Algorithmic bias isn’t an ethics debate. For APAC startups, it’s actually a customer acquisition problem.

Picture this: you’re a founder running campaigns on Google or Meta, using an AI-powered optimisation tool your team swears by. The dashboard looks healthy, the algorithm is working, and it’s confidently serving your ads to urban, English-literate, smartphone-native consumers: the same segment other well-funded competitors in your space are chasing.

The algorithm isn’t broken, not really. It’s doing exactly what it was trained to do, and there lies the problem.

Most AI marketing tools were built on data that reflects who has historically converted, and in most cases, that customer profile was shaped by Western markets, existing financial access, and majority-language behaviour.

So when an APAC startup plugs in without asking questions, it inherits a very specific worldview of who your customer is supposed to be.

You don’t need a machine learning degree to understand the core mechanic. AI marketing tools learn from patterns: who clicked, who converted, who stayed.

And unlike a recruiter you can brief, the algorithm doesn’t tell you when it’s working from outdated assumptions. It just keeps optimising in the wrong direction.

More than a bias problem, this is a CAC problem

Here’s the reframe that matters for founders: the segments that AI tools tend to deprioritise are often the ones worth fighting for.

Underserved audiences in APAC are typically less saturated, and fewer competitors have bothered, which means lower costs to reach them.

They’re often faster-growing, representing first-time digital finance users, rising middle-class consumers, and gig economy workers entering the formal economy for the first time.

Also Read: AI didn’t invent bias, it inherited it

And once acquired, they tend to be more loyal. When you’re the first brand to reach someone in their language, on their terms, with a product that actually fits their life, you don’t lose them easily to a competitor whose algorithm never found them either.

The startup optimising only toward algorithmically “safe” audiences is competing on the most expensive, most crowded ground available. Meanwhile, the segment the algorithm flagged as low-converting might just be low-converting for the incumbent that trained the model.

Consider the trajectory of something like GCash in the Philippines or GoPay in Indonesia. The dominant narrative around their growth tends to focus on product. But a significant part of what made them work was a willingness to reach customers that existing financial infrastructure – and by extension, existing marketing logic – had written off.

Three things to do before you trust your tool’s outputs

• Ask where your tool was trained before you trust what it surfaces

Most vendors won’t answer directly, but the question is worth asking. Look at which audience segments the tool constructs automatically versus which ones you have to build manually. The defaults reveal the assumptions.

If the tool’s “recommended audience” looks nothing like the customer your product was built for, that’s not a good recommendation.

• Seed your own first-party data early and deliberately

The fastest way to correct for training bias is to give your algorithm a better signal. That means running intentional top-of-funnel campaigns to underserved segments: not to convert immediately, but to start generating behavioural data your tool can actually learn from.

It’s a slower start, but compounds significantly over time. The startup that builds a proprietary data advantage in a segment their competitors have algorithmically abandoned is the one that wins.

• Treat “low-converting segments” as hypotheses, not verdicts

When your tool tells you a segment underperforms, ask why before you cut it. Is the creative wrong for that audience? Is the landing page in the wrong language? Is the call-to-action built around a behaviour your customer doesn’t have yet?

The algorithm can’t tell the difference between “this segment won’t convert” and “this segment hasn’t been spoken to correctly,” and only you can make that call.

Also Read: The hidden dangers of AI bias: Where it can go wrong

The competitive case for equitable marketing

Building marketing infrastructure that works for the actual APAC customer, not the default archetype your software recognises, is a growth strategy.

Take the opportunity of the segments being systematically underserved by algorithmically-biased tools, because these are the market your competitors have outsourced the decision to a tool that was never trained to see them.

Equity by design, in marketing terms, is the unsexy work of auditing your stack, questioning your defaults, and deciding whether the “optimised” audience your tool serves up is actually your audience. The algorithm will always find you a customer. The question is whether it’s finding yours.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The post The AI marketing tools you’re using were trained on your competitor’s customer, not yours appeared first on e27.

