Two boring stories. Laid side by side, they are the most honest picture of this region you will get right now. Both are asking the same question, the one I ask in every partner meeting at Indelible, the one that decides who gets rich over the next ten years and who just gets used:

Who owns the thing that is actually scarce?

Malaysia tries to climb a rung

On 1 July, MTDC, the Malaysian Technology Development Corporation, launched the first cohort of Semicon Start Malaysia. Ten companies picked from 39 applicants. A pot of RM10 million for the first phase, up to RM1 million per company, call it US$250k apiece, with Khazanah money in the mix.

If you have been in this region as long as I have, your first reaction to “government launches program to build high-tech industry” is a small, tired sigh. We have seen this film. Malaysia has a graveyard of these: grand corridors, MOU signings, innovation valleys, state venture funds that wrote checks into slide decks and got slide decks back. Big announcement, ribbon, photo, handshake. Two years later you go looking for the companies and nobody is home.

I had that sigh ready. Then I stopped, because this one has the potential to be different, and the reason why is the whole point of this piece.

This time there is a real industry underneath the program. Penang is not a hopeful press release. Penang has been doing semiconductor assembly and testing for decades. A serious slice of the world’s chips passes through Malaysian hands on the way to being packaged and tested. That is not a pitch. That is payroll. Factories that have run for thirty years, and a workforce that already knows the difference between a good die and a bad one.

So the bet is not “let’s conjure a chip industry out of nothing.” The bet is much narrower, and potentially much smarter: we already own one rung of this ladder. Can we climb one step up into design, where the money actually sits?

The climb has already started without the program. SkyeChip, a homegrown Penang design house doing genuinely hard work (high bandwidth memory, chiplets), listed on Bursa’s Main Market. Before recording this week’s episode I saw a report suggesting Cerebras, the US chip company that also just went public, may be tapping SkyeChip for design work. I have not verified that, so hold it loosely. But the proof point stands either way: a local company has already climbed the exact rung the government now wants ten more companies to climb. Add the National Semiconductor Strategy from a couple of years back, Penang’s own chip design academy, and Selangor standing up a state fund, and you have something rarer than a press release. You have momentum with an industry underneath it.

The timing is as good as it has ever been, too. The world wants to diversify where its chips come from. Nobody wants every advanced part made in one strait that could close on a bad Tuesday. Malaysia is neutral, capable, and already in the supply chain. If there was ever a decade to attempt this climb, it is this one.

Now the hard part, out loud, because that is what this show is for. Money was never the thing missing here. What has been missing, every single time, is patience and expertise arriving in the same envelope as the cash. A million ringgit and a short program do not build a chip design house. Chip design is a long-term sport played by people who have failed at it a few times first. If Semicon Start is a check and a demo day, it joins the graveyard. If it comes with real design mentors, real customer introductions, and follow-on money that does not vanish when the photo op ends, it has a shot.

So the thing to watch is not the RM10 million. It is whether anyone attached to the program has real operating expertise. Money is easy. Knowing what to do with it is the scarce part. Hold that thought.

The cable, and what it actually is

Now to the seabed. This week it was reported that Microsoft, together with Singapore’s Lightstorm, is leading a consortium building a new subsea cable called I2C: roughly 3,600 kilometres of fibre linking India to Malaysia to Singapore, targeted to go live around 2029, built for AI and data centre demand.

Standard disclaimer, because I read these announcements the way I read a pitch deck: this is a 2029 project, consortium details on these things move around, and I have not seen final paperwork, just a news story. Treat the specifics as direction, not gospel.

But the direction is what matters. Every few weeks now there is a story like this. A new cable, a new hyperscaler campus, somewhere with cheap power and a friendly minister. And every one of them gets written up as billions pouring into Southeast Asian digital investment. Celebrations all round.

Here is what I actually see, and maybe I am a bit cynical: the region being wired up as a very good place to host other people’s compute. The fibre lands here. The data centres sit here. They use our power and our seabed. That is real economic activity and I am not pretending it is nothing. But ask the only question that matters. Who owns the compute? Who owns the demand sitting on top of that cable? Generally, not us. The demand is offshore, the models are somebody else’s, and the margin, the part where value actually compounds, is in Seattle and San Francisco, not Johor.

We are the landlord renting out the ground floor, being told to feel grateful for the rent.

I am a capitalist. Rent is not a dirty word. It is a perfectly good business, and Singapore has run that playbook for fifty years. But do not confuse being the landlord with owning the building. A region cannot tell itself it is climbing the value chain when what it is actually doing is leasing the basement to the people who own the value chain.

This is where the cable and the chips rhyme. Same story, pointed in opposite directions. Malaysia’s chip program is a country trying to own more of the building. The cable is the region agreeing to stay one rung down. One is a strategy. The other is a lease dressed up as a strategy.

What is actually scarce

Value flows to whoever controls the scarce thing. It always has, AI or no AI. Find what is scarce, own it, and the money flows to you. Own something abundant and you compete it down to nothing.

So: in Southeast Asia right now, what is actually scarce?

I will tell you what is not. The technology is not scarce. The model is not scarce. Models are commoditizing in front of us, between the big labs’ price war and open source, and they will get cheaper and better every quarter whether you do anything or not. Building your moat on the model is building your house on the tide.

Here is what is scarce. The customer who already trusts you. The physical network that took years and real pain to build. The license from a regulator who does not hand them out twice. Distribution into the towns and small shops that no hyperscaler in the world will ever bother to map. The workflow nuance that took ten years of unglamorous work and cannot be copied in a weekend of clever prompting.

That is the scarce layer. That is the thing worth owning.

Where the winners come from

Look back at the two stories through that lens and they light up. Malaysia is trying to move from an abundant thing (cheap, capable labour, which everyone has) to a scarce thing (design capability, which very few have). Right instinct. Own the scarce rung.

The founder version of the same move: the winner is not the one who owns the AI and goes hunting for a customer. The winner is the one who already owns the customer and quietly adds AI on top. The lending business that already has the borrowers and now underwrites them better. The logistics operator that already owns the trucks and the routes and now runs them tighter. The distributor who already reaches 10,000 shops and now forecasts demand for them.

Those companies will never put AI in the headline. They do not need to. They already own the scarce thing. The AI is just a sharper tool in a hand that already knows the work.

I know that is not a fashionable thing to say in 2026. Every second founder I meet opens with the model they are building on, the AI-native this, the agentic that. The funding tallies love it: somebody counts up the AI startups that raised this quarter, puts out a chart, and everyone nods. But that chart measures ambition, not durable revenue. Those are very different things, and the gap between them is where founders and their investors go to die.

And here is the uncomfortable part I want founders to sit with. Every wave of cheap capital, every shiny new tool, every drop in the price of intelligence does not close the gap between those two kinds of companies. It widens it. When the tool gets cheap and everyone has it, the tool stops being the difference. The only difference left is the position underneath: the distribution, the trust, the scarce layer. Cheap AI makes owning real distribution worth more, not less.

Be honest about what you own

This is where Indelible puts its money, and I will say it plainly so you can hold me to it. We back people who own the scarce layer, or are credibly climbing one rung towards owning it. Not people standing on top of somebody else’s scarce layer with a nicer logo. (None of this is investment advice. It is simply where my money already is.)

So the homework this week, if you are a founder: be honest about what you actually own. Not what is in your headline. What is in your foundations. If the answer is a really good wrapper around somebody else’s model, it is better to know that now. Using a commodity as an input is perfectly fine. Every company will. The question is what you own on top of it.

A chip program in Penang. A cable on the seabed. One country trying to climb a rung, one region agreeing to rent out the basement, and underneath both of them, the only question that has ever really mattered:

Who owns the thing that is scarce?

I write the checks, so I have to be right about this. Come argue with me if you think I am wrong.

Real. Raw. Relatable.

So this week I want to talk about who is buying, who is selling, and which side of that trade you actually want to be standing on.

Four stories, and they braid into one. We open with the good news, because there usually is some. Then we follow the money all the way to the part nobody puts on the deck.

The smart money showed up twice in one week

Start with the hopeful, because it is real and it is specific.

This week two of the most serious institutions on the planet made their first proper bet on Southeast Asia. Not a press tour. Not a memorandum of understanding. Actual money into actual companies.

The first: MIT, the university, joined the cap table of a Singapore company called PVX Partners. Not a flashy name, I had not heard of them before this. They do cohort-based financing for user acquisition. In plain terms, they fund the marketing spend for mobile games and consumer apps, and they get paid back out of the revenue those users generate. It came on the back of a ten-plus-million-dollar round with names like General Catalyst, and I think a DraftKings vehicle in there too. As far as I could find, this is MIT’s first major disclosed startup bet in the region.

The second, and this one landed the day before I recorded: Pfizer Ventures, the drug giant’s venture arm, made its first Southeast Asian startup investment into a Singapore biotech called Engine Biosciences. Engine does AI-driven precision oncology, hunting cancer drugs with machine learning. They just opened a Silicon Valley office to go with the Singapore base.

Here is why this is not just a funding roundup. When an elite American endowment and Big Pharma’s investment arm both pick Singapore companies for their opening move, in the same week, that is not a coincidence. That is a signal about where sophisticated capital now thinks the edge is.

These are not tourists chasing a hot round. PVX is unglamorous infrastructure. Engine is deep science. Both are the kind of bet you make after you have done the work.

Hold that thought, because the rest of this is about what happens to the money that was already here when it tries to leave.

The Philippines is betting its whole year on one listing

On the 27th, Mint, the company behind GCash, filed its registration with the Philippine SEC and its listing application with the stock exchange. The number: up to 92.3 billion pesos, roughly 1.5 billion US dollars at up to ten pesos a share, targeting a fourth-quarter debut. If it prices at the top, it is the largest IPO in Philippine history.

Sit with the context. The Philippines’ IPO count for 2026 before this filing was zero. Nothing. So the country’s first listing of the year is also the biggest it has ever had. And it is a fintech, which if you have listened before you know is my home-turf bias made concrete.

GCash put financial services into something like 90 million pockets. It is the rare regional company that is genuinely profitable. The pitch writes itself: the people who made GCash a habit can now own a piece of it. I want this to work. Let me say that plainly.

Now the part that worries me, out loud, because that is the point of these episodes.

The float is about 12%. Twelve percent of the shares go to the public market. The public is being sold a fairly thin slice while insiders keep the rest. And to fit GCash into its main index, the exchange is now considering cutting its own minimum public float rule from 20% down to as low as 12%.

Take that in. The benchmark is bending its own rules to accommodate one company. When a market reshapes itself around a single listing, and that listing is carrying the whole nation’s IPO year on its back, that is not a recovery. That is concentration risk wearing a party hat.

The real question: does GCash trade well enough to reopen the pipeline for everyone waiting behind it, or does one wobble set the Philippine market back another two years?

To answer that honestly, you cannot just look at GCash. You have to look at what happened to the last batch of regional champions that rang the bell.

Indonesia got a stay of execution, not a clean bill of health

While Manila is opening a door, Jakarta is trying to keep one from closing.

On the 24th and 25th of June, MSCI, the index provider whose decisions quietly move billions in passive money, deferred its decision on whether to downgrade Indonesia from emerging-market status to frontier. They kicked it to November. Indonesia keeps the badge, for now.

Why was it even on the table? MSCI said, in effect, that it cannot trust the market. Lack of transparency in who actually owns the shares. Suspected coordinated trading that makes it hard to know what a fair price even is, or how much stock is genuinely free to trade. And the market rallied on the news.

Here is where I get off the celebratory bus. That rally is celebrating a delay, not a fix. When the index provider tells you it cannot work out who owns the shares or what they are really worth, that is not a paperwork problem. That is a governance warning about the entire market.

And look at the response. Indonesia is leaning on Danantara, the sovereign fund, plus insurance and pension money, to add buying support and prop up the exchange. Think about what that means. To pass a test about transparency and genuine free float, the answer is to bring in state and pension money to hold the market up. That is close to the opposite of the thing they are being asked to prove.

A frontier downgrade is not abstract. It would force passive funds to sell Indonesian equities mechanically, which raises the cost of capital for every late-stage founder in the country dreaming about an IPO on that market, especially now without the hype cycle. November is closer than it sounds.

Manila might be opening up, maybe. Jakarta is one review away from being pushed out. Hope on one side, risk on the other. So let me put some numbers on which way this bet usually goes.

The receipts

I promised you a number at the top. Here it is with the receipts. Since 2017, this is how Southeast Asia’s big tech IPOs have actually treated the public investors who bought in.

SPAC valuations are listing marks, not day-one closes. Dollar figures are dragged by weak pesos and rupiah. Current values approximate.

One winner. Sea Limited went out at a $4.9 billion valuation and trades somewhere in the $56 billion range today. Everything else is a shipwreck. Grab is down around 60% from its listing cap. GoTo lost roughly nine-tenths of its value. Bukalapak is trading below the cash it raised. Converge, the one Philippine name I could pull, is the cautionary tale sitting right next door to GCash.

Now the caveats, out loud, because the show runs on honest data. The SPAC valuations were listing marks, not day-one closes, and several fell on the open. Currency matters too: weak pesos and rupiah drag the dollar figures down. On a per-share basis the returns are often worse than the market-cap numbers suggest, because of share issuances along the way.

But the base rate for this region is brutal. If you bought the Southeast Asia tech IPO story over the last eight years, with one exception, you lost money.

What actually breaks the curse

Here is the thing that matters. Almost every one of those shipwrecks went public unprofitable, floated at the very top of the cheap-money window on a growth-at-all-costs story.

GCash is not that. GCash actually makes money. That is the one real thing that could break the curse.

The curse was never the business. The risk is the entry price. GCash is reportedly chasing a valuation around eight to nine billion dollars, against roughly five billion in the private market just a couple of years ago. That is the exact same “premium to the last round” framing that came right before every name on the shipwreck list.

History says it is not company quality that determines whether public investors win. It is the price on the day they are let in. Buy low, sell high. If Mint prices for perfection at the top of the range, the regional base rate says the valuation compresses toward fundamentals first and compounds later, if you are patient. Converge, down 40%, is what impatience looks like.

Who holds the pen

Here is the thread that ties the week together.

This was the week Southeast Asia’s public markets stopped pretending to be a pure growth story and started behaving like state-managed plumbing. A fintech bends an exchange’s rules to get listed. A country leans on its sovereign fund to keep its emerging-market badge. And underneath all of it, the smartest new money in the world, MIT and Pfizer, is quietly buying into private companies at the early stage, where the value actually gets made, long before any of this public-market theater begins.

Notice where the sophisticated capital is putting its chips. Not into the IPO. Into the cap table, years earlier.

So my filter for all of it, and yours, should be the same question: who actually holds the pen here? Who decides what gets built, what gets listed, what gets propped up? More and more in this region, the answer is governments and sovereign funds, not founders and not public investors.

If you are a founder who is not a conglomerate heir or a sovereign-fund favourite, that should tell you exactly where to aim, and exactly who to raise from.

That is the week. If it was useful, the most useful thing you can do is send it to one founder who is about to get excited about an IPO.

In May, startups in this region raised $472 million. More than double what they raised in April. Read only that line and you would think the drought had broken.

Now the second number. That doubling was built almost entirely on two checks. Take those two out and May was thin, still down on the year before.

So here is the question I want to sit inside. When you are a founder in Kuala Lumpur, or Bangkok, or Manila, which numbers are actually telling you the truth?

Because two of the loudest numbers in this market, the funding headline when you raise and the IPO pipeline when you want out, are both unreliable. And they are unreliable in different ways. The money coming in is inflated. The money going out is uneven. In between sits a real company, your company, trying to make decisions on top of figures that flatter and figures that lie.

The mirage: headlines that flatter

The funding rebound is a perfect little lie. Not a dishonest one. A statistically true one, which is worse, because it is harder to argue with.

May 2026: $472 million across 31 deals, per DealStreetAsia. Up 104% on April. The kind of line that gets screenshotted into a pitch deck by Tuesday.

Look underneath it. The jump came from the return of mega deals, transactions worth $100 million or more. A data center. An AI hardware platform. April had none. May had two. Two checks did the heavy lifting for an entire region. And even with them, May still came in 18% below the same month a year earlier. Strip the two big ones out and what you have left is quiet.

This is not new, and that is the point. We saw the same shape in the first quarter: about $2.8 billion across 98 deals, the lowest deal count in at least eight years, with a single data center raise accounting for more than 70% of all that capital. Once you see the pattern you cannot unsee it. The total goes up. The number of companies actually getting funded does not. The aggregate is being inflated by hardware and data centers, while the count of real operating companies catching a check stays flat.

Here is why that matters to you, and it is not academic. If you are raising right now and you benchmark yourself against the headline, you will conclude that capital is flowing and you are simply being passed over. That is the wrong lesson, and it will make you do desperate things. The right lesson is that the deal count, not the dollar total, is the honest gauge. And the deal count says fewer companies, higher bar, slower checks.

The honest number is in the margin

So if the aggregate is a mirage, what is the real one? What is the number on a Southeast Asian cap table that does not lie?

It is the margin. Which brings me to one of the genuinely good stories in the region this month.

Respond.io, a Malaysia-based company, raised a $62.5 million Series B led by Camber Partners, with Endeavor Catalyst and existing backers coming back in, off the back of going through the Endeavor selection network. Big round. But the round is not the story. The story is what was true before the round.

$35 million in annual recurring revenue. Growing over 100% a year. At a decent profit margin. Read that again, because they were already profitable. They raised growth money from a position where they did not strictly need it. That is the exact opposite of the burn-first, find-the-model-later playbook the last cycle rewarded and then punished.

They run an AI-agent-powered customer messaging platform, the layer that lets a business actually hold a conversation and close a sale across the channels where commerce in this region happens. Billions of messages a quarter, more than 10,000 businesses, over 180 countries. The new money is going west, into North America and Europe, with the possibility of some acquisitions. A profitable company, quietly compounding, raising on its own terms and going on offense into the biggest markets in the world.

Take one thing from this. Stop reading the league tables. Read the profit and loss. In 2026, the only honest number on a Southeast Asian cap table is the margin, because it is the one figure nobody can dress up with a single big check.

The asterisk Malaysia should be honest about

Let me complicate my own happy story, because I am not here to wave the flag.

This one is close to home, and KL should be proud of it. The founder is not Malaysian. The company did not start here. It was brought here. That should be a feature, not a footnote. A founder who could base anywhere chose to base in KL, and that decision creates things you can touch: engineering jobs, payroll that gets taxed, corporate tax, office leases, local lawyers and accountants, the cafe downstairs, and a signal to the next founder weighing where to land that says people build serious companies here. Malaysia should bank that credit fully and without an asterisk.

But the timing is almost too on the nose, because there is an asterisk.

At the same moment, the rules on foreign talent are leaning the other way. The salary floor on the employment pass has jumped. Pass lifespans are changing. To me, though, the salary number is not the headline. The harder one is the requirement that you have a replacement plan in place for foreign talent, and some of those plans are short.

Detail has been scant, but one person closer to the interpretation told me the employment is treated as tied to the company, not to the title or the role. So if you bring in a foreign hire to fill, say, a junior developer seat, and that person does well and gets promoted, it does not matter that their title has grown. What matters is that they are still there, and the requirement is that you replace them so that they no longer are.

Sit with that from the talent’s side. What highly capable person takes a role knowing there is a clock on it? If they have a family, will they uproot to a market that is effectively saying we want you temporarily but not forever?

I understand the intent. We do need to build local capability, and you should not let companies park expats in seats indefinitely. Fair enough. But here is the tension I cannot get past as an investor. You cannot run a “come build your global company here” pitch and a “here is your countdown timer, please train your replacement” policy at the same time. The open-door version of this works. There are countries we can point to that prove it.

This is a competitive sport. The founder who chooses KL had other options, because Singapore wanted him, Hong Kong wanted him, Tokyo, Bangkok and Manila all wanted him. The risk is that Malaysia celebrates this win in the very quarter it makes the next one harder to land. If attracting mobile founders is how a small market punches above its weight, and it is, then the policy and the pitch have to point in the same direction. For this month at least, they did not.

The fork in the road

Now the way out. Every founder eventually asks the quiet question. If this works, how do I get out, and where? Every investor asks it less quietly. In Southeast Asia the answer used to be a shrug. This month, three companies gave three different answers, and together they tell you more about this region than any funding total.

Thailand sends its champion abroad. LINE MAN Wongnai, the app more than 10 million Thais use for food, rides and payments, is weighing an IPO, and the venues it is looking at are Hong Kong and New York, not Bangkok. The reporting cites weak domestic conditions and political volatility, with a decision expected as soon as the end of this month. Sit with that. The most-used app in the country looked at its home exchange and decided it could not get a fair hearing there, so it is shopping for a listing 8,000 kilometers away. A market that cannot list its own champions does not have a sentiment problem. It has a plumbing problem. The pipes that turn a great company into a liquid, locally owned public outcome simply have not been built.

