Across Southeast Asia, cyber risk is now a boardroom topic. Regulators, investors, and executive leadership teams increasingly treat cyber incidents not as technical failures, but as matters of enterprise governance, resilience, and accountability.

As expectations rise, many organisations face a persistent challenge. While cyber risk is widely understood, ownership and governance are often unclear, especially when accountability is under regulatory, legal, or post-incident scrutiny. The SEC’s July 2023 final rules under Regulation S-K Item 106 now require public companies to describe board oversight and management’s role in assessing and managing cybersecurity risk.

In Singapore, Phase 2A of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2022 commenced on 10 May 2024, implementing new technology risk management provisions and empowering MAS to impose harmonised technology and cybersecurity risk requirements across all financial institutions.

Globally, the fifth edition of the NACD-ISA Director’s Handbook on Cyber-Risk Oversight reinforces the same expectation, providing boards with an independently validated framework for cyber risk governance built on six oversight principles. The direction is consistent: cyber risk governance is a leadership accountability, not a technical function.

Also read: Cybersecurity strategies for startups on a budget

The auditability gap

Despite increased awareness, many organisations continue to manage cyber risk through fragmented structures. Boards receive dashboards rather than decision-grade evidence of who decided what, against which risk appetite, and with what compensating controls in place.

This is the auditability gap: not a lack of controls, but a lack of defensible governance evidence. It is a challenge playing out across industries where the stakes are especially high, from banking and financial services to manufacturing and the EV and mobility sector, where cyber risk intersects directly with business continuity, safety, and regulatory compliance.

In financial services, institutions are under pressure to demonstrate technology risk governance. In manufacturing, IT/OT convergence has expanded exposure and governance complexity. In the EV and mobility sector, software-defined and connected environments introduce cyber risks with real-world legal and safety implications.

Regional expansion plans

Against this backdrop, Cybersense Solutions today announced the launch of its Southeast Asia operations, establishing Singapore as its regional base. Thailand also has been selected as the firm’s first expansion market, driven by demand from manufacturing-led industries, a growing EV ecosystem, and an evolving cybersecurity regulatory landscape.

“Most organisations already understand where their vulnerabilities are,” said Adrian Harris, Regional Managing Director, Cybersense Solutions. “The issue is rarely awareness, it’s ownership. Decisions around cyber risk are frequently deferred because accountability sits between departments, between legal and IT, between the board and the operations team. Cybersense exists to close that gap: to give organisations a single partner that can take responsibility for turning risk awareness into structured, defensible action.”

Also read: Supply chain attacks are becoming SEA’s new normal

Governance-first approach

Cybersense’s establishment reflects a growing shift toward governance-first cyber risk management. Its engagement model integrates cybersecurity operations, regulatory compliance, operational resilience, and legal defensibility with a single focus: turning cyber risk from known to governed, accountable, documented, and defensible. The emphasis is on outcomes that hold under scrutiny, including clearer accountability structures, audit-ready artefacts, and structured incident readiness, rather than technology procurement.

As organisations operate in increasingly interconnected and regulated environments, the ability to govern cyber risk with clarity, consistency, and defensibility is becoming a defining leadership requirement.

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About Cybersense Solutions

Cybersense Solutions Pte. Ltd. is a Singapore-headquartered cybersecurity firm with a presence across ASEAN. We combine legal and technical expertise to help organisations accelerate audit readiness, strengthen incident preparedness and reduce exposure from common attack paths.

The post When cyber risk becomes a board responsibility, governance matters more than tools appeared first on e27.

 

The detention of three senior executives from PT Lunaria Annua Teknologi—the parent company of KoinWorks—over the alleged misappropriation of IDR600 billion in funds from state lender BRI is not merely a legal affair. It is a reputational shockwave hitting one of Indonesia’s most visible fintech platforms even as the sector continues to depend heavily on public and institutional trust to sustain growth.

KoinWorks built its identity on democratising financial access for MSMEs and underserved communities. That narrative becomes acutely difficult to maintain when its own leadership stands accused of the kind of financial misconduct it was ostensibly built to combat. The platform’s silence — no public statement as of publication—compounds the reputational damage at precisely the moment transparency is most needed.

