Day: August 26, 2026

For years, agritech in emerging markets was sold on a seductive premise: agriculture could leapfrog missing infrastructure the same way mobile phones helped consumers bypass fixed-line banking and communications. Build a marketplace, onboard farmers, connect buyers, add a layer of data, and scale would follow.

That story is now colliding with the harder reality of rural Asia. The “AgTech Investment in Emerging Markets 2025” report prepared by AgBase, Briter, and Mercy Corps, has found that fragmented farm supply chains cannot be fixed by software alone when produce still moves across poor roads, storage is unreliable, cold chains are patchy, and quality control depends on human judgement at the farmgate.

Also Read: Why Indonesia’s agritech winners will be phygital, not purely digital

The funding correction after 2023 has made that weakness harder to ignore. As capital became more selective, many “venture bets” built on rapid user growth and thin digital coordination started to look fragile. In their place, investors and founders are being forced to consider “system bets”: businesses that may be slower and messier to build, but which are grounded in logistics, trust, repayment behaviour, and actual control over supply.

In Southeast Asia, where agriculture remains central to employment and food security, this distinction matters. Indonesia’s startup correction offered an early warning. Growth-at-all-costs models, often backed by generalist venture capital, struggled when operational controls and unit economics did not keep pace with expansion. In agriculture, that gap is even more punishing because the offline world does not bend easily to digital ambition.

The infrastructure problem software cannot hide

The core challenge is simple: in many emerging markets, infrastructure is not a support layer. It is the bottleneck.

A startup that wants to aggregate farmers, sell inputs, finance planting, or connect produce to buyers often discovers that it must also solve for transport, warehousing, grading, traceability, and sometimes even power reliability. These are not side problems. They determine whether the platform can deliver on time, preserve quality, reduce waste, and get paid.

This is why the clean distinction between asset-light and asset-heavy models is becoming less useful. Asset-light platforms, built mainly around transactions and coordination, can work in more mature markets where roads, storage, logistics providers, and buyer standards are already functional. But in weaker ecosystems, the same model often has little control over the messy parts of the chain that decide whether a transaction succeeds.

The lesson from markets such as Nigeria is relevant for Asian founders. Basic infrastructure cannot be leapfrogged. Digital tools may improve visibility and coordination, but they cannot make produce travel faster on broken roads or keep perishables fresh without cold storage. Before data rails can generate value, “hard rails” — storage, logistics, fulfilment centres, and quality systems — often need to be built or tightly controlled.

Also Read: A comprehensive guide to Indonesia’s agritech ecosystem

This does not mean every agritech startup must own trucks and warehouses. But it does mean founders need a serious answer to who controls the physical movement of goods and how quality is verified. In agriculture, trust is not created by an app interface. It is earned through repeated offline execution.

The rise of the phygital model

That is why the “phygital” model, combining physical infrastructure with digital systems, has shifted from being a fashionable term to a practical requirement.

The digital layer still matters. It can capture farmer data, manage payments, monitor supply, forecast demand, and support credit scoring. But the human and physical layers are just as important. Field agents remain essential in smallholder markets because they translate technology into trust. They help farmers understand products, verify crop conditions, manage service delivery, and reduce the perceived risk of engaging with a platform.

This is particularly important in Southeast Asia, where smallholders often operate on thin margins and rely on local relationships. A farmer in rural Java, Mindanao, or the Mekong Delta may not adopt a service simply because it is cheaper or more efficient on paper. Adoption depends on whether the provider is known, whether payment terms are credible, and whether the platform shows up when something goes wrong.

African examples underline the point. ThriveAgric in Nigeria and Twiga Foods in Kenya have both demonstrated that agricultural platforms often need direct involvement in fulfilment, logistics, and buyer relationships. Kenya also offers a cautionary tale: donor-backed pilots can validate ideas without proving commercial durability. Without the physical layer, many projects remain trapped as pilots rather than becoming scalable businesses.

For emerging Asia, the implication is clear. The winners are unlikely to be pure apps. They will be companies that use software to coordinate a deeper operating system across inputs, finance, logistics, and market access.