Bitcoin and traditional equity markets moved in a tight, synchronised dance fuelled by a sudden thaw in geopolitical tensions. Bitcoin climbed 0.86 per cent to reach US$74,813.22, almost perfectly mirroring the 0.88 per cent gain across the broader cryptocurrency sector.

This movement appears deeply tethered to the S&P 500, with an 86 per cent correlation, suggesting that the digital asset is currently trading as a high-beta proxy for global risk appetite. Investors are clearly looking past previous volatility, focusing instead on a massive return of institutional capital and the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the conflict in the Middle East.

The primary driver of this price surge is a dramatic reversal in institutional behaviour toward spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds. After a period of cooling interest, these funds recorded net inflows of US$411.5 million on April 15. BlackRock led this charge through its IBIT fund, which alone accounted for roughly US$214 million in new capital. This represents the second-largest daily inflow for April and serves as a powerful signal that institutional smart money is stepping back in to provide a robust floor for the market.

When large-scale buyers commit hundreds of millions of dollars in a single session, it creates a supply-demand imbalance that naturally forces the price upward, reinforcing the narrative that Bitcoin is no longer just a retail playground but a core component of modern portfolio management.

This resurgence in digital assets cannot be viewed in isolation from the record-breaking performance of the US stock market. On April 16, 2026, the S&P 500 gained 0.80 per cent to close at a historic peak of 7,022.95, while the Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.59 per cent to end at 24,016.02. This marked an impressive 11-session winning streak for tech-heavy indices.

Market sentiment was lifted by renewed optimism surrounding peace talks to resolve the war in Iran. As the fear of a broader regional escalation eased, the CBOE Volatility Index fell 1.03 per cent to 18.17. This decline in market fear directly benefited Bitcoin, as traders felt more comfortable moving back into riskier assets that had been suppressed by the threat of geopolitical instability.

Also Read: Is Bitcoin’s geopolitical rally sustainable? The data says maybe, but there’s a catch

Technically, Bitcoin’s price action appears increasingly constructive as it holds above critical support levels. The asset successfully held above the 50 per cent Fibonacci retracement level at US$74,479 and its seven-day simple moving average of US$74,586. These levels are essential psychological and mathematical markers for traders.

Staying above them confirms a bullish structure and prevents the cascading sell-offs seen at the height of the conflict earlier this year. As long as Bitcoin remains above this US$74,479 threshold, the path of least resistance appears to be toward the recent swing high of US$75,409. If that barrier is breached, the market will likely set its sights on the US$76,559 extension level.

While the headline numbers on Wall Street and in the crypto markets suggest a period of euphoria, the underlying economic data present a more nuanced and complicated reality. According to the Federal Reserve Beige Book, the US economy is growing at only a slight-to-modest pace. The report highlights that the war in Iran remains a major source of uncertainty, leading many businesses to adopt a wait-and-see posture regarding hiring and capital investment.

Furthermore, preliminary April data show that consumer sentiment has plunged to a historical low of 47.6 per cent. This disconnect between record-high stock prices and record-low consumer confidence is largely driven by persistent inflation concerns, even as energy prices, such as West Texas Intermediate crude oil, cooled slightly to settle at US$90.69.

The corporate sector reflects this divide between growth and geopolitical pressure. On one hand, tech giants and financial institutions are showing remarkable resilience. Broadcom surged more than 4.19 per cent following an extended partnership with Meta on custom artificial intelligence chips, and Tesla rallied 7.62 per cent to lead the major tech players. Large banks also contributed to the positive market mood, with Morgan Stanley rising 4.52 per cent and Bank of America gaining two per cent after delivering earnings that surpassed expectations.

These companies seem to be navigating the inflationary environment and the higher-for-longer interest rate landscape better than smaller firms. Other sectors more sensitive to energy costs, such as the energy industry itself, struggled as crude prices dipped, with TotalEnergies falling more than three per cent.

Also Read: Bitcoin’s US$74K surge: Institutional conviction or macro mirage?