For Indonesia’s broader tech startup ecosystem, this case serves as a cautionary signal that governance, compliance infrastructure, and ethical conduct at the executive level are not optional—they are existential.

REGIONAL

Three KoinWorks executives detained in Indonesian corruption probe over US$36M in misused BRI funds: All three suspects have been remanded in custody for 20 days with BAA and JB at Cipinang Detention Centre, and BH at Salemba Detention Centre–pending further proceedings.

Vietnam talents face digital skills gap as employers raise the alarm: The message from the business community is that technical fluency is no longer a niche requirement confined to the tech sector. It is fast becoming a baseline expectation across manufacturing, logistics, commercial operations, and beyond

ReN3 raises US$5M in seed funding to expand Agentic AI across Southeast Asia: The capital will be directed towards accelerating go-to-market expansion across the region and advancing product development, including an agentic workflow builder and an upcoming agent marketplace.

Featherless AI secures backing to make open-source models viable at enterprise scale: The funding is intended to accelerate the company’s core mission: making open-source AI practical and reliable at scale.

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INTERVIEWS & FEATURES

Singapore’s F&B sector has a digital infrastructure problem. Cata thinks it can fix it: Cata, a consumer app platform serving F&B and retail operators, recently closed a US$5.3 million seed round to accelerate what its founder describes as a fundamentally different approach to restaurant tech.

Lumina’s Aria aims to fix what is broken at the top of the hiring funnel: At the heart of Lumina’s proposition is what Glenn Low, the company’s CEO and co-founder, describes as a signal-to-noise problem in hiring.

AI skills now translate into real pay gains for software engineers, NodeFlair finds: The findings point to a tech labour market in which AI fluency has moved from a desirable attribute to a measurable financial advantage.

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INTERNATIONAL

Anthropic surpasses OpenAI in revenue: Anthropic’s annual recurring revenue eclipsed OpenAI’s for the first time, reaching a US$30 billion annualised run rate compared to OpenAI’s $24 billion, driven primarily by enterprise adoption of agentic workflows.

Google Chrome silently installs an AI model: Google Chrome has been quietly installing a 4 GB AI model on user devices without explicit consent, raising significant privacy concerns about the nano AI model being bundled automatically with the browser.

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CYBERSECURITY

Malware Found in PyTorch Lightning Library: Security researchers discovered “Shai-Hulud” themed malware embedded in the PyTorch Lightning AI training library, designed to compromise AI training pipelines.

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SEMICONDUCTOR*

Global semiconductor sales increase 25 per cent from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026: Global sales were US$99.5 billion during the month of March 2026, an increase of 79.2 per cent compared to the March 2025 total of US$55.5 billion and 11.5 per cent more than sales in February 2026.

Singapore semiconductor firms push into US market as global AI boom drives advanced chip demand: Each new advancement is fuelling demand for increasingly sophisticated chips – many of which have yet to be developed, observers say.

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AI

IBM releases Granite 4.1: IBM released Granite 4.1, an 8-billion-parameter model that achieves performance comparable to 32-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts models.

Kaggle launches new AI agents course: Kaggle launched a 5-Day AI Agents Intensive “Vibe Coding” Course with Google, following their previous course that reached over 1.5 million learners.

Anthropic’s MCP crosses 97M installs: Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol crossed 97 million installs in March 2026, with every major AI provider now shipping MCP-compatible tooling. The Linux Foundation also announced it would take MCP under open governance, cementing it as foundational industry infrastructure.

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THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

One flawed system can damage a micro business overnight: But in this new economy, one thing has not changed: Trust remains the currency of business.

AI won’t fix manufacturing until we fix our understanding: This is especially evident in food systems. Unlike highly controlled digital environments, food production deals with biological raw materials that are inherently variable.

The same company, twice: There is a simpler explanation. It is not popular, because it implicates the people who commissioned the transformation in the first place.

The real battle for global trade isn’t at sea: “We’re still talking about ships and chokepoints. But the real action has already moved elsewhere—to data systems, financial infrastructure, and payment rails”.

5 hard lessons from Money20/20 Asia 2026: Moving past the hype requires a brutal look at the friction inherent in the region. One must look beyond the “unbanked” narrative and confront the debt currently slowing our progress.