Why single-point apps struggle

The era of the standalone crop advisory app is fading. Advice alone is hard to monetise, especially when farmers are price-sensitive and customer acquisition is expensive. A platform that tells a farmer what to plant or when to spray may create value, but it often struggles to capture enough of that value to build a durable business.

The stronger model is bundled. A platform that provides quality inputs, links farmers to buyers, embeds financing, and captures transaction data becomes harder to replace. It also creates multiple revenue pools. Instead of charging farmers directly for every service, the platform can monetise downstream through processors, corporates, insurers, lenders, and buyers that care about traceability, reliable supply, water efficiency, and climate resilience.

This shift matters because the strongest economics in agritech often sit beyond the farmer. Corporates may pay for verified supply. Lenders may pay for better risk data. Buyers may pay a premium for predictable quality. Insurers may rely on platform data to price products more accurately.

When these services are integrated well, the results can be meaningful. Bundled platforms have reported repayment rates above 95 per cent and farmer income gains of 20-30 per cent. Those figures are not just impact claims. They point to the commercial logic of deeper integration: farmers stay because the platform solves several problems at once, while partners pay because the system reduces risk.

The capital stack has to change

The difficulty is that this kind of agritech does not fit neatly into traditional venture capital timelines. Building logistics networks, field operations, financing systems, and quality controls takes time. A five-to-seven-year fund horizon can push founders towards fast growth before the operating foundations are ready.

Also Read: Malaysian pension fund KWAP moves to contain damage after eFishery fraud shock

That mismatch is becoming one of the sector’s central financing challenges. Agricultural infrastructure often needs patient capital, blended finance, working capital facilities, and strategic corporate participation alongside equity. Brazil offers one example of how an agritech ecosystem can scale when domestic debt markets and corporate venture arms complement startup funding. In other markets, concessional capital can help de-risk early infrastructure, before commercial investors fund growth.

For Southeast Asia, this is especially relevant as food security, climate adaptation and rural income become more urgent policy priorities. Governments and development finance institutions can help build public goods such as farmer registries, digital IDs, and climate data systems. But commercial startups still need disciplined models that can survive without permanent subsidy.

The next phase of agritech in emerging Asia will not be won by the company with the slickest dashboard. It will be won by those that understand the farm economy as a system: physical, financial, human, and digital.

The shift from clicks to bricks is not a retreat from technology. It is a recognition that technology only works when it is anchored in reality. In agriculture, that reality is muddy, fragmented, and deeply local. The companies that accept this early will have a better chance of building platforms that are not only scalable, but permanent.

The post From Lagos to Jakarta: Why SEA agritech needs Africa’s “boots on the ground” playbook appeared first on e27.

Every fortnight brings a fresh headline: another Southeast Asian fintech bolting stablecoin rails onto its payment stack, another central bank issuing a licence, another founder claiming to have solved remittances. The global stablecoin market has crossed roughly US$300 billion in market capitalisation, with transaction volumes running into the tens of trillions of dollars annually, a scale that now rivals the throughput of the major card networks.

Southeast Asia isn’t a bystander to this. It’s arguably the epicentre. Asia is the single largest stablecoin-flow region in the world, moving US$12.5 trillion in 2025 alone, up 67 per cent year-on-year, and within the region, 43 per cent of B2B cross-border payments in Southeast Asia already run on stablecoins.

Also Read: Stablecoins surge in Southeast Asia 2026: A real shift or just a bridge to CBDCs?

The industry’s own telling of this story is a triumphant one: cheaper remittances, faster settlement, financial inclusion for the underbanked. All true. But sit with the numbers a little longer and a less comfortable story emerges — one about who actually controls Southeast Asia’s money, and whether the region’s regulators have fully clocked what they’ve signed up for.

The remittance math is genuinely extraordinary

Start with what stablecoins are unambiguously good at. The Philippines has upward of 10 million overseas workers, and its OFW remittance corridor moves close to US$40 billion a year. Traditional remittance rails charge migrant workers an average of 8.3 per cent globally to send money home, according to World Bank estimates, a tax on people who can least afford it.

Stablecoin-based transfers can undercut that to well below 0.1 per cent. That gap is not a rounding error; for a domestic helper in Singapore sending a third of her salary home every month, it is the difference between a decent transfer and a punitive one.

