Day: May 22, 2026

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Southeast Asia’s SME economy is often discussed as if it were a single market with a single set of digital needs. It is not. A retailer grappling with refunds in Jakarta does not need the same payments stack as a restaurant managing dine-in, delivery, and click-and-collect in Bangkok, or a services business in Singapore trying to automate recurring billing.

That is one of the clearest takeaways from How Southeast Asia Buys and Pays 2026: Unlocking SMEs’ Potential by IDC and 2C2P. The study argues, implicitly but unmistakably, that generic payment products are increasingly out of sync with how Southeast Asia’s SMEs actually operate. If the region’s next wave of fintech growth is to come from SMEs, it will likely come from more vertical-specific infrastructure, not broader one-size-fits-all checkout tools.

Also Read: Why Southeast Asia’s SMEs are falling out of love with bank-led payments

The numbers back that up. Retail, food and beverage, and services SMEs are all digitising, but under very different operational constraints.

Retail’s problem is not just collecting payments

Retail SMEs in Southeast Asia contribute an average of 13 per cent of total GDP, according to the study, and they sit in the most visibly digitised part of the SME economy. E-commerce platforms, social commerce, marketplaces, and plug-and-play storefront tools have lowered the barrier to entry. But they have also created a new payment mess.

The report shows that 81 per cent of retail SMEs use e-commerce platforms, plugins, or add-ons for online sales. That sounds like a healthy adoption. But the convenience comes with trade-offs. Among retail SMEs, 64 per cent cite limited payment options as a challenge when accepting payments through those platforms, 59 per cent point to security or fraud concerns, and 56 per cent cite high fees or costs.

That is a striking trio of complaints. The very tools that help SMEs get online quickly may also be the ones that constrain conversion and margins once those businesses start scaling.

Then there is the refund problem. Across Southeast Asia, 31 per cent of retail SMEs say returns and refunds affect their payment operations. The pain is especially acute in Indonesia and Malaysia, where the figure rises to 48 per cent and 44 per cent, respectively. In Singapore, it is 37 per cent.

That matters because returns are not a side process in e-commerce. They are part of the customer experience, the cash-flow cycle, and the back-office workload. Yet many SME payment setups are still designed mainly for the initial transaction, not what happens when a sale goes wrong.
Fraud is the other operational tax. Across the region, 55 per cent of retail SMEs say 1 per cent to 5 per cent of transactions turn into fraud or chargeback cases. In Singapore, the proportion reporting that level of incidence rises to 67 per cent. Those are not trivial leakages. They are margin erosion disguised as operating friction.

Retail does not need payment acceptance. It needs payment systems that are built for post-transaction chaos.

F&B lives or dies by channel complexity

Food and beverage SMEs face a completely different set of pressures. The sector contributes around 6 per cent of Southeast Asia’s total GDP and employs an estimated 15 million people, but its digital challenge is less about fraud or refunds than about handling fragmented consumer journeys.

Also Read: Southeast Asia’s digital payments boom has a dirty secret: SMEs still love cash

The report paints a picture of a sector trying to manage dine-in, takeaway, delivery, self-service kiosks, and online order-and-collect flows all at once. That creates an omnichannel payments challenge that many generic providers are poorly equipped to solve.

Across Southeast Asia, 43 per cent of food and beverage SMEs already support online payment and collect at the store through a website or app. At the physical counter, 39 per cent support card payments and 27 per cent support QR code payments. At the table, 31 per cent support card payments and 26 per cent support QR code payments. Even self-service kiosks are generating their own payment mix, with 26 per cent supporting cards and 25 per cent supporting QR payments.

This is not just about offering more ways to pay. It is about reconciling multiple channels, hardware formats, and workflows without adding headcount or operational confusion.

The future demand signals are even more telling. In Malaysia, 56 per cent of food and beverage SMEs want to support online payment and collect at the store in future. In Vietnam and Thailand, that figure is 48 per cent. In Singapore, 47 per cent want better support for card payments at the counter, while 35 per cent want QR code payments at the counter.

The obvious reading is that food and beverage SMEs are not simply digitising payments. They are redesigning the service journey. And when labour shortages and delivery platform competition are already squeezing margins, clunky payment infrastructure becomes a direct drag on resilience.

What this vertical needs is not another generic payment gateway. It needs orchestration across the full stack: in-store, at-table, kiosk, app, and delivery-linked flows.

Services SMEs are still under-automated

If retail is about post-transaction complexity and food and beverage is about channel complexity, services SMEs face automation complexity.

