the Philippines. Another successful business that we invested in would be E-taily, an e-commerce enabler. With ecommerce enablement, what we're very excited about is that, at the end of the day, it just shows the digitization of the Filipino people and the increasing demand from both consumers and businesses to get their goods online. It’s hard to ignore the success that E-taily has had over the last few years. On the B2B side, we are great fans of Peddlr, which is a PO focused on Sari-Sari stores. Today, it has over 200,000 monthly active users. They have a very active user base of Sari-Sari store owners online. This is a difficult market to tap into. We believe that Peddlr has done a very good job of doing so. Finally, Colourette Cosmetics which is a direct to consumer brand run by a great founder named Nina Dizon. This startup received a ton of attention last year and has also received a lot of investor interest. Nina is female founder from the Pampanga. She built this business on her own to become one of the largest beauty brands in the Philippines. She did it mostly online during the pandemic. We think that there's such a great story there that really shows the aggressive growth and interest of Filipino consumers in online products.

Looking ahead, what are the future goals and plans for Foxmont Capital in terms of expansion and impact?

When I speak to outside investors who are looking at the Philippines or Southeast Asia for the first time, I always say that the most impactful type of investment is actually early stage venture capital. Why is that? I believe that what we do when we invest in many of these businesses is that they are able to scale very quickly because of three reasons, namely: it's early stage,  based on tech, and based online. Since it's able to scale quickly, the businesses are often able to hire more people with potentially more income. I actually believe that Foxmont, as an emerging manager in an emerging market, is a very impactful fund to the Philippines. I believe that when our investments mature, we will be able to track a lot of the impact that we've made. Be it investing into female founders, businesses that are focused on climate or circular economy, businesses that are startups, and SME enablement among others, these are all very impactful things that I believe Foxmont capital we'll continue to do.

We’re going to continue to be focused on the Philippines, building more funds that continue to bring focus into the country. If there's one thing that this country needs to grow and to develop, its capital. I believe that Foxmont can help with that. 

Franco Varona is the Managing Partner of Foxmont Capital. Franco oversees investment strategies, fosters connections within and outside the company, is responsible for achieving the company’s mission and vision, and most importantly, aims to contribute to the local startup ecosystem. He is an important figure in realizing the mission of Foxmont Capital in the country. As seen in him, Franco has a burning passion for developing the startup ecosystem in the country through supporting promising startups made by Filipinos for Filipinos.

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