Singapore has positioned itself as the natural hub for formalising this. StraitsX, part of the Fazz Financial Group, now issues XSGD and XUSD and controls more than 70 per cent of the non-USD stablecoin market in Southeast Asia, with over US$18 billion in cumulative on-chain volume. It has embedded XSGD directly into GrabPay and struck a settlement partnership with KBank in Thailand, while extending its rails toward Taiwan and Japan, the kind of consumer-facing distribution that turns a crypto product into genuine financial infrastructure.

StraitsX’s CEO, Tianwei Liu, put the regional ambition plainly: Asia, he said, is “setting the pace for how stablecoins will power the next phase of global payments.” The Singapore-Indonesia corridor alone is now said to process around US$45 billion a year in cross-border flows, 89 per cent of it B2B — trade finance and supply-chain settlement, not speculative trading.

Six countries, six rulebooks, and founders are the ones paying for the gap

Here is where the optimism should get more qualified. Southeast Asia is not one stablecoin market; it’s at least six, each with a different regulatory philosophy operating at a different speed.

Singapore’s MAS has built arguably the clearest licensing pathway in Asia. The Philippines’ BSP treats stablecoins as a remittance-cost problem to solve, and licenses accordingly. Indonesia’s OJK and Bank Indonesia still classify crypto assets as commodities, not currency, leaving cross-border stablecoin payments to route through licensed money-transfer operators rather than direct rails.

Also Read: How SMEs are using stablecoins to beat currency swings

Vietnam is the strangest case of all: the State Bank of Vietnam does not formally recognise crypto as a payment instrument, yet Vietnam ranks among the world’s most crypto-active markets, with informal USDT transfers already doing the work of a payments system that doesn’t officially exist, a pilot regulatory framework isn’t expected until later this year.

For a founder trying to build a single stablecoin payments product across the region, this fragmentation is not a minor compliance headache. It means Singapore-grade product assumptions can’t simply be copy-pasted into Jakarta, Hanoi or Manila. It means the “SEA stablecoin market” that investors pitch decks describe so tidily is, in practice, six separate licensing regimes, six separate AML expectations, and at least one jurisdiction (Vietnam) where the underlying activity is thriving in a formal vacuum.

The region’s stablecoin winners over the next two years will likely be decided less by who has the slickest product and more by who navigates this patchwork fastest without getting burned by it.

The dollarisation question nobody in the pitch decks wants to answer

The bigger, quieter concern sits one level up, at the central banks themselves. Almost every stablecoin flowing through these corridors is pegged to the US dollar. The Bank for International Settlements has now published research directly warning that this represents a new, digitally frictionless form of dollarisation, one that lets residents of emerging economies shift savings and payments into dollar tokens instantly and pseudonymously, in a way that physical dollar cash never allowed.

BIS researchers examined foreign reserve holdings across more than 130 countries alongside stablecoin inflow data and found a pattern with real financial-stability implications for developing nations. The IMF has gone further, warning that heavy dollar-stablecoin adoption could erode a central bank’s grip on interest rates and money supply, cut into government seigniorage revenue, and open an express lane for capital flight during a crisis.

The European Central Bank’s Isabel Schnabel made the same point from Seoul this June: growing stablecoin use, she warned, “may further cement the international dominance of the US dollar” at the expense of smaller, weaker currencies.

For Vietnam’s dong, the Indonesian rupiah, the Philippine peso, or any currency that has already lived through informal cash dollarisation driven by inflation and volatility, a frictionless digital version of the same phenomenon is not a hypothetical risk. It’s arguably already underway, just not yet at a scale that shows up in central bank models. None of the region’s regulators have shown any inclination to slow stablecoin adoption down; every incentive, from cheaper remittances to foreign investment optics, points toward encouraging it further.

What this actually means for SEA’s founders and investors

None of this argues against stablecoins. The remittance savings are real, the B2B settlement efficiency is real, and Singapore’s regulatory head start is a genuine regional asset.