The services segment accounts for around 12 per cent of Southeast Asia’s total GDP, and the report suggests it remains the most under-digitised of the three verticals studied. Many businesses still rely on manual or outdated systems for accounting, governance, customer management, tax, and payments.

Recurring billing is the clearest example. Across the region, only 47 per cent of services SMEs use recurring payment solutions. Usage is higher in Indonesia at 57 per cent, Vietnam at 55 per cent, and Malaysia at 52 per cent, but much lower in Singapore at 38 per cent and Thailand at 39 per cent.

That is surprising, because recurring payments are one of the most obvious ways for service businesses to reduce churn, improve cash-flow predictability, and cut administrative labour. Yet in many cases, SMEs still appear to be processing repeat transactions manually.

The integration data is just as revealing. Across Southeast Asia, only 37 per cent of services SMEs have integrated bookings with their payment technology. The figures fall further for returns at 26 per cent, cancellations at 24 per cent, and refunds at just 14 per cent.

That last number is especially telling. Refunds are often where operational pain becomes most visible to customers, yet they remain the least integrated payment process in the services segment.

The broader issue is that many service businesses are using payments as a bolt-on, not as part of an integrated operational system. That creates inefficiency on both sides of the transaction: more manual work for the business and more friction for the customer.

The next fintech winners will likely look more vertical

The report does not say this outright, but it points strongly in one direction: the horizontal fintech pitch is weakening.

For years, the standard approach was to sell SMEs generic payment acceptance with some localisation layered on top. But as sectors digitise differently, the gaps are becoming more visible. Retail needs better refund and dispute flows. Food and beverage needs channel unification. Services needs recurring billing and process integration.

Also Read: SEA’s SMEs are global in ambition but stuck at checkout

That does not mean horizontal providers disappear. It means the winning products will increasingly be those that feel vertical even if the underlying rails remain horizontal.

For startups, this is less a warning than an opportunity. Southeast Asia’s SME market is huge, but it is not uniform. Founders who keep treating it as a single broad payments category may find adoption and retention harder than expected.

The smarter bet is that the next meaningful gains will come from solving the exact operational pain of a specific segment, then building outward from there.

In Southeast Asia, generic fintech is starting to hit the limits of generic thinking.

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At Echelon Philippines, Maansi Vohra of Monk’s Hill Ventures sat down with Jessica de Mesa-Lim, Founder and CEO of Kindred Health, for an insightful fireside chat on building an omnichannel product tailored to the Philippine market — with a sharp focus on women’s healthcare.

De Mesa-Lim walked through her approach to product development, which begins with deep consumer research, including focus group discussions designed to surface real pain points and unmet needs. From there, the work becomes about crafting solutions that genuinely meet women where they are.

A central theme throughout the conversation was consumer education — de Mesa-Lim believes that when women are informed and empowered about their own health, they become the strongest advocates for their own care. That shift in awareness, she argues, is ultimately what drives adoption and long-term engagement with Kindred Health’s services.

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Singapore’s Doozy Robotics has announced an aggressive global expansion into the United States, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and Asia as it prepares for a Series A.

The startup, which builds humanoid and autonomous-vehicle fleets controlled by a central orchestration layer called Eywa-OS, is pivoting hard into a subscription-first model and pitching itself as a solution to chronic labour shortages in manufacturing and logistics.

What Doozy is selling

Doozy isn’t offering single-purpose machines. Its stack combines an industrial super humanoid, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), and autonomous forklifts, all governed by Eywa-OS. The software converts high-level production goals into task assignments, dynamically reallocating resources across the floor and reacting to disruptions in real time. The industrial humanoid is slated to launch in Q3 2026, with deployments set to follow.

Also Read: The humanoid robot economy is no longer science fiction

The package is intentionally vertical: hardware, fleet orchestration, and a robot-as-a-service model rolled into one. Customers subscribe to a multi-agent workforce every month and can scale capacity up or down as demand changes, shifting automation from capital expenditure to an operational cost.

The labour thesis

Doozy frames its push around a long-running demographic squeeze and tightening labour markets. The company points to projections that labour constraints in the US could shave more than US$1 trillion off GDP by 2030 and notes that nearly half of American workers are over 45 while Gen Z accounts for roughly eight per cent of the workforce. In that context, Doozy argues facilities will need agentic automation that operates like an intelligent factory manager.

“The global labour shortage is a structural shift, not a temporary imbalance,” said co-founder and CEO Suresh Chandrasekar. “We are building the Physical AI workforce that will power the next era of manufacturing.”