The Philippines builds a house worth staying in. In the same window, the opposite answer. Mint, the parent of GCash, the finance super app tens of millions of Filipinos live inside, has authorized the filing to go public: a registration with the regulator, a listing application with the Philippine Stock Exchange, an offer of around 12% of the company, targeting the second half of this year and possibly the fourth quarter. It is shaping up to be the largest IPO in the history of that exchange. And it is listing at home. Not Hong Kong. Not New York. The biggest fintech outcome the country has produced is choosing to be a Philippine public company. It is not alone. Maya, the digital bank, is weighing its own listing on a dual track, the local exchange plus NASDAQ, after its first profitable year. One foot at home, one foot abroad, a hedge.

Look at the fork honestly. Thailand’s champion is leaving the list. The Philippines has one champion committing to the home exchange outright and another hedging across both. That is not the region as a single sound story. That is the region splitting in real time over the same question: is it worth building a venue people want to stay for? Right now, this quarter, the Philippines is making the bigger bet that the answer is yes.

The caveat, because I promised it. Do not let anyone sell you Mint and Maya as a scrappy-startup miracle. Mint sits behind Globe and the Ayala group, with AMP alongside. Maya sits behind PLDT. These are conglomerate and telco children going public, which rhymes with what I said recently about Vietnam, where the giants raise and the startups starve. Hold both thoughts. The optimism is earned: a deep local public market is the single thing this region has always lacked, and the Philippines is genuinely building toward it. But the homegrown-founder fairy tale is not the right frame. Incumbents are listing. That is still good. It is just not the legend.

And here is the constructive next move, the one I would want a Filipino policymaker or operator to actually hear. One record listing does not make a market. The test is the second one, and the third, and the fourth. Can the exchange turn Mint’s debut into a habit, so that the next great Filipino company does not even think about Hong Kong or the US? If it can, the Philippines stops being the market everyone underrates and becomes the market with the exit nobody else in the region has.

The through line

Two acts, the same lesson from opposite ends of a company’s life.

When you raise, the headline lies. It is inflated by a handful of checks you will never be part of, and the only number that tells you the truth is your own margin. So build like respond.io. Get to profit, and let profit, not a press release, be the thing that earns you a round.

When you leave, the region forks. One country will send you abroad to be valued. Another is trying, right now, to build a house worth staying in. Do not assume your exit. Choose it on purpose, the way you would choose a co-founder.

In between sits the thing I keep coming back to. The capital around a Southeast Asian founder, the private money coming in and the public money you eventually exit through, is unreliable and uneven. That is not a reason to be cynical. It is a reason to be precise. Read the honest number, pick the real venue, and do not build your company on top of someone else’s headline.

The markets that win the next decade out here will be the ones that do both: attract the people who create the margin, and build the place those people can cash out at home. This month, one company showed us the margin. One country showed us the door, opening it and starting to close it at the same time. And one country started building a room worth staying in.

Be the reason the money stops sitting still.

Real. Raw. Relatable.

... --- ...

I am not here to cover the politics. I am here to follow the power. Because that one shock shows up three times in the Southeast Asian startup story this quarter, wearing three different costumes. It sold electric cars. It raised the price of the electricity our data centre boom depends on. And it gave every cautious LP one more reason to keep the chequebook shut. Energy, iron, and idle capital. Follow the power and you follow the whole region.

One. The war that sold a million electric cars

The lazy version of this story is “war happened, everyone bought an EV.” That is not what happened. What happened is that a fuel shock landed on top of a shift that was already moving fast, and poured petrol, pun intended, on the fire.

The scale first. In 2025, EV sales in Southeast Asia more than doubled year on year to more than half a million vehicles, and more than 90 percent of those were full battery electric, not hybrids. The demand was already there. Then the petrol queues showed up. One Thai market report described long lines at filling stations on the same days that EV displays pulled the biggest crowds at the Bangkok motor show. That is the whole story in one image. One queue for the old thing, one crowd for the new one.

Go around the region and the averages hide the real story. Vietnam is the outlier nobody outside Asia talks about: EV share of new cars hit close to 40 percent in 2025, ahead of the UK and the EU, almost entirely on the back of one company, VinFast, which targets 300,000 deliveries this year after 175,000 last. Thailand is the cleanest fuel link, with EV sales tripling year on year to over 44,000 units in January 2026 alone, and logistics fleets switching specifically to cut their exposure to fuel cost swings. When the fleet operators move, it is about the spreadsheet, not the planet. Indonesia crossed 15 percent EV share and passed the United States, with Chinese brands taking more than 75 percent of the market. This is not a Western EV story. It is a Chinese supply story with a Southeast Asian buyer. And Malaysia, my home market, is earlier and more honest: adoption up 14-fold since 2022, but still only about 5.5 percent of cars sold, held back by roughly 5,000 public charge points. You cannot fuel-shock your way past missing infrastructure.

None of this is just consumers being noble. It is policy and cheap money. Thailand cut excise on passenger EVs from 8 percent to 2, and to zero on electric pickups. The Philippines went further, putting forward an incentive package worth around 60 billion pesos while ending subsidies for combustion engines, with the reporting tying the move directly to the oil shock. Read that again: a government using an oil crisis as cover to stop subsidising petrol and start subsidising electrons. Then the banks did the quiet part. In Singapore, UOB ran a green car loan at 1.5 percent, DBS at 2.48. When a bank prices your electric car loan below your petrol one, the moral argument is over. The maths makes the decision.

The part that matters for operators is the fleet. Grab signed with BYD to put up to 50,000 EVs into its fleets across the region, with an eco-friendly toggle in Singapore and Thailand. GoTo took the other lane, going after two wheelers with a pledge to electrify Gojek’s motorbike fleet by 2030. On autonomy, be honest: the robotaxi headlines are a US and China story. Out here the fundable shift is the powertrain under the existing driver, not removing the driver. If you are pitching autonomous ride-hailing for Southeast Asia this year, the oil shock did not help you. The EV swap did.

Here is where I land, and it is not the clean version. The war did not invent this boom. China did, with cheap good cars and a supply chain nobody here can match, and governments did, with subsidies written before anyone fired a missile. The shock just compressed years of slow behaviour change into a few quarters. And demand pulled forward by a price spike can snap back. If Hormuz reopens and Brent drifts back to the 60s, some of this 2026 surge was borrowed from 2027 and 2028. The companies that survive that are the ones building real local supply, financing, and charging, not the ones riding a fear premium.

Two. Twenty billion lands in Johor, and DayOne raises four and a half

We have covered the Malaysian data centre build before, so I will not reread the brochure. I want to follow the money one step further than the headlines do.

Announced data centre capex across the region now runs past 20 billion US dollars over the 2024 to 2028 window, and that is committed, not deployed. AWS around 9 billion into Singapore, Google 5 billion plus 2 for its first Malaysian site, Microsoft a couple of billion more into Malaysia and Indonesia. On top of that, private money: AirTrunk alone is putting 12 billion ringgit into two new Johor campuses, taking its Malaysian commitment to roughly 27 billion ringgit, call it 7 billion dollars. And just this month DayOne, the Singapore-domiciled operator that flipped out of China’s GDS, closed a 4.5 billion dollar Series C led by Coatue and Hillhouse with Indonesia’s sovereign fund alongside. Hold that name, because it comes back in the third act.

Now the question nobody asks: what is that money actually buying? Land, concrete, power, cooling, and imported chips. A hyperscale data centre is a real estate and energy project wearing an AI t-shirt. The single biggest cheque inside it goes to Nvidia. Very little of that 20 billion touches a local software founder. This is not venture capital landing in the region, it is construction capital.

So what is the secondary effect on the rest of us? Three things, and I want to be balanced. First, cost. These campuses pull on the same grid and water local businesses use, and Malaysia stopped approving non-AI data centre proposals back in 2024 to keep the power for AI builds. The state is rationing power and choosing hyperscalers. When your tariff drifts up in three years, this is part of why. Other parts of the world now require operators to reinvest into the local energy and water network to offset that pressure. I have not seen that proposed seriously in Malaysia yet, and I would like to. Second, jobs. A hyperscale campus employs a crowd for eighteen months of construction, then a skeleton crew. It is not a founder-jobs engine. Third, and this is the genuine prize: if the build is done right, founders get cheaper, closer compute and local data residency, the thing that lets a regulated fintech or health startup build on sovereign infrastructure without stitching together a compliance workaround.

The roads analogy is the honest one. Infrastructure is an enabler, not the destination. The data centre boom only pays off for the domestic economy if we generate the demand to use it: enterprises and government going properly digital, and a real layer of AI-native startups creating the load these campuses were built for. Lay the road, then you still need the trucks. Capital keeps flooding the iron. Whether it earns its return depends entirely on who drives on it.

Three. The lowest deal count in eight years, sitting on a mountain of cash

Two facts that should not be true at once. In the first quarter of 2026, Southeast Asian startups raised about 2.8 billion dollars across 98 equity deals, the lowest quarterly deal count in at least eight years, and even that is flattered by one or two giant infrastructure cheques of the DayOne variety. Meanwhile APAC investors sit on roughly 240 billion dollars of dry powder, down from a 2023 peak near 315 but hardly an empty tank.

So which is it, drought or hoard? Both, and the contradiction is the story. The money exists. It is just not moving into Southeast Asian early stage. The last clean read on region-specific dry powder was around 7 billion dollars, a couple of years old and probably overstated, but the direction is the point: funding here fell about 70 percent from the 2021 peak while the cash pile barely moved. That is not a region that ran out of money. That is a region whose investors went on strike.

Where did the new money go instead? Peak XV, the old Sequoia India and Southeast Asia team, closed 1.3 billion late last year, labelled India Seed, India Venture, and APAC. India now runs hundreds of active early-stage funds and has climbed from roughly 9 percent of APAC capital markets volume toward 20. The APAC money is concentrating into India for growth and Japan for buyouts, not Southeast Asian seed. So when a Singapore GP tells you the market is tough, hear it precisely. It is not that Asia has no money. It is that the money is choosing India’s depth and Japan’s stability over our fragmentation and our weak record in the asset class. Capital is being selective, and Southeast Asia is the one being un-selected.

Then layer the war back on. In March the reporting was blunt that the Iran conflict threatened to deepen Asia’s worst private equity fundraising slump in a decade. An oil shock spikes uncertainty, and uncertainty is the enemy of a new fund commitment. The same barrel of oil that sold an electric car in Bangkok made a pension fund in the West, and a high-net-worth backer here, think twice about a new Southeast Asian VC. Cash gets more cautious exactly when founders need it to get braver.

So do not buy the clean drought story, and do not buy the clean abundance story either. The honest version: the tank is full, the driver is scared, and the road out, meaning exits, still looks rough. 98 deals is not a money problem. It is a conviction problem and an exit problem wearing a money problem’s clothes. And even that 7 billion dollar regional figure is fuzzy, because so much of it sits in Singapore holding structures that can deploy anywhere from Jakarta to Bangalore. When the domicile lies, the dry powder number lies a little too.

The money is here. It is waiting for a reason. Your job, whether you are building or, like me, allocating, is to be the reason it stops sitting still.

Sources and further reading: IEA Global EV Outlook 2026 · RECCESSARY, Thailand EV 2026 · VinFast targets, Nikkei Asia · Philippines incentives, Gulf News · Grab and BYD · AirTrunk Johor, NST · DayOne closes $4.5B, Crowdfund Insider · DayOne, the Singapore flip, Asia Tech Review · SEA Q1 2026 deal review, DealStreetAsia · APAC PE Report 2026, Bain · Peak XV $1.3B, YourStory

I think that’s the wrong story.

I’ve been sitting with these numbers for a few days, and the more I look at them, the more I’m convinced we’ve been telling ourselves the comfortable version. The comfortable version is that the money left and the money will return. The harder version, the one I actually believe, is that the region made a strategy bet a decade ago, the bet didn’t have an exit attached to it, and 2025 is just the year the math stopped hiding. We’ve had a few of these years where the math stops hiding. This is another one.

So let me do a bit more opining than usual. This one’s a little spicy.

* * *

The number everyone read

The headline is genuinely rough. In 2025, Singapore recorded 472 venture deals, down 35 percent from the year before. Total capital raised came in at 4.6 billion US dollars, down 34 percent year on year. And Singapore is the strong one. Across the ASEAN-6, both deal value and deal volume hit a four-year low.

Now hold that next to the United States in the same year. Silicon Valley deal value nearly doubled, to around 160 billion dollars. A lot of that was two rounds: OpenAI at 40 billion, Anthropic at 15 billion.

Two companies, in one country, raised more than ten times what the entire island of Singapore raised across 472 deals all year.

The easy conclusion is that capital is concentrating into American AI and starving everyone else. That’s true as far as it goes. There’s real gravity pulling allocators toward the bleeding edge, and that gravity sits in Silicon Valley.

But that’s a description of the weather. It doesn’t tell you why our house is the one with the leak.

For that, you have to go back further than last year, and look at what we actually spent the money on, and what we expected to get out the other side.

* * *

The bet we made

Here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough. For most of the last decade, Southeast Asia poured its venture money into consumer. Ride-hailing, e-commerce, food delivery, the super-app. The big, beautiful, blitzscaled consumer story where you capture a young, mobile-first population of 700 million and become the thing they open twenty times a day.

I’m not mocking it. I lived through the optimism. Grab, GoTo, Sea, Lazada, Shopee. These companies built the rails the whole region runs on now. Digital payments are everywhere because of them. That’s real, and it was needed. Consumer is the precedent layer. Most maturing markets start there, build the rails, then transition. That part is natural.

But look at the allocation. In 2023, more than a third of Southeast Asian venture deal value went into consumer. The honest caveat is that “consumer” is a fuzzy line, depending on whether you fold in consumer fintech, so treat the exact figure loosely. Even on the conservative read, you land somewhere north of thirty percent. Run the same count in the US that year and you’re in single digits. The number I keep landing on is around three and a half percent.

Read that again. We put an order of magnitude more of our capital into consumer than the most mature venture market on earth did.

And we weren’t growing out of it. We were accelerating into it. Consumer’s share of regional deal value kept climbing while software’s share fell. So while the US was doing the boring, durable thing, funding enterprise software and infrastructure, we were doubling down on the consumer copycat play right as the cheap money drained out.

Why does that matter? Because of what happens at the end.

* * *

The door that was never there

Every venture dollar is a bet on an exit. Money goes in, and somewhere down the line it has to come out bigger, through a sale or a listing. No exit, no returns. No returns, no next fund.

So how did the region do on exits? Here’s the number that should be tattooed on every term sheet. Since 2015, the entire Southeast Asian venture market generated roughly 70 billion dollars in exit value. Sounds fine until you look underneath. More than 55 billion of that came from three exits, all in 2021. Stretch it out and nearly 87 percent of all exit value since 2015 came from six companies. Take it to the top twenty and you’re at 96 percent.

Yes, there’s always a power law. Concentration is normal. But strip out a handful of unicorns and the regional market has returned almost nothing to almost everyone. The investment-to-exit ratio has run consistently above twenty to one. Twenty dollars in for every dollar that found its way out.

It’s been a trap. The Hotel California of venture. You can check in, but you can never leave.

And here’s the part that connects the dots. The few giant exits we did get didn’t happen here. Grab went out via a SPAC on the Nasdaq. Sea listed on the New York Stock Exchange. They had to leave to get out. The Singapore Exchange, the biggest in the region, ranks only ninth by market value in Asia-Pacific, and several regional exchanges still carry listing rules strict enough to keep a cash-burning consumer company out entirely. For a blitzscaled consumer business, the local IPO was a closed door.

So put it together. We funded consumer companies built on the growth-at-all-costs playbook, and that playbook only pays off through a big public listing. We never built the public markets to list them on. We built companies for a door that, at home, was never there.

That’s not a winter. Winter ends. This was a design flaw.

* * *

Consumer is the hardest thing to sell, everywhere

This is the part I want founders and investors to chew on, because it goes beyond us. Consumer is one of the hardest categories to exit anywhere in the world.

Think about who actually buys companies. In enterprise software there’s a deep, permanent bench of buyers who do this all day. 2025 was the most active year on record for software M&A, with strategic buyers alone accounting for around 42 percent of deals. The most active software acquirers in 2024 included IBM, Cisco, Autodesk, Nvidia. There were 22 firms that each made at least five acquisitions in a single year. That’s a machine. A standing market of people whose job is to buy companies. What are they buying for? Recurring revenue, mission-critical, sticky, hard to rip out.

Now ask who the standing buyer is for a regional food-delivery app, or who’s lining up to roll up consumer brands in a market where customers switch the second someone else runs a discount. There isn’t a bench. Consumer internet leans almost entirely on the IPO. And we just covered what happened to that door.

Let me be fair, because the honest version is more interesting than the cheap one. Enterprise exits aren’t easy either. Only about ten percent of companies tagged as software ever get acquired. IPOs are about six percent of software exits. The median software acquisition went for roughly three times revenue, not the eye-watering multiple people imagine. B2B is not a golden ticket.

What enterprise has is a functioning market of repeat buyers. Consumer mostly has the IPO. It’s a difference in optionality, in how many doors are actually open. We bet the region on the category with the thinnest exit options, and didn’t build the one exit that category depends on until recently. If you wanted to design a liquidity crunch on purpose, that’s how you’d do it.

* * *

The people who built it are now saying it

What makes this report worth reading past the headline is the back half, where they ran candid pieces from a row of the region’s investors. To their credit, the honesty is right there.

Vishal Harnal at 500 Global names liquidity as the clearest challenge facing the region, pointing straight at underdeveloped exit markets and the long holding periods that wear founders and investors down. Angela Toy at Golden Gate is just as direct, conceding the region still lacks depth in both M&A and secondaries to get people their money out.

The one that stuck with me is from Cyril at SOSV, who lays out the question every Singapore founder eventually asks out loud. If the place you ultimately have to go for capital, scale, and an exit is San Francisco, why not just start there on day one? Why build here at all? That’s a tough one to sit with. It’s not a critic on the sidelines. It’s a GP at an active global fund saying the quiet part into a government report.

Then there’s Antler. They’ve raised about 1.5 billion dollars globally, from dozens of institutions and sovereign funds. The amount that came from Singapore institutions was around 10 million. The US allocates roughly five percent of its capital to venture as an asset class. Singapore sits well below one. So even the domestic money, the money that’s right here, mostly doesn’t back the local market. The capital sits in the city. It just doesn’t believe in the thing the city keeps saying it wants to be.

When this many people who built the market all point at the same missing piece, it stops being a complaint and starts being a diagnosis.

* * *

So what do we actually do

To be clear, Singapore isn’t sitting still. The response is substantial: an extra billion dollars into Startup SG Equity for growth-stage companies, a new 1.5 billion dollar anchor fund aimed squarely at strengthening exits, and a Singapore Exchange and Nasdaq partnership we’ve talked about here before. Almost all of it is about building the exit door now, after a decade-plus of funding companies that needed it and didn’t have it.

I’m not saying that to dunk on the policy. The policy is correct. Real liquidity, a working M&A culture, a credible place to list, that is exactly the right thing to spend on. My point is that we’re building the staircase after everyone already jumped. The companies that needed this in 2018, 2021, 2023 are gone or got out somewhere else. The question is whether the next decade of founders builds for the door that’s finally going up.

So here’s where I land. Stop building for the exit that doesn’t exist, and start building for the one that does.

That’s been our thesis at Indelible Ventures: back the higher-probability path from where the region actually is, and keep tracking how that liquidity path shifts over time. If the dependable way out is acquisition rather than a hometown IPO, then build the kind of company that has buyers. Real revenue, defensible product, something a strategic acquirer or a private equity firm actually needs to own. Not a big user number you’re hoping a public market rewards someday. Reality over vanity metrics. Capital efficiency stops being a constraint you tolerate and becomes the strategy. The companies getting funded here, and more importantly the ones that can get out, are the ones with clean unit economics, not the steepest growth chart.

I want to say something specific about the Philippines, because I’m genuinely optimistic about it and the lesson lands well there. The consumption story is real. Household spending is something like three-quarters of GDP. The young population, the digital adoption, all of it is genuine. The trap would be to look at that and run the same blitzscaled copycat playbook that just left the rest of the region holding companies it can’t sell. The opportunity is to build for that consumption with discipline, with models that travel across similar markets, and with an exit in mind from the start.

Same demand, smarter strategy. The fundamentals are a gift. The old playbook was the problem.

