Minette Navarrete

A pioneer in the Philippine startup ecosystem, Minette Navarrete is the founder and managing partner of Kickstart Ventures, the nation’s largest corporate venture capital fund. She is globally recognised for opening doors for talented entrepreneurs, having led Kickstart to invest globally in tech startups since its inception over a decade ago. The firm has successfully supported names like Kumu, SariSuki and Pickup Coffee.

Navarrete’s strategic vision is further amplified by her crucial concurrent roles as vice-chair of the Ayala Corporation’s Innovation Council and a senior vice president at Globe Telecom, allowing her to bridge the gap between disruptive technology and one of the country’s most established conglomerates.

The year 2025 has seen Navarrete significantly intensify Kickstart’s focus, leveraging the firm’s third fund, the Active Fund, to drive the next wave of innovation. Under her resolute leadership, the firm is on track to fund a minimum of 12 startups by the end of 2025, with a strategic pivot towards high-impact sectors, particularly electronic commerce and artificial intelligence (AI). Navarrete’s philosophy is that “Innovation is most powerful when it’s inclusive”, championing a “connected and inclusive prosperity” where startups, investors, corporates and governments co-create growth.

Her specific mandate is to back AI-driven ventures under the theme of “from automation to augmentation”, with every team member, including herself, actively “experimenting with building [their] own Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPTs)” to increase efficiency. She views venture capital as a means to nurture ecosystems and has made her most important investment decision in people and building culture, bringing together “spiky talent with diverse backgrounds” to ensure a strong foundation for Kickstart’s next leap. The firm has already executed seven follow-on investments this year, ensuring robust support for its high-performing portfolio companies.

Her focus remains on building bridges in the industry and discovering new business founders who are creating solutions that drive sustainable growth and open up opportunities for communities that have long been underserved, aiming to shape an innovation landscape in Southeast Asia where success is shared.