Workforce management needs a supply chain mindset: One approach that has emerged is the R7 Framework, which applies supply chain thinking to talent management.

AI is removing the co-founder bottleneck for early-stage startups: “As someone who has always been interested in entrepreneurship, I always thought the biggest challenge was finding the right idea”.

The real promise of AI and crypto convergence: It signals a fundamental rearchitecture of how value moves, how decisions execute, and how intelligence itself gets distributed across digital networks.

Why Bitcoin’s jump to US$82,400 could push BTC to US$93,000: The spike above US$82,000 was not random. Multiple factors aligned to create upward momentum.

The post Ecosystem Roundup: The KoinWorks case and what it means for Indonesian fintech appeared first on e27.

The adage of “time is money” has never been truer in the world of SME financing.

Across APAC, businesses today have more funding options than ever: banks, venture debt, revenue-based financing, and crowdfunding. Yet many SMEs will tell you that access isn’t actually their biggest hurdle. The real gap is time. Capital often shows up long after the moment it was needed, and in the world of small businesses, that delay can be the difference between catching a growth wave or missing it entirely. 

As founders, we operate in digital time: sales spike overnight, opportunities appear without warning, and customer behaviour shifts in hours. Meanwhile, financing still moves on institutional time: weeks of paperwork, follow-ups, and risk checks.  

The next big shift in APAC fintech, in my view, will be defined not by who can offer the best rates, but by who can collapse the time between need and capital. 

The cost of missing the moment 

For SMEs, growth rarely comes in predictable, linear curves. It comes in spikes: festive season peaks, viral TikTok moments, urgent restocking opportunities, or that one bulk-discount offer on  11.11, 12.12, and Black Friday that could double margins. 

But these moments have an expiry date. A delay of just a few days can mean losing a container slot, missing out on discounted raw materials, or being outbid by a competitor who restocked faster. Slow financing doesn’t just slow you down; it closes doors. 

In a digital economy, when funding arrives too late, the business doesn’t just lose revenue, it loses momentum and customers. That’s something traditional lenders still underestimate. 

That said, the gap isn’t due to a lack of good intentions from traditional lenders. It’s structural. 

Traditional underwriting was built for stability: multi-year financial statements, predictable cash flow, and long cycles. But modern SMEs grow in bursts. This is especially true for online or cross-border merchants, whose performance is driven by multiple market forces such as currency fluctuation, changing regulations, and demand across regions. By the time the paperwork clears, the business environment has already changed. 

Also Read: Late-stage capital tightens grip on Southeast Asia’s fintech market

Why time-to-funding will become the new competitive edge 

This is where fintech has started to close the gap: by reading a business’s momentum rather than its past. 

At Choco Up, for instance, our AI-driven assessment pulls real-time data across payment processors, digital platforms, and advertising dashboards (with a business’s consent). That means we can evaluate performance instantly, not weeks later. Automated decision-making, supported with human input, then turns what used to be a multi-step manual review into a same-day decision. 

This changes the game. And I’ve personally seen this play out, with one example being BatteryMate, a fast-growing online seller in the region. They hit a high-demand period but needed to restock quickly to maximise the momentum. Traditional financing timelines would have caused them to miss the window entirely.

As their founder shared with us, importing from China ties up cash for 60 days or more, and traditional lenders still evaluate them like a brick-and-mortar store. With fast funding, they avoided a 12–18 month delay in launching new models and became the first in Australia to roll out new variants ahead of competitors.

With automated assessment and quick deployment, they secured the capital immediately and rode the demand surge. That agility directly translated to higher inventory turnover, stronger cash flow, and an accelerated expansion timeline.  

When funding moves at the same pace as the business, founders can seize opportunities the moment they appear. For many SMEs, the financing partner they choose increasingly comes down to the speed at which the capital can be deployed rather than on interest or structure alone. 

I’ve seen this play out repeatedly, where fast funding supports: 

• Quick inventory turnover 
• Rapid customer acquisition 
• Cash flow health 
• Pace of expansion 

As SMEs become more data-driven, they naturally gravitate toward financing partners who operate at that same rhythm. 

