Grab is spending US$600 million to buy Delivery Hero’s foodpanda delivery business in Taiwan, in a move that does far more than add another pin to its map. It gives Southeast Asia’s biggest super app its first foothold outside the region, hands Delivery Hero a clean exit from one of its more valuable assets. It reshapes competition in one of Asia’s most closely watched food delivery markets.

The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2026, pending regulatory approval and other customary conditions. If completed, Grab will take over foodpanda Taiwan’s operations across 21 cities, inheriting a business that generated around US$1.8 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025 and was profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis before Delivery Hero’s group cost allocations.

Also Read: Grab: How we grew a business from 40 to 630,000 drivers

That last bit matters. Grab is not buying a troubled outpost in need of rescue. It is buying scale, coverage and an already functioning operation in a market where food delivery has matured beyond the early subsidy-fuelled chaos.

Why this acquisition matters for Grab

For Grab, the Taiwan deal is less a geographic vanity project than a strategic shortcut.

The company has spent years building out its delivery and mobility playbook across Southeast Asia. Still, by now, the region’s major urban markets are well mapped, fiercely competitive, and harder to expand at the pace investors once expected. Taiwan offers something rare: a developed, densely populated, mobile-first market where demand patterns are familiar, digital adoption is high, and urban logistics are complex enough to reward operational discipline.

Grab chief executive Anthony Tan called Taiwan its “ninth market and first outside of Southeast Asia”, framing the move as a natural extension of the company’s experience in dense Asian cities. Stripped of corporate varnish, the message is simple: Grab thinks the operating muscle it built in Jakarta, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City and Manila can travel.

There is also a financial case. Grab said the acquisition would be accretive to its 2026 revenue guidance of US$4.04 billion to US$4.1 billion and contribute at least US$60 million in incremental adjusted EBITDA in 2028. At a time when public market investors care more about earnings than expansion theatre, buying a scaled and already profitable delivery business is easier to defend than launching from scratch and burning cash for years.

The Taiwan entry also gives Grab something else: optionality. Today, the deal is about food delivery. Over time, if regulators and market conditions allow, Taiwan could become a launchpad for broader services such as grocery delivery, merchant tools, payments, and potentially mobility. Grab has not announced any such expansion, but its history suggests that once it has users, merchants and drivers on a platform, it rarely stops at one vertical.

Why the sale matters for foodpanda and Delivery Hero

For Delivery Hero, this is a strategic retreat wrapped in a decent cheque.
The German company has been under pressure to improve profitability, streamline its portfolio and show discipline after years in which food delivery companies chased growth at punishing cost. Taiwan was one of foodpanda’s stronger markets, which is precisely why it could fetch US$600 million in cash. The sale gives Delivery Hero liquidity and supports its broader strategic review.

Chief executive Niklas Östberg described the divestment as “a key first step in our ongoing strategic review”. Translation: Delivery Hero is reassessing where it wants to keep fighting and where it would rather cash out.

This is not the first attempt to sell foodpanda Taiwan. In 2024, Delivery Hero agreed to sell the business to Uber for about US$950 million, but Taiwan’s competition regulator blocked that transaction. The concern was obvious. Uber Eats was already a major player in Taiwan, and swallowing foodpanda would have dramatically concentrated the market.

That deal failed because it appeared to be a consolidation. Grab’s bid is different because it is entering Taiwan rather than merging with an existing local food delivery incumbent. That distinction could prove critical in the regulatory review.

What this means for Taiwan’s food delivery industry

Taiwan’s delivery sector was heading towards a competition cliff. The blocked Uber-foodpanda deal would likely have narrowed consumer choice, weakened merchants’ bargaining power and given one player a much tighter grip on the market.

Also Read: Driving performance: How Grab develops products that support driver-partners’ productivity

Grab’s purchase changes the script. Instead of reducing competition, the deal could preserve a two-horse race: Uber Eats on one side, a newly Grab-owned foodpanda on the other. That is not a perfect market by any means, but it is healthier than a near-monopoly.