* * *

What it actually says

Southeast Asia’s problem in 2025 was never that it ran out of money. The region is full of money. Family offices, sovereign funds, the whole lot. The problem is that we built a generation of companies with no clean way to turn into returns, in the category least likely to produce them, listing on markets that mostly weren’t here.

That’s fixable. But only if we’re honest that it was a choice, not the weather.

The money will come back. The question is whether we’ll have built something it can actually leave through.

Not complaining about the economy. Not asking where I was from. Telling me about his project.

I’ve been turning that over ever since, because it isn’t an isolated thing. For weeks now I’ve been scanning event listings in whatever city I land in, and the pattern is hard to miss. It isn’t pitch nights anymore. It isn’t another fireside with a fund manager. It’s vibe coding meetups, agentic AI sessions, AI trainings. Paid attendance, no walk-ins, speakers who’ve shipped real apps. KL has them. Singapore has them. Bangkok and Manila have them. Go on Lu.ma or Eventbrite right now and there’s probably one happening in your city this week, maybe two.

I know this firsthand because I run some of them. I host AI salon events in Bangkok, and I’ve watched the rooms change.

So while the rest of the startup world argues about whether funding is back, looking at numbers that are frankly pretty dismal, there’s this whole other thing happening in cafes and malls across Southeast Asia. Regular people are learning to build software by talking to a machine.

Why I trust this one

I dismiss most AI hype on reflex. My feed is littered with slop, articles that read like they were generated by the thing they’re describing, people calling everything the future. I scroll past it.

This is different, and the reason is simple. People are paying to show up.

And it’s a different crowd than I’m used to seeing at startup events. University students and fresh grads who can see the job market tightening and are choosing to get ahead of the curve instead of waiting it out. Founders who can’t afford a dev team. Marketers. People with an idea and no technical co-founder, who a year ago would have been stuck with that idea trapped in their head, never seeing daylight. This is the no-code, low-code movement, upgraded and supercharged into the current AI era.

The category has a name now: “vibe coding”. I’m not a fan of the term, all that talk of vibes and feel grates on me, but it’s the vernacular, so I’ll use it. You describe what you want in plain language and the AI writes the code. That’s the whole thing.

I do it myself. I’ve used AI coding to replace most of our software stack. Thinking back to the friction of a couple of years ago versus how good this is now, and then projecting forward to how good it’ll be as the models keep improving, is genuinely one of the more interesting arcs I’ve lived through as an operator.

From apps to agents, which is where it gets serious

Building an app is one thing. The next rung up the ladder is building an agent, and agents are a different animal.

Most people, once you get out of the tech bubble, still picture a chatbot. You type, it types back. You ask, it answers. A better Google. That’s generation. It makes text, images, words.

An agent acts. It doesn’t tell you how to clear your inbox, it clears your inbox. It books the meeting. It sends the email. It runs commands on your machine. It talks to other software and gets things done with barely any input from you.

That’s the entire ballgame for risk. A chatbot needs a human to type every prompt. Every harm one causes still started with a person asking for it. An agent can plan, decide, and act on its own initiative. It can cause harm nobody asked for.

I want to be clear that I’m bullish on this. Hugely. But being bullish and being measured aren’t opposites, and the risk side of this deserves honest airtime.

Two examples everyone in the open-source world is talking about. The first is the lobster: OpenClaw. It went viral the moment it dropped. It connects an AI model to your messaging apps and acts on your behalf, books things, browses, runs commands, manages your house. People pulled their old Mac minis out of drawers to run it. Apple caught the wave and nudged the price up. It is not a Southeast Asian product, and we should be honest about that. It went viral hardest in China, which has been well ahead on the open-source movement. Southeast Asia needs to kick into gear as a fast follower, even when we’re not the origin.

The second is Hermes, out of a US research lab a few months back. What makes it different is memory. It lives on your own server, runs all the time, and gets better the longer you use it. It remembers what you told it last Tuesday. It writes down how it solved a problem so it never starts from scratch again. By this month it was the most-used agent out there by some measures, hundreds of billions of requests a day, hundreds of thousands of developers piling in within three months.

Here’s the part that should make you pause. Three separate security audits this year found malicious code hiding in the add-on skills people share for these agents. Think about what that means. An autonomous thing, running constantly, on your own machine, with access to your messages and files and maybe your ability to spend money, pulling new abilities from a community marketplace that’s already been found to contain things designed to hurt you. That isn’t a future problem. It’s a this-year problem, and it’s happening on hardware people own, in their homes, outside any IT department or compliance check.

A friend who’s far sharper than me on this put it well. Permissioning an agent is like onboarding a new intern. You give them enough access to act, but not enough to break things. If humans are entities of action, we have to treat agents as entities of action too, with the same scoping and the same limits. The catch is that getting that right still takes real technical skill, and most of the people downloading the lobster don’t have it.

So who’s writing the rules

Surely someone’s regulating this. Here’s where it actually stands, and the answer is more interesting than “nobody is.”

Three big global players, three different postures. The US is actively deregulating to keep its lead, tearing up the old safety rules and trying to stop its own states from making their own. The posture is get out of the way, though there was an executive order floated recently that would have made new models notify the government before public release, something closer to how the FDA approves a drug. It got paused, not signed. We’ll see. Europe, true to reputation, has the most serious regime, and just this month agreed to delay the hardest parts, the high-risk rules, by over a year. Competitiveness pressure. So even the strictest regulator in the world is loosening its grip right as agents arrive. And China is the strictest in practice and the only one already acting on agents specifically, real enforcement, thousands of non-compliant services shut down. Telling, the country where everyone installed the lobster also told its own government agencies and state banks not to put it on work devices. The adoption champion got nervous about its own craze.

Even the deregulating US quietly started building standards for autonomous agents. So nobody actually thinks this is fine. Everyone sees the gap. They’re just moving at wildly different speeds.

Southeast Asia is that same story compressed into one region, running at three speeds. Vietnam, maybe not who you’d guess, has the only real binding AI law here, passed late last year, enforced since Q1, risk-based with actual prohibited uses. It tracks, given how much of the region’s developer talent sits there. Singapore did something very Singapore: the world’s first governance framework built specifically for agentic AI, detailed and thoughtful, and deliberately voluntary. No teeth. The bet is give industry sophisticated guidance, remind everyone they’re still liable when their agent screws up, and keep the innovation onshore. They’ve already refreshed it with case studies from the likes of OCBC, Tencent and Workday. A living document, which is the right call given the pace. And then Malaysia, where I’m based, sitting on one of the most aggressive agent rollouts in the region, with its actual rules still in draft. Not here yet.

Here’s the whole thing in one line. Everyone, globally and right here at home, is regulating the last war. The last war was chatbots generating bad content, the stuff you can ban after it spreads. We saw it when Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines banned Grok over deepfakes, including images of children. Three countries, fast, coordinated, and fully deserved. But that’s the model: react after the harm, fold quickly. And every one of those images still needed a human to type the prompt.

The next war is agents taking bad actions on their own, because the black box decided that was the thing to do. That war is already shipping. Through anonymous downloads, onto personal machines, learned at meetups across the region, in a place where exactly one country has even a voluntary framework and the country with the biggest rollout is still drafting.

We’re banning the thing that needs a human to ask. We haven’t started on the thing that doesn’t.

What I keep coming back to

I’ll be honest, I don’t have a clean answer. Part of why I raised this is that it was a quiet news week. But the bigger part is that I can’t stop noticing the trend, and I doubt I’m alone. If you’re a CISO or a CTO or sitting in a compliance function, you’re already living this, because the whole enterprise is integrating more automation and more agents by the month, and the risk side is going to drag a regulatory environment into the room whether we invite it or not. It always does, the moment a technology touches enough of society. So it’s worth thinking now about what that reaction is likely to look like, instead of being surprised by it.

But I keep coming back to those meetups. To the rooms full of people building. Because that’s the real story, and it isn’t happening in a lab or a boardroom. It’s happening on your street, in cafes, in small event rooms. People in this region are adopting this faster than the people meant to govern it can keep up, and honestly that’s fine, because that’s how technology has always moved. I’m genuinely excited to see Southeast Asia stop being just a fast follower and start leapfrogging, with the macro trends, shifting supply chains, and regional growth all pointing the same way. There’s an enormous opportunity here, and I think this is going to sit at the front of it.

So I’ll leave you with the question I can’t answer myself. If you’re building with these tools right now, who’s responsible when your agent does something you didn’t intend? You? The person who built the tool? The government that hasn’t written the rule yet?

Right now the honest answer is nobody knows. And everybody’s building anyway.

As we should. But take a beat on that one.

Tell me where I’m wrong.

The Philippines hosted a US Undersecretary of State for a site unveiling. Malaysia’s securities regulator released a public consultation paper on its small-cap exchange. Two countries. Two moves. No obvious connection.

Here’s the version where you actually connect the dots.

The Philippines just told the United States it isn’t running the place. Manila publicly rejected the US request for diplomatic immunity and US legal jurisdiction over a 4,000-acre industrial zone that’s about to anchor billions in foreign capital. That changes the read on the entire Pax Silica deal.

Malaysia just did the most aggressive thing any SEA regulator has done in years for venture-backed companies. VC firms can now sponsor IPOs directly. Retail money is allowed in for the first time. A real funding escalator from crowdfunding to LEAP Market to ACE.

And here’s what almost nobody is saying out loud. These two moves are not separate stories. They’re symptoms of the same shift. Southeast Asia is running two parallel races at once, and the countries that figure out both are going to compound differently than the countries that don’t.

Two stories. Let’s take them properly.

What the Philippines Did on Monday

Pax Silica is the US-led alliance launched in December 2025 to build an allied semiconductor and critical minerals supply chain that doesn’t depend on China. Fourteen countries plus the Philippines have signed on. The Philippines joined as the 13th member in mid-April.

The country’s contribution is a 4,000-acre Economic Security Zone in New Clark City, two hours north of Manila. Roughly 1,620 hectares. Designated as the first AI-native industrial acceleration hub under the framework. The State Department is calling it a “Golden Node.”

On Monday, US Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg flew in for the site unveiling. The numbers he shared: more than 20 companies have expressed interest. A dozen are billion-dollar US firms. At least five US and East Asian companies have specifically indicated they want to locate inside the zone. The interest spans robotics, electronics manufacturing, AI training infrastructure, power, renewable energy, water management. Technical surveys begin in June. Groundbreaking targeted before the end of 2028.

That’s the headline. Now here’s the part that didn’t make most of the international press.

The Sovereignty Moment

When the Wall Street Journal reported a month ago that the hub would operate under US laws and that US personnel would enjoy diplomatic immunity, there were a lot of raised eyebrows in Manila. Including mine. It sounded like a value-chain rental. The Philippines provides the land, the minerals, the workforce. The Americans bring capital and write the rules.

On Monday, standing next to Helberg at the site unveiling, BCDA president Joshua Bingcang publicly killed that framing.

The Philippines, he said, had rejected the US request for diplomatic immunity and US legal jurisdiction. The hub will operate under Philippine law. Specifically the Investors’ Lease Act, recently amended to allow foreign investors to lease land for up to 99 years, and the BCDA Law, which governs the conversion of former US military bases. Treated as a regular business development contract.

That changes the read. This is not a US-governed enclave with a Philippine flag on it. This is a Philippine economic zone with a US-led anchor tenant.

Trade Undersecretary Ceferino Rodolfo reinforced the legal framing and then added one sentence that I think summarizes the entire industrial policy. He said the Philippines wants to move beyond exporting raw green minerals like nickel and copper, and instead process them into higher-value green tech metals used in batteries, data centers, semiconductors, and electronic components.

Get out of the raw materials lane. Move into processed inputs for the AI economy. That’s the climb, articulated openly.

What the Country Actually Brings

The Philippines is the 9th largest semiconductor exporter in the world. Electronics products were nearly $40 billion in exports last year, about 60% of all Philippine exports. The country has 40 years of OSAT experience. Amkor, onsemi, Analog Devices, Texas Instruments. Massive nickel reserves. An English-language technical workforce. The 2026 ASEAN chairmanship.

Eleven days ago, the Luzon Economic Corridor expanded to include Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, and the UK. Nine more allied countries are now part of the surrounding framework. The Philippines also published its first Semiconductor Roadmap last year, targeting $110 billion in combined semiconductor and electronics exports by 2030, with a five-year plan to train 128,000 semiconductor professionals.

This is a country making coordinated moves. Pax Silica on Philippine legal terms. The LEC expansion. The Semiconductor Roadmap. The ASEAN chair. That’s the most ambitious industrial push the Philippines has made in my time watching this region.

The Regional Comparison

Every country in Southeast Asia is running a version of this play. The comparison is worth knowing because it tells you what kind of opportunity is forming in each market.

Singapore is in a category of one. They produce 10% of the world’s semiconductors. Full value chain. In January, Micron broke ground on a $24 billion NAND wafer fab, on top of a $7 billion HBM advanced packaging facility started last year. UMC opened a 22nm fab in 2025, with volume production starting this year. And the Singapore government is putting S$500 million into a shared national fab that startups will be able to use by 2027. A government-funded fab that early-stage companies can access. There is no equivalent of that anywhere else in Southeast Asia.

Malaysia is the 6th-largest semiconductor exporter, with about 13% of the global assembly, testing, and packaging market. Last November, five Malaysian companies formed the Malaysia Advanced Packaging Consortium, formally launched at SEMICON SEA earlier this month. Target: 7% of the global advanced packaging market by 2035, worth $5 billion a year. The Malaysian government put up RM92 million in R&D grants, with another RM93 million in industry matching contributions. FusionAP, the startup at the center, was founded by senior Intel and TSMC veterans who came back to Malaysia. Intel’s Project Pelican advanced packaging facility in Penang is 99% finished.

Vietnam started construction on its first homegrown semiconductor fab in January, led by state-owned Viettel Group, on 27 hectares near Hanoi. Initial process node is 32nm. Last month, Samsung Electro-Mechanics committed $1.2 billion to a flip-chip substrate facility for Groq’s latest LPU chip, which gets integrated into Nvidia’s Vera Rubin AI platform. Vietnam has roughly 7,000 IC design engineers across 50+ companies, with a national plan to grow that to 50,000 by 2030.

Singapore is betting on its ecosystem. Malaysia is betting on its operators. Vietnam is betting on talent and anchor multinationals. The Philippines is betting on geopolitical leverage with sovereignty intact. None of these is wrong. They’re shaped by what each country can actually offer.

But here’s where the second story comes in. And here’s the part of the regional comparison that almost nobody is connecting.

The Other Race Nobody Is Tracking as One Story

While the industrial race has been getting all the attention, there’s a parallel race happening in capital markets. Every country in Southeast Asia is trying to fix the same problem at the same time.

The public market for venture-backed companies in this region has been broken for a decade. The IPO window collapsed. SGX listings thinned. The PSE became a hard listing. Indonesia got small-company-unfriendly. Founders have nowhere to go.

And now, finally, the regulators are responding. Each one is doing it differently. And almost nobody is connecting these dots into one regional story.

Singapore’s Quiet Aggression

Singapore is moving the most aggressively. The Monetary Authority of Singapore set up an Equities Market Review Group in August 2024. The package they’ve rolled out is huge.

A 20% tax rebate for primary listings. A 10% rebate for secondary listings. A S$5 billion Equity Market Development Programme, since expanded to S$6.5 billion, placing capital with asset managers to invest in Singapore-listed equities. Nine asset managers have already been allocated nearly S$4 billion to deploy. A S$30 million “Value Unlock” package to help listed companies improve investor engagement.

And then in November, the biggest move. SGX signed a partnership with Nasdaq to launch a Global Listing Board for dual listings. Companies with at least S$2 billion in market cap can list simultaneously on SGX and Nasdaq using a single set of offering documents. The framework goes live mid-2026. The regulatory groundwork is essentially complete.

This is the first formal dual-listing partnership Nasdaq has ever done with another exchange. Ever.

Singapore is not trying to fix the small-company problem. They are explicitly going after large Asian growth companies that would otherwise go straight to Nasdaq, and offering them a way to anchor in Singapore on the way to the US. A different segment of the market from what Malaysia is doing.

Indonesia, Vietnam, and the ASEAN-6

Thailand has been quietly building. The Stock Exchange of Thailand launched LiVE Exchange for SMEs and startups years ago, although only a handful of companies actually trade on it. Thailand also signed a depository receipt linkage with SGX back in 2023.

Indonesia is moving in the opposite direction. In March, the Indonesian Stock Exchange tightened its listing rules. Companies now need positive retained earnings to list on the Main Board. Stricter free float requirements. Quality over quantity. But Indonesia also joined the SGX depository receipt linkage in October last year, which gives Indonesian investors access to Singapore-listed companies. Tightening at home, opening cross-border.

Vietnam is exploring depository receipts for blue chips. Yuanta Securities has already issued DRs for FPT, Vinamilk, Mobile World, and Vietcombank into international markets.

And here’s the part of the story that gets almost no coverage. In December 2024, the six major ASEAN exchanges, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, signed an MOU to develop a cross-border depository receipts framework. Any company listed on one ASEAN exchange could have DRs trading on the other five. Larger pools of liquidity. More retail access. ASEAN as one capital market.

It’s early. Implementation is slow. But the direction is unmistakable.

And Then Malaysia, This Week

On Sunday, the Securities Commission Malaysia and Bursa Malaysia released a public consultation paper proposing the biggest changes to the LEAP Market since it was created.

Quick context. The LEAP Market is Malaysia’s stock exchange for early-stage and emerging companies. It’s been around for years. It has not worked. In its entire history, exactly one company has transitioned in from regulated equity crowdfunding. One. Ten LEAP-listed companies have graduated to the ACE Market.

The regulator knows it. So they’re rewriting the rules.

Here’s what they’re proposing.

First. VC and PE firms can act as listing agents. If you raised at least RM5 million on a regulated crowdfunding platform, or you have a VC or PE firm on your cap table, you can list on LEAP without appointing a traditional approved adviser. Your VC sponsors you to the public market. That collapses traditional banker-led IPO economics. The regulator is saying, we trust the people who already did diligence on this company.

Second. Retail investors are allowed in for the first time. Sensible caps. RM100,000 per company, RM250,000 total exposure. This is the first SEA exchange that’s letting retail directly access early-stage public listings with this kind of framework.

Third. Simplified disclosure documents. Lower legal cost.

Fourth. Advisers can take up to half their fees in shares. Lower cash burden on the startup.

Fifth. The transfer from LEAP to ACE Market gets streamlined.

Stop and think about what they just built.

A funding escalator specifically designed for the segment nobody else in the region is solving for. Too small for Singapore’s Global Listing Board. Too early for Indonesia’s Main Board. Malaysia just took it.

The consultation closes June 15. The rules will likely take effect later this year.

Two Races, One Pattern

When you zoom out, what’s happening in Southeast Asia right now is two simultaneous races.

The first race is industrial. Pax Silica, MAPC, Viettel’s fab, Singapore’s NSTIC. Each country is trying to climb the value chain for the AI economy. Different bets. Different segments. Singapore on full-stack. Malaysia on advanced packaging. Vietnam on talent and anchors. Philippines on geopolitical leverage.

The second race is capital markets. The SGX-Nasdaq dual listing bridge, Malaysia’s LEAP Market 2.0, Indonesia’s tightening, the ASEAN-6 depository receipts framework. Each country is trying to give its own companies a real exit path. Different segments here too. Singapore on the $2 billion-plus growth company headed to Nasdaq. Malaysia on the VC-backed mid-market. Indonesia on quality over quantity. Vietnam through DRs.

You can’t have a real AI or semiconductor economy without a functioning public market to recycle capital back into the next generation of founders. Singapore figured that out twenty years ago. Malaysia is figuring it out right now. The MAPC industrial consortium and the LEAP Market reform are not unrelated. They’re the same strategy expressed in two domains.

Where the Philippines Sits

The Philippines is running hard on the industrial race. The country has put together the most ambitious geopolitical-industrial move of any SEA country in decades, on its own legal terms. That is genuinely impressive, and I want to say that clearly because the rest of this analysis is going to be a little harder.

On the capital markets side, the Philippines has been quiet. The PSE has not announced anything comparable to what Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, or even Vietnam are doing. There’s no LEAP equivalent. No SGX-Nasdaq style bridge. No coordinated push to make the Philippine public market work for venture-backed companies. The country joined the ASEAN-6 depository receipts MOU, but that’s a regional initiative, not a domestic one.

That’s the gap. And it’s a gap that’s worth saying out loud because the Philippines has positioned itself extraordinarily well on the industrial side, and the capital markets side is what makes the rest compound.

Where the Founder Opportunity Actually Sits

For Filipino founders. The industrial opportunity from Pax Silica is real, and it’s not where most people are looking. It’s not in chips. It’s in everything that has to feed the zone. Industrial automation software. Predictive maintenance for factory equipment. Workforce training platforms to upskill thousands of engineers and technicians on advanced packaging processes. Mineral traceability software, because critical minerals coming out of Philippine mines need chain-of-custody verification. Energy management software. Logistics platforms, customs platforms, ESG reporting tools, supply chain visibility software.

