Golden Gate Ventures Doubles Down on Locofy.ai Investment to Accelerate Go-to-Market for Startups and Enterprises

Golden Gate Ventures, a venture capital fund in Southeast Asia (SEA) founded by Silicon Valley natives, has injected a second round of investment into Locofy.ai, a platform that converts graphic designs into working code with AI. Other investors joined the round, including experienced SME technopreneurs from Dropbox, Lottiefiles and Zopim. The US$4.25m investment is one of SEA’s largest pre-seed rounds into an AI startup.

Golden Gate Ventures first spotted Locofy.ai’s potential early on, identifying the startup’s ability to tap into the ever-growing low-code platform market and participating in Locofy.ai’s first institutional investment round in 2021.

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“The early-stage investment scene is all about identifying trends ahead of an inflection point, and to be the first in: the first institutional investor into the startup, at the right time. Our investments into the AI space pre-date the buzz around ChatGPT. Being FirstIN enables us to help founders ahead of anyone else and yields higher returns for our investors,” said Vinnie Lauria, Founding Partner at Golden Gate Ventures.

Off the back of the firm’s FirstIN strategy is a long list of successes including, Rukita, Bukuwarung, Homage, Vui and Multiplier – where Golden Gate Ventures was the first institutional investor and has continued to support the startups across multiple funding rounds.

What informs the firm’s early investment strategy is the combination of the partners’ SEA and Silicon Valley experience, coupled with Golden Gate Ventures’ Brain – our data-driven market predictions platform based on data and insights the firm has amassed over a decade.

“We’ve used data to identify niche opportunities in the AI space.  Golden Gate Ventures’ Brain platform is designed to mine data points across markets, industries and changing economic conditions, uncovering unexpected patterns that our partners leverage to identify specific types of startups that we proactively search for in the market,” said Jeffrey Paine, Founding Partner at Golden Gate Ventures.

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“Based on our Golden Gate Ventures’ Brain platform and partners’ insights, we started investing in AI startups over five years ago when most of the market was skeptical about their return-on-investment. AI is going to dramatically transform go-to-market strategies and accelerate e-commerce development at an exponential rate. We will see an unrivalled rate of innovation, which coincides perfectly with the rising consumer class across SEA’s fast-growing economies,” Vinnie Lauria adds.

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