In the bond and commodities markets, the signals remain mixed but generally supportive of the current risk-on environment. The 10-year Treasury yield is trading near 4.26 per cent, and while the yield curve remains inverted, with the two-year yield higher than the 10-year, equity markets have largely ignored this traditional recession signal for the time being.

Gold, often a rival to Bitcoin for the safe haven title, edged up 0.82 per cent to US$4,829.37 per troy ounce. The fact that both gold and Bitcoin are rising simultaneously suggests that while some investors are betting on peace and economic growth, others are still hedging against the possibility that inflation and war-related uncertainties could return at any moment.

The Russell 2000 also joined the rally, rising 0.30 per cent to 2,713.66, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.15 per cent to 48,463.72. This slight underperformance in the Dow suggests that the market favour is heavily skewed toward growth and technology rather than traditional industrial components.

Looking ahead, the market outlook for Bitcoin remains cautiously bullish, though it is heavily dependent on the continued transparency and volume of daily institutional reports. The key trigger for the next major move will be whether the momentum of these massive spot ETF inflows can be sustained throughout the week.

If the daily reports continue to show hundreds of millions of dollars entering the space, the psychological resistance at US$75,400 will likely crumble. Should the inflows dry up or turn into outflows, a pullback toward the US$73,549 swing low becomes a very real possibility. Investors must remain vigilant, as the current rally is built on the twin pillars of institutional support and fragile geopolitical hopes.

Also Read: Beyond the US$70K level: Why Bitcoin’s real test isn’t price yet

The transition from a speculative asset to an institutional one is nearly complete. Market participants now treat Bitcoin as a legitimate barometer of liquidity and risk. Every tick of the clock brings more data from providers like SoSoValue or Farside that dictates the near-term trend.

For the rally to continue, the support zone around US$74,479 must be defended at all costs. A failure there would signal that the institutional appetite is not as deep as current numbers suggest. Analysts are watching for a daily close above US$75,409 to confirm the next leg of the journey toward the US$76,559 mark.

Ultimately, the events illustrate a world where Bitcoin is no longer an outsider but a central character in the global financial narrative. I will keep watching the market.

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Quick commerce has often been framed as a sub-sector: fast groceries, dark stores, and on-demand convenience. That framing is too narrow for Southeast Asia. What is happening now is not simply the rise of a new retail format. It is a deeper strategic shift in which e-commerce players are trying to capture a bigger share of everyday life, one urgent order at a time.

According to Ecommerce in Southeast Asia 2026 by MomentumWorks, quick commerce is becoming “a fight for user frequency, not a standalone business”. That is the right lens. The real prize is not a bag of milk, a phone charger, or late-night paracetamol. The real prize is habitual demand.

Also Read: Shopee, TikTok, Lazada: Three ways to win and no easy way in

Once a platform becomes the default place consumers go for the next one hour, four hours, or same-day purchase, it stops being a shopping app and starts becoming an operating system for urban consumption.

Why frequency matters more than basket size

Traditional e-commerce in Southeast Asia was built around planned purchases. Consumers searched, compared, waited, and often bought non-urgent items such as fashion, beauty, home goods, gadgets, and seasonal promotions. Quick commerce changes the rhythm completely. Orders become smaller, faster, more local, and more frequent.

That matters because frequency is one of the strongest levers in platform economics. A consumer who orders twice a week is more valuable than one who orders once a month, even if the average order value is lower. More frequent behaviour means more data, greater payment engagement, more wallet share, and a higher chance of cross-selling into categories once considered outside the scope of e-commerce.

This is why quick commerce is strategically significant even if the unit economics remain tricky. It is a habit engine.

Southeast Asia is producing multiple models, not one dominant formula

MomentumWorks makes an important point that is often missed when investors compare Southeast Asia with India or China: the region does not yet have a single dominant fulfilment model for quick commerce.

In India, first-party dark stores have become the defining approach.
Southeast Asia looks messier. Shopee is using its on-demand fleet, often via ShopeeFood infrastructure, to pick up from e-commerce sellers for instant delivery. Grab is leaning on a partner-led model, integrating with existing supermarket chains and retailers. Lazada is pushing a more controlled first-party dark store model in selected areas, particularly through RedMart Now in Singapore. Foodpanda is extending pandamart. Independent players such as Astro in Indonesia, and FoodMax in Singapore are also still in the game.