Commercial traction: impressive, but caveated

For a seed-stage company, Doozy’s commercial claims are eye-catching. It says it has a qualified global pipeline exceeding US$200 million, a US$144 million memorandum of understanding (MOU) with a major industrial conglomerate, and a large pilot underway with a US pharmaceutical leader. Doozy lists paying customers across two continents, naming Daimler, Carrier and VitaQuest among its engagements.

Cocoon Capital, an early investor, has publicly backed the company’s traction. “They have cracked some of the most persistent bottlenecks in industrial robotics, such as seamlessly navigating uneven floors and disorganised spaces, and reducing the operational footprint by 50 per cent compared to traditional forklifts,” said Michael Blakey, managing partner at Cocoon. He also called Doozy’s pricing a driver of “inevitable” mass-market adoption.

Also Read: Rise of the machines: 20 robotics startups shaping Southeast Asia’s future

Those metrics deserve scrutiny. A qualified pipeline is not revenue; an MOU signals intent rather than a binding order; and pilots often fail to convert. Investors and potential customers will watch conversion rates from pilot to production deployments, how subscription pricing compares to traditional capex models over time, and the real-world economics of operating humanoid fleets.

Engineering and regulatory hurdles

Humanoids promise dexterity and adaptability where wheeled robots fall short, but they add engineering complexity. Challenges include robust manipulation, battery life, component wear, safety, and maintaining uptime in gritty, industrial environments. Doozy claims its systems can handle uneven floors and cluttered spaces, a key advantage in older warehouses that were not designed for automation.

Safety and regulation are another hurdle. Standards and certification requirements vary across the US, GCC and Asia; integrating humanoids alongside human workers will demand a high bar for safety assurance.
Doozy’s global push will test whether its technology can meet disparate regulatory requirements without eroding margins or slowing deployments.
The economics of subscription robotics

Turning automation into an operational expense is compelling for capital-constrained manufacturers. Doozy’s multi-agent subscription model promises elasticity: scale robots up during peaks, scale down when demand falls. The model also bundles maintenance and software upgrades, theoretically lowering friction for adoption.

However, lifetime customer value and unit economics are critical. Humanoids may have higher maintenance and component costs than simpler AMRs. Supply-chain pressures on actuators, sensors and specialised parts could affect uptime and service costs. The viability of the subscription model hinges on predictable reliability and compelling total cost of ownership compared with manual labour or incumbent automation.

Competition and market timing

Doozy enters a crowded field. Traditional robotics giants, AMR specialists and a growing cohort of humanoid and legged-robot startups are all racing for customers. Doozy’s differentiators are vertical integration and Eywa-OS, which could simplify deployments and enable cross-agent coordination. But the company must prove these advantages at scale and across multiple industries.

Also Read: China’s humanoid robot leader AGIBOT sets sights on Southeast Asia

The planned Series A will be a bellwether for investor appetite in capital-intensive, humanoid-first automation. If Doozy converts a meaningful share of its pipeline into long-term contracts and demonstrates repeatable deployments, it could secure the capital needed to scale hardware production, service infrastructure and international operations. If not, the path forward will be tougher.

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Touchstone Partners, a Vietnam-focused climate-tech venture firm, has made a partial exit from Stride, a distributed solar platform for households and micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Vietnam, following the startup’s successful Series B raise.

Stride closed a US$15 million Series B co-led by Lightrock and TRIREC via the Accelerate7 platform, with existing backers Clime Capital’s SEACEF II and UOB Venture Management’s Asia Impact Investment Fund II also reinvesting. The financing has prompted at least one early investor to monetise part of its holding, reflecting growing interest in commercial-scale distributed solar in Southeast Asia.

A quick backstory

Touchstone and Clime Capital co-led Stride’s US$2 million seed round in 2023, among the earliest institutional bets on Vietnam’s residential distributed solar market. Since then, Touchstone, which specialises in climate-tech and impact-driven businesses, says it has provided strategic support, fundraising help and introductions to policy and corporate stakeholders while working alongside Stride’s founding team.

Also Read: Stride lands Series A funding to power rooftop solar expansion in Vietnam

Stride’s footprint has expanded substantially: the company now claims operations across north, central and south Vietnam, supported by more than 75 verified engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) subcontractors. Touchstone says Stride has nearly tripled its project portfolio since the seed round and has become Vietnam’s largest platform for residential solar installations.

Why the partial exit matters

Partial exits from early-stage venture funds are noteworthy for several reasons. For limited partners, they provide realised returns and proof that the fund can return capital; for the fund, they free up deployment capacity to back new opportunities. For the market, such exits signal maturation: capital is being recycled from early backers into new deals within the same ecosystem.