None of that requires a $20 billion fab. None of it requires fabless chip design expertise. All of it can be built by Filipino SaaS founders with the capital that’s available in this market right now.

The Philippines doesn’t need to spawn TSMC. It needs to spawn the regional Applied Materials.

For Malaysian founders. You have a policy environment that’s never been better. Equity crowdfunding into LEAP into ACE into the Main Market, with VCs as your sponsors, retail money coming in, and ASEAN cross-border listings on the horizon. The funding escalator is real. Use it.

For founders anywhere else in the region. The capital markets are being rebuilt. Each country is solving for a different segment. Pay attention to which segment your company fits into. Because where you build matters now in a way it didn’t five years ago.

What These Two Stories Say Together

Put them next to each other and they’re telling one thing.

Southeast Asia is doing something it has never done before. The region is simultaneously rebuilding its industrial base for the AI economy and its capital markets for venture-backed companies. Each country is making different bets. Each country is solving for a different segment. Some bets will work. Some won’t.

I’m bullish on the Philippines. The fundamentals are real. The trajectory is good. Pax Silica is the right bet for this moment, and the way Manila handled the sovereignty question this week shows the country isn’t going to be a passive host in this deal.

The next move that matters is the capital markets one. Foreign industrial capital is coming in under Philippine law. Domestic founders are going to build the picks-and-shovels companies that feed it. But they need a real path to liquidity that lets them compound wealth and recycle it into the next generation. That gap exists. Closing it is the work of the next two years.

The founders who understand both races and position themselves on both sides are the ones worth watching.

This post accompanies the SEA of Startups episode for the week of May 20, 2026. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Real. Raw. Relatable.

SEA of Startups | Kevin Brockland

The Q1 2026 funding report shows the highest quarterly capital raised since late 2022. Malaysia’s hottest IPO in sixteen years prices and lists next week. OpenAI and Anthropic both announce major new enterprise offerings backed by some of the biggest names in global private capital.

Here’s the version where you actually read the numbers.

One data centre deal accounts for over 70% of the quarterly funding total. The chip company getting 95 times oversubscribed has three-quarters of its revenue coming from China and a tax exemption that expired eight months ago and hasn’t been renewed. And the AI labs building $4 billion services arms are, if you read what they’re actually saying, admitting that their models are not easy to deploy in the real world.

Three stories. Let’s take them properly.

* * *

The Real Q1 2026 Funding Number

DealStreetAsia dropped their Q1 2026 Southeast Asia funding report this week. It’s making the rounds. The headline: $2.81 billion raised, the highest quarterly total since Q4 2022.

One deal, DayOne, a Singapore-based data centre operator, raised $2 billion in a Series C. I’ll put a mild caveat on that: this is a data centre, not technically a startup, and it was spun off from an existing entity. It’s in the numbers because it carries a Series C label. That’s fine. But it’s worth knowing what you’re looking at.

Strip it out. You have just under 100 deals and under $800 million combined. The lowest quarterly deal count in at least eight years.

That’s the actual funding market founders in this region are navigating right now. Not the headline. The actual market.

On the Singapore Number

The report shows Singapore capturing 91.5% of total capital. I’m honestly always a little skeptical of that figure in isolation, and here’s why.

Singapore is the home of the holdco. If you’re a founder in Malaysia or Indonesia or Vietnam trying to raise international capital, you’re not going to stay registered in your home jurisdiction. You’re going to put a holding company in Singapore, because the legal and regulatory environment is cleaner, because international investors are more comfortable with it, because that’s just how it’s done. Your operating company may still be fully onshore in your home market.

So some portion of what gets reported as “Singapore funding” is actually capital going into companies operating across the region, just routed through a Singapore holdco. How much? Hard to know. But it’s worth holding that nuance when you see the 91.5% figure.

What it definitely does tell you is that the Singapore jurisdiction matters, for capital access, for legal infrastructure, for institutional credibility. That part is real regardless of the holdco effect.

Malaysia: Signal or Noise?

The report calls out Malaysia as a bright spot, ranking second in Southeast Asia by deal volume for the first time. Eighteen deals, the highest quarterly count since Q3 2024.

I’m active in the Malaysian ecosystem. My honest read: take this with some salt. When you dig into what drove the number, a meaningful portion came from small cheques through a single accelerator programme. That’s not nothing, but it’s not the same as organic deal activity across the ecosystem.

I don’t want to be the one pouring cold water on every green shoot, and I’m not saying the Malaysian ecosystem isn’t moving. But there’s a difference between an ecosystem inflection and a batch of accelerator cheques inflating a quarterly number. We’ll know more by Q3.

Where the Money Is Actually Going

If you’re a founder asking where capital is flowing: AI. Specifically agentic AI, automation of workflows, tasks that execute with limited human oversight. Not chatbots. Actual agents doing actual work.

AI and ML deals came in second by volume in Q1 with thirteen transactions. The biggest was Amity’s $100 million Series D. Worth noting: Amity has a long-standing relationship with CP Group, one of Thailand’s largest conglomerates, which is the lead investor. That context matters for how you read the round. It doesn’t diminish the achievement, it’s still a strong signal of appetite in the space, but it’s worth knowing.

The message for founders: if you’re building real enterprise automation, real measurable productivity gains, there is capital. Not a lot. But it exists and it’s consistent.

The Quiet Problem Nobody Names

There’s something that doesn’t get said clearly in this ecosystem, so let me say it.

There is a growing number of zombie companies across Southeast Asia. Not failed companies, companies that can’t raise new capital, can’t grow meaningfully, but won’t die. They exist in a kind of operational limbo. Technically alive. Burning slowly.

Part of what sustains this is that down-rounds almost never happen here. The funds across the region are still relatively young. The LP relationships are new. Nobody wants to be the one writing a markdown into their portfolio, having that conversation, taking that medicine. So instead, they hold the valuation flat, keep the paper TVPI looking reasonable, and wait.

You can talk about your book value multiple all you want. If the company can’t raise and can’t grow, the number isn’t real.

The downstream problem: there are cases where this dynamic is actually blocking deals. An investor who doesn’t want to see a down-round may resist a transaction that would otherwise be good for the company, because accepting it means acknowledging the valuation they’ve been carrying is wrong.

Sometimes you have to take one step back to take two steps forward. That’s not a comfortable thing to do. But it’s more honest than pretending nothing is wrong until there are no options left.

* * *

SkyeChip and Malaysia’s Chip Moment

I want to start this one with genuine enthusiasm, because it deserves it.

SkyeChip Bhd lists on Bursa Malaysia’s Main Market on May 20th. The public tranche closed 95 times oversubscribed. Total retail demand hit RM 3.04 billion. The largest retail subscription in Malaysia since Petronas Chemicals in 2010, sixteen years ago.

The whole AI and chip investment wave has been impossible to ignore. NVIDIA’s share price trajectory. The compute boom. The data centre buildout. And now, emerging from Penang, a Malaysian company that sits right in the middle of that stack. That’s a big deal for this ecosystem.

Upfront caveat: I’m not a semiconductor expert. What follows is based on my research into the prospectus and what’s been circulating in the analyst and retail investor community. Take it in that spirit.

What SkyeChip Actually Does

Malaysia’s semiconductor sector has historically been dominated by the back end: assembly, testing, packaging. Important work. But it’s the low-margin end of the chain. The government has pushed for years, through NIMP 2030, through IC design parks in Selangor and Penang, through various national initiatives, to move the industry up the value chain into front-end design.

SkyeChip is the poster child for that ambition. It’s a fabless IC design company, it doesn’t manufacture chips, it designs silicon intellectual property. Reusable building blocks that chip makers integrate into their own products.

Think of it this way: TSMC makes the chips, NVIDIA designs what goes on them. SkyeChip is not saying they service either of those companies, but the analogy holds, they sell the blueprints for specific components that go inside chips. Their flagship IP is HBM3E: high-bandwidth memory interface technology, the memory architecture inside the AI accelerators that run the large language models powering frontier AI.

That’s the tie-in to the chip craze. And it’s why the hype is real. This isn’t fabricated. The technology is real.

The National Story

The government is leaning in hard, and in this case the support is substantive not just rhetorical. SkyeChip gets access to Arm Holdings design tokens through Malaysia’s Silicon Vision initiative, a national licensing arrangement that gives Malaysian companies access to Arm’s IP architecture. That’s a genuine strategic asset, not a marketing line.

The Deputy Minister attended the prospectus launch and talked about SkyeChip potentially reaching the level of Broadcom. Broadcom is a $700 billion company. SkyeChip is listing at RM 1.6 billion. The ambition is clear. The road is long.

But what matters is that this company is creating a visible proof point, that a Malaysian IC design house can be built, can reach a meaningful scale, can list on the main market, and can attract global attention. The next founder who wants to build something like this now has an example. That matters for the ecosystem in ways that go beyond the specific valuation.

The Numbers Worth Noting

Revenue more than doubled over two years. Profit margins around 30%. Analysts projecting roughly 31% earnings CAGR over three years, with the most bullish target price close to double the IPO price of RM 0.88.

The business model, IP licensing, is a proven high-margin, scalable model. Arm, Cadence, Synopsys. These are multi-billion dollar businesses built exactly this way: create the IP once, license it repeatedly. SkyeChip isn’t reinventing the model. It’s executing on it with new IP in a hot category.

The Risks That Deserve Honest Attention

China Revenue and US Export Controls

For the seven months ending October 2025, China accounted for 73.3% of revenue. Almost three-quarters of the company’s most recent revenue came from Chinese fabless IC companies selling advanced HPC and AI chips.

The prospectus explicitly acknowledges that if any of their customers are added to the US Entity List, supply must be suspended. None are listed today, but today is a snapshot, not a guarantee. The company is also planning to open US offices, which creates a real balancing act between serving Chinese customers and operating in a US regulatory environment that is actively tightening controls on exactly this category of IP.

The Tax Exemption Expired

This is the one I keep coming back to.

SkyeChip has been operating under a Pioneer Status tax exemption, effectively a 2.7% tax rate. That exemption expired September 9, 2025. They applied for renewal. As of the last published date in the prospectus, the renewal is still under review.

The IPO is priced at 44x FY2025 earnings. Those earnings use a 2.7% tax rate that no longer exists. Normalise to a standard 25% rate and you’re paying closer to 57x.

Most analysts will have noted this. But it’s worth being explicit about: the multiple headline is priced on a tax rate that hasn’t been legally valid for eight months and may not be renewed. That’s a material question sitting unresolved at the point of listing.

Revenue Quality and Customer Concentration

Top three customers represent around 60% of FY2025 revenue. More importantly, the revenue model is largely non-recurring, lump-sum contracts, one-off sales, high upfront. You need to keep winning new work to replace completed contracts.

Retail investors who have done deep dives on the prospectus, the i3investor and KLSE Screener community has been thorough here, have flagged that several of the largest customers from earlier years no longer appear as active. Replaced by new Chinese customers with sub-one-year relationships. Customer names are undisclosed so independent verification isn’t possible, but the pattern is worth understanding before you subscribe.

Where I Land

Malaysia needs stories like this. We need proof points that deep tech can be built here, that front-end design is achievable, that a Malaysian company can capture global demand in a critical technology category. SkyeChip creates that proof point. Congratulations to the team and their investors, genuinely.

The technology is real. The Arm access is real. The revenue growth is real. There’s genuine substance here and, looking at comparable companies globally, there’s still room for upside even from the IPO price.

The risks are also real. China concentration, an expired tax exemption, non-recurring revenue, some customer churn buried in the prospectus. None of these are necessarily deal-breakers. All of them require the optimistic scenario to hold.

Watch the listing day on May 20th. The market will be more honest than any analyst note about how much of the 95x was conviction and how much was leverage-financed retail applications planning a day-one flip.

* * *

OpenAI and Anthropic Just Told You the Hard Part

This is the most globally significant story of the week. And I think it has the most direct implication for founders building in Southeast Asia right now.

Within the same week, Anthropic first, then OpenAI, both companies announced they are building enterprise AI services companies. Not products. Not model updates. Not API pricing changes. Services companies. Engineers going inside client organisations and building AI systems for them.

What They Announced

OpenAI announced on May 11th. They’re calling it the OpenAI Deployment Company. Launching with over $4 billion in initial investment from 19 founding partners, TPG leading, with Bain Capital, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank, McKinsey, and Capgemini in the group. OpenAI also acquired Tomoro, an applied AI consulting firm, and brought roughly 150 engineers into the venture from day one. OpenAI retains majority ownership.

The model: Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) embedded directly inside client organisations. They work with business leaders and frontline teams to identify where AI can have the biggest impact, redesign workflows around it, and build production systems connected to the company’s actual data and infrastructure.

Anthropic announced a week earlier, backed by Blackstone, Hellman and Friedman, Goldman Sachs, General Atlantic, Apollo, GIC, and Sequoia. Same fundamental concept. Their framing specifically targets mid-market: community banks, mid-size manufacturers, regional health systems. Companies that could benefit enormously from AI but don’t have the internal resources to build and run frontier deployments.

When you look at the roster of investors across both of these efforts, you’re seeing a significant portion of global private capital touching large segments of the broader economy. This is not a side bet.

The Palantir Model

To understand why this matters, you need to understand what Palantir built over the last two decades.

Palantir’s entire model was built on one idea: you can’t sell complex software to complex organisations and expect them to use it well. You have to embed engineers inside the organisation. Work through the legacy systems, the internal politics, the messy reality of how things actually get done inside a large enterprise. Build something that functions in that specific environment.

That made Palantir extraordinarily sticky. Once you’ve had a team embedded inside an organisation for months, rebuilding core operational workflows around your platform, good luck ripping that out. The model is controversial. Critics call it consulting dressed as software. Believers say it’s the only honest way to sell software to organisations that don’t know what they need.

OpenAI and Anthropic are applying that same logic to AI. At scale. With billions behind it.

If the models were easy to deploy, these services arms would not need to exist. Full stop.

The Deployment Gap Is the Real Problem

Enterprise AI has a gap that doesn’t get enough honest discussion. The models work. Claude works. GPT works. The demos are genuinely impressive. But when companies try to deploy these systems into actual operations, into fifty-year-old legacy software, complicated permission structures, compliance requirements, and workflows that have developed organically over decades, the complexity is enormous.

The gap between “this model is impressive” and “this model is running reliably inside our organisation and measurably improving how we operate” is not a small gap. It is enormous. And closing it requires human expertise, people who understand the technology and the specific operational context of the organisation.

The fact that both labs are committing at this scale to closing that gap is an admission. Model quality is not the bottleneck anymore. Deployment is the bottleneck. And that reframes where value sits in the AI stack.

The Inversion of SaaS

Here’s a framing I’ve been thinking about. The SaaS era was defined by software being light on the surface, an interface you accessed yourself. The software sat on top of your workflow but you still had to do the work. Self-service by design.

What these services arms represent is something different. The model is going deep into the workflow, understanding it, rebuilding it, and then leaving behind something that runs with minimal human intervention. You’re not delivering software. You’re delivering a running operation. Services as software.

If that model sticks, and the fact that it’s being backed this heavily suggests it will, the companies that win are not the ones with the best model. They’re the ones who can deploy the best model inside the most complex environments, with the most contextual understanding of how those environments actually work.

What This Means for Southeast Asia

OpenAI’s Deployment Company is starting in US enterprise. Anthropic is starting in US mid-market. Neither of them is starting in Southeast Asia.

That means the deployment gap in this region is not going to be closed by Silicon Valley in the near term. Someone local has to do it.

The bank in KL running a fifty-year-old core banking system. The Indonesian manufacturer with warehouses of paper records. The healthcare group operating across five countries with different languages and different regulatory frameworks in each market. These aren’t problems that a foreign firm can parachute in and solve. They require local knowledge, local language, local relationships, and long-term on-the-ground presence.

The two most credible AI labs in the world just confirmed there is a structural, multi-billion dollar opportunity for exactly this business. The window to build it before the global players get here is not unlimited.

If you are building an AI services or implementation company in Southeast Asia right now, this week’s announcements are a green light. Pick up the pace. The clients will move slowly, that’s fine, enterprise always moves slowly. You move fast. Get embedded. Build the local relationships. Develop the deployment expertise. Because once you’re in and the workflows are built around what you’ve built, it becomes very hard to replace.

And one more signal worth noting: when AI labs start building services arms, it tells you something about the model layer. If being the best model was a durable, defensible moat, you would not need a services company. You would just keep making the model better and let it sell itself. Both companies have genuinely good models. They’re still building this.

The future isn’t won at the model layer. It’s won at the integration layer, the workflow layer, the trust layer. For founders building AI companies in Southeast Asia, that’s the competition you’re actually in. And it’s a winnable one.

* * *

What These Three Stories Say Together

Put them next to each other and they’re telling one thing.

The funding market is leaner than the headlines suggest. Capital is concentrating, in Singapore, in AI, in infrastructure. The zombie problem is real and growing quietly. There are silver linings: Malaysia is moving, agentic AI has consistent demand, and the data centre boom is real even if it distorts the quarterly numbers.

SkyeChip is the most tangible proof point this ecosystem has produced in years that big, globally relevant deep tech can come out of Malaysia. Whether it becomes a durable business depends on questions the prospectus cannot yet answer. The execution has to turn the IPO moment into something lasting.

And the global AI labs just spent billions telling you that the hard part of AI isn’t the model. In Southeast Asia, the opportunity to do that hard part, the deployment, the integration, the on-the-ground expertise, is wide open and freshly validated.

The founders who understand that and move on it in the next twelve to eighteen months are the ones worth watching.

This post accompanies the SEA of Startups episode for the week of May 13, 2026. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Real. Raw. Relatable.

SEA of Startups | Kevin Brockland

Here’s what we cover, and why each one matters.

1. China forced Meta to unwind a completed acquisition. Mid-honeymoon.

In December, Meta acquired Manus — the AI agent startup that went viral in 2025 as China’s answer to deep research tools. The deal closed. Manus’s website was already saying it was part of Meta.

On April 28th, Beijing’s NDRC told both parties to reverse it.

The Singapore-washing playbook — where Chinese founders restructure as Singapore entities to access US capital — is now provably dead. Beijing just proved it can reach into a completed acquisition, across jurisdictions, and pull the plug.

But the surface story is not the interesting story. The interesting story is the mechanics of what an “unwind” actually looks like. Money has already flowed through to investors and their LPs. Engineers have been working inside Meta for weeks. Knowledge transfer has happened. How do you reverse that?

And then there’s the Meta question. Did they make a mistake — or did they knowingly race the regulator, betting that if they got the technology embedded before enforcement could land, a slow unwind would be better than no acquisition? Their public statement — “the transaction complied fully with applicable law, we anticipate an appropriate resolution” — says absolutely nothing. Which might be exactly the point.

Singapore has been conspicuously silent throughout all of this. What that silence costs them is a conversation the episode goes deeper on.

2. eFishery. Nine years. And it still doesn’t feel like enough.

Gibran Huzaifah was sentenced to nine years on April 29th. Two other former executives received nine and seven years respectively.

The numbers, if you haven’t heard them: the company told investors it generated $752 million in revenue from January to September 2024. Actual revenue was $157 million. They reported a $16 million profit. The actual result was a $35 million loss.

SoftBank. Temasek. KWAP — Malaysia’s civil servant pension fund. All recovering less than ten cents on the dollar.

But this episode is not a crime recap. The eFishery story is a prompt for a harder question about what kind of ecosystem we’re building here.

Fraud exists on a spectrum. At one end: criminal fabrication at scale. At the other: things that happen every week across the region that would never see a courtroom — vanity metrics dressed as traction, pilots treated as revenue, LOIs presented as signed contracts. None of that is eFishery. But it is on the same continuum.

And it is not only founders. Investors do it too.

The reason this matters beyond the immediate case is economic. In a high-uncertainty market like Southeast Asia, trust is the operating system. When it erodes — when every investor assumes every founder is telling the most optimistic version of the truth — the whole system gets more expensive. More friction. More time on verification. Fewer deals done.

A high-integrity environment is a high-output environment. The ecosystem gets the standards it is willing to enforce.

3. Indonesia capped ride-hailing commissions at 8%. GoTo just posted its first-ever profit. Congratulations.

On May 1st — International Workers’ Day, timing very much intentional — President Prabowo signed a regulation capping the maximum commission ride-hailing platforms can take from drivers at 8%. Down from 20%. Drivers now get a minimum of 92% of every fare.