That variety reflects the region’s structural reality. Southeast Asia is not one market. It is a patchwork of very different urban densities, retail systems, transport constraints, labour costs, and consumer expectations. A model that works in dense, affluent Singapore may not scale neatly in Jakarta, where traffic patterns, fulfilment complexity, and retail fragmentation create different constraints. Bangkok, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Kuala Lumpur each add their own wrinkles.

Shopee, Grab, and Lazada are chasing different forms of relevance

The battle is not being fought by identical competitors.

Shopee’s push into instant delivery is defensive as much as offensive. TikTok Shop has changed how consumers discover products, but Shopee still has a strong logistics backbone and an embedded user base. By offering sub-four-hour delivery in five of six Southeast Asian markets, it is reinforcing a consumer proposition that users can feel immediately: speed.

Grab, by contrast, is extending an existing delivery ecosystem. Its expansion through GrabMart is less about reinventing e-commerce and more about monetising an installed network of riders, merchant relationships, and consumer trust around immediacy. For Grab, quick commerce is a natural adjacency to food delivery and mobility, not a wholesale bet on a new category.

Also Read: The future of social and quick commerce for developing countries

Lazada’s approach is more selective and may offer higher margins. RedMart Now in Singapore suggests that Lazada sees quick commerce as a way to deepen engagement with premium households and high-frequency grocery demand, rather than chasing volume everywhere.
Each player starts with a different asset base. That is why the competitive end state remains unsettled.

The real map of demand is shrinking

One of the smartest ideas in the report is that platforms are starting to segment demand by proximity. Hyperlocal demand can be fulfilled within an hour. Local demand can often be served within four hours. Country-wide demand still belongs to conventional parcel logistics and next-day or scheduled delivery.

This seemingly simple shift has large implications.

It means inventory strategy becomes more important than pure assortment size. It means retailers with well-placed stores suddenly matter again. It means delivery fleets, mapping tools, and dispatch systems become strategic assets. It means brands have to decide which products belong in fast delivery, and which should remain in standard ecommerce. It means the geography of a city starts to shape platform economics in a far more direct way.

In short, the competitive map of e-commerce is shrinking from a nation to a neighbourhood.

Retailers and brands now face harder choices

Quick commerce not only changes platforms. It forces trade-offs across the entire ecosystem.

Brands must decide whether to build their own fast-delivery capability or partner with dominant platforms. They need to rethink pricing: should quick commerce carry a premium because of convenience, or be priced at parity to drive volume and customer acquisition? They must consider inventory placement, assortment design, and the role of local stores versus central warehouses.

Retailers face a different dilemma. Their physical footprint, once considered an analogue legacy, can become an e-commerce advantage if used as a fulfilment layer. But store-based picking can disrupt offline operations. That creates a tension between asset utilisation and operational simplicity.

For service providers and startups, the question becomes even sharper: where is the defensible layer? Pure last-mile delivery is increasingly commoditised. The more durable opportunities may lie in routing software, store operations, inventory intelligence, cold-chain logistics, or merchant tools that help brands navigate fragmented fulfilment models.

Southeast Asia’s cities make quick commerce plausible

The infrastructure base is stronger than it was a few years ago. Delivery fleets are bigger, dispatch systems are smarter, and consumers are more accustomed to app-based fulfilment. Large cities across the region are congested, mobile-first, and full of need-based purchases that still happen offline. That is fertile ground for quick commerce.

Also Read: Shopee, TikTok Shop, Lazada now control 84% of SEA’s e-commerce market

But the winner will not simply be the platform that delivers fastest. It will be the one that uses speed to deepen frequency, improve retention, and reshape consumer behaviour at scale.

In Southeast Asia, quick commerce is not about selling groceries faster. It is about owning the next urban habit. And the platform that wins habit usually wins far more than the basket in front of it.