“Since we have invested, the company has grown 7.25x in valuation,” Tu Ngo, General Partner at Touchstone Partners, said in a statement. She framed the exit as validation of Touchstone’s thesis that locally built climate solutions can generate both commercial returns and emissions impact, a claim consistent with rising investor appetite for Southeast Asia climate plays.

The figures behind the headline

Stride’s Series B of US$15 million is a meaningful vote of confidence from international and regional investors. Lightrock, a global investor that has backed climate and health tech, and TRIREC, an investment vehicle that uses the Accelerate7 platform,co-led the round. The participation of Clime Capital and UOB Venture Management, both of which reinvested, underscores continued support from regionally focused impact investors.

Touchstone’s partial sell-down comes after a 2023 seed investment of US$2 million that helped Stride scale its operations. Touchstone did not disclose the exact quantum of capital realised in the partial exit, nor the post-money valuation implied by the Series B, standard practice when exits involve negotiated secondary purchases.

What this says about Vietnam’s distributed solar market

Vietnam sits at an inflexion point in distributed renewable energy. Rising energy demand, frequent grid constraints, and a policy environment increasingly focused on decarbonisation have created fertile ground for rooftop and small-scale solar models. However, deployment has long been held back by financing, standards, and fragmented supply chains.

Stride’s model, a marketplace-style platform that aggregates EPC partners and focuses on households and MSMEs, tackles two of those constraints: professionalising installation supply and simplifying customer acquisition. Growing to a network of more than 75 vetted EPC subcontractors suggests the company has solved at least some of the operational challenges that often plague fragmented markets.

Also Read: Lightrock bets US$500M on energy access play across SEA’s unelectrified millions

Yet the market is not without risks. Household and MSME adoption depends on affordable financing, stable incentives, and consumer trust in installation quality and after-sales service. The participation of a range of investors in the Series B indicates confidence in Stride’s ability to manage these risks. Still, competition from utilities, specialised solar providers and other platforms will intensify as capital flows into the space.

Investor strategy and sectoral signal

Touchstone’s move also reflects a broader pattern among early-stage climate funds in Southeast Asia: backing local founders through product-market fit and early scaling, then recycling capital as winners consolidate. By partially exiting a portfolio company after a successful institutional round, the firm increases its dry powder to chase adjacent opportunities in mobility, energy efficiency, clean production and other climate-tech verticals.

Touchstone’s portfolio includes companies such as Selex Motors and Enfarm, positioning the fund across mobility and agri-tech as it seeks to capture multiple vectors of the green transition in Vietnam. The firm also runs the Net Zero Challenge with Temasek Foundation, an initiative intended to bridge funding gaps for green-economy startups, further signalling its role as a catalytic investor in the local climate ecosystem.

What remains unanswered

Important operational and financial details around Stride were not disclosed in the announcement. Key unknowns include:

• The precise amount Touchstone realised from the partial sale.
• Stride’s revenues, profitability metrics or unit economics on residential and MSME installs.
• The company’s roadmap for growth outside Vietnam, if any, and capital allocation plans following the Series B.

These gaps matter for assessing whether Stride’s growth is primarily driven by demand or by favourable capital markets. They also affect how one reads the exit: validation of a durable business model versus a timely secondary sale enabled by strong investor appetite for climate-linked growth stories.

Broader implications for the region

Southeast Asia has become a target for climate-first capital, with distributed solar an obvious entry point. Solar complements other decarbonisation strategies and can be deployed rapidly compared with large grid-scale projects, making it attractive to both impact and growth investors.

The participation of global and regional players in Stride’s round underscores two trends. First, foreign capital is comfortable backing Vietnam’s climate startups when founders demonstrate scalable operations and clear go-to-market strategies. Second, re-investment by existing regional funds signals belief in the company’s execution, not merely a de-risking by new entrants.

What to watch next

• How Stride deploys the new capital: whether it focuses on deeper penetration in Vietnam, moves upmarket to commercial and industrial clients, or invests in financing solutions for customers.
• The competitive response: whether utilities and incumbent solar installers consolidate or partner with platforms like Stride.
• Follow-on exits: whether Touchstone and other early backers exit further as Stride matures toward eventual larger liquidity events.

Also Read: Clime Capital, Touchstone Partners inject US$2M into Vietnamese cleantech startup Stride

For now, Touchstone’s partial exit is a modest but useful data point: investors are willing to both fund and monetise distributed solar bets in Vietnam, suggesting the sector is moving from pilot phase toward commercial scale. That, in turn, could accelerate a wave of follow-on funding and operational consolidation across Southeast Asia’s rooftop solar market.

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