EV Growth beefs up team with hires from media group, BAce Capital, Rocket Internet

GROWTH-STAGE venture capital firm EV Growth, a joint venture between East Ventures, Sinar Mas' SMDV and Yahoo! Japan Capital, has appointed an operating partner and two new vice-presidents (VPs) of investment to its team.

David Fernando Audy, who has over 18 years of executive experience in the media and content industry, joins as operating partner. He was the chief executive of PT Media Nusantara Citra Tbk (MNCN IJ), a publicly-listed media conglomerate in Indonesia, and was a director of PT Global Mediacom Tbk (BMTR IJ), a publicly-listed company in the field of DTH Satellite Pay-TV operator and Broadband ISP.

He currently serves as a senior advisor to ThreeBody Capital, a UK-based investment fund for publicly-traded securities. He is also the former CEO of WeChat Indonesia, director for Rakuten Indonesia and the founder of Okezone.com, a news portal in Indonesia.

Mulyono Xu, formerly managing director at BAce Capital, and Pascal Christian-Sarana, formerly director at Rocket Internet, have been appointed the fund's VPs of investment.

Mr Xu led three Series A deals and a number of earlier-stage deals in the region while at BAce Capital. He has more than 10 years of experience in the Internet industry, and was heavily involved in most of Alibaba's South-east Asia's investments and strategic partnerships.

Mr Christian-Sarana has seven years of cross-border deal execution, investment structuring and M&A (mergers and acquisitions) advisory experience. At Rocket Internet, he led proptech investments in Indonesia.

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Willson Cuaca, managing partner at EV Growth and founding partner of East Ventures, said the new members' diverse experiences complement that of the existing team. "All of them are based in Jakarta and will work closely with the Indonesia-based founders," he said.