Also Read: Morph bets on stablecoins as the next rail for digital commerce

However, the industry conversation in Southeast Asia has been almost entirely one-sided — infrastructure triumphalism, without much scrutiny of what happens to a central bank’s toolkit when a meaningful share of a country’s dollar exposure moves onto rails it doesn’t control. Founders building in this space should treat regulatory fragmentation as a permanent design constraint, not a temporary inconvenience.

And investors backing the next StraitsX or MetaComp would do well to ask not just how fast the corridor is growing, but how a central bank in Jakarta, Hanoi or Manila is likely to respond once the flows get big enough to notice.

The post SEA’s stablecoin boom has a dollarisation problem nobody’s pricing in appeared first on e27.

Southeast Asia’s electric vehicle sector has quietly matured from concept pitches to funded pilots, with the top 16 startups across Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam attracting a combined US$622M in equity, per Tracxn’s August 2026 report. Every company on the list was founded from 2016 onward, and funding sits mostly at Series A/B — past experimentation, short of scale.

Singapore hosts half the cohort despite a tiny domestic vehicle market, functioning as a financing and HQ base rather than a manufacturing hub. Indonesia’s four companies lean on its nickel reserves and battery ambitions; Thailand and Vietnam each have two, reflecting established automotive manufacturing bases.

Crucially, the region’s EV story isn’t cars; it’s motorbikes, delivery fleets, battery-swapping and charging infrastructure, since two-wheelers dominate daily transport. Backers include Peak XV Partners, Jungle Ventures, GSR Ventures, TVS Motor and Horizons Ventures, blending financial and strategic capital.

At US$622M, the region trails China, the US and Europe by orders of magnitude, but that may reflect a market shaped by fragmented regulation, price-sensitive consumers and fleet-heavy usage rather than a copy-paste of global EV playbooks. Government policy is pulling demand forward; the real test is whether pilots convert into durable, subsidy-free businesses.

REGIONAL

Granite Asia tops US$500M for private credit fund Libra Hybrid: Granite Asia has closed its Libra Hybrid private credit strategy above US$500M, backed by Temasek, Khazanah and Indonesia’s sovereign fund, targeting Asia’s mid-market firms too big for VC and too small for public markets or bank lending.

SEA’s stablecoin boom hides a dollarisation risk, BIS warns: Asia moved US$12.5tn in stablecoins in 2025, with 43% of SEA’s B2B cross-border payments now on-chain, but the BIS warns dollar-pegged tokens could erode central banks’ grip on money supply and capital flows.

Chocolate Finance launches business accounts for idle SME cash: Singapore’s Chocolate Finance is launching business accounts offering up to 1.5% annual returns on spare operating cash, as SMEs lose an estimated US$616M yearly leaving funds idle in low-yield bank accounts.

Indonesia’s agritech winners will be phygital, not digital-only: Indonesian agritech is shifting from venture-fuelled growth bets to phygital models blending software with field agents and physical infrastructure, as smallholder farming proves too fragmented for apps alone to fix.

SEA agritech needs Africa’s “boots on the ground” playbook: A new AgTech Investment report from AgBase, Briter and Mercy Corps argues Asian agritech founders should copy African peers like ThriveAgric by building physical logistics and quality-control infrastructure, not just software.

The Philippines doesn’t need more fintech apps; it needs rails: Bank account ownership in the Philippines fell to 34% even as e-wallet use hit 70 million users, exposing a data-sharing infrastructure gap that BSP’s Open Finance Framework has yet to close.

Climate tech funding in SEA matures as investors get choosier: SEA climate tech raised roughly US$725M in 2023, mostly in Indonesia, but the region still attracts just 2% of global clean energy investment versus the US$190bn a year needed by 2035 to meet its climate goals.

Temasek-backed Azalea adds US$1B+ in new capital: The Temasek-backed alternatives platform has secured over US$1B in fresh capital commitments across its private equity platforms, reinforcing Singapore’s position as a hub for institutional-grade alternative asset management.

Visa joins Singapore’s stablecoin settlement pilot: Visa has joined Singapore’s stablecoinproject to pilot seven-day settlement cycles with payments firm Nium, signalling growing institutional confidence in stablecoin infrastructure for cross-border transactions.

responsAbility closes Asia climate fund at US$461M: The impact investor closed its Asia-focused climate fund at US$461M, targeting green infrastructure and climate resilience projects across the region amid rising institutional appetite for sustainable assets.

