Where VC Discipline Meets Impact
At our 2025 Annual Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Sai Kit Ng, Chairman of the Malaysian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association (MVCA), closed things out with a sharp, grounded take on where venture discipline meets impact investing — drawn from close to a decade of watching the space evolve in Malaysia, and from his own experience chairing MVCA since 2023.
His starting point was candid: impact investing in Malaysia is still young. Some of the country's most impactful deals weren't even built with impact in mind — they were retrospectively measured and found to be doing good, almost by accident. That observation is what pushed him to look more closely at how VCs could have more intentional conversations about impact and sustainability, rather than stumbling into it.
The numbers
Drawing on recent regional data, he laid out where the market actually stands:
Impact allocations across Asia grew roughly 60% between 2019 and 2024
The investor base over the same period expanded by around 26%
The average impact deal size sits at roughly USD 7 million — not a rounding error, a real allocation
By 2024, impact-focused funds delivered close to 20% returns, versus around 17% for traditional capital
That last point was the one he leaned on hardest. In a region where plenty of traditional VC funds are struggling to post double-digit returns after the unicorn-chasing years, impact funds outperforming isn't a nice-to-have footnote — it's proof that doing good and doing well aren't mutually exclusive.
Southeast Asia currently accounts for around 47% of that regional impact allocation. Malaysia's slice of it, by his estimate, is about USD 2.6 billion — roughly 3% of Asia's total impact capital pool. Small. But that's exactly the point: there's real room, and real momentum, to grow it.
Stop operating in silos
The framework he walked the room through was less about theory and more about what actually changes in a term sheet. A conventional VC underwrites for problem, solution, and financial return. Impact investing asks for all of that plus a second layer: measurable outcomes, milestone-linked governance, and reporting requirements that don't exist in a typical VC deal — think impact reporting rights, or KPIs tied to things like the percentage of borrowers who are women-led micro and small enterprises.
His challenge to the room was to stop treating these as separate boxes to tick. Build dual KPIs directly into the term sheet — financial returns and measurable impact, side by side, the same way a fintech portfolio might track portfolio-at-risk alongside something like the percentage of underserved borrowers gaining access to finance. Treat intent, measurement, and scale as one continuous loop: you begin with intent, because without it there's no real outcome to chase. Then you measure, because impact has to be seen, not just felt. And only then can you scale — because efficient capital allocation only works once the first two are in place.
He also pointed to Malaysia's philanthropic landscape as a case study in what happens without that discipline: plenty of well-meaning trusts, each running their own small projects, each carrying their own admin overhead, with no shared platform to pool capital or measurement standards. His call to action was blunt — bulk up. Find ways to combine capital and standardize how outcomes get reported, so philanthropic and impact capital actually compounds instead of getting spread thin.
The takeaway
Malaysia is still just a sliver of Asia's impact capital pool. But the data suggests the opportunity is real, the returns are already competitive, and the frameworks to close the gap — dual KPIs, shared measurement standards, less siloed capital — already exist elsewhere in the region. It's a matter of building the muscle to use them.
This is exactly the kind of conversation we want to keep going.
