Jelawang Capital appoints Howard Soh as CEO
- ID
- 28433
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 25 Sep 2026, 12:37 PM
- Fetched
- 25 Sep 2026, 1:23 PM
- Provider
- Digital News Asia
- Category
- malaysia-tech
- Original URL
- https://www.digitalnewsasia.com/startups/jelawang-capital-appoints-howard-soh-ceo
- Source URL
- https://www.digitalnewsasia.com/rss.xml
Summary
- Score
- 4.0
- Created
- 25 Sep 2026, 1:23 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- founderssaas_founders
What happened
Jelawang Capital, described as Malaysia's National Fund-of-Funds and a wholly owned Khazanah Nasional Berhad subsidiary, named Howard Soh as CEO effective 1 October 2026. Soh joins from LemmaTree, where he was group chief investment officer, and the announcement cites prior roles as CEO of Sea Malaysia, director of investments at Ekuinas, and founding/leading early Malaysian operations for Lazada, Zalora and Foodpanda. Jelawang sits inside Khazanah's US$245 million (RM1 billion) Dana Impak allocation aimed at strengthening Malaysia's VC and startup ecosystem.
Why it matters
Jelawang is a fund-of-funds, so the RM1 billion Dana Impak allocation reaches founders indirectly, by way of the VC fund managers it backs rather than through direct cheques. If you are raising in Malaysia, the useful signal to track is which fund managers get mandates from Jelawang under the new CEO, since that determines where the capital actually lands. The announcement contains no programme terms, cheque sizes, sector focus or timelines, so there is nothing actionable yet beyond watching the GP list.
Discussion angle
Fund-of-funds vs direct investment: does routing RM1 billion through Malaysian VC managers actually reach early-stage founders faster, or does it concentrate capital in the same few GPs?