GoTo shares dropped nearly 6% on the news. Analysts estimated the ride-hailing segment accounted for roughly 48% of GoTo’s EBITDA. Grab, which derives about 20% of its total EBITDA from Indonesia, is also in the firing line.

Both companies will either raise fares, eat the margin hit, or some combination of both. None of those options is clean.

Here is the part that might be unpopular in a room full of investors: Prabowo is not entirely wrong.

Indonesia has around four million ride-hailing drivers. The platform without the driver is just an app with nowhere to go. The economics for drivers have been genuinely rough. The system was designed to extract maximum value from a class of workers with very little negotiating power.

The underlying question — how do we ensure the people who actually do the work get a fair share of what they create — is legitimate. If platforms do not answer it voluntarily, governments will answer it for them.

The risk, of course, is that fares go up, volumes drop, and drivers end up worse off than before. That is the irony of heavy-handed regulation. But that is a problem for GoTo and Grab to solve. They had the data. They should have got ahead of this before a president had to sign a decree on Workers’ Day.

4. Malaysia is building gas plants to power AI data centres. The energy transition did not plan for this.

This week, a Melaka-based company called DPS Resources — until recently primarily a furniture and property developer — announced it signed an MOU with an Alibaba affiliate to explore building a $1.1 billion AGI data centre in Melaka. 150 to 180 megawatts. DPS provides the land, the power, the infrastructure. Alibaba’s entity handles operations and brings the computing demand.

This deal is not an anomaly. It is a perfect emblem of what is happening across Malaysia right now. Everyone wants a piece of the data centre gold rush. The question not being asked loudly enough is whether Malaysia actually has the power to sustain it.

TNB’s pipeline is 7,500MW across 56 data centre projects. Current actual load from those facilities: 850MW. The draw-down is coming as facilities rack up through 2026. At the same time, 6,400MW of coal-fired generation is scheduled for retirement between 2029 and 2031.

To cover those retirements and meet rising demand, Malaysia needs roughly 12,000MW of new generation by 2031.

Right now, the Energy Commission has an open tender — NewGen26 — for new gas-fired generation to plug that gap. Bids close July 1st. Eight weeks away. This is Malaysia racing to build baseload capacity before the demand wall hits. The fact that it is gas, not solar, tells you everything about the timeline pressure.

The Iran conflict makes this personal. TNB’s Automatic Fuel Adjustment mechanism means global oil and gas price spikes feed directly into Malaysian electricity bills within 30 days. Data centres in Johor were approved on the premise of cheap, stable Malaysian electricity. That premise is now under pressure from a war on the other side of the world.

The deeper question is who actually benefits from this boom. DPS provides the land and the power. Alibaba keeps the data, the models, and the IP. Research consistently shows data centres create the lowest number of jobs per square foot of any major facility type. Thousands of construction roles during the build, then roughly 200 operational staff when running.

Malaysia is providing the real estate, the utilities, and the environmental cost. The hyperscalers are keeping the value.

That is not a reason to stop. But it is a reason to be far more deliberate about what we are trading and what we are getting in return.

Watch the episode

Four stories. One theme running underneath all of them: the rules are being rewritten. Who controls AI. Who controls capital flows. Who gets a fair share of the value created. Who owns the infrastructure the future runs on.

These are not settled questions. They are live negotiations — between governments, between companies, between regions.

Southeast Asia is not a passive observer in any of this.

[Watch / listen to the full episode → link]

SEA of Startups is a podcast for founders, investors, and operators building in Southeast Asia. Real. Raw. Relatable.

We tend to mark progress in big, dramatic moments. But the honest truth is that what’s happening in the space economy right now has been building quietly, then all at once — and it started with a stubborn entrepreneur who refused to let his company die.

SpaceX didn’t just build a business. It rewrote what was possible. It opened a door that has since become a flood.

In 2008, SpaceX’s fourth launch attempt succeeded after three consecutive failures. Musk had poured in the last of his PayPal money and basically said: one more shot. That moment, unglamorous, almost desperate, was arguably the starting gun for an entirely new era. By proving a private company could reach orbit, SpaceX didn’t just survive. It changed what other people thought was allowed.

Fast forward to today: space tech companies raised over $8 billion in 2025 alone. That’s 154% year-on-year growth. There are now over 35,000 companies in the global space ecosystem. The cost to put a kilogram into orbit has dropped from $10,000–$20,000 in the 1990s to under $2,000 today — and Starship could push it below $100. When you change the unit economics that dramatically, entirely new business models become viable. Orbital manufacturing. Satellite constellations. And yes, data centers in space.

That last one sounds like it belongs in a Netflix series, but Star Cloud — a startup founded in January 2024 — launched the world’s first GPU satellite running an Nvidia H100 in November 2025. They ran Google’s Gemini AI from orbit. Eighteen months after founding, they closed a $170M Series A at a $1.1B valuation. Fastest YC company ever to hit unicorn status. That is not a white paper. That is a business.

The interplanetary story is no longer confined to conference slide decks. It’s in regulatory filings. It’s in rocket test programs. It’s in hiring plans.

And then there’s the SpaceX IPO. Filed confidentially the same day as Artemis II — either beautiful symmetry or a very busy Tuesday — targeting a June NASDAQ listing at a reported valuation of $1.5 to $2 trillion plus. Potentially the largest IPO in the history of public markets. The company that was weeks from bankruptcy in 2008 is now valued at nearly 40x what it was just six years ago.

I’ll be honest: I find this genuinely extraordinary. Not in a hype-cycle way. In a we-are-watching-the-stories-we-grew-up-with-actually-happen kind of way. The orbital stations. The moon bases. The asteroid miners. For most of the last 50 years, that vision felt frozen. Now it’s moving — one satellite, one startup, one mission at a time.

We talked through all of this on the latest episode of SEA of Startups. The full story: Artemis II, the SpaceX IPO, orbital data centers, lunar ice mining, and whether the sci-fi stories we grew up with are finally coming true.

The founder who built Kaidee to 35 million users and guided it to a successful exit sat down with SEA of Startups and said what most operators are afraid to say out loud: your team is probably performing AI adoption, not doing it. And the longer you stay there, the harder it gets to move.

Here’s what he actually said — the numbers, the examples, the provocations.

The 5 Levels of AI Maturity (And Why 1.5 Is a Trap)

Tiwa’s framework runs from 0 to 4. Most conversations stop at listing the levels. The more important conversation is why so many companies get stuck halfway through Level 1.

Level 0 — Unaware: No AI tools in use. Working like it’s 2019.

Level 1 — Curious: ChatGPT is bookmarked. It gets used for emails and translation. Actual work output: unchanged.

Level 1.5 — The Trap: This is where Tiwa spends most of his time on stage. A few people are experimenting. Strategy decks mention AI. But workflows, decisions, and output haven’t moved. He calls this adoption theater — and it’s where the majority of SEA companies currently sit.

Level 2 — Active: AI is genuinely built into daily work. Measurable productivity gains of 25–50%.

Level 3 — Integrated: Multiple AI tools connected in smooth workflows. The data analyst goes from one report a week to one a day. The PM tests ideas overnight with simulated customers. 2–3x productivity — and completely redesigned ways of working.

Level 4 — Transformative: Creating value streams that simply didn’t exist before. Tiwa estimates this is roughly 2% of the global workforce today.

The goal isn’t to inch from 1.5 to 2. It’s to move from 1.5 to 3, and then to 4. Anything less is rearranging deck chairs.

The Mental Model That Changes Everything

Tiwa’s most useful reframe isn’t a framework — it’s a metaphor.

Think of AI as the most capable but most forgetful intern you’ve ever hired. It can do almost anything better than any employee on your team. But the moment it leaves a conversation, it remembers nothing. Zero context. Starting from scratch.

This metaphor matters because it tells you exactly what your job is: you’re not a user of AI. You’re a systems designer for AI. Your task is building the handoff infrastructure — the context-carrying mechanisms, the memory systems, the structured prompts — that prevent that amnesia from killing your output quality.

Tiwa draws a direct parallel to the Toyota Production System. You’re not optimising one conversation. You’re building a manufacturing process for intelligence, with daily standups, continuous improvement loops, and institutional memory that compounds over time.

Most companies treat AI like a vending machine. High performers treat it like a factory floor.

The Numbers That Should Stop You Mid-Sentence

If you think the efficiency gap between good and great AI usage is somewhere between 20–30%, Tiwa has a number for you.

The difference between a 30% productivity gain and a 300x productivity gain isn’t the model you’re using. It’s how you’re using it.

That’s not a typo. 300x. The delta between someone using AI as a faster search engine and someone who has built genuine fluency — with context management, iteration discipline, and system-level thinking — is not incremental. It’s categorical.

On token economics specifically, Kevin cited Jensen Huang’s framing directly: a developer earning $500K annually should be spending roughly $250K a year in AI tokens. That’s the ratio of a high-performance AI-native engineer. For context: serious power users are already spending $500+/month on tokens. Some AI-native startups are at $1,000 per person per day.

If your developers aren’t asking for AI budget, Tiwa’s take is unambiguous: that’s a performance issue.

The Hiring Freeze Argument (And Why It’s Not Crazy)

The most provocative position Tiwa took in the recording:

Freeze all hiring until your AI implementation is complete.

The reasoning is mathematical. Communication pathways explode non-linearly with headcount:

• 5 people → 10 pathways

• 10 people → 45 pathways

• 20 people → 190 pathways

Every person you add before you’ve stabilised your AI workflows creates coordination overhead that compounds. You’re layering human complexity on top of unresolved process complexity. The problems don’t add — they multiply.

The implication for most early-stage SEA founders: your instinct to hire for growth may be the thing slowing your growth. A team of 6 people who are genuinely at Level 3 will outrun a team of 15 people stuck at Level 1.5, every time.

The Middleware Trap: A Warning for Builders

Tiwa is an investor. He’s pattern-matching on where value will be captured — and where it will evaporate.

His verdict on horizontal and middleware AI companies: 18-month obsolescence risk. The major frontier models are absorbing middleware functionality as a matter of course. If your moat is sitting between the model and the enterprise, that’s a shrinking gap.

The defensible positions he sees in SEA:

• Vertical solutions with deep workflow integration and hard-to-replicate domain understanding

• Regulated, complex legacy environments where switching costs are real and proprietary data is locked in

• Physical AI — Tiwa cited MUI Robotics, which has deployed an AI tongue (taste and smell sensors) across dairy companies, water utilities, and hotel renovation monitoring, and is currently running a research project on early liver cancer detection through smell. 300+ clients. 50+ multinationals. That’s not a middleware play.

The common thread: proprietary data, physical integration, or regulatory complexity. If you can be replaced by a model update, you’re not building a business — you’re building a feature.

Two Real Examples, Not Hypothetical Ones

The Jira/Confluence Replacement: A software development house replaced its entire project management stack — Jira, Confluence, the lot — in four days using AI-assisted development. Annual savings: $24,000. More importantly, they own the system now. No vendor dependency. No per-seat pricing. No waiting for a roadmap that doesn’t match their workflow.

The HubSpot Replacement: A friend of Tiwa’s replaced their entire HubSpot instance with a custom-built CRM in eight hours of AI-assisted coding. Eight hours. The off-the-shelf tool cost thousands annually and didn’t fit the workflow. The custom solution does — and it cost a weekend.

The pattern here isn’t “build vs. buy.” It’s “stop buying things that make you dependent when you could own the thing in a day.”

What AI-First Actually Requires From Leadership

Tiwa’s framework for leaders isn’t about tool selection. It’s about accountability architecture.

The key shifts:

Every function owns its own transformation. This can’t live with the CTO alone. Engineering, product, marketing, finance, customer success — every team lead is responsible for their own AI integration roadmap.

Model the behaviour publicly. If leadership isn’t visibly using AI — and visibly failing with it, learning from it, sharing what they found — no one else will take the cultural signal seriously.

Measure outcomes, not activity. Logins aren’t fluency. Licenses aren’t execution. The metrics that matter: workflow velocity, decision speed, output quality. Not hours of AI training completed.

Daily continuous improvement. Not a quarterly AI review. A daily standup cadence for what’s working, what broke, what gets refined tomorrow. Toyota didn’t build the production system in a sprint. Neither will you.

The Real Question

Tiwa closed with the line that stayed with everyone in the room.

“The question isn’t how do we find extraordinary people. It’s whether extraordinary people get unleashed inside this org — or leave to do it on their own.”

For founders in SEA: you probably already have the talent. The judgment is in the building. The only variable is whether you build the systems that let it operate at full power — or whether you stay at Level 1.5 long enough that the people who figured it out first come back to compete with you.

Watch the full conversation with Tiwa York on SEA of Startups

Understanding the SaaSpocalypse

The term SaaSpocalypse refers to the recent significant decline in the valuations of publicly traded SaaS companies. This decline has raised concerns about the future viability of these companies. But is the doom and gloom justified?

The Current Landscape

- Valuation Adjustments: Many SaaS companies have seen their valuations drop sharply, leading to discussions about overvaluation in the sector. As Chris Birrell notes, some of these companies were indeed due for a correction.

- Growth Continues: Despite the downturn, many SaaS companies are still experiencing growth rates of 15-20% year-over-year, which, although lower than previous highs, indicates resilience in the market.

Key Insight: The SaaS market is not dying; it’s evolving. Companies that can adapt to new technologies, especially AI, may find new opportunities for growth.

The Role of AI in SaaS

AI is a game-changer for many industries, and SaaS is no exception. As the demand for AI integration grows, traditional SaaS companies must adapt.

Embracing AI Technologies

- Increased Demand for AI Solutions: Companies are under pressure to integrate AI into their workflows. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for incumbents who can leverage their existing customer relationships to offer new, AI-driven solutions.

- The Risk of Disruption: While established companies may have a strong foothold, they are not immune to disruption. New entrants who can offer innovative solutions may quickly gain traction.

Example: Companies like Salesforce are well-positioned to sell AI-driven solutions, thanks to their existing customer base and established workflows.

Navigating Change: Strategies for SaaS Companies

As the industry evolves, SaaS companies in Southeast Asia must consider their strategies carefully. Here are a few key areas to focus on:

Focus on Core Competencies

- **Defensible Moats**: Companies with deep integrations into their clients’ workflows are better positioned to weather market fluctuations. Understanding what makes your service indispensable can help you maintain customer loyalty.

- **Avoiding the Surface-Level Solutions**: Companies that offer point solutions without deep integration risk losing market share to more comprehensive platforms.

Capitalizing on Regional Nuances

Southeast Asia is a unique market, and understanding local dynamics can provide a competitive edge.

- Local Expertise: Companies with founders who understand regional challenges are likely to succeed where larger, global firms may falter. This localized approach can help companies tailor their solutions to meet specific market needs.

The Future of SaaS in Southeast Asia

Looking ahead, what does the future hold for SaaS companies in Southeast Asia?

Opportunities Amidst Challenges

- Emerging Startups: As Chris mentions, startups that can build reusable software components tailored for AI-driven environments may find success. There’s a growing need for specialized solutions that can integrate seamlessly with existing workflows.

- BPO Evolution: Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies are also on the brink of transformation. By leveraging AI, they can enhance their service offerings and improve efficiency, setting the stage for a new era in service delivery.

Conclusion: Adapting for Success

In conclusion, while the SaaSpocalypse presents challenges, it also opens up avenues for growth and innovation. Companies that can adapt to the changing landscape—embracing AI, focusing on core competencies, and understanding regional market nuances—will be well-positioned to thrive in the future.

Key Takeaways:

- The SaaSpocalypse is not the end, but a transition.

- Embrace AI and focus on integration to maintain your market position.

- Understand regional dynamics to tailor your solutions for success.

---

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the SaaSpocalypse?

The SaaSpocalypse refers to the significant decline in valuations of publicly traded SaaS companies, raising concerns about the future of the industry.

How can SaaS companies adapt to the changing landscape?

By integrating AI solutions, focusing on their core competencies, and understanding regional market dynamics, SaaS companies can navigate the challenges ahead.

Is the SaaS industry dying?

No, the SaaS industry is evolving. Companies that can innovate and adapt will continue to thrive.

One-Sentence Summary:

Meta’s acquisition of Manus reveals how rapid execution, strategic geographic positioning, and navigating geopolitics can position Southeast Asian startups for global AI success.

In recent months, Meta (formerly Facebook) shocked the tech world by acquiring a nine-month-old Singapore startup, Manus, for a staggering $2.5 billion. This deal isn’t just about investment; it’s about signaling a seismic shift in how tech giants and startups position themselves in Asia’s rapidly evolving AI landscape. If you’re a founder, investor, or tech enthusiast in Southeast Asia, understanding the implications of this move could shape your strategy in the coming years.

In this post, we’ll uncover what makes Manus’ story so significant, explore whether this signals a new blueprint for startups in the region, and discuss how geopolitics, regulation, and execution are converging to reshape Asia’s AI startup ecosystem.

Why Meta’s Acquisition of Manus Is a Game-Changer for Asia’s AI Ecosystem

Meta’s swoop on Manus — a Singapore-based startup that quickly skyrocketed to a $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) in just eight months — highlights a broader trend: big tech is fast-tracking AI talent and innovation across Asia.

Speed as the New Currency in AI

Unlike traditional startups that focus on slow, methodical growth, Manus exemplifies rapid execution and market capture. From its rebranding and relocation from China to Singapore to its swift commercialization, Manus became a symbol of agility. The fact that Meta paid over two billion dollars for a startup that was barely a year old shows how high the stakes have become.

Strategic Geopolitical Play

This deal isn’t just about AI; it’s a geopolitically-sensitive move. Singapore’s neutrality, coupled with its strong regulatory framework, makes it an ideal hub for international tech investments trying to navigate the US-China tensions. This “Singapore washing,” as some call it, allows startups to de-risk their Chinese origins while positioning for global expansion.

Validation for the Singapore Tech Scene

For Southeast Asia, Manus’ exit sends a powerful message: regional startups can achieve world-class valuation and attract the attention of global giants. It validates Singapore’s infrastructure and regulatory environment as a launchpad for tech innovation, especially in deep tech and AI.

The Geopolitics Behind the Deal: Singapore’s Role as a Neutral Ground

The Manus acquisition sheds light on how Singapore is positioning itself as a crucial nexus for cross-border AI innovation. With China’s restrictions on certain AI exports and the US’s tightening of tech regulation, companies see Singapore as a sandbox — a place to de-risk and scale.

Decoupling and the Singapore Advantage

The ongoing US-China tech decoupling has led companies to see Singapore as a neutral jurisdiction that can serve as a launch point for global ambitions. Many Chinese-origin startups relocate or incorporate there to avoid geopolitical pitfalls, often cleaning up their corporate footprints by removing Chinese ties.

Regulatory and Legal Neutrality

Singapore’s clear, predictable regulations make it attractive for startups seeking to expand internationally. As Manus’ story shows, relocating or registering in Singapore can be a strategic move, even if the company’s origins are Chinese.

Potential Risks and Geopolitical Tensions

However, the geopolitical landscape is shifting. Countries like China are scrutinizing cross-border AI deals, and export controls on AI behavior and models are intensifying. If such deals face bans or restrictions, the entire regional strategy could be impacted. But currently, Singapore remains a preferred hub — for now.

Implications for Founders and Investors: The New Playbook for Asia

The Manus saga is a wake-up call for Southeast Asian founders and investors. It demonstrates that rapid, bold moves in AI can lead to monumental exits and widespread regional impact.

From Local to Global in Record Time

In just eight months post-launch, Manus hit $100 million ARR, thanks to aggressive product development and strategic data-scale efforts. This proves that if you focus on execution, a startup in Southeast Asia can scale globally without needing to relocate to Silicon Valley.

Building in the Region, Selling Globally

Startups should see Southeast Asia not just as a market but as a launchpad. The example of Manus shows that founders can begin locally, then leverage regional hubs like Singapore’s pro-business environment, excellent talent pool, and strategic position for international growth.

Attracting Global Talent and Capital

Meta’s huge bets are fueling a DJai of tech talent and capital into Singapore. This influx will likely lower the barriers for founders and create new local ecosystems of innovation, much like the influx of liquidity into startups driven by recent exits.

The Future of Funding and Exits

With regional startups achieving billion-dollar valuations at breakneck speed, the local venture scene could see a new wave of mega-deals, encouraging more ambition and liquidity. However, this also raises questions about the dependency on big exits versus sustained growth and scaling.

The Role of Geopolitics, Regulation, and Execution

The Manus deal underscores a larger theme: in AI, execution — not just innovation — determines success. It also highlights how geopolitics, regulation, and competitive positioning influence startup strategies.

Regulation and Export Controls

Countries are increasingly scrutinizing cross-border AI technology transfers. Manus, with its origins in China, initially faced “de-China-ing” to comply with local and international regulations. Future deals could be blocked or slowed, but Singapore’s legal neutrality currently provides some breathing room.