For restaurants, especially small and medium-sized merchants, that matters. Delivery platforms are not just logistics pipes; they are gatekeepers to digital demand. When too much power sits with one platform, commission structures, promotional demands and visibility algorithms start to matter even more than food quality. A second serious player gives merchants leverage, however imperfect.

For consumers, more competition tends to mean better pricing discipline, broader choice and a stronger incentive for platforms to keep service levels high. The subsidy wars of the past may never fully return, but neither side can afford complacency.

For delivery riders, the picture is mixed. More competition can create better earning opportunities and platform incentives, but it can also intensify pressure around fees, utilisation and productivity. Much will depend on how Grab handles migration, incentives and workforce policies as it folds foodpanda Taiwan into its own systems by early 2027.

How foodpanda’s delivery business is faring in Taiwan

By the numbers, foodpanda Taiwan is holding up well.

According to the announcement, the business generated approximately US$1.8 billion in GMV in 2025. It was profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis before group cost allocations, in a sector where profitability has often been more mythical than real, which makes Taiwan one of the sturdier delivery assets in the region.

That performance helps explain why Grab is interested and why Delivery Hero could command a meaningful cash exit even after the Uber deal collapsed.

Taiwan’s market characteristics also help. The island has a population of around 23 million, high smartphone penetration, dense urban centres, a strong convenience culture and consumers who are comfortable ordering food and groceries through apps. Those are highly attractive conditions for a logistics-heavy platform business.

Foodpanda has also built broad geographic coverage, which is not trivial. Serving multiple cities well requires more than marketing spend; it needs merchant density, rider supply, route efficiency and local operational depth. Grab is effectively buying a machine that already works.

Taiwan is attractive, but not friction-free

There is, however, a reason food delivery companies do not glide through Taiwan on bubble tea and optimism alone.

The market is competitive, operationally intense and politically sensitive. Regulators have already shown that they are willing to intervene where platform concentration becomes excessive. Labour issues around gig workers remain a live concern across Asia, and Taiwan is no exception. Merchant economics are also under scrutiny in any market where platforms become dominant.

Grab may have a cleaner antitrust case than Uber did, but approval is not automatic. Authorities will still look at how the acquisition affects future competition, whether platform practices could disadvantage merchants or riders, and how the migration from foodpanda to Grab will be managed.
That makes execution as important as strategy. Buying the asset is one thing. Retaining users, merchants and driver-partners through the transition is another. Platform migrations are delicate affairs. If incentives are mishandled, rivals can poach supply and demand with alarming speed.

Grab’s acquisition trail so far

The foodpanda Taiwan transaction is also notable because Grab has not historically relied on a rapid-fire M&A spree, unlike some tech groups. Its biggest moves have been selective and strategic.

Based on publicly disclosed acquisitions and majority-control deals, Grab has made five notable acquisitions or control transactions before this deal:

• Kudo in Indonesia in 2017, expanding into online-to-offline commerce and agent networks
• Uber’s Southeast Asia operations in 2018, the company’s most transformative deal, which cemented Grab’s regional scale in ride-hailing and food delivery
• iKaaz in India in 2018, strengthening payments capabilities
• Jaya Grocer in Malaysia in 2022, deepening its grocery footprint
• Trans-cab in Singapore in 2025, adding taxi fleet access in its home market

If the foodpanda Taiwan acquisition closes, it would become Grab’s sixth major acquisition or control deal of note. It may also be one of its most strategically symbolic, because it breaks the company’s geographic mould.

Grab’s current markets: the count needs correcting

The press release says Taiwan will become Grab’s ninth market. That means there are not “nine other markets” today. There are eight existing markets where Grab currently operates: Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Myanmar.

Also Read: How mobile marketing is powering the next phase of food delivery growth in Southeast Asia

That may sound like a small detail, but in platform businesses, geography is never just geography. Each market means a separate set of regulators, labour dynamics, consumer habits, merchant relationships and unit economics. Entering a ninth market is not a line-extension exercise; it is a serious operational commitment.

