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SEA of Startups

SEA of Startups

By: Decoding the Pulse of Founders Capital & Conviction in Southeast Asia.
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Real, raw, relatable takes on Southeast Asian startups. One investor, the week's news, no script.

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Episodes
  • The Mirage and the Fork in the Road

    The Mirage and the Fork in the Road
    Jun 24 2026
    Start with two numbers and a question.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 flatterThe 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 marginSo 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 aboutLet 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....
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    28 mins
  • Ep 31 - Oil, iron, and idle money: what the war is really doing to Southeast Asia

    Ep 31 - Oil, iron, and idle money: what the war is really doing to Southeast Asia
    Jun 10 2026
    Start with a sliver of water between Iran and Oman. On a normal day, roughly a fifth of the world’s oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz. This year it stopped being normal. When the strait seized up, Brent jumped 10 to 13 percent in a single session into the low 80s and kept climbing to the highest level since 2022. The International Energy Agency, which does not deal in drama, called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.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 carsThe 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 halfWe 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...
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    31 mins
  • Ep. 30 - We Called It a Funding Winter. I Think We Built for an Exit That Was Never There.

    Ep. 30 - We Called It a Funding Winter. I Think We Built for an Exit That Was Never There.
    Jun 3 2026
    Singapore just released its report on venture funding for 2025, and almost every write-up reads the same way. Funding winter. Capital’s gone quiet. Hold the line, it’ll come back.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 readThe 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 madeHere’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 thereEvery 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, ...
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    24 mins
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