Episodes

  • One Winner, Six Shipwrecks

    One Winner, Six Shipwrecks
    Jul 1 2026
    Since 2017, Southeast Asia has produced exactly one tech IPO that made public investors real money. One. And this week, the Philippines is getting ready to bet its entire year on the next one.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 weekStart 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 listingOn 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 healthWhile 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. ...
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    21 mins
  • 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
  • EP 29 - Chatbots to Agents and where Liability Lands

    EP 29 - Chatbots to Agents and where Liability Lands
    May 27 2026
    I hopped into a taxi in Bangkok last week and the driver, a man north of fifty, spent the ride telling me what he was building with AI.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 oneI 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 seriousBuilding 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 ...
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    37 mins
  • Ep. 28 - The Philippines Just Drew a Line With Washington. Malaysia Just Rewrote Its IPO Rules. And the Whole Region Is Doing Something Nobody Is Tracking as One Story.

    Ep. 28 - The Philippines Just Drew a Line With Washington. Malaysia Just Rewrote Its IPO Rules. And the Whole Region Is Doing Something Nobody Is Tracking as One Story.
    May 20 2026

    Two stories from Southeast Asia this week, and almost nobody connected them.

    The Philippines unveiled the marker for the Pax Silica industrial hub in New Clark City. Twenty plus companies expressed interest. A dozen are billion-dollar US firms. And on the same day, Manila publicly rejected the US request for diplomatic immunity and US legal jurisdiction over the zone. The hub will operate under Philippine law.

    Malaysia rewrote the rules of how startups go public on Bursa. VC firms can act as listing agents. Retail investors can participate for the first time. A real funding escalator from regulated crowdfunding to LEAP Market to ACE Market.

    But the Malaysia story is part of something bigger. Singapore signed an SGX-Nasdaq dual listing bridge last November. The ASEAN-6 signed a cross-border depository receipts MOU in December 2024. Indonesia is tightening listing rules to chase quality. The whole region is rebuilding its public markets for venture-backed companies at the same time, and almost no one is tracking it as one story.

    This episode walks through the two races happening in Southeast Asia right now. The industrial race for the AI economy, and the capital markets race for venture-backed exits. Each country is making different bets. Each country is solving for a different segment. Where you build matters now in a way it didn't five years ago.

    I'm bullish on the Philippines. But the country has a gap on the capital markets side, and closing that gap is the work of the next two years.

    Real. Raw. Relatable.



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seaofstartups.substack.com
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    38 mins
  • Ep. 27 - Strip Out One Deal and SEA Raised $800M. A Chip Stock Just Got 95x Oversubscribed. And OpenAI Spent $4 Billion Admitting AI Is Hard to Deploy.

    Ep. 27 - Strip Out One Deal and SEA Raised $800M. A Chip Stock Just Got 95x Oversubscribed. And OpenAI Spent $4 Billion Admitting AI Is Hard to Deploy.
    May 13 2026
    There’s a version of this week that looks like a good week for Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem.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 NumberDealStreetAsia 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 NumberThe 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 GoingIf 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 NamesThere’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 ...
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    38 mins
  • Four Stories That Explain Southeast Asia Right Now

    Four Stories That Explain Southeast Asia Right Now
    May 7 2026
    This week’s episode is a news episode. No guests. Just four stories that I think every founder, investor, and operator in Southeast Asia should be paying attention to right now.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 ...
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    40 mins