Also Read: 2026’s fintech imperative: Lend responsibly, scale smartly, and build for the long term

The next leap for APAC fintech: Integrated and invisible financing 

Looking ahead, I believe financing will become even more embedded into the platforms SMEs already use. Marketplaces, payment providers, logistics platforms – they’re all sitting on rich, real-time data that reflects how a business is performing. It’s only a matter of time before these platforms become seamless entry points for capital. 

Imagine receiving a funding offer inside your seller dashboard the moment your sales spike. No separate application. Just capital that shows up at the exact moment your business signals it needs it. When financing becomes invisible and integrated, SMEs won’t just get faster loans; they’ll operate in faster lanes. 

If APAC wants to unlock the full potential of its SME ecosystem, we need to solve the time gap, not just the capital gap. The good news is that the region is primed for it: high digital adoption, strong platform economies, and a thriving fintech landscape mean the foundations are already in place. 

The next wave of fintech innovation in APAC will be shaped by speed. Financing should move at the pace of founders. Because in the world of SMEs, growth doesn’t wait. And neither should capital. 

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If you’re building a company, one thing’s guaranteed: your year never turns out exactly the way you planned it. You’ll set goals, build decks, forecast projections, and then life, markets, people, and the unexpected will take those plans and rewrite them in real time.

But that’s the game. If you’re playing it right, your outcomes won’t always be linear or neat. They’ll fall somewhere in a range. And if you’ve planned for that range — financially, operationally, emotionally — you’ll stay in the game long enough to win.

For us, this past year was about fortifying. We focused on strengthening our treasury, increasing our runway, and onboarding a new tier of clientele that aligned with our long-term vision. There were no shortcuts. No easy wins. Just disciplined execution and lots of hard conversations.

And, of course, the setbacks came: macro shifts in markets, family health scares, missed deals, and a few internal restructures. But that’s what makes the year valuable. It wasn’t about whether we hit every KPI. It was about whether we built the resilience and optionality to respond when things didn’t go as expected.

Margins and mergers: What tech got right (and wrong)

Look at some of the tech giants this year. Apple doubled down on margin, launching new products that leaned heavily on services revenue and ecosystem lock-in. Meta swung aggressively into acquisitions and infrastructure, pulling top talent and AI muscle from OpenAI to scale their internal capabilities. Amazon streamlined operations and focused on logistics scale, while Google absorbed criticism around Gemini and kept shipping updates and new integrations.

Some wins. Some flops. But across the board, you’ll notice one pattern: they played within a range. These companies don’t optimise for a single quarter. They optimise for staying relevant over decades. And they do that by building in buffers: cash reserves, diversified products, partnerships, and control over cost centres so that when things break, they bend instead of snap.

It’s a mindset founders need to adopt earlier. If you’re still operating on a binary success model — win the deal or die trying — you’re exposing yourself to unnecessary volatility. Instead, build your business to survive the range: five per cent margin or 25 per cent, two clients this month or ten, fast growth or slow build. Give yourself the grace and the structure to be adaptable.

Also Read: Tried-and-tested marketing strategies for startups across all stages in Singapore

When balance sheets become a strategy

At NewCampus, this year wasn’t about vanity metrics. It was about balance sheet power.

We focused heavily on improving our unit economics and deploying capital into areas that offered compounding value: team systems, delivery scale, and pipeline stability. We put real time into tightening our gross margins and revisiting vendor relationships. We didn’t just want top-line growth. We wanted defensible, predictable, and scalable foundations.

That meant saying no to certain markets. It meant moving slower than our competitors in some regions. But it also meant that by the time we rolled out new programs, expanded to new verticals, or onboarded high-value clients, we had the operational muscle to handle it.

For founders, this is the unsexy stuff that makes or breaks the long game. Flashy announcements are great. But a clean balance sheet, a solid treasury, and optionality in how you finance growth? That’s what gives you breathing room when the market pulls back, or priorities shift.

Loss, life, and learning the hard way

This wasn’t an easy year. Not for anyone. Some of us lost family. Others lost entire markets. And in both cases, the rules of the game changed without notice.

There were weeks when I was nowhere near my best. Times when leadership meant just showing up. Being present for your team even when your mind and heart were a thousand miles away. And that’s what most founders don’t say out loud. Sometimes your growth comes from survival, not scale.