The bigger message behind the deal

This acquisition lands at a moment when the food delivery industry is growing. The era when platforms could justify almost anything in the name of market share has faded. Investors now want profits. Regulators want competition. Merchants want fairer economics. Consumers still want speed and discounts, because human nature remains gloriously inconvenient.

Grab’s Taiwan move sits at the intersection of all four forces. It is expansion, but disciplined expansion. It is consolidation, but of a type less likely to kill competition outright. It is also a reminder that in Asia’s platform economy, geography still matters enormously. Dense cities, strong mobile usage and food-centric consumer behaviour remain valuable combinations.

For Grab, Taiwan is a calculated bet that its Southeast Asian logistics DNA can travel. For Delivery Hero, it is a monetisation event that supports a broader strategic reset. For Taiwan, it may be the difference between a delivery market with two heavyweight contenders and one drifting towards dangerous concentration.

That is why this deal matters. It is not just about who delivers dinner. It is about who controls digital demand, merchant access and urban convenience in a market that is too important to be left to one platform alone.

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The cybersecurity threats facing businesses in 2026 are not merely an evolution of what came before. According to Arryaan Bhandari, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Singapore-based PQStation, they represent a structural shift. One driven by AI, accelerating attack cycles, and the looming spectre of quantum computing.

For security leaders across the Asia Pacific, the message is clear: preparation cannot wait for a crisis, a mandate, or a competitor’s breach.

In an email interview with e27, Bhandari describes 2026 as the beginning of an era in which AI compresses the timeline between a threat actor’s reconnaissance and their strike. AI-powered phishing, deepfake-enabled identity fraud, automated vulnerability discovery, and autonomous attack infrastructure are all converging to lower the barrier for launching sophisticated attacks.

“The organisations that combine AI-enabled defence with long-term cryptographic agility will be the ones that build durable digital trust,” Bhandari says.

That convergence is reshaping what cybersecurity fundamentally demands of business leaders. Detection, which is defined as catching threats as they arrive, is no longer sufficient on its own. The more urgent imperative, Bhandari argues, is architecture: how an organisation’s systems are built and whether they are designed to adapt as threats evolve. As generative AI lowers the cost and complexity of attacks, PQStation’s position is that cybersecurity must be treated not just as a detection problem, but as an architecture problem.

Also Read: Plug-and-play cooling: Carnotfleet’s bid to democratise the cold chain

Bhandari points to iterative validation as a practical starting point. Frequent proof-of-concept testing across security mechanisms — from endpoint defences to the cryptographic layer — helps enterprises identify what actually holds up under real-world pressure, rather than generating a false sense of compliance.

Critically, he cautions against waiting for regulatory mandates before acting. Organisations that move only when required will find themselves perpetually catching up. “The smarter approach is to build modularity and agility into security architecture now … so that as threats evolve — whether AI-driven or quantum-enabled — the underlying infrastructure can adapt without wholesale replacement.”

The quantum threat is not theoretical

Beyond the immediate cybersecurity threats of 2026, Bhandari identifies post-quantum cryptography as the defining long-term challenge for enterprise security. Much of today’s digital security — online banking, government communications, critical infrastructure — relies on cryptographic algorithms that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break.

“Quantum migration is no longer science fiction,” he says. “It is a structural inevitability.”

The challenge for enterprises, Bhandari explains, is not simply adopting new post-quantum standards. It is doing so across complex, deeply embedded systems without disrupting operations. That requires what PQStation terms “crypto-agility”, the ability to transition between cryptographic standards without mission-critical systems going dark in the process.

He recommends that organisations begin by building a clear inventory of their cryptographic assets, dependencies, and long-lived data exposure. Without that baseline, any transition will be fragmented and reactive. From there, a phased migration framework aligned with business-criticality gives security teams a structured, measurable path forward.