Stablecoin card spending tops US$10.9B globally: RedotPay data shows stablecoin cardspending has crossed US$10.9B as the sector matures, with Southeast Asia among the fastest-growing markets for stablecoin-based consumer payments.

UAE’s Fasset raises US$68M Series C at US$1B valuation: SBI-led round values the digital asset platform at US$1B. Fasset operates across emerging markets including Southeast Asia, where it targets underbanked populations with crypto-based financial services.

FEATURES AND INTERVIEWS

KPMG’s Leo Yang: move into China in phases, not all at once: KPMG’s Leo Yang says Chinese firms are building genuine substance in Singapore rather than just parking capital, but warns Southeast Asian companies eyeing China to weigh compliance risk and move in phases.

How Willog turned shipment sensor data into an insurance model: South Korea’s Willog has built zero-churn logistics contracts by feeding IoT sensor data on temperature and shock into AI-driven predictions and is now pricing cargo insurance premiums off the same dataset.

INTERNATIONAL

Why one founder moved to Dubai six weeks after the ceasefire: A Singaporean founder argues Dubai’s post-ceasefire funding slump — UAE startups still took 71% of MENA’s US$1.7B H1 2026 capital — shows competition thins fastest exactly when headlines look worst.

Flipkart closes in on India’s quick-commerce leaders: Two years after Walmart relaunched its push, Flipkart’s quick-commerce arm is narrowing the gap with Blinkit and Zepto, a development SEA players in the sector will watch closely as the model expands regionally.

India’s Airbound raises US$37M for cargo drones: The startup is betting rocket-inspireddrone design can displace trucks on short-haul freight routes, a model with directimplications for logistics-heavy SEA markets exploring last-mile aerial delivery.

Uber faces US$1B fine over automated driver suspensions: A regulator has proposed a nearly US$1B penalty against Uber for using automated systems to suspend drivers without due process — a precedent with significant implications for gig economy regulation across Southeast Asia.

Berry Street merges with India’s Healthify amid GLP-1 surge: The US nutrition startup is combining with Healthify as demand for GLP-1 weight-loss drugs reshapes digital health, creating a cross-border platform with reach into Asian markets.

TikTok agrees US$400M settlement over children’s privacy: ByteDance’s short-video platform will pay US$400M to settle a children’s data privacy lawsuit, its largest such payout, raising the compliance bar for social platforms operating across SEA.

Trump bought SpaceX shares after blockbuster IPO: The US president acquired SpaceX shares within two weeks of the company’s IPO, reigniting debate over conflicts of interest and the blurring of political and private capital in the space sector.

Apple cuts hundreds of jobs from Siri and Vision Pro teams: Apple has laid off hundreds of engineers working on Siri and the Vision Pro, signalling a strategic reset on its AI assistant and spatial computing ambitions.

AI

Alabama probes OpenAI over Hugging Face hack: Alabama’s attorney general has launched a formal investigation into OpenAI over its alleged hacking of Hugging Face, raising questions about competitive conduct and cyber ethics among the world’s top AI labs.

Japan earmarks US$944M more for Rapidus in AI chip race: Tokyo is deepening its bet on domestic chipmaker Rapidus with a further US$944M injection, as the country races to build sovereign AI chip capacity ahead of anticipated US–China supply chain disruptions.

Nvidia in talks to acquire Korean chip startup Rebellions: A potential deal would give Nvidia access to Rebellions’ AI inference chip technology, deepening its dominance in custom silicon as competition with AMD and domestic Korean players intensifies.

Nvidia to ship AI chips to China by year-end: Nvidia is planning to resume AI chip shipments to China before year-end, a move that could reshape the competitive landscape for AI infrastructure across Asia, including SEA cloud and data centre operators.

Where AI money is made, and where SEA founders should compete: An investor’s stack breakdown shows AI’s fattest margins sit in chips and power, while application-layer startups — the only tier SEA founders can realistically fund — remain the thinnest-margin, least proven layer.