These moments — losses, missed quarters, tough pivots — aren’t failures. They’re reminders. That this isn’t just about valuations or headlines. It’s about building something that outlives your worst days. Something your team believes in. Something your clients rely on. And something you, personally, can be proud of.

Range means understanding that some years will be about momentum. Others will be about maintenance. And some will be about recovery. They’re all valid. They all count.

Also Read: Why AI startups across Southeast Asia are shipping themselves into churn

Looking ahead: Build with range, play the long game

As we roll into a new year, founders should reflect less on what they achieved and more on what they absorbed. What shocks did your business weather? What new muscles did your team build? Where did you gain resilience?

If you’re too focused on chasing outcomes, you’ll miss the signals. You’ll over-invest in the wrong levers. You’ll miss the nuance that success isn’t a straight line. It’s a set of probabilities, and your job is to shift the odds in your favour.

For us, the next year won’t just be about new customers or revenue milestones. It’ll be about increasing our strategic range: diversifying capital, experimenting with financial products, and playing where we have an edge. That includes working more with high-growth customers in finance and crypto, expanding our delivery footprint, and structuring our business to ride the cycles, not get wrecked by them.

Final thought: if you’re a founder, stop asking yourself “Did we win?” Start asking: “Did we widen our range for next year?” Did we build margin? Optionality? Strategic leverage? Because if you did, you didn’t just survive the year. You set yourself up to dominate the next one. And that’s the kind of growth that lasts.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

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As the new year begins, the startup ecosystem quickly regains momentum. Annual event calendars fill up, demo days resume, and conferences once again become central meeting points. January and February are often positioned as the starting line for new connections.

Yet one familiar pattern persists. While the number of meetings continues to grow, the rate at which they translate into real outcomes does not.

As preparations for 2026 are already underway, this gap can no longer be explained by individual effort alone. It points to a structural limitation across the ecosystem.

Connections are made, but the next step is undefined

Most startup events are carefully designed to optimise introductions. Pre-matching, pitch sessions, and curated meetings are now standard practice. What remains underdeveloped is what follows.

• Ownership of the next action is unclear
• Context from the discussion is rarely structured
• Criteria for prioritisation and follow-up are undefined

As a result, conversations with genuine potential often fail to progress into customers, partnerships, or investments.

Follow-up is not an individual skill gap

At the start of every year, teams resolve to “do better follow-ups.” Yet when the same issue repeats annually, it signals a systemic problem rather than a personal one.

The ecosystem has invested heavily in pre-meeting optimisation, but very little in post-meeting execution design.

Without clarity on:

• What type of relationship could a meeting evolve into
• What the immediate next step should be
• When decisions should be made

Follow-ups remain dependent on memory and goodwill, not process.

Also Read: Why networking, not online applications, now determines career success

A common early-year reflection

In early-year conversations with founders, investors, and ecosystem operators, a consistent reflection emerges: there were many promising meetings last year, but few translated into concrete outcomes.

This is not a failure of networking quality. In many cases, the quality has improved. The challenge lies in the absence of a shared structure that turns connection into execution.

January and February are not only about starting new conversations, but about reassessing whether last year’s methods were effective.

How some organisations are responding

A growing number of venture studios, accelerators, and communities are beginning to treat this as a core operational issue. They no longer see networking as a series of isolated events, but as a continuous execution flow.

Their questions are straightforward:

• What outcome should this meeting lead to?
• What is the smallest actionable next step?
• How can this process become repeatable?

This shift reframes follow-up not as an administrative task, but as the beginning of execution.

An early-year question for a 2026 mindset

As we prepare for 2026, the more relevant question is no longer how many meetings we generate, but how many we can convert into outcomes.

This is not something a single tool or framework can solve. It requires venture studios, accelerators, communities, and investors to collectively rethink how the “after” of a meeting is designed.

Follow-up as strategy

Follow-up has long been treated as the final step of networking. Seen through an early-year lens, it is closer to the starting point of execution.

As the ecosystem looks ahead to 2026, the real advantage will not come from meeting more people, but from building structures that reliably turn meetings into progress.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

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