SEA of Startups

There are two ways out of a company in Southeast Asia. One of them is loud. On 20 October, GCash will ring the bell at the Philippine Stock Exchange in the biggest listing that country has ever done. Cornerstone investors with names like BlackRock and T. Rowe Price. A valuation that starts with a number most Filipino founders will never see in their lifetime. The other is quiet. A few weeks earlie...

Somebody is going to stand on a stage in Singapore this month and tell you two things. Southeast Asia now has more than 60 profitable tech startups. And the region is in the middle of a $4 billion AI boom. Both numbers are true. Both are also lies. Not made up. Lies the way your uncle lies at dinner, where every word checks out and the whole thing is still nonsense. So I am going to tell you up fr...

This week a guy who, as far as anyone can tell, had never posted anything in his life put up a thread about artificial intelligence and got 170 million eyeballs on it in five days. A former Anthropic employee, or so the byline says. Within 48 hours you had Senator Bernie Sanders talking about banning superintelligence, market people calling for a bloodbath on Monday morning, and half my group chat...

Last week one of the firms that taught this region what seed capital even looks like quietly admitted that it will not raise another Southeast Asia fund. 500 Global showed up in KL, in Jakarta, in Bangkok more than a decade ago, when honestly almost nobody in the Valley could find these cities on a map, let alone wire money to them. They ran the accelerators. They wrote the small early checks that...

Three of the biggest companies this region has ever produced just did something they had never done before. They made money. Sea, the Singapore company behind Shopee and Garena, posted a net profit of 487 million US dollars in a single quarter, on 7.8 billion dollars of revenue. GoTo, the Indonesian giant behind Gojek and Tokopedia, booked its second profitable quarter in a row. And Grab, maybe my...

As you read this, thousands of people are in a convention hall in Bangkok. Techsauce Global Summit, 26 to 28 August, at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center. Three hundred sessions, hundreds of exhibitors, and one word on every lanyard and every panel title. The word is next. The race to the next model, the next unicorn, the next Thailand. So I want to be a little contrarian this week and...

There is a company in Singapore that has raised close to half a billion US dollars and has never sold a single thing. Not a small amount of revenue. None. It has a chip. It has a box. It has a founder story, a serious set of engineers, and one of the bigger names in Singaporean venture writing the cheque. What it does not have is a customer you can name or a price you can look up. And here is the...

In 2022, at the Vietnam Venture Summit, forty one funds stood up and pledged one and a half billion dollars for Vietnamese startups. The pledge covered the three years from 2023 to 2025. Through May of this year, Vietnamese founders raised twenty eight point eight million dollars. Ten rounds. And next month, on the twenty first of September, FTSE Russell reclassifies Vietnam from a frontier market...

On the twenty seventh of July, in a bank tower in Petaling Jaya, the Malaysian government announced more than five billion ringgit of financing for Malaysian startups. It has been a week. I still cannot tell you who is giving it. Not because it is a secret. Because nobody published the list. The minister said fifteen organisations. The fullest account any newspaper ran named twelve, and it introdu...

For a decade, Indonesia was not a story about Southeast Asia. It was the story. Two hundred and eighty million people, most of them young, most of them coming online for the first time with a phone in their hand. Gojek, Tokopedia, a parade of unicorns. Every global fund with a Southeast Asia slide put Jakarta in the middle of it, and everybody wanted in. In 2021, at the peak, Indonesian startups r...

Over the past few weeks, three Malaysia stories hit the news that, on the surface, have nothing to do with each other. A government pension fund answered in Parliament for nearly RM200 million lost in a fish farming startup that turned out to be a fraud. A celebrity founder and her husband sat in a courtroom over money that came from two of the biggest state funds. And a quasi-crypto commune in Fo...

You have seen the number this week, probably five or six times, from five or six people who all copied it from the same report. Southeast Asian tech funding hit 7.4 billion dollars in the first half of 2026. More than double last year. Recovery is here, the drought is over, break out the good coffee. It is true. It is also one of the most misleading true things I have read all year. Because 4.5 bi...

This week the two biggest stories in Southeast Asian tech were not a funding round or somebody’s ninth super app pivot. They were a government chip program in Penang and 3,600 kilometres of fibre being dropped on the seabed between India and Singapore. 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, t...

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 t...

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...

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 lar...

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 th...

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...

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 Ph...

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 versio...

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 de...

Episode Title: The New Space Age Is Actually Here | Artemis II, SpaceX IPO & The Rise of Orbital Infrastructure Episode Summary Right now, four humans are flying around the moon. Not in a simulation. Not in a film. For real. Kevin uses the launch of Artemis II on April 1, 2026 as the jumping-off point for a deep dive into the most consequential shift in space exploration since the Apollo era — and...

Most AI content gives you a framework. Tiwa York gives you a verdict. 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 numbe...

In the ever-changing landscape of technology and business, the term “SaaSpocalypse” has emerged to describe the recent downturn in public software stocks. But what does this mean for the future of SaaS companies, especially in Southeast Asia? In this blog post, we’ll explore the nuances of the SaaSpocalypse, the potential for growth amidst disruption, and what established and emerging companies ca...

Keywords Meta, Manus, acquisition, Singapore, AI, geopolitics, startups, tech industry, business growth, investment Summary In this conversation, Kevin and Kim discuss Meta's recent acquisition of Manus, a Singapore-based startup, exploring its implications for founders in the region, the geopolitical landscape, and the evolving nature of AI in business. They analyze the rapid growth of Manus, the...