The true cost of AI is starting to surface: As GitHub shifts Copilot to usage-based billing, this essay argues AI’s real costs are moving from subscriptions to grid pressure and vendor concentration, an irreversible dependency once agents sit inside critical workflows.

What Malaysian employees really want from workplace tech: 93% of Malaysian employees use generative AI at work, yet 68% report heavier workloads, a survey of 506 KL office workers finds, pointing to fragmented systems, not AI itself, as the real productivity drag.

How AI helps sales teams stop losing context between calls: A practical AI workflow can turn scattered enquiries, CRM notes and call transcripts into structured lead summaries, closing the gap between what a prospect says and what a salesperson acts on.

Gen Z increasingly turns to AI to plan and navigate travel: 99% of Gen Z travellers now use AI before a trip, per Booking.com, for personalised recommendations and destination research — though most still want a human involved before booking.

AUTHORED ARTICLES

Singapore’s real opportunity is coordinating ASEAN, not AI: An SIIA report reframes Singapore not as a standalone economy but as ASEAN’s coordination layer, arguing the region’s next unicorns will build cross-border compliance and payments infrastructure, not consumer apps.

SEA’s oldest savings circles still can’t price who goes first: Arisan, paluwagan and hui move roughly US$1tn a year outside formal banking, but informal circles still settle payout order by favour or lottery — a gap one founder’s discount-auction platform is trying to fix.

Decoding Bitcoin’s strongest weekly rally since 2023: Bitcoin surged toward

US$80,000 on record ETF inflows of US$1.92B in a week and a US$4B short squeeze, as Treasury bond buybacks pushed capital toward inflation hedges ahead of Jackson Hole.

Bitcoin, Ethereum flush US$1.44B in shorts; real test begins: A short squeeze cleared US$1.44B in leveraged bets from Bitcoin and Ethereum between 19–21 August, while spot ETF inflows hit their strongest weekly pace in months, leaving both assets overbought but resilient.

Why a global company can’t be a copy-and-paste company: ASEAN drew roughly US$226B in FDI even as global investment fell 11% in 2024, but this essay warns that treating the region as one market — rather than translating pricing and trust locally — is where expansions unravel.

Southeast Asia doesn’t lack ideas; it lacks follow-through: AI has made ideas cheap to generate, but this essay argues Southeast Asia’s real shortage is judgement, turning frontline observations into protected, buildable assets rather than letting them disappear.

Why startups are cutting the number of tools they use: 63% of organisations cite unused or overlapping SaaS apps as a driver of consolidation, with this essay arguing founders should keep only specialised, well-integrated tools rather than chase the fewest tools possible.

Competing on switching costs without becoming hostage: This essay distinguishes earned switching costs — built on trust and workflow value — from engineered lock-in, arguing the strongest firms compete on recovery cost, not just how painful it is to leave.

3 months, 1,264 commits, zero inbound links: a founder’s lesson: A solo founder who shipped 600-plus pages and zero editorial backlinks in three months argues supply-side metrics — commits, articles, impressions — always rise and always feel like progress, while distribution to strangers does not.

The post Ecosystem Roundup: SEA’s EV startups pull in US$622M as bets move from pitch to pilot appeared first on e27.

A few months ago, a founder from a prominent country in Asia sent me a message I have been thinking about ever since.

He had signed letters of intent worth around US$1 million in committed revenue over three years. He was getting strong direct-to-consumer interest from another major Asian market worth another US$600,000 in pipeline. He had spent US$15,000 on a campaign on an early consumer buying intent platform, the kind that lets a hardware startup test demand before committing to mass production. The campaign generated US$120,000 in pre-orders, roughly a seven-fold return on his marketing spend.

By every real business metric, this founder was moving.

His investors could not see it.

They told him to focus on indigenous manufacturing only, even though his strategy of collaborating with Chinese partners was cutting his R&D and production costs in half. They told him his buying intent platform results were not a real validation channel, because they had never heard of the platform. He explained that almost every consumer hardware founder he knew had heard of it, and many had launched their businesses on it with very little capital upfront. His investors still saw the channel as irrelevant. They had no response at all to his idea of building an ecosystem to launch other Asian companies into global markets.

