$ 600 m valuation and JPMorgan exit both trace back to Sri Lanka

Friday, 3 April 2026 00:25 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Ventures Managing Partner Chalinda Abeykoon

Ventures writes first cheques to two fintech companies that market is now paying millions to catch up with

Most venture funds celebrate one good exit. nVentures is quietly sitting on two, and both are still getting bigger.

In the span of three years, the Singapore-Sri Lanka-based venture capital (VC) fund has logged an acquisition by JPMorgan and watched a portfolio company it seeded get valued at $ 600 million.

Neither outcome was obvious when nVentures wrote the cheques.

The MAS-licenced firm is now publicly raising Fund II, targeting $ 10 million to back Enterprise AI startups built by Sri Lankan founders for global markets.

Exit one: The company whose acquirer just hit $ 600 million

nVentures was the first institutional investor in Kaiju Labs—a Web3 infrastructure play it backed at the earliest stage. Kaiju was acquired by KAST Finance, delivering nVentures a 2x Multiple on Invested Capital (MOIC) at a 48% Internal Rate of Return (IRR) within 20 months of investment. Post-acquisition, KAST scaled its Sri Lankan engineering operation to over 100 roles. Earlier this year, KAST raised $ 80 million in a Series A led by QED Investors and Left Lane Capital at a $ 600 million valuation, now serving over 1 million users and processing roughly $ 5 billion in annualised transaction volume.

nVentures had already exited. The company it seeded is now one of the better-capitalised stablecoin platforms in the world.

Exit two: The company that became part of JPMorgan

Then came WealthOS. In the 2022 seed round, nVentures backed a cloud-native wealth management platform founded by two Sri Lankan entrepreneurs, with its entire product and engineering operation based in Colombo. The co-investors included Barclays. The acquirer turned out to be JPMorgan, which absorbed the company and all 60 of its employees into its International Consumer Banking division.

JPMorgan bought the platform, kept the team, and integrated the technology into its consumer banking infrastructure.

The numbers behind the narrative

Fund I: Under $ 3 million deployed across 13 investments spanning Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and the UK. Current reported metrics: 1.81x MOIC, 30% IRR, 0.26x Distributed to Paid-In Capital (DPI) — with two realised exits and several portfolio companies marked up between 2.2x and 6.4x on the back of subsequent funding rounds.

nVentures Managing Partner Chalinda Abeykoon said. “We didn’t have the luxury of a large fund. Every cheque had to be right. That discipline is what Fund II is built on.”

What comes next

Fund II targets $ 10 million, deploying into pre-seed and seed Enterprise AI startups—Sri Lankan founders building from Australia, Canada, Singapore, the UK, and the US, with engineering centres anchored in Colombo. The fund targets a 3x MOIC and 25% IRR gross, backed by LPs who are senior operators at Apple, AWS, Nokia, BCG, Klarna, and others.