A founder-led early-stage fund in Southeast Asia that specializes in the loneliest moment of a startup - the one before there's anything to show. Two former Fave operators decided to make that their whole business.
There is a specific kind of quiet that surrounds a founder who has an idea and nothing else. No revenue, no logos, no traction chart bending toward the sky. Just a person and a claim. Most venture funds are built to avoid that quiet - they wait for the numbers to arrive first. First Move built its entire business around walking into it.
First Move is a founder-led early-stage venture capital firm working across Southeast Asia. Its pitch is unusually plain: it writes first cheques, often at the idea stage, sometimes before a founder has assembled a pitch deck. The fund puts up to US$100,000 into a startup using a YC-style SAFE with a post-money valuation cap around US$3 million, and it tries to make the decision quickly. The tagline it uses - "founders backing founders" - is doing more work than most taglines. It is also a description of the business model.
The firm was started in 2023 by Joel Neoh and Audra Pakalnyte, two operators who spent roughly 13 years building companies together and exited three times along the way, across Groupon Asia Pacific, Says.com and Fave. When they moved to the other side of the table, they did not reinvent venture capital. They narrowed it - to the moment they remembered being hardest.
Ask anyone who has raised money and they will tell you the same thing: the earliest capital is the most difficult to secure and the most valuable to receive. Global funds increasingly want to see Series A-style traction before they engage. Angel investors exist, but they are scattered, informal, and hard to reach if you are not already inside a network. That leaves a founder at the idea stage - especially one in a market like Malaysia, Indonesia or the broader region - with nowhere obvious to go for the first believing dollar.
That gap is the thing First Move sells into. It is not trying to lead your Series B. It is trying to be the first phone call, the cheque that lets you quit the day job and buy the domain. In a region of more than 600 million people, the pre-seed layer has long been thin. First Move planted its flag there on purpose.
Plenty of funds say they are founder-friendly. The interesting question is what that changes when a real decision is on the table. Because Neoh and Pakalnyte have personally lived the pivots, the payroll panic and the exits, their read of an early founder is less about the spreadsheet - there usually isn't one - and more about the person and the wedge. The bet is that operator empathy is a screening tool, not a slogan. In a market where capital is increasingly a commodity, being genuinely understood is rarer than being funded.
That last step matters more than it looks. First Move built a Consumer Tech Angel Syndicate - a bench of experienced founders and senior executives from D2C, e-commerce, mobility and fintech scale-ups who co-invest in its deals. The lesson embedded in the structure is one any founder can borrow: money is a commodity, network is not. When you raise, the useful question is not only who is writing the cheque, but who arrives with it.
The credibility behind First Move is not theoretical. Joel Neoh's name is well known across the region - he founded and scaled consumer commerce businesses, ran Groupon's Asia Pacific operations, and later built Fave, which the pair exited. Audra Pakalnyte was alongside him through that arc, moving from operator to fund manager after the Fave exit. Between them they carry the scar tissue of building in emerging markets: the cash-flow squeeze, the abandoned features, the moment a plan meets a customer and loses.
That history shapes the fund's temperament more than any thesis document could. When you have raised your own hard first cheque, you tend to remember who returned the email and who did not. First Move is, in part, the fund the founders wished had existed when they started - designed less around ownership targets and more around removing friction from the beginning of a company's life.
First Move's portfolio does not read like a typical technology fund's. It reads like a well-curated market stall that happens to be run by engineers. There is premium Malaysian coffee (Koppiku), slow-baked pet kibble (Notti), longevity supplements aimed at women (L'Evive Labs), Asia's LGBTQ digital health platform (Pride Health), and an AI nutrition coach that tracks calories over chat (Welling). Alongside them sit more infrastructural bets: data observability (Decube), AI talent matching (OurTeam.ai), knowledge-base automation (Shieldbase.ai), and financial operations for regional startups (FinKnight).
The through-line is not a sector. It is a stage and a temperament: consumer-facing or consumer-adjacent businesses, run by founders who are early enough that most funds would politely pass. As the firm has evolved, the AI thread has thickened. First Move now describes itself as all-in on AI-native founders, and it applies a simple filter to keep the label honest - would this company exist without AI? If the answer is no, it is the kind of bet the fund is looking for.
Illustrative - based on First Move's stated first-cheque, idea-stage focus.
First Move's first fund was backed by 500 Global and its angel syndicate, and market chatter at launch pegged it in the US$3-4 million range aimed at 15 to 20 companies. The bigger signal came later. In 2025, the firm secured anchor backing from Jelawang Capital, a subsidiary of Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional, for a new AI-focused fund. The term sheet set a minimum target of roughly US$14.31 million (RM60 million) by a first milestone in early 2026, with Jelawang committing to match a share of the raise.
There is a quiet lesson in that progression for anyone raising institutional money: reputation is dealflow. The partners had operator credibility before they had a fund, and the capital followed the trust rather than the other way around.
The economics are the familiar venture arithmetic, run at an earlier and higher-variance stage. First Move raises capital from institutional limited partners - 500 Global early on, Khazanah's Jelawang Capital for the AI fund - and from the operators in its angel syndicate. It deploys that capital in small SAFEs, betting that a handful of the earliest cheques will convert into meaningful ownership as companies raise their next rounds and, eventually, exit. The SAFE with a post-money cap keeps the paperwork light and the decision fast, which is the point: at the idea stage, a 40-slide deck is friction, not signal.
Writing many small cheques at the idea stage is a wide-funnel strategy - most will not return the fund, and a few are meant to carry it. What lowers the risk on each bet is the operator lens on the front end and the syndicate on the back end, which gives portfolio companies a warm network the moment the money lands. It is a model that trades ownership percentage for access, speed and first position.
In the Southeast Asian venture landscape, First Move sits at the earliest, riskiest edge - the pre-seed and idea stage where the alternatives are regional accelerators and angel networks such as Antler, Iterative, 1337 Ventures and scattered syndicates, rather than the larger seed and growth funds. What separates it is less the cheque size, which is modest by design, and more the willingness to commit before the artifacts of a "real" company exist, paired with a co-investing operator network.
For a founder, the practical value is speed and belief at the moment both are scarcest. For the wider ecosystem, First Move is a piece of plumbing: the layer that turns an idea into something fundable by the next investor up the chain. It is not trying to be the last cheque. It is trying, on purpose, to be the first.