So he wrote to me, asking for investment support and guidance on regional expansion. He needed someone who could see what his existing investors could not.

His situation is not unusual. It is the story of an entire generation of Asian founders.

The archetype Asia is missing

In the US, the operator-investor has become one of the most powerful figures in early-stage capital. These are former founders who built and exited companies, then turned around to back the next generation. They write cheques between US$250,000 and a few million dollars. They move in days, not months. They sit on cap tables next to institutional VCs but offer something the institutions cannot. They have done the work themselves.

In 2024, more than half of all new fund managers globally were solo GPs. Many of them were operators making their first move into investing. Elad Gil, who built and exited multiple companies before raising a billion-dollar solo fund in 2024, is the most famous example. Hundreds of less famous operator-investors are now active in the US market, writing the cheques that traditional VC firms used to dominate.

Asia has the demand for this kind of capital. We do not have the supply.

Why the gap exists

Asia has produced extraordinary operators over the past two decades. The founders of Grab, Sea, Gojek, Razer, Flipkart, Lazada, and dozens of other companies built businesses worth billions. Many of them exited or reached liquidity events. Many are now in their forties or fifties with significant personal capital.

Almost none of them became check-writing operator-investors at scale.

Also Read: Bitcoin’s 73% correlation with gold forces investors to rethink crypto

Most retired into family offices. The capital went into diversified portfolios managed by professionals. It earned a steady return. It did not flow back into the early-stage ecosystem that produced them.

A second group took board roles at large corporates or strategic advisory positions. Their time went into governance, not into spending Sunday afternoons reviewing pitch decks from twenty-six-year-olds. The expertise was preserved. The capital deployment was not.

A third group started their own VC firms at institutional scale, with multiple partners and investment committees. The structure mirrored the US institutional VC model from a decade earlier, not the operator-investor model emerging in the US today.

The result is a region with abundant operator wisdom and abundant capital, but very few of the small, fast, conviction-driven cheques that the founder above could not find.

What this costs Asian founders

Go back to the founder with the buying intent campaign.

His investors were not bad people. They were not unintelligent. They were operating on a framework that had no place for what he was actually doing. Indigenous-only manufacturing made sense in their model because that was what they had seen succeed in the previous decade. The buying intent platform looked irrelevant because it was not a channel they had ever underwritten. They had not even heard of it, despite the fact that most consumer hardware founders use these platforms routinely. Ecosystem-building sounded vague because they could not see how operators in the US had used the same approach to build companies like Stripe, Shopify, and Plaid.

A US operator-investor would have read everything immediately. The buying intent campaign was customer validation, community building, and pre-order revenue rolled into one. The China collaboration was not a sovereignty problem. It was operational leverage. The ecosystem ambition was a recognised path to category leadership.

The founder is paying the cost of that frame mismatch. Six months from now, he will either have changed investors, or he will have changed his business to fit theirs. Both outcomes hurt him.

Multiply this across thousands of Asian founders over a decade. Some bend their businesses to fit the wrong framework and break the original model. Some refuse and stay underfunded. Some take cheques from US or European solo GPs who do not understand the regional market. The aggregate result shapes which companies get to global scale and which ones stall regionally.

Also Read: How to use AI to become a better investor

Who is trying to fix it

The infrastructure for change is being built. Singapore-based platforms like Auptimate are making it easier for operators to set up angel syndicates. Angel School has been training a new cohort of Asian angel investors and syndicate leaders since 2022. BANSEA, the regional angel network, has over a hundred members and four hundred investments behind it. XA Network connects senior operators across Southeast Asia. Several Asian markets are showing acceleration, with January 2026 industry analyses describing solo GPs as the next wave of capital management.

These efforts are good. They are also not enough on their own.

The capital is here. The reason for the gap is cultural and structural. Asian operators who could become investors often do not, because the path is not clear, the deal flow is hard, and the time commitment looks unattractive next to a board seat or a family-office mandate.

Closing the gap requires more than infrastructure. It requires successful Asian operators making a deliberate choice that previous generations did not. They have to choose to write the cheques and do the work.

