Tin Men Capital

Tin Men Capital

Tin Men Capital was founded in Singapore in 2018 by Murli Ravi and Jeremy Tan, two former operators and angel investors who had previously built and exited companies across Asia. Ravi co-founded Jigsoar, a technology recruitment firm, while Tan founded a digital consultancy and held roles at Singtel Innov8. They set up Tin Men to address what they saw as a funding gap in Southeast Asia: smart teams building essential B2B software for legacy industries, but struggling to raise Series A capital from generalist investors unfamiliar with the sectors. Tin Men runs a concentrated, thesis-driven strategy. It invests exclusively in Series A enterprise technology companies across Southeast Asia that are digitizing traditional verticals — logistics, construction, agriculture, and financial services. The firm leads or co-leads rounds, writing initial checks of $1M to $3M, and maintains a high-conviction portfolio with deep operational support. Confirmed portfolio companies include Pencil, an AI-driven creative ad platform, and Aviva, a digital lending infrastructure provider. Geographic exposure spans Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam, with thematic emphasis on platforms that replace manual workflows with cloud-based and AI-enabled systems. The firm closed its first fund, Tin Men Capital I, at approximately $20M in 2019, with a portfolio of roughly 10 companies by 2021 (per TechCrunch, 2021). Team size has not been publicly detailed, but published reports describe a lean, partner-heavy structure with Tan and Ravi leading all investment decisions. In 2021, the firm expanded its platform to include a venture-building arm aimed at catalyzing new B2B companies internally before seeking external co-investors, broadening its sourcing pipeline beyond traditional venture deal flow. Tin Men Capital differs structurally from most Southeast Asian early-stage VCs in its unbending focus on B2B alone — no consumer, no marketplaces, no B2B2C exceptions. The partners frame this as a deliberate information advantage: by refusing to scan the entire tech landscape, they build proprietary pattern recognition in unglamorous sectors that generalist and consumer-focused funds overlook. Their holding periods and board engagement also skew longer and heavier than the regional Series A norm, reflecting the operational turnaround work that digitizing industrial Southeast Asia demands.