The post Why quick commerce is really about frequency, not speed appeared first on e27.

There is a conversation happening in boardrooms across Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo that almost never makes it into a marketing report.

Senior B2B marketers — the ones with the budgets, the data, and the track record — are quietly pulling spend away from digital channels. Not because digital doesn’t work. But because of their specific goal — getting in front of a CFO, a CTO, or a Chief Revenue Officer who actually controls the budget — it has become nearly impossible to break through.

I hear this every week. I run The Ortus Club, a B2B executive event agency that has hosted more than 2,500 invitation-only roundtable dinners, masterclasses, and summits across 40+ countries since 2015. Our clients are companies like Google, Visa, Meta, IBM, and Airwallex. And in the past 18 months, almost every single one of them has said a version of the same thing: digital is saturated at the top of the funnel. The executives we need to reach have stopped responding.

Our 2026 Event Marketer’s Playbook — which surveyed 295 senior B2B marketers across 30 cities — confirms what we are seeing on the ground. The shift is real, it is accelerating, and it is reshaping how the most sophisticated B2B brands in APAC are thinking about pipeline.

The executive attention problem is not going away

Let me give you the honest picture. A senior decision-maker at an enterprise company in Singapore receives, on average, somewhere between 100 and 200 unsolicited outreach messages per week across email, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp. Their EA screens calls. Their LinkedIn inbox is a graveyard of unanswered connection requests. Their email filters have become extraordinarily sophisticated.

The traditional B2B playbook — awareness campaign, gated content, MQL handoff to sales, SDR follow-up sequence — was designed for a world where digital channels were still relatively low-noise. That world is gone. What has replaced it is a senior executive who has essentially become unreachable through conventional means, and a generation of marketing teams who are still measuring success by the number of form fills.

What the data from 295 marketers actually shows

Across the 295 senior B2B marketers we surveyed for the 2026 Event Marketer’s Playbook, three findings stood out.

First, in-person executive events now rank as the single highest-ROI channel for pipeline generation at the enterprise level, ahead of paid social, content marketing, and outbound SDR programmes. This is not a soft preference — it is a commercial finding based on deal velocity and average contract value.

Second, the most cited reason for increasing event budgets in 2026 is not brand awareness. It is trust acceleration. Marketers told us repeatedly that a 90-minute dinner conversation compresses a sales cycle that would otherwise take six to nine months of digital nurturing. The decision-maker who sat across the table from your CEO at a roundtable last Tuesday is not the same prospect as the one who downloaded your whitepaper.

Also Read: Pre-launch marketing is a tease that works, how to get it right?

Third, the format matters enormously. Traditional conferences and trade shows are losing share to smaller, curated, invitation-only formats. The reason is simple: executives will not give up three hours of their time for a room of 500 people, but they will clear their calendar for a dinner of twelve where everyone in the room is relevant to them.

Why is this particularly true in APAC

Southeast Asia is not a monolith, and any B2B marketer who treats it as one will struggle. The relationship dynamics that govern enterprise purchasing decisions in Singapore are fundamentally different from those in Jakarta, Bangkok, or Kuala Lumpur. In most of this region, business does not happen between companies — it happens between people who have met in person, established trust, and decided they want to work together.

This is not a cultural observation. It is a commercial one. The B2B brands that have built the deepest enterprise pipelines in APAC over the past decade are almost universally the ones that have invested in face-to-face executive relationships — not the ones with the most sophisticated marketing automation stacks.

Digital channels are absolutely necessary for awareness and reach. But in APAC’s enterprise market, they are not sufficient for conversion. The gap between a warm digital lead and a signed contract is filled by human interaction, and the most efficient way to create that interaction at scale is through curated executive events.

What to actually do about it

If you are a B2B marketing leader reading this and your pipeline is heavily dependent on digital channels, here is what I would look at first.

Map your top 50 target accounts and ask honestly: which of those decision-makers have we had a real conversation with in the last six months — not a demo, not a webinar, an actual conversation about a problem they have? If the answer is fewer than ten, you have a relationship gap that no amount of retargeting spend will close.