What this means for founders raising in 2026 and 2027

The gap will not close quickly. Founders raising over the next two years will still be operating in a market with limited operator-investor supply. But there are practical things to do.

Spend time mapping the small but growing community of Asian operator-investors. They exist. Most are not on Crunchbase yet. They are introduced through other founders, surfaced at the right events, and found through specific angel networks rather than VC press releases.

Be willing to take smaller cheques from the right operator over larger cheques from the wrong institution. An operator-investor cheque of US$250,000 from someone who reads your business correctly is often more valuable over three years than an institutional cheque of US$1 million from someone who keeps asking why you are not doing things their way.

Be honest with yourself when you meet an investor who does not understand your business. The founder with the buying intent campaign was not the problem. His investors were. If your investors are asking you to do things that make no business sense, or if they have never heard of the tools your peers use routinely, you do not have a problem you can negotiate around. You have a frame problem that will compound for as long as that capital sits on your cap table.

The Asian operator-investor gap is the single largest unnamed problem in regional venture capital. It will close over time. The founders who navigate it correctly in the meantime will be the ones who define the next decade of Asian technology companies.

—

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 views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.

Join us on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn to stay connected.

The post Asian startups have an investor problem nobody is naming appeared first on e27.

BANGKOK, Thailand — August 26, 2026 — On Monday, Taiwan Tech Solution Day in Bangkok brought together Thailand’s corporate, investment, and startup communities with 11 Taiwanese technology startups for an afternoon of market insight, startup presentations, and discussions on cross-border collaboration. Co-organized by Startup Island TAIWAN and Taiwan Startup Terrace, and supported by iFlowDev, BitKub Capital Holdings, and Techsauce Global Summit Innovation Week, the event formed part of the lead-in to Techsauce Global Summit 2026. It underscored Taiwan’s commitment to building practical partnerships in Thailand and the wider ASEAN market.

 

The event reflected a cross-ministry collaboration between Taiwan’s National Development Council, which established Startup Island TAIWAN as the national startup brand, and the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Small and Medium Enterprise and Startup Administration, which launched Taiwan Startup Terrace as a government startup initiative. By combining their internationalization, ecosystem-development, and market-access capabilities, the two organizations created a platform for Thai stakeholders to engage directly with Taiwanese founders and technology providers.

In 2025, Taiwan’s foreign direct investment in Thailand totaled US$870 million across 131 projects, ranking Taiwan sixth among Thailand’s foreign direct investment sources for the year. This established investment base, together with Taiwan’s reputation as a reliable technology partner, provides a strong foundation for continued collaboration in the Thai market.

The program opened with remarks by Hsien-Chao (Joseph) Tseng, Director of the Economic Division at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Thailand. Director Tseng said that Taiwan is committed to serving as a trusted partner in investment and trade and noted that existing collaborations between Taiwanese startups and Thai partners offer a strong basis for further cooperation between the two markets. 

In the keynote session, Worapoj Chosen, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CHOSEN Digital, addressed “Synergies between Thailand and Taiwan Markets.” He examined areas in which Thai market demand and Taiwan’s technology capabilities can complement one another. Chosen Digital has leveraged Taiwan’s hardware to run its AI VPP aggregator to significantly improve data center and EV energy management, and has signed MOUs with Acer, VicOne, and Taiwan Startup Terrace. 

The event then turned to a market-entry case study by Manwoo Joo, Chief Executive Officer of Gogolook Thailand and Chief Operating Officer of Gogolook. In “From Taiwan to Thailand: The Whoscall Thai Market Domination,” he discussed the company’s experience building a 25-million-user base in Thailand and operating across global markets. He highlighted Whoscall’s early collaboration with the Royal Thai Police as an important mechanism for building local trust and encouraged Taiwanese startups to invest in local talent.

A centerpiece of the program was the Taiwan Startup Pitch Showcase, where 11 companies presented solutions spanning healthcare, sustainability, energy, AIoT, enterprise software, and consumer technology. The delegation included ADVMEDS Co., Ltd.; AiStyle; Apollo Power; BBOX Limited; CarbonClean Energy; ekoXense Enterprise Ltd.