Also Read: Horizon Quantum’s SPAC listing signals selective return of deeptech deals

In the Asia Pacific region, Bhandari expects 2026 to function as an inflexion year. Most regulators have not yet mandated immediate post-quantum migration, but clear signals around quantum-readiness planning and cryptographic visibility are already shaping enterprise investment well before formal requirements arrive.

Financial services, government agencies, critical infrastructure operators, and healthcare organisations are the sectors most likely to face concrete guidance, and potentially structured mandates, during the year ahead.

His advice to security leaders is to move beyond minimum compliance. Documented migration roadmaps, measurable cryptographic risk assessments, and demonstrable resilience planning will increasingly become baseline expectations, not differentiators.

Ultimately, Bhandari frames the challenge for security leaders in 2026 not as one of reaction, but of readiness. Embedding security into architecture and procurement decisions, investing in internal capability, and aligning security strategy with long-term business continuity are the pillars he returns to consistently.

“In 2026,” he says, “leadership will be defined not by speed of response, but by depth of preparation.”

For businesses still treating cybersecurity threats as a compliance checkbox rather than a strategic priority, that distinction may prove to be a costly one.

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Image Credit: GuerrillaBuzz on Unsplash

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She always knew the answer. But she never raised her hand. I was tutoring a 13 year old girl who consistently scored well, but when it came to speaking up in class, she froze. “What if I say it wrong?” she whispered.

That line stuck with me.

It reminded me that the biggest barrier to learning isn’t always access to content, data, or devices. Sometimes, it’s confidence.

As edutech continues to shape the future of learning in Southeast Asia, we often talk about reach, affordability, and personalisation. But we talk far less about emotional safety, cultural expectations, and the silent learners who get left behind.

I believe there’s a confidence gap in edutech. And most platforms aren’t designed to close it.

Not every student is ready to click “submit”

Let’s be honest. Many edutech tools reward confidence: fast responses, public leaderboards, group discussions, peer review.

But what about the hesitant ones? The student afraid to speak in class, let alone in a Zoom breakout room The teen who worries more about making mistakes than making progress The adult learner who’s trying again after past failures

Also Read: The leapfrog thesis: Why embodied edutech is SEA’s path to a superior education future

If these learners don’t feel safe trying, no amount of adaptive learning will help. Because confidence isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s foundational.

What confidence-aware edutech could look like

From my experience as a tutor and digital product builder, here’s what I believe confidence-aware platforms might consider:

• Anonymous first tries: Give students the option to practice privately before sharing. Tools like quizzes or reflections could be visible only to the learner until they’re ready to go public.
• Low-stakes feedback loops: Instead of pass/fail or right/wrong, offer feedback that focuses on effort, growth, or improvement. Think “You’re getting closer!” instead of “Incorrect.”
• Voice optional participation: Speaking up isn’t the only sign of engagement. Let learners submit written responses, use emojis, or give confidence ratings about how sure they are.
• Personalised encouragement: Let AI guide learners through gentle nudges: “Most students hesitate here, and that’s okay. Want a hint?” This kind of reassurance matters.
• Private practice modes: Create sandbox environments where users can try lessons or speak answers aloud without being recorded or judged.

Confidence is cultural

In many Southeast Asian classrooms, students are taught not to question. Silence is often seen as respect. Failure, especially in front of peers, feels deeply uncomfortable. So when we bring in bold, gamified, Western-style edutech products, we sometimes forget: confidence looks different here.

One of my adult mentees that I mentored , a 42-year old mom reentering the workforce, told me: “I don’t dare to press anything wrong. Later my son laugh at me.”

Designing for that mindset isn’t about dumbing down. It’s about meeting users where they are.

Edutech that builds confidence builds loyalty

When learners feel seen and safe, they stay. The tools that help users overcome their fears become the ones they recommend.

Also Read: Why Southeast Asia’s edutech must go beyond chatbots to truly transform learning

I’ve seen shy students become regular contributors once they trusted the environment. I’ve seen dropout risks turn into daily users just because the app didn’t shame them for missing a day.

Building for confidence doesn’t just help students. It helps retention.