Regulatory Challenges and the “Hostage” Dynamic

Meta’s acquisition might seem straightforward, but behind the scenes, regulators in the US, China, and the region watch carefully. Ensuring sensitive AI models aren’t compromised or exploited remains a concern, and deals may sometimes resemble a negotiation more than a transaction.

Execution Over Everything

The core lesson for founders? Speed and execution matter most. Manus’ rapid growth and decisive relocation/de-risking strategies show that those who act swiftly can capture market share and achieve billion-dollar valuations — even from a small startup.

What This Means for Southeast Asian Startups

This high-profile deal unlocks opportunities and signals for regional startups:

Use Singapore as a Launchpad

• Regardless of where your origins lie, establishing a legal presence or HQ in Singapore can be a strategic move to attract global investment and talent. It’s a flexible gateway to international markets.

Focus on Execution and Speed

• Aim for rapid product deployment and market traction. Manus’ success shows that even in complex, geopolitically-sensitive industries, swift action can lead to extraordinary outcomes.

Leverage Regional Liquidity and Growth

• The Asian startup ecosystem is increasingly flush with liquidity, partly thanks to high-profile exits. Founders should view this as an opportunity to raise capital, learn from successful precedents, and aim for scale.

Think Globally, Act Regionally

• Building out of Southeast Asia with an eye on global markets becomes more feasible when backed by the right policy environment, talent, and a focus on execution.

Final Thoughts: The Future of AI and Startup Strategy in Asia

Meta’s Manus acquisition isn’t just a one-off headline — it’s a harbinger of how Southeast Asia and Asia at large will play a critical role in the next wave of generative AI and tech innovation. For founders, investors, and ecosystem builders, this signals the importance of boldness, agility, and strategic positioning.

The region’s narrative is shifting from “emerging” to “emerged” — with Singapore leading the charge. Remember, in AI and startups, the real winners are those who can execute fastest, adapt to geopolitics, and leverage regional advantages.

Stay ambitious, stay nimble, and watch as Southeast Asia’s AI scene continues to shape the future.

Summary:

Meta’s $2.5 billion Manus deal exemplifies rapid AI growth, geopolitical strategy, and the region’s potential to produce world-class startups. Founders should leverage Singapore’s neutrality and focus on execution — because in AI, speed and agility are king.

As technological advancements accelerate, few topics generate as much buzz and speculation as the future of space-based data centers and artificial intelligence. Recently, Elon Musk made headlines with a monumental deal: SpaceX’s acquisition of XAI, valued at over $1.25 trillion, signaling a bold step toward integrating AI, space exploration, and data infrastructure into a unified system. If you’re curious about how these developments could redefine our digital and physical worlds, you’re in the right place.

In this post, we’ll explore Musk’s visionary plans for space data centers, the convergence of AI and space tech, potential sovereignty issues, and what this means for the future of global infrastructure. Get ready to dive into a universe of possibilities where space becomes the new digital frontier.

What Elon Musk’s Latest Merger Means for the Future of Space and AI

In a move that signals a fundamental shift in how we view technological infrastructure, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has merged with XAI, forming a colossal enterprise valued at around $1.25 trillion. This isn’t just a business deal—it’s a bold statement that AI, space, and data are becoming inseparable.

The Significance of the SpaceX and XAI Deal

This merger combines Musk’s space ambitions with cutting-edge AI capabilities. SpaceX’s prowess in rocket technology and satellite deployment now supports a new vision: data centers operating in orbit. Meanwhile, XAI, which was formerly part of Twitter, brings advanced AI reasoning into the mix.

Why does this matter?

Traditionally, data centers are terrestrial—dependent on vast amounts of power, water, and cooling. Moving them into space could revolutionize data processing by leveraging the unique environment of orbit. It signals a move from conventional cloud computing to “orbit cloud,” where data is processed and stored outside Earth’s boundaries.

Space as the Next Data Infrastructure Frontier

Musk’s focus on space-based data centers stems from several advantages:

Unlimited Sun Power:

Space centers can harness solar energy uninterrupted, providing a scalable power source.

Cooling Efficiency:

Operating in a vacuum eliminates traditional cooling concerns, reducing energy consumption.

Global Coverage:

Satellites and in-orbit servers can deliver low-latency connectivity worldwide, especially in remote or underserved regions.

By building data sensors and centers in space, these systems could bypass limitations of terrestrial infrastructure, including power grid capacity and cooling constraints.

The Convergence: From Space Rovers to Orbiting AI Powerhouses

Musk’s approach isn’t just theoretical; it’s grounded in strategic infrastructure planning. Previously, XAI built massive data sensors, which required giant chips and data centers on Earth. Now, the plan appears to be moving these sensors into space—integrating with satellite networks like Starlink and deploying AI reasoning systems that operate in orbit.

Building Data Sensors in Space

In recent years, XAI invested heavily in large-scale data sensors, including massive chip purchases and developing space-enabled data centers. The next logical step? Moving these sensors into orbit to:

• Tap directly into solar power

• Minimize Earth’s cooling and power challenges

• Enable real-time data collection across the globe

This aligns with Musk’s longstanding ambitions for space-based technology and the evolution of satellite infrastructure.

Space Data Centers: The Next Step

Imagine a space data center linked to Starlink satellites, operating in a vacuum with efficient solar energy and minimal cooling needs. This setup could:

• Support AI models with real-time, global data feeds

• Reduce latency by processing data closer to where it’s generated

• Enable autonomous operations beyond Earth’s atmosphere

In fact, such centers could be used for various applications—from managing global logistics to autonomous manufacturing in space.

Sovereignty, Regulation, and Challenges in Space-Based Tech

While the technological vision is compelling, the legal and regulatory landscape remains murky. Currently, space law is primarily governed by treaties designed for rockets and satellites, not data centers or AI.

The Outer Space Treaty and Its Limitations

The UN’s Outer Space Treaty states that no country can claim ownership of space or celestial bodies, and space must be used for peaceful purposes. However, it doesn’t address:

• Data sovereignty in orbit

• Ownership of AI-powered data centers

• Liability for AI actions beyond Earth

As Musk’s ventures blur these boundaries, there’s a pressing need for updated regulations that clarify jurisdiction and governance over space-based data infrastructure.

Potential Challenges Ahead

Legal Uncertainty:

Sovereignty agreements for orbit and AI liability are still in development.

National and Regional Regulation:

Countries may implement conflicting policies, creating a patchwork of rules.

Security and Control:

Ensuring that space data and AI systems are protected from malicious actors becomes more complex as systems operate beyond ground control.

The Role of Regional Governments and Alliances

Countries like Singapore and ASEAN nations are already eyeing space as the next frontier. Initiatives for space hubs and orbit regulations could spark a new era of international cooperation—or competition. The challenge is establishing coherent, enforceable rules in this emerging domain.

Implications for Industries and Global Power Dynamics

The shift toward space-based AI and data centers is poised to reshape industries and geopolitical relationships.

New Opportunities for Tech Giants and Nations

Hardware Supply Chains:

Companies like Nvidia and TSMC could develop space-hardened chips for orbiting servers.

Government Contracts:

Space agencies and militaries may turn to private firms for orbital data infrastructure.

Regional Innovation:

Southeast Asia, with its strategic position and growing tech sector, could become a significant player in space exploration and AI deployment.

Disruption of Power and Control

As data centers move off-planet, traditional regulatory and control frameworks face challenges. “Borderless” AI and compute could:

• Undermine terrestrial sovereignty

• Create new “sovereignty” in orbit

• Shift the power balance toward companies and nations willing to operate beyond Earth’s boundaries

The Broader Narrative: From AI as a Tool to Space as the New Cloud

Elon Musk’s vision illustrates a future where AI, powered by orbital data centers, isn’t just cloud-based but space-based. This could lead to:

• AI systems governing autonomous space manufacturing

• Interplanetary data exchange networks

• New economic models based on orbital infrastructure

What You Should Know and How to Prepare

The seismic shifts Musk is pioneering pose both opportunities and risks. Here’s what to keep in mind:

Stay Curious:

Follow developments from tech giants and regulators.

Understand Sovereignty:

Grasp the legal challenges of space law and data rights.

Think Globally:

The future of AI and space-based systems will involve international cooperation—and competition.

Innovate Locally:

For entrepreneurs and regional players, there’s potential to participate in space tech supply chains, especially in specialized hardware and software.

Final Thoughts: A New Era in Space and AI

Elon Musk’s bold moves toward integrating space exploration with AI and data infrastructures suggest we’re entering a new chapter of human innovation. The concept of orbiting data centers, space-based AI, and planetary-scale computing is no longer sci-fi—it’s becoming reality.

As regulation catches up and technology matures, the space economy will likely redefine what it means to be a digital civilization. Whether as entrepreneurs, policymakers, or consumers, understanding these trends will be crucial in shaping the next generation of global infrastructure.

Want to stay ahead? Keep an eye on developments from SpaceX, TSMC, Nvidia, and regional space initiatives. The universe of possibilities is expanding—and it’s right above our heads.

FAQ: Space Data Centers and AI

What legal frameworks govern data centers in space?

The primary framework is the Outer Space Treaty, which restricts sovereignty claims but doesn’t address data or AI directly. New regulations are expected as these technologies become more prevalent.

Why move data centers into space?

Space-based data centers harness solar energy, avoid cooling issues, and provide global coverage with low latency, enabling real-time interplanetary communications.

How will this impact global regulation and sovereignty?

It could complicate jurisdiction, leading to a need for international treaties specifically covering space-based AI and data infrastructure.

Are private companies like Nvidia or TSMC involved in space hardware development?

Potentially. Developing space-hardened chips and hardware is seen as a logical next step for these giants, making them critical players in the orbital economy.

• SGX × NASDAQ dual listing is a real regulatory breakthrough — but U.S. liquidity remains unproven

• The fintech “funding collapse” was actually capital consolidation into Singapore

• Southeast Asia is shifting from emerging → maturing, with real scaffolding for a capital stack

• Founders + investors have a 24-month window before this becomes table stakes

• Ride the waves with Sea of Startups

The Setup: Why This Moment Matters

SGX and NASDAQ just launched a dual-listing bridge — something Southeast Asia’s growth-stage founders have wanted for a decade.

But here’s the twist:

This isn’t about IPO convenience.
It’s about Singapore silently building its own version of Silicon Valley’s capital stack — adapted for Southeast Asia’s geopolitical reality.

And it’s happening while the rest of the ecosystem is still parsing the headline.

We are at an inflection point,but not for the reasons most people think.

1. SGX × NASDAQ Dual Listing

Real Liquidity or Ego Liquidity?**

What It Is

A streamlined structure allowing ~$2.5B+ companies to list simultaneously on SGX and NASDAQ without:

• duplicate filings

• conflicting disclosures

• multi-jurisdictional legal chaos

A real regulatory achievement.

What Everyone Assumes

“Finally! A viable U.S. exit path for Southeast Asia tech.”

What It Actually Is

A partial solution — with one massive unanswered question:

Does this create real U.S. liquidity, or just better press releases?

Regulatory friction? Solved.
Liquidity, analyst coverage, and market-making? Not solved.

Let’s be blunt:

• Who in New York is covering a $3B ASEAN B2B SaaS they’ve never used?

• Who is trading your stock at 2 a.m. EST?

• How do you compete for attention against trillion-dollar tickers?

In Singapore, you matter.
In the U.S., you are… a symbol on a screen.

Who Wins (Right Now)?

• SGX — they can pitch “NASDAQ access” to the entire region

• Founders — they gain optionality and cleaner paperwork

Will U.S. liquidity appear?

TBD.

Yes, AvePoint dual-listed in 2025 — but one data point does not equal a trend.

2. The Fintech Funding ‘Collapse’ That Wasn’t

If you only saw the headline:
“SEA fintech funding down 39% YoY.”

You missed the real story:

Singapore captured 84–88% of all fintech dollars.
Capital didn’t disappear — it moved to safety.

The Numbers

• $829M raised (SEA fintech, first 9 months of 2025)

• Singapore → 84% (with multiple quarters at 88%)

• Mega rounds continued quietly:

  • Thunes — $150M Series D

  • Airwallex — $150M Series F

This isn’t contraction. It’s radical selectivity.

When markets tighten, capital flies to clarity.
In Southeast Asia, clarity has a postal code — Singapore.

The Nuance No One Mentions

Many “Singapore rounds” are Singapore TopCos with operations elsewhere.
But even adjusting for that, the trend is undeniable:

Singapore is becoming the gravitational center of SEAs capital stack.

If You’re Building Outside Singapore…

You need a Singapore strategy now, not “when we hit Series B.”

• Entity structure

• Regulatory setup

• Investor relationships

• Capital access

You cannot retrofit a cap table at scale.

If You’re a Seed Investor…

Your job just became extremely difficult.

You must identify the 10–15% of founders who:

• can reach late stage

• understand jurisdiction strategy

• can navigate regulatory complexity

• know how to design an intelligent capital stack

Most seed funds will not do this.
The ones who do will win disproportionately.

3. From Emerging → Mature

Is Southeast Asia Finally Growing Up?**

Silicon Valley is built on a simple assumption:

Build → Scale → Exit on NASDAQ.
Because the infrastructure exists.

Southeast Asia has never had that luxury.

Grab went to NASDAQ.
Sea went to NYSE.
No major regional champion listed on SGX — because the liquidity + coverage didn’t justify it.

What’s Shifting Now?

Singapore is positioning itself as the region’s public-market on-ramp:

• SGX × NASDAQ dual listing

• Extreme fintech capital concentration

• Temasek + GIC reallocating toward deep tech and infrastructure

• Robust IP protection

• $28B RIE2025 deep-tech plan

To become a mature ecosystem, you need:

1. A complete capital stack
   Seed → A → Growth → Pre-IPO → Public markets

2. Exit pathways that convert
   Not theory — execution.

3. Signaling mechanisms
   Real wins → real returns → capital recycling.

We’re not fully there.
But for the first time, the scaffolding is real.

4. The Implicit Geopolitical Subtext

U.S.–China decoupling has reshaped global capital flows.

China still owns ~75% of Asia biotech funding…
but diversification is accelerating fast.

And Singapore is playing its hand masterfully- clever and very typical.

Singapore is now:

• Neutral

• Globally aligned

• Legally predictable

• Highly trusted

Signals:

• Biotech capital shifting to Singapore & South Korea

• Flagship Partnering × A*STAR: $100M deep-tech commitment

• Talent and IP migrating to strong-jurisdiction hubs

This isn’t incremental.
It’s a generational repositioning. (See it now?)

5. What Founders Should Actually Do

(Immediately)**

1. Five-Decision Audit

Label your last 5 decisions: Offense or Defense.
If you’re 4–1 defensive, you’re playing not to lose.

2. Entity Structure Review

Make your TopCo dual-listing ready:
clean cap table → clean governance → clean audit trail.

3. Live Capability Target List

Every month, update your list of 10 companies/tech you may:
Acquire → Partner → Replicate.

4. Board Transformation Agenda

Shift board meetings from quarterly KPIs → 3–5 year capability maps.

This is how category-defining companies build.

6. What Investors Should Do

Late-Stage Investors

Dual listing optionality changes your entire underwriting model:

• valuation ceilings shift

• secondary liquidity widens

• crossover investor interest increases

• exit horizons change

Audit portfolio readiness now.
This advantage won’t last long.

Seed Investors

Your edge becomes:
jurisdiction strategy + regulatory guidance + capital stack architecture.

This is no longer “nice-to-have.”
It’s competitive advantage.

7. The 24-Month Window

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

The founders and investors who move now will define the next decade.

Infrastructure windows don’t stay open:

• SGX is motivated today

• NASDAQ is paying attention today

• Capital is concentrating today

• Regulations are flexible today

In 3–5 years?

This either becomes table stakes —
or a missed opportunity we’ll reference for a generation.

8. The Question Southeast Asia Has Been Asking Wrong

For years the ecosystem asked:

“Can Southeast Asia produce the next Google?”

Wrong question.

The real one is:

“Can Southeast Asia build systems that consistently produce category-defining companies?”

For the first time, the answer is trending toward yes — cautiously, but convincingly.

Not because of one unicorn.
But because the infrastructure is finally being built.

• dual listing bridge

• capital consolidation

• sovereign repositioning

• regulatory maturity

• talent density

• deep-tech investment

Together, they form the early blueprint of a Southeast Asian capital stack.

Purpose-built for this region.
Not imported.

Before You Go

This year stretched us — in the best way.

We decoded:

• orbital compute

• fintech infrastructure

• regional capital flows

• AI rails

• cross-border regulation

A pattern emerged:

Southeast Asia isn’t catching up.
It’s reshaping itself.

We’re taking a short break — a reset, a recalibration (maybe even one day off our phones… maybe).

But 2026?
We’re coming back with the founders building the next layer of infrastructure — the kind that defines decades.

Stay curious.
Stay ambitious.
Keep building.

The ecosystem is leveling up.
All we need now is you.

— Kim & Kevin
SEA of Startups

Thought , leave a thought.

Leave a comment

Both are about to be catastrophically wrong.

A week ago, Kevin sent me an article with six words that basically detonated my brain:

“Google. Space-based data centers. Read this.”

I opened it half-curious, half-exhausted, the way you doomscroll Instagram after a mentally draining day ,where your attention spans feels like a fragile, flickering candle. Five minutes later, my eyes widened in the same way they did when I first learned Elon Musk planned to land rockets vertically (and then did it).

I messaged Kevin:

“Wait… is this real or am I spacing out?” Ha, geddit?

Nope. Real. And if the math holds, this might be the most important infrastructure shift of the next decade , do you SEA it (another one! )

Why Google Wants to Move Compute to Space (and Why It’s Not Crazy)

Google’s Project Suncatcher is exactly what it sounds like:
AI data centers… in orbit.

Not in 2080. Not when we’re all old and retired.
But plausibly in the next 10–12 years. (Boom!)

Why space? Because space quietly solves the three things governments in Southeast Asia lose sleep over (EVERYBODY NEEDS SPACE,duh) :

1. Unlimited Solar.

No clouds. No night cycles (if placed in the right orbit).
Just pure, consistent energy — 8x more efficient than panels on Earth.

2. Free Cooling.

Space is a vacuum. No water consumption. No humidity.
None of the HVAC nightmares every Malaysian and Singaporean data center operator deals with.

3. No Land Constraints.

No zoning fights. No “please wait for the next masterplan.”
No need for 100 acres of land and a new substation.

Launch costs used to be the blocker, but not anymore:

• 2000s: $10,000/kg

• Today: ~$1,500/kg

• SpaceX target by 2035: ~$200/kg

And where your stomach drops:

At ~$200/kg, space-based data centers hit cost parity with certain AI workloads on Earth.

This is economics colliding with physics. (KaPow)

SEA: The Region With the Most to Gain and Lose

Let’s bring this home.

Right now, SEA is fighting an invisible war nobody wants to admit:

• Malaysia: pausing new data center approvals because of electricity and water

• Singapore: strict compute allocation because the grid is maxed

• Indonesia & Vietnam: racing to plug infrastructure gaps “just in time”

Our region wants to be the AI hub of the East — but we’re trying to build a 2030 economy on 2010 infrastructure.

Google’s move is essentially saying:

“If countries can’t supply the power or cooling we need… we’ll go above them.”

That should be a wake-up call, but a window.
Because Southeast Asia has a unique strategic advantage: the equator.

Equatorial regions are ideal for orbital paths and ground station networks.
Whoever builds these first becomes the access point for orbital compute. One win, at a time.

This is the new “port city” moment, but instead of trade routes on water, it’s trade routes in space.

This Isn’t Just “Tech News” — It’s a Rerouting of Value

People hear “space tech” and imagine rockets, spacesuits, Elon in a leather jacket.

But the real impact is not in space.
It’s in the industries that feed families and employ millions here.

1. AI Compute: The Ceiling No One Talks About

Founders don’t publicly say this, but privately they admit:

• GPU access is painful

• Training runs are expensive

• Data centers are oversubscribed

• Even “cloud” is bottlenecked by physical infrastructure

Orbital compute changes this:

• Cheap energy

• No water for cooling

• Stable environment

• No land cost

• Shorter upgrade cycles

Heavy training workloads can run in orbit.
Inference happens on Earth.

It’s the literally the best of both worlds.

2. Agriculture: SEA’s $400B Industry, Reinvented

This is where it gets beautifully human.

Picture a farmer in Chiang Mai, Long An, or Kelantan.
She plants based on gut instinct passed down from her parents — the weather, the soil, the “feel.”