Second, consider whether your events strategy is built for volume or for quality. A 500-person conference appearance and a 12-person invitation-only roundtable dinner are not the same thing. One builds brand awareness. The other builds a pipeline. You probably need both, but most B2B marketing budgets are still heavily skewed toward the former.

Third, think about what you are actually offering the executive when you invite them. The invitation-only format works because the value proposition to the guest is explicit: you will spend 90 minutes with 11 other senior leaders who share your challenges, in a pitch-free environment where you can speak candidly. That is a genuinely compelling offer. A webinar about thought leadership trends is not.

Also Read: Why traditional marketing fails for complex B2B and deeptech products

The harder truth

The brands that will struggle most in APAC’s B2B market over the next three years are not the ones with the smallest budgets. They are the ones that continue to optimise for the wrong metrics — click-through rates, MQL volumes, cost per lead — while their competitors are quietly building the executive relationships that actually convert.

The executives who matter most are not hiding. They are simply waiting to be approached in a way that respects their time and treats them as peers rather than targets.

That is a harder thing to build than a campaign. But it compounds in ways that a campaign never can.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The post The quiet exodus: Why APAC’s B2B marketers are ditching digital marketing for executive dinners appeared first on e27.

Every week, a founder somewhere in Southeast Asia sends a polished deck to an impact fund. The numbers are real. The mission is genuine. Three months later: silence.

They assume the deck wasn’t good enough. They tighten the narrative. Apply again. Same silence.

The deck was never the problem.

The myth: Impact funds are just VCs with a conscience

Most founders approach impact funds the same way they approach any VC, growth story, TAM slide, compelling founder narrative. That’s the first mistake.

Impact funds are not VCs with an ESG checkbox. They operate under completely different internal logic. Mandates tied to specific theories of change. LPs who care about measurable social outcomes, not just returns. Some can only deploy grants, blended finance, or catalytic capital, instruments that have nothing to do with equity.

When a founder sends an equity pitch to a fund that can only deploy grants, it doesn’t matter how good the deck is. The application fails before anyone reads slide two.

The reality: It’s a fit problem, not a writing problem

In my experience mapping 100+ impact programs across SEA, fewer than 30% are genuinely open to cold applications. The rest require a warm intro, a prior relationship, or a very specific instrument match that’s never published.

Here’s what most founders don’t know: impact funds rarely publish their real criteria. The website says “we invest in climate, health, and financial inclusion across SEA.” What it doesn’t say is that their last six investments were all health-only, all in Vietnam, all at Series B, structured as convertible notes with a three-year impact reporting requirement.

That’s not on the website. You learn it by being in the room.

Also Read: Why non-dilutive capital is the smarter first move for SEA founders in 2026

Three fit questions that actually matter, before you write a single word:

• Does your instrument type match what the fund can actually deploy?
• Does your geography and sector match their last five investments, not just their stated mandate?
• Is this fund relationship-first or application-first? (Some have never funded a cold application in their history.)

The fix: Do the work before the application

Before you open any application form, answer these:

• What instrument does this fund deploy, and does it match what you need?
• Who have they funded in the last 24 months, and do you look like those companies?
• Is there a warm intro available, or is this fund genuinely open to cold applications?
• What does their theory of change require you to prove, and can you prove it with your current data?

If you can’t answer all four, you’re not ready to apply. You’re ready to research.

The uncomfortable truth

The impact funding ecosystem in SEA has a discovery problem. The funds exist. The capital exists. The mandate overlap with what founders are building is real.

But the information is asymmetric. Funds know exactly what they want. Founders are guessing.

That gap, between what’s published and what’s actually fundable, is where most applications die. Not in the writing. Not in the pitch. In the research that should have happened before any of it.

The founders who figure this out stop chasing every fund that looks relevant and start treating fund selection like due diligence. Fewer rejections. More callbacks. And eventually, they stop wondering why the silence.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The post Why SEA founders keep failing at impact funds (and it’s not your pitch deck) appeared first on e27.