Lessons from tutoring that tech often misses

As a tutor or coach, I don’t just teach subjects. I teach self-trust. I celebrate small wins. I let students explain things back to me without pressure. Most importantly, I read between the silences.

Edutech can do this too, with the right signals and mindset: Celebrate streaks, yes. But also celebrate comebacks. Track mastery, but also track courage (e.g., “You tried a harder topic today!”) Don’t just personalise content. Personalise encouragement.

Why this matters for founders

If you’re building an education startup in Southeast Asia, remember this: Your users may be smart but scared. They may log in daily but never participate. They may drop off not from lack of interest, but from fear.

If your platform only serves the confident, you’re excluding the majority.

Closing thought

We often say edutech can scale good teachers. But good teachers don’t just deliver content. They create safe spaces.

If we want to truly transform education, we must stop building just for performance. And start building for confidence.

Because confidence isn’t the reward of learning. It’s the permission to begin.

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The post Safe spaces, not just smart tools: How edutech can build confidence in learners appeared first on e27.

In this interview, e27 speaks with Dennis Yap, Founder of AI Seer, an AI venture focused on building systems that prioritise verifiable truth, traceability, and transparency in an increasingly noisy information landscape. As generative AI accelerates content production across social platforms, AI Seer positions itself around verification rather than generation, aiming to help organisations and individuals navigate misinformation more confidently.

This conversation forms part of e27’s broader AI Pulse coverage, which examines how organisations across the region are building, deploying, and governing AI in real-world settings.

Designing truth-seeking AI

e27: Briefly describe what your organisation does, and where AI plays a meaningful role in your work or offering.

Dennis: We create truth-seeking AIs, including a patented Multi-spectral Reality Detector and our bot @ArAIstotle which has a growing presence on Crypto Twitter has unique granular fact checking capabilities which is required for multimedia or long-form content on X unlike @grok for example. We’re also at least 3X less inaccurate than any other AI Search when it comes to news citations and provide fully transparent and traceable reasoning from credible sources.

Debunking misinformation in practice

e27: What is one concrete way AI is currently creating value within your organisation or for your users or customers?

Dennis: We help debunk fake news that are used in pump and dump scams on crypto twitter. See the post that @ArAIstotle is factchecking here as an example.

Protecting innovation

e27: What was a key decision or trade-off you had to make when adopting, building, or scaling AI?

Dennis: When to patent our AI inventions vs the costs of doing so.

Also read: AI Pulse Exclusive: How Asia AI Association is advancing human-centred AI across the region

What surprised us

e27: Looking back, what has worked better than expected, and what proved more challenging than anticipated?

Dennis: Our X bot gaining followers was easier than expected after launching our token. Raising from the local SEA startup ecosystem has been more challenging than anticipated after ZIRP especially.

Adoption challenges

e27: What is one lesson about applying AI in real-world settings that leaders or founders often underestimate?

Dennis: Operations buy-in as people are very used to their existing workflows.

Practical advice for AI adoption

e27: Based on your experience, what is one practical recommendation you would give to organisations that are just starting to explore or scale AI?

Dennis: Start small with explorations and use sandbox environments for testing. Look beyond LLMs, to other forms of AI that can help contain the randomness of LLMs.

Also read: AI Pulse Exclusive: How GenAI Fund is accelerating enterprise AI adoption across Southeast Asia

Looking ahead

e27: Over the next 12 months, how do you expect your organisation’s use of AI, or the role of AI in your industry, to evolve?

Dennis: We expect to continue trying new AIs and integrating them into our workflows, especially for coding.

Final thoughts

e27: Anything else you want to share with the audience?

Dennis: There are other frontier tech that can increase human productivity aside from AI, I am getting healthier through red light therapy for example and you can factcheck some claims about it here.

Building trust in the AI era

This conversation highlights a growing emphasis on transparency, verification, and trust as AI adoption accelerates. As generative technologies expand content creation, initiatives focused on fact-checking and traceability are becoming increasingly important in maintaining confidence in digital information environments.