Now imagine she gets:

• Soil health insights down to micro-plots

• Pest outbreak warnings 72 hours before they hit

• Water stress signals before leaves even turn yellow

• A planting window tailored to her exact microclimate

All powered by:

• Satellite imaging

• AI models running directly in orbit

• Insights beamed down to her phone

And it’s not hypothetical. Startups like AcerX and LunaSat are already building toward it.

3. Mining, Utilities & Infrastructure: The Unsexy Big Winners

Mining companies can identify mineral deposits without sending teams into the field.
Utilities get real-time grid monitoring.
Supply chains gain route optimisation from orbit.

The boring industries the ones that actually move trillions just might benefit most.

and the BUT - The Hard Part: Space Is Unforgiving

Let’s not romanticise it.
Space is brutal. Very- too much space- no good.

Maintenance?

On Earth, data centers have technicians.
In space, unless Kevin’s secretly building a robotics lab, you need humanoid robots.

The funny thing is… they might actually arrive before half the “AI startups” raising money today.

Thermal Radiation?

Space is cold, but cooling is weird in a vacuum.
There’s no convection — only radiation.
So you need massive radiator panels that look more ISS than Instagram-aesthetic.

Latency & Bandwidth?

Yes, LEO can be faster than Singapore → California.
But you still need:

• Laser interlinks

• Dense ground stations

• Spectrum coordination

• Policies that don’t take 10 years to debate

This is where SEA has ~24–36 months to move.
After that, the infrastructure map locks in.

What Founders Should Actually Do (Without Quitting Everything to Start a Rocket Company)

Here’s the grounded version (time to be down-to- earth) HA! — actionable, human, sane:

1. Map your “Orbital-Eligible” Workloads

Which parts of your stack are:

• compute-heavy

• non-latency-critical

• expensive to run

• bottlenecked by infrastructure today

That’s your future orbital backlog.

2. Get to Know the Space-Tech Folks

You don’t need to build satellites, but you do need to understand what’s possible.

Grab coffee with teams like:

• AcerX

• LunaSat

• One Orbit

• StarCloud founders visiting the region

One coffee chat > 50 hours of reading PDFs.

3. Start Using Earth Observation Data Now

Don’t wait for “perfect.”
The companies that learn satellite data workflows today will dominate by 2030.

4. Add One Slide to Your 5-Year Strategy

Literally one slide:

“How does our model change if orbital compute becomes cost-competitive by 2029?”

This single question will separate resilient companies from fragile ones.

5. Join the Policy Conversations

Spectrum. Ground stations. Data flows.
This is no longer “for the government.”
It’s for anyone dependent on compute.

Be in the WhatsApp group, not the press release.

The Real Bet: Participate or Spectate

Every founder in SEA is making a bet — consciously or not.

If you ignore orbital compute, you’re betting that:

• launch costs won’t drop

• energy constraints won’t worsen

• Big Tech won’t reshape the map

Historically, that’s not a great bet.

When cloud arrived, early adopters won.
When mobile arrived, early adopters won.
When space arrives quietly, then suddenly early adopters will win again.

We’re not saying “pivot to rockets.”
We’re saying “don’t get blindsided” go in with eyes wide open dude.

Southeast Asia has the talent, the geography, the hunger, and the emerging deep-tech ecosystem.
What we lack is urgency — and maybe a little imagination.

A Human Ending (And Kevin’s Hoverboard)

At one point in our recording, Kevin went on a passionate tangent about how he still hasn’t gotten the hoverboard Back to the Future promised him.

And honestly, that’s the perfect metaphor for this moment.

Every generation gets promised the future in a neat, shiny package.
Flying cars.
Robot butlers.
Teleportation.
Hoverboards.

Most of it doesn’t arrive on time.
Most of it arrives sideways, in shapes we didn’t expect.

Maybe the future wasn’t a hoverboard…
Maybe it was a data center quietly floating above us, catching sunlight no country can ration.

Maybe the future isn’t about “thinking big.”
Maybe it’s just about not spacing out when the big ideas finally show up.

And if Southeast Asia plays this right — participates, not spectates — we might not get Kevin his hoverboard…

…but we might just build the next great infrastructure platform of our time. Close enough lah.

And that brings us to you.

If you’re reading this and thinking “this doesn’t apply to me,” you’re probably wrong.

If you’re a startup founder:
Orbital compute will determine whether you can train your models, scale your workloads, or access affordable GPUs.

If you’re a corporate operator:
Your agriculture, logistics, energy, manufacturing, and supply chain decisions will increasingly rely on satellite-driven intelligence.

If you’re an investor:
The companies that understand this shift earliest — and position for it — will capture the compounding returns.
Everyone else will be late.

Everyone in Southeast Asia’s tech ecosystem is touched by this shift —
from the farmer in Vietnam using satellite insights,
to the AI engineer in Singapore fighting for GPU time,
to the logistics operator in Malaysia navigating floods, delays, and unpredictable demand.

This isn’t just a “Google thing.”
It’s a where-the-future-happens thing.

The question isn’t whether space-based compute is coming.
The question is:

Will Southeast Asia shape this future, or watch it happen from the sidelines?

— Kimberley & Kevin

What did we miss? What resonated?

Hit reply or drop a comment — these conversations shape how we cover the ecosystem.

Leave a comment

🔗 Connect with us:
Kim: linkedin.com/in/weiisyuenyeoh
Kevin: linkedin.com/in/kevinbrockland

P.S.

Tags:
space tech, orbital compute, AI infrastructure, Google Project Suncatcher, Southeast Asia innovation, satellite analytics, agriculture tech, deep tech SEA, frontier tech, ground stations ASEAN, SpaceX, NVIDIA, climate tech, SEA startups, Elon Musk, Carl Sagan , Steve Jobs, Hoverboard, Backtothefutre

Quick gut check for every founder in Southeast Asia:
You’re not asking “How do we grow?” anymore.
You’re asking: “Will this survive what’s coming?”

Different question. Different game. Different scoreboard.

Companies that transform while they transact have outperformed the S&P 500 by 400 %+ over the last decade.
Not 10 % better. Not 2×. Four times better than the index everyone benchmarks against.

That’s not incremental improvement. That’s a different category of value creation altogether.

💀 The Old Playbook Is Dead (And Nobody Told Southeast Asia)

Traditional M&A is sequential. Linear. Predictable.
1️⃣ Buy the company.
2️⃣ Integrate operations.
3️⃣ Maybe think about transformation later.

Transformational M&A runs everything in parallel:
Strategy + Execution + Transformation happening simultaneously.

You’re not buying revenue; you’re buying capabilities.
You’re not integrating headcount; you’re integrating ecosystems.

The result? Outlier companies that blend defensive resilience (cost excellence, operational efficiency) with offensive expansion (AI adjacencies, new models, ecosystem plays).

And in Southeast Asia?
Most companies haven’t even shown up to the fight yet.

🧩 The Six Habits Behind 400 % Outperformance

Deloitte’s data shows six recurring practices among these outperformers.
Let’s break them down — and see where Southeast Asia really stands.

Habit 1: Leadership Mandate

This isn’t about a CEO who “gets” M&A.
It’s about a leadership team that understands the skills required for the organization of the future.

In Southeast Asia, that means:

• Navigating 11 regulatory systems and infinite complexity.

• Building technical capabilities to bridge fragmentation.

• Thinking in ecosystems, not silos.

Reality check:
Most corporates still treat M&A as a finance function.
Grab didn’t. Every acquisition came with CEO-level strategy baked in.

Habit 2: Always-On Portfolio

Think like Temasek, not an accountant.
Prune. Double down. Rotate.

Replace “revenue P&L” with a capability P&L:
Did this deal add what we need to win the next decade?

Reality check:
Too many SEA conglomerates cling to legacy divisions out of nostalgia.
Capability P&Ls force brutal honesty.

Habit 3: Transform As You Transact

The game-changer.

Old approach → Buy → Integrate → Transform (maybe).
New approach → Identify → Transform → Integrate — all at once.

Before the deal: map data architecture.
During: design operating models.
After: accelerate what you already started.

Reality check:
Most regional acquisitions still “figure it out later” — and value evaporates in 18 months.

Example: PropertyGuru built not just a classifieds empire, but a capability stack — mortgage infra, SaaS tools, developer ecosystems.
EQT noticed. $1.1 B take-private last year.

Habit 4: AI at the Core

AI isn’t a cost lever; it’s a business-model catalyst.

DBS understood this early.
They became a 27 000-person tech company that happens to do banking.
DBS QuickFinance uses AI to cut SME loan approvals from days to seconds.
That’s not cost-saving — that’s category redefinition.

Reality check:
If your 2025 M&A thesis doesn’t have an AI spine, it’s half-baked.

Habit 5: Power in Collaboration

SEA isn’t a single market — it’s an 11-piece orchestra.

You can’t muscle through; you have to dance with regulators, partners, and hyperscalers.
Collaboration isn’t optional — it’s survival.

Reality check:
Few corporates truly operate across SEA’s linguistic, legal, and cultural patchwork.
Those who can? They compound faster.

Habit 6: Workforce for Tomorrow

Integration is a people sport.
Culture. Upskilling. Judgment.

Grab didn’t win because it had the best tech.
It won because its teams understood Jakarta ≠ Singapore ≠ Bangkok.

Human fluency is the ultimate scaling tool.

🚀 The Grab & DBS Masterclasses

Grab’s Playbook:
Capability stacking through acquisition — Kudo (payments rails), Bento (wealthtech talent), Jaya Grocer (last-mile retail), Singtel bank license (new revenue stream).
Five of six habits nailed.
Still not printing money — but strategically unassailable.

DBS’s Masterclass:
Fewer acquisitions, deeper transformation.
AI-first, tech-mindset, cultural reinvention.
They stopped competing with banks — and started competing with tech giants.
And winning.

🧱 Why Southeast Asia Keeps Getting M&A Wrong

It’s not capital.
It’s culture.

• Family dynasties: “We build, we don’t buy.”

• Concession economies: “Competition is minimal.”

• Risk aversion: “We lost money on tech once.”

• Relationship bias: “M&A feels too transactional.”

But the tides are shifting:

1. Foreign players acquiring aggressively.

2. Private equity forcing modernization.

3. AI making “build-only” strategies obsolete.

Timeline: Expect a full programmatic-M&A wave in 3–5 years.

🤖 The AI-Enabled M&A Future

AI changes everything — from target scouting to post-deal integration.

• Targeting: algorithmic mapping of capability gaps.

• Diligence: instant financial + legal analysis.

• Integration: culture-fit and synergy modeling in real time.

• Optimization: predictive tracking of value capture.

AI won’t replace human judgment.
It will supercharge those who know how to use it.

🏗️ Build vs Buy: The Equation Just Flipped

Historically:

Build if it’s core. Buy if it’s faster.

Now:

Build is cheaper (AI tools). But buy delivers distribution, data, and teams you can’t replicate.

Even as building gets easier, the value of proven ecosystems rises.
Expect M&A volume to climb — not fall.

🧠 What Founders Should Do This Quarter

1. Five-Decision Audit
   Label your last 5 major calls: Defense or Offense.
   If they’re all one type — rebalance.

2. Live Capability Target List
   Keep a top-10 pipeline of companies or tech you could buy, partner, or replicate.
   Update monthly. Treat it like dealflow.

3. Transformation on the Board Agenda
   Map 3–5-year capabilities: Build ? Buy ? Partner ?
   Calibrate quarterly.

⏳ The 24-Month Window

Every major SEA shift follows this rhythm:
E-commerce. Ride-hailing. Fintech.

Each had a 24-month interoperability window — a moment before standards locked in.

We’re entering the same window for AI-enabled M&A.
Move now, or watch the opportunity ossify.

💬 The Bet You’re Already Making

Every founder and corporate leader in SEA is unconsciously betting on one of two futures:

Bet A: M&A stays slow; legacy build-culture wins.
Bet B: Transformational M&A compounds advantage and rewrites the decade.

History — and 400 % returns — say Bet B.

🔭 What Success Looks Like by 2030

• Scenario 1: The Local Champion — programmatic acquirer evolving into a capability platform.

• Scenario 2: The Regional Super App 2.0 — Grab’s playbook with profitability discipline.

• Scenario 3: The Strategic Foreign Acquirer — outsiders build regional powerhouses while locals hesitate.

All three will happen.
Only one will dominate.

⚠️ The Uncomfortable Truth

Most corporates still won’t act.
They’ll cling to comfort zones until disruption forces change.
That’s fine — it leaves room for the bold.

Because in M&A, being late means being irrelevant.

🔔 One Last Thing

If you’re reading this and thinking “this doesn’t apply to me,” you’re probably wrong.

• If you’re a startup founder: M&A is your exit path or your growth accelerant. Either way, it matters.

• If you’re a corporate operator: Transformational M&A is how you compete against better-funded, faster-moving competitors.

• If you’re an investor: The companies that master this playbook will deliver outsized returns. The ones that don’t will underperform.

Everyone in Southeast Asia’s tech ecosystem is affected by this shift.

The question is: Will you shape it, or will you watch it happen to you?

- Kimberley & Kevin

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Deloitte Transformational M&A Report (2025)

What did we miss? What resonated? Hit reply or drop a comment—these conversations shape how we cover the ecosystem.

Leave a comment

M&A strategy, transformational M&A, Southeast Asia acquisitions, capability stacking, corporate development, startup exits, DBS Bank, Grab strategy, Deloitte M&A report, AI-enabled M&A, build vs buy, regional expansion, corporate innovation, strategic partnerships, private equity Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia. Your home. Your battlefield.

This week, the 47th ASEAN Summit descended on Kuala Lumpur. Trump showed up. Chinese Premier Li Qiang flew in. Traffic became a nightmare. Everyone talked about integration, unity, alignment.

Here’s what nobody said out loud: The fragmentation might be the entire point.

While governments were signing MOUs about cross-border cooperation, Grab was quietly celebrating 12 years of navigating 11 different regulatory systems. SEA Group hit its stride by learning to build around friction, not through it. These companies didn’t win despite Southeast Asia’s complexity—they won because of it.

The question isn’t whether ASEAN needs more integration. The question is: What if controlled chaos is Southeast Asia’s biggest competitive advantage?

The Middle Child Syndrome

ASEAN is 58 years old. Not ancient, but not exactly young either. The EU has decades more to figure out integration. ASEAN is still in that awkward phase—too big to be ignored, but not quite confident about what it wants to be when it grows up.

Sound familiar?

The Southeast Asian startup ecosystem is the same. It’s in its ambitious twenties. It knows what it wants—to be globally relevant, to matter. It has the ingredients: 680 million people, third-largest market in the world, combined GDP crossing $4 trillion.

But it’s still figuring out the identity question. Are we a free trade bloc? A security alliance? A diplomatic counterweight to China and the U.S.?

Stuck in the middle. Again.

The Integration Everyone Wants (But Nobody Actually Needs)

Here’s the recurring theme at every ASEAN summit: “We need more integration.”

Unified payment rails. Harmonized regulations. Seamless cross-border trade. QR codes that work everywhere.

They’ve been talking about this for years. Photo ops. Handshakes. MOUs that go nowhere.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: An EU-style integration would probably destroy what makes Southeast Asia interesting.

Europe tried the unified currency thing. Look how that worked out when Greece nearly collapsed and dragged everyone down with it. Different economies at different stages of development don’t magically sync up just because you force them into the same system.

Southeast Asia’s fragmentation forces companies to become anti-fragile. You can’t just build for one market and copy-paste it everywhere. You have to understand local nuances. You have to navigate complexity. You have to build partnerships.

And that creates a moat.

Why Silicon Valley Keeps Failing Here

Google tried. Uber tried. Amazon tried.

They all assumed Southeast Asia was just “emerging markets with cheaper labor.” They helicoptered in, threw money around, and expected the playbook that worked in Palo Alto to work in Jakarta.

It didn’t.

Not because Southeast Asian consumers don’t want good products. But because the complexity isn’t just a barrier—it’s a feature.

Grab succeeded where Uber stumbled because they understood that Jakarta needs different payment systems than Singapore. That Indonesia requires different regulatory approaches than Thailand. That Vietnam’s consumer behavior is fundamentally different from Malaysia’s.

They didn’t try to force uniformity. They built for fragmentation.

That’s the moat.

Western tech giants look at Southeast Asia’s 11 different systems and see inefficiency. Local founders look at the same thing and see competitive advantage—because they’re the only ones who’ve learned to navigate it.

The Strategic Non-Alignment Playbook

Malaysia just signed AI cooperation agreements with China while simultaneously licensing chip design from UK-based Arm and partnering with U.S. firms on industrial automation.

Singapore uses Chinese robotics for some infrastructure, Western AI for financial services, and invests heavily in their own research.

This isn’t fence-sitting. This is strategic positioning.

The company or country that can integrate Chinese hardware with Western software with local applications becomes incredibly valuable. You’re the translator in a world where two superpowers speak different languages.

But this only works if you have actual capability, not just diplomatic skill.

The Tier One City Thesis

Here’s the insight most people miss: Kuala Lumpur has more in common with Bangkok than Kuala Lumpur has with Alor Setar.

The tier one cities across Southeast Asia share more characteristics—stage of development, consumer habits, technology adoption—than they do with tier two or tier three cities in their own countries.

Which means the path to regional scale isn’t about solving for every market simultaneously. It’s about dominating tier one cities first, then expanding from that base.

But you can’t do that if you’re waiting for perfect regulatory alignment. By the time governments agree on unified standards, the window will have closed.

What Actually Works Right Now

Let’s get tactical. If you’re building in Southeast Asia, here’s what separates exits from shutdowns:

1. Default to regional thinking, but execute locally

Your vision has to be regional from day one. 680 million people. $4 trillion GDP. That’s your TAR (Total Addressable Reality).

But your operations have to be hyper-local. You need people who understand each market deeply—culturally, regulatorily, economically.

Grab’s leadership includes people from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam. That diversity isn’t nice-to-have. It’s operationally necessary.

2. Study policy like your life depends on it (because it does)

Every country is prioritizing different sectors. Malaysia’s pushing semiconductors. Vietnam’s targeting EV supply chains. Thailand’s building the Eastern Economic Corridor for advanced industry.

Understanding these policies lets you stack advantages. Where can you get grants? Where can you access talent pools? Where will regulators give you sandbox access?

If you’re not mapping this systematically, you’re flying blind.

3. Engage with government before you need them

In Southeast Asia, your ability to navigate stakeholder dynamics often matters more than technological superiority.

That doesn’t mean becoming a rent-seeker. It means understanding that governments here play a much larger role in market development than in Silicon Valley.

The founders who succeed are the ones who figure out how to work with regulators as partners, not fight them as obstacles.

4. Embrace the long game

Grab took 12 years to get where they are. SEA Group took 10 years. Building a regional champion in Southeast Asia isn’t a five-year venture-backed sprint.

It’s a decade-plus marathon.

Yes, AI is changing timelines. Yes, things are moving faster. But sustainable businesses in complex markets still take time to build.

If you’re optimizing for a quick flip to a Western acquirer, you’re probably in the wrong region.

5. Celebrate the chaos (strategically)

Some of the complexity is your competitive moat. It’s why Western tech giants can’t just waltz in and dominate.

The chaos forces you to build capabilities that matter: local partnerships, regulatory navigation, cultural adaptation, operational resilience.

Don’t just tolerate the fragmentation. Use it.

The Bet You’re Actually Making

Every founder in Southeast Asia right now is making an implicit bet about the future.

Bet A: ASEAN will eventually integrate more deeply, and being positioned for that unified future matters.

Bet B: ASEAN will remain fragmented, and learning to thrive in complexity is the actual skill that matters.

The smart money? Both bets are partially right.

There will be some integration—payment rails, trade agreements, regulatory harmonization in specific sectors. But the deep cultural, linguistic, and political differences aren’t going anywhere.

So the winning strategy is building companies that benefit from integration where it happens, while maintaining resilience in fragmented markets where it doesn’t.

The 24-Month Window Nobody’s Talking About

Here’s the uncomfortable timeline: The next 24 months will determine which companies own the next decade.

Why? Because right now, the rules are still being written. Mega-deals between tech giants are still being structured. Standards are still fluid. There’s room for regional players to position themselves.

But once those deals lock in—once the ecosystems solidify—the interoperability window slams shut. You’re either inside or permanently outside.

This is the new digital divide, and it’s being drawn right now.

What This Actually Means

If you’re building in Southeast Asia and you’re frustrated by the complexity, you’re looking at it wrong.

The fragmentation isn’t a bug. It’s the operating system.

Western founders look at Southeast Asia and see inefficiency. Local founders look at the same thing and see training ground.

Companies that survive here become anti-fragile. They learn to operate across 11 regulatory systems, 10 payment structures, hundreds of cultural nuances. They get good at building partnerships. They master stakeholder management.

And when they eventually expand globally? They’re prepared for anything.

Because if you can navigate Southeast Asia’s controlled chaos, you can navigate anywhere.

The Real Question

The ASEAN Summit in KL wrapped up with the usual commitments to cooperation, integration, and regional solidarity.

None of that matters as much as what founders do in the next 24 months.

Will you wait for perfect alignment that’s never coming? Or will you build for the region that actually exists—messy, complex, fragmented, and full of opportunity precisely because of it?

Your competitors are already making that choice.

What’s yours-Thoughts?

Leave a comment

What did we miss? What resonated? Hit reply or comment below—these conversations shape how we cover the ecosystem.

- Kimberley & Kevin

P.S. If you know a founder still waiting for ASEAN to “get its act together” before scaling regionally, forward this. They’re already too late.

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:

🎧 Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• 47th ASEAN Summit (May 2025, Kuala Lumpur)

• Malaysia-US Trade Deal

• ASEAN Digital Economy Framework

• Startup ASEAN Summit

TAGS:

ASEAN, Southeast Asia startups, regional expansion, venture capital, startup strategy, Grab, SEA Group, regulatory strategy, cross-border business, emerging markets, fragmentation, strategic partnerships, government relations, market entry, Southeast Asian tech ecosystem

Welcome to the most expensive game of musical chairs in human history.

In October 2025, OpenAI—the company that made you question whether your job is safe—signed roughly $1 trillion worth of deals. Not over decades. Not in theoretical future value. One trillion dollars in commitments that locked together the biggest names in tech like a high-stakes game of Twister.

Nvidia committed up to $100 billion to OpenAI’s data centers. AMD followed with tens of billions more. Oracle inked a $300 billion cloud contract. Each company took equity stakes in OpenAI while simultaneously becoming its customer and supplier.

It’s beautiful. It’s terrifying. And if you’re building anything in Southeast Asia, it’s about to force your hand.

The Flywheel That Might Break the World

Here’s what’s actually happening beneath the surface of those press releases.

OpenAI needs computing power—not just a lot, but an almost incomprehensible amount. We’re talking 20 gigawatts worth of data centers. That’s the output of 20 nuclear reactors, running continuously, just to train the next generation of AI models.

They can’t pay for this upfront. So they’ve structured deals where chipmakers like Nvidia essentially finance OpenAI’s infrastructure in exchange for guaranteed orders. Nvidia’s money buys data centers filled with... Nvidia chips. Which OpenAI uses to train AI models. Which drives demand for more Nvidia chips. Which justifies Nvidia’s stock price. Which gives Nvidia more currency (in the form of valuable equity) to invest in... OpenAI.

See the loop?

Now multiply this across AMD, Oracle, Microsoft, and a web of cloud providers and startups. Everyone is simultaneously the investor, the customer, and the supplier. Capital flows in a perfect circle, each deal reinforcing the next, each rising stock price validating the previous bet.

This is either the most sophisticated value-creation flywheel ever constructed, or it’s vendor financing on steroids.

The Cisco Parallel Nobody Wants to Talk About

If you’re over 35, you remember what happened to Cisco Systems.

Late 1990s. Internet boom. Cisco was the arms dealer of the dot-com gold rush—selling routers and networking equipment to every startup that raised venture capital. Their stock went parabolic. They briefly became the most valuable company on Earth.

Then came the vendor financing strategy. Cisco would invest in or loan money to internet companies... so those companies could turn around and buy Cisco equipment. Revenue exploded. Wall Street cheered. Cisco executives became billionaires.

Until the music stopped.

When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Cisco discovered that a huge chunk of their “revenue” was actually just their own money cycling through customer companies. Those customers went bankrupt. Cisco’s stock dropped 90%. The playbook that seemed genius became the textbook example of bubble economics.

Nvidia’s $100 billion stake in OpenAI looks uncomfortably similar.

Is this time different? Maybe. AI is real in a way many dot-com businesses weren’t. ChatGPT has 200 million users. Companies are deploying AI in actual workflows, not just buying vaporware.

But here’s the uncomfortable question: How much of AI’s current growth is real demand versus artificially inflated demand created by these circular financing arrangements?

Why This Matters for Southeast Asia (And Why You Have Less Time Than You Think)

While this trillion-dollar poker game plays out in Silicon Valley and Shenzhen, Southeast Asia is being forced to make a choice it didn’t ask for.

Do we join this ecosystem on whatever terms we can get? Or do we try to build our own capabilities knowing we’re years behind?

The honest answer: We need to do both. And we have maybe 24 months before the window closes.

Here’s why the timeline is so tight.

Right now, these mega-deals are still being structured. Standards are still fluid. The technology stack is still evolving. There’s room for regional players to position themselves as integration layers, deployment partners, or specialized service providers.

But once these circular deals lock in—once Nvidia’s chips only work seamlessly with Microsoft’s cloud which only optimizes for OpenAI’s models—the interoperability window slams shut. You’re either inside the ecosystem or permanently outside it.

And if you’re outside? Good luck competing when your opponent has access to computing power you can’t afford, AI models you can’t replicate, and partnership networks you can’t penetrate.

This is the new digital divide, and it’s being drawn right now.

The Robot Revolution Nobody’s Pricing In

If the AI investment loop was just about software and cloud services, we could debate whether it’s sustainable. But there’s a second wave coming that changes everything: embodied AI.

Translation: Robots with AI brains, walking around in the physical world.

July 2025. Shanghai. World Artificial Intelligence Conference. Over 150 humanoid robots on display. Chinese companies selling working humanoids for $16,000. Some models as low as $5,900.

Morgan Stanley just published research projecting the humanoid robotics market could hit $5 trillion in annual revenue by 2050. That’s twice the size of the global automotive industry.

Let that sink in. We’re not talking about science fiction or distant futures. We’re talking about a trillion-dollar manufacturing ecosystem that needs to get built in the next 10-15 years.

And Southeast Asia has a real shot at being a major player—but only if we move now.

Why China Is Winning the Robot Race (And What We Can Learn)

Here’s the uncomfortable geopolitical truth: China is currently best-positioned to dominate “embodied AI.”

Not because they have the best AI research (though they’re closing the gap fast). But because they’ve cracked three things that matter more than pure technology:

1. Manufacturing ecosystem at scale. China can produce robots cheaper and faster than anyone else. Their supply chains for motors, sensors, batteries, and materials are unmatched.

2. Guaranteed internal demand. Chinese state-owned enterprises will buy domestic robots as a matter of policy. That gives Chinese robotics companies a market to refine their products before going global.

3. Strategic patience combined with tactical speed. Beijing identified robotics as a national priority years ago. They’re playing a 20-year game with 6-month sprints.

Meanwhile, American robotics CEOs went to Congress in 2025 literally begging for a national strategy, warning that without coordinated policy and investment, the U.S. will lose both the robotics race and, by extension, the AI race.

The robots are where AI’s economic value gets captured. If you lose robots, you lose AI.

Where does that leave Southeast Asia?

The Strategic Non-Alignment Playbook

Here’s the move: Southeast Asia should become the Switzerland of the AI-robotics cold war.

Not in the sense of being neutral and boring. In the sense of being the place where East meets West, where interoperability gets figured out, where multiple tech ecosystems coexist and connect.

Malaysia is already doing this. They signed AI cooperation agreements with China while simultaneously licensing chip design technology from UK-based Arm and partnering with U.S. firms on industrial automation. They’re building relationships on all sides while developing domestic capability so they’re not completely dependent on anyone.

Singapore is even more sophisticated. They use Chinese robotics for some infrastructure, Western AI for financial services, and invest heavily in their own research. They’re building genuine optionality.

This isn’t fence-sitting. It’s strategic positioning.

Because here’s what most people miss: The company or country that can integrate Chinese hardware with Western software with local applications becomes incredibly valuable. You’re the translator in a world where two superpowers speak different languages.

But this only works if you have actual capability, not just diplomatic skill. You need engineers who understand both ecosystems. You need companies that can deploy and maintain robots regardless of where they’re manufactured. You need software that works across platforms.

Building that takes time. Hence: 24 months.

What Founders Should Actually Do This Quarter

Enough strategy. Let’s get tactical.

If you’re a founder or operator in Southeast Asia right now, here are five moves that matter:

1. Pilot robots now, even if they’re imperfect.

Don’t wait for mature technology. If you’re in manufacturing, logistics, or warehousing, start testing robot deployment today. The companies that learn how to integrate robots with human workflows now will have compounding advantages by 2030.

The cost of being five years behind in operational knowledge will vastly exceed the cost of adopting imperfect technology today.

2. Build the integration layer, not the hardware.

Unless you’re exceptionally well-funded, don’t try to compete with Chinese firms on robot hardware or Western firms on foundational AI. Instead, build the software and services that make those technologies useful in Southeast Asian contexts.

A robot designed for a Japanese factory doesn’t automatically work in an Indonesian palm oil plantation. Someone needs to adapt it. That someone could be you.

3. Make your pitch anti-fragile.

If you’re fundraising, assume it will take twice as long as you think and that 80% of pitches will fail. That’s not pessimism—that’s the new baseline.

Series A deal volume is down 18%, dollars deployed down 23%, and median fundraising timeline has stretched to 20+ months. Build your financial model assuming you need 24-30 months of runway, not 18.

4. Get specific about your AI story—or drop it entirely.

VCs are getting sophisticated about AI-washing. If you claim to be an AI company, you’ll get grilled on model architecture, training data, and inference costs. If you can’t defend those claims technically, don’t make them.

Better to be a great logistics company that happens to use AI than a mediocre AI company trying to find a use case.

5. Map your stakeholder ecosystem before scaling.

For every market you want to enter, identify the regulators, incumbent players, and local partners who will determine whether you can actually deploy. Then engage them early.

In Southeast Asia, your ability to navigate complex stakeholder dynamics is often more important than pure technological superiority.

The Bet You’re Making Whether You Realize It or Not

Every founder right now is making an implicit bet about the future—even if you’re trying to avoid making a bet.

If you’re building in AI or robotics, you’re betting that this wave is real, that the investment will eventually find profitable returns, and that there’s room for new players despite the trillion-dollar incumbents.

If you’re staying away from AI entirely, you’re betting that the hype will deflate, that most AI companies will fail, and that there will be opportunities in the aftermath for more traditional businesses.

Both bets carry risk. But only one bet has upside if you’re wrong.

If you bet on AI and it turns out to be overhyped, you’ve still built capabilities in cutting-edge technology. You can pivot. You’ve learned. You have optionality.

If you bet against AI and it turns out to be transformative, you’ve built capabilities in a world that no longer exists. You’re starting from zero.

This is why the smartest founders I know aren’t asking “Is this a bubble?” They’re asking: “How do I build something that has value regardless of whether this is a bubble?”

The answer? Focus ruthlessly on unit economics, real customer problems, and sustainable business models. Use AI as a tool, not a story. Build partnerships that give you leverage, not vendor relationships that make you disposable.

And move fast—because in 24 months, the rules of this game will be set in stone.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Timing

We’re at an inflection point that happens maybe twice in a generation.

The last comparable moment was probably the late 1990s with the internet, or the late 2000s with mobile. Decisions made in the next 2-3 years will shape the next 2-3 decades.

The leverage available to individual founders, operators, and investors right now is enormous. But you have to be willing to grab it.

That means accepting uncertainty as the baseline condition. That means making decisions with incomplete information. That means being wrong sometimes and adjusting fast.

The biggest mistake isn’t picking the wrong technology or the wrong market. The biggest mistake is paralysis—waiting for perfect information that will never come, watching the window close while you’re still analyzing.

Southeast Asia has a genuine shot at being a major player in the AI-robotics revolution. But only if we’re willing to act while the rules are still being written.

The trillion-dollar flywheel is spinning. The robot factories are being built. The investment decisions are being made.

You can shape this, or you can watch it happen to you. But you can’t do both.

What’s it going to be?

Share Sea of Startups

Kim Yeoh is co-host of Sea of Startups and writes about technology, strategy, and building in Southeast Asia. Kevin Brockland is her co-host and occasional voice of reason. They’re both trying to figure this out in real-time, just like you.

Subscribe to Sea of Startups for weekly insights that won’t make you dumber:

🎧 Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

💬 What’s your take? Are we in a bubble, a revolution, or both? Comments are open.

Leave a comment

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are personal opinions and do not represent any organizations mentioned. Content is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered professional, investment, or legal advice.

“The interim phase to autonomous vehicles is harder than the end goal. The end goal is all cars are autonomous. The interim is humans and machines sharing the road.” - Kevin

Hey guys,

Something strange just happened in Singapore.

In September 2025, Grab announced plans to launch Ai.R, its first autonomous vehicle service for consumers in Singapore, in partnership with WeRide. Days later, Pony.ai announced its entry into the Singapore market, partnering with ComfortDelGro, the country’s largest transportation service provider, to deploy autonomous vehicles.

Two massive AV deployments. Same city. Same month. Different playbook than anything Silicon Valley tried.

Here’s what nobody’s connecting: This isn’t just about self-driving cars. It’s about how deep tech actually scales when you stop pretending regulation doesn’t exist.

P.S. Share this with one founder who needs to rethink their regulatory strategy. That’s how we grow.

Share

The Partnership Puzzle

Think about this for a second. Grab partnered with WeRide. ComfortDelGro partnered with Pony.ai. Not acquisitions. Not licensing deals. Strategic partnerships where neither side could win alone.

Grab brings:

• Millions of ride records

• App infrastructure that works across 8 countries

• 15 years of regulatory relationships in Singapore

• User trust built ride by ride

WeRide brings:

• Autonomous driving technology

• Over 50 million kilometres of autonomous driving experience

• Two vehicle models that cleared Singapore’s safety assessment

• Global AV credibility

Neither company walks into Singapore and “disrupts” anything. They both recognize that moving fast and breaking things doesn’t work when things include pedestrians.

What Actually Happened in the US

Let me get the Silicon Valley story straight, because it matters.

Waymo didn’t fail. They’ve been running commercial robotaxi service in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin. Waymo leads the robotaxi market with over 4 million rides in 2024 and 96 million rider-only miles projected by mid-2025.

But here’s what’s true: They fought every inch of the way. Years of regulatory battles. Public skepticism. Constant scrutiny over every incident.

Cruise? Different story. They did get shut down in San Francisco after incidents that included one where their vehicle was involved in dragging a pedestrian. That’s not just a PR problem—that’s the entire autonomous vehicle future hanging by a thread.

The US approach: Build the tech, launch the service, negotiate with regulators as problems emerge, hope public opinion doesn’t turn against you.

The Singapore approach: In 2025 the Land Transport Authority announced partnerships with several AV developers for pilots covering daily commutes, with the aim of deploying a limited number of driverless buses and shuttles on public roads by 2025.

See the difference? The government didn’t approve pilots. They orchestrated them. They selected partners. They set the timeline.

The Question Every Deep Tech Founder Needs to Ask Right Now

Stop asking: “Can we build this technology?”

Start asking: “Who already owns the relationship we need?”

Not “might buy our product.” Not “could be a customer.”

Who has distribution, trust, and regulatory access we cannot replicate—and a strategic problem they cannot solve without us?

That’s your entry point. That’s your leverage. That’s how you survive the next 24 months in deep tech.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: If you’re selling to an established player, you’re a vendor. Vendors get squeezed on price and replaced when something cheaper comes along.

If you’re partnering with an established player to solve something existential for them, you’re a strategic partner. Strategic partners get equity, long-term commitments, and a seat at the table.

Pony.ai’s collaboration with ComfortDelGro began with a Memorandum of Understanding in July 2024, establishing a strategic partnership aimed at accelerating large-scale commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles. That’s not a vendor relationship. That’s co-building the future of transportation.

Now Let’s Talk About The Fundraising Desert

While autonomous vehicles get all the headlines, here’s the reality most founders are living:

Series A dollars deployed: Down 23% year-over-year Deal volume: Down 18% Median time from Seed to Series A: 20 months

But that median hides the brutal truth. A significant chunk of companies are taking 3.5 years or more to get from Seed to Series A.

If you raised an 18-month seed round expecting to raise Series A in 12-15 months? You’re probably scrambling for a bridge round right now.

This isn’t a temporary dip. This is the new normal. The easy money era of 2020-2021 ended abruptly, and it’s not coming back.

What’s Actually Getting Funded

Hot sectors:

• AI infrastructure (chips, hardware, not the wrapper apps)

• AI-native SaaS (built from scratch, not retrofitted)

• Cybersecurity (always evergreen)

• FinTech (surprisingly resilient)

• Web3 (modest comeback in valuations, not volume)

Cold sectors:

• Food & beverage

• Personal products

• Ad tech

• Medical devices

Translation: If you’re in a hot sector, money still exists but standards are higher. If you’re in a cold sector, you need 2-3x better metrics to raise the same round, and it’ll take 50% longer.

The Growth Playbook Nobody Wants Anymore

Remember triple-triple-double-double-double? Hit $1M ARR, then grow 3x, 3x, 2x, 2x, 2x to reach ~$100M in five years.

That playbook is dead.

Now the bar is: 10-20x revenue growth in the first 18 months. $100M ARR before Series B. Path to profitability visible from seed stage.

If that sounds insane, congratulations—you’re paying attention. But that’s also what’s getting funded in 2025.

What Southeast Asia Founders Must Internalize

1. Fundraising takes 2x longer than you think

If you think it takes 6 months, plan for 12. Your competitors who don’t plan for this will run out of money mid-process.

2. Extended runway isn’t optional

Raise 24-30 months of runway, not 18. If you can’t, have a detailed burn reduction plan before you need it, not when you’re three months from zero.

3. Government isn’t your enemy—it’s your accelerant

Singapore proves something critical: In emerging markets, government backing is the fastest path to scale.

If you’re still trying to “disrupt” your way around regulators, you’re fighting yesterday’s war.

4. Strategic partnerships beat solo execution

The era of “we’ll build everything ourselves” is over. Find the established player who needs you as badly as you need them. That’s your Series A pitch.

5. Stop copying Silicon Valley playbooks

What works in San Francisco doesn’t work in Jakarta. What works in Jakarta doesn’t work in Manila.

Build for the market you’re actually in, not the market you wish you were in.

The AI Reality Check Nobody Wants to Hear

Everyone’s adding “AI-powered” to their pitch deck like it’s 2021 and we’re throwing “blockchain” at everything.

Here’s what investors actually ask:

• “Is AI core to your value prop, or did you just wrap an LLM?”

• “What’s your moat when the next model drops?”

• “Why is this a company and not a feature?”

If you can’t answer these authentically, don’t force the AI angle. Investors can smell AI-washing from across the table.

Two Futures, One Winner

We’re watching two parallel approaches to innovation unfold:

Approach A: Move fast, break things, fight regulators, hope public opinion stays positive, burn billions proving a concept.

Approach B: Partner strategically, work with regulators, test in controlled environments, scale with infrastructure, build trust systematically.

Singapore just demonstrated Approach B at scale. Pony.ai will deploy autonomous vehicles in the Punggol area with fixed routes, pending regulatory approval. Controlled rollout. Fixed routes. Regulatory partnership.

Not as exciting as “we’re launching tomorrow and regulators can deal with it.” But far more likely to actually work.

What This Means for You

If you’re building deep tech in Southeast Asia right now, you’re navigating the hardest fundraising environment in a decade.

But here’s the upside: If you can build something real, something sustainable, something that solves an actual problem with proper unit economics and strategic partnerships—you’ll be one of the few left standing when this correction ends.

And corrections always end.

The founders who win won’t have the flashiest demos or the biggest seed rounds.

They’ll be the ones who figured out how to:

• Partner with established players strategically

• Navigate regulation as a competitive advantage

• Build for 30-month runways in a capital-constrained market

• Focus on fundamentals while everyone chases whatever’s trending on Twitter

One Last Thing

The autonomous vehicle story isn’t really about autonomous vehicles.

It’s about what happens when you stop pretending you can ignore the existing infrastructure and start figuring out how to become part of it.

WeRide joined Singapore’s Steering Committee on Autonomous Vehicles as the only international member alongside Waymo. That’s not disruption. That’s integration.

And integration, it turns out, scales faster than disruption when you’re building things that touch millions of people’s daily lives.

Worth thinking about.

-Kim and Kevin

What resonates? What did we miss? Reply with what you’re seeing in your market—these conversations shape how we cover the ecosystem.

Leave a comment

Listen to the full episode:

🎧 Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Sources:

• Grab Singapore press release (Sept 2025)

• Pony.ai investor relations announcements (Sept 2025)

• Land Transport Authority AV trial data

• Carta Series A market report

• Waymo operational metrics

Sea of Startups delivers weekly reality checks for founders building in Southeast Asia. No fluff. Just what actually matters.

Subscribe for insights on what’s really happening in Southeast Asian tech.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now →