For more interviews, analysis, and real-world perspectives on how organisations across the region are applying AI in practice, explore more AI stories here.

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When regional startups map out their Southeast Asia expansion, the Philippines usually lands somewhere in the middle of the whiteboard. Not first, not last. “Emerging market” gets written next to it, which in founder shorthand tends to mean: small total addressable market (TAM), low willingness-to-pay, figure it out later.

That framing is outdated. For startups trying to prove commercialisation before burning through their Series A runway, it is also an expensive mistake — at least according to Vince Yamat, President and CEO of 917Ventures, the corporate venture builder of Globe Telecom.

Yamat has spent years sitting at the intersection of large enterprise infrastructure and startup execution, helping ventures across fintech, healthtech, adtech, and e-commerce move from experimentation to structured revenue generation inside the Globe ecosystem. His view on the Philippines is neither boosterism nor wishful thinking. It is grounded in what he sees founders consistently get wrong when they arrive here.

More scale than the label suggests

“Founders often hear ’emerging market’ and assume small, early, and low willingness-to-pay. What they miss is that the Philippines is actually one of the most efficient places in Asia to prove you can commercialise at scale. It combines a large, digitally engaged population with the kinds of real-world complexity that startups will eventually face across Southeast Asia,” Yamat says.

The numbers support that. The Philippines has 114 million people, roughly 87 million internet users, and 138 million mobile connections. Filipinos spend an average of 3.5 hours per day on social media, among the highest globally. That is one of the most digitally engaged consumer populations in Asia, accessible within a single language, a single regulatory environment, and an increasingly unified digital payments infrastructure.

The country is also the second-largest population in Southeast Asia after Indonesia. Yet it receives a fraction of venture attention. That gap between market reality and investor perception is exactly where the opportunity sits.

Why the Philippines works as a validation market

Three structural factors make the Philippines unusually useful for startups at the validation stage, Yamat argues.

The first is behavioural complexity within a single market. The Philippines compresses many of the dynamics startups will eventually face across Southeast Asia into one addressable environment: mobile-first consumers, real price sensitivity at a GDP per capita of roughly US$3,900, fragmented geography across more than 7,000 islands, and strong social commerce behaviour. Founders can stress-test pricing elasticity, retention, and distribution without the operational overhead of running a multi-country experiment.

The second is digital infrastructure that already exists at scale. GCash, built on Globe’s distribution network and part of the 917Ventures portfolio, has been used by 94 million Filipinos. “That scale has created a strong digital commerce layer across the market, giving startups access to one of the largest digitally transacting user bases in Southeast Asia,” Yamat notes. Globe itself serves around 65.8 million mobile subscribers, meaning the distribution question that stumps most market entrants is already largely solved.

The third factor is the speed of feedback. “Filipino consumers are extremely active online. Startups receive product feedback, adoption signals, and behavioural data very quickly,” Yamat says. “That matters enormously when you are trying to iterate before your next raise.” The country consistently ranks among the top markets globally for social media and messaging usage, making it one of the fastest environments in the region to pick up real user signal.

Also read: Why many funded startups still struggle to scale

What actually surprises founders once they get here

Pilot success does not automatically translate into scaled revenue. That is the first and most common reality check for regional startups entering the Philippines.

Yamat sees three patterns emerge once founders move past the initial proof of concept. “The biggest surprise is that pilot success does not automatically translate into scaled revenue. Distribution matters more than product. Reaching users often requires partnerships with telcos, fintech platforms, or large enterprises. Price sensitivity is real. And offline still matters — even digital products often require physical marketing or field activations to move beyond early adopters.”

Many startups arrive with a purely digital growth playbook and quickly discover that hybrid go-to-market strategies are not a compromise but a requirement. “Many startups come in with a purely digital growth mindset and realise that hybrid GTM strategies may work better here,” Yamat says. The market rewards founders who adapt fast and penalises those who insist on replicating playbooks built for more homogenous consumer environments.

Velocity and the case for structured enterprise access

This is where the structural gap in the Philippine ecosystem becomes most relevant for founders looking to move quickly.

Corporate engagement has historically been slow. Startups often spend months trying to identify the right business sponsor inside a large organisation, navigating layers of process before anything resembling a real pilot gets off the ground. “Large companies still operate in silos, which makes integration and deployment harder. Startups often don’t know who the real business sponsor is,” Yamat says.

Velocity by 917Ventures was built to close that gap. Rather than treating startups as vendors to be evaluated, the programme structures commercialisation partnerships directly with the Globe Group and its portfolio companies across fintech, adtech, consumer, and enterprise platforms. “Velocity exists so that startups don’t have to navigate the Globe Group alone,” Yamat explains. “The programme is designed to make collaboration easier and faster, helping startups work directly with the right business units from day one.”

Each engagement starts with a clear enterprise sponsor and a defined use case. Pilots are designed to run within 3-6 months and measured against concrete commercial outcomes, not just technical milestones. In some cases the programme also includes equity or staged investment options, aligning incentives on both sides from the start.

The first startup to go through Velocity illustrates the model well. Netopia AI, creator of the behavioural AI platform Predikta, is currently working with Brave Connective Holdings and its subsidiaries AdSpark and Inquiro to test how predictive behavioural insights can improve marketing intelligence and audience segmentation inside a real enterprise environment. “For Netopia, the value is exposure to large-scale consumer datasets and complex enterprise workflows, which helps refine the accuracy of its models and how insights are delivered to decision-makers,” Yamat says. For the enterprise side, it is a structured way to evaluate whether predictive tools can improve campaign outcomes before broader deployment.

That dynamic, a startup refining its product inside a real operating environment while the enterprise evaluates real outcomes, is what commercialisation actually looks like. It is different from a demo, a hackathon, or a pilot that never leaves the sandbox.

Also read: From VC-first to capital stack: Rethinking funding in Southeast Asia

The sectors worth watching

Four areas stand out as strong validation opportunities in the Philippine market right now.

“We are particularly bullish on digital trust and security, customer experience platforms, adtech and data, and vertical AI,” Yamat says. As digital adoption grows, demand for identity verification, fraud prevention, and secure transaction infrastructure is accelerating. Customer experience platforms are well-suited to the Philippine consumer’s behaviour across chat, messaging, and mobile. The digital advertising market is maturing quickly, with brands moving toward data-driven marketing and customer analytics. And vertical AI, particularly domain-specific applications integrated with enterprise data in telecom, fintech, and customer engagement, represents the next defensible layer for startups building in the region.

“These sectors align closely with the infrastructure and distribution platforms already present in the Philippine ecosystem,” Yamat adds. For startups, that alignment matters. It means the path from pilot to enterprise deployment is shorter because the underlying infrastructure already exists and is already in use at scale.

A regional launchpad, not a consolation market

The longer-term case for the Philippines is bigger than validation alone.

The country already supports one of the world’s largest IT-BPM workforces of around 1.7 million people, a talent base well-positioned to evolve alongside AI and automation. Yamat believes that over the next decade, this could translate into stronger capabilities in AI-enabled services, data operations, and digital product support, shifting the Philippines from a consumer market to a more active node in how regional technology gets built and refined.

The distribution dynamics are also structurally different from most markets. “One major difference between the Philippines and ecosystems like Silicon Valley is corporate distribution power. Telecom, fintech, and digital platforms already reach tens of millions of users. Over time, we may see corporates increasingly become startup distribution engines,” Yamat says.

The Philippines is unlikely to compete with Singapore as a capital hub or with Vietnam as an engineering centre. Its role is different and arguably more useful for founders at the commercialisation stage. “The Philippines could increasingly serve as a regional launchpad for commercialisation — a place where startups test adoption, validate business models, and build partnerships before expanding into larger but more fragmented Southeast Asian markets,” Yamat says.

For startups serious about Southeast Asia, that is not a secondary market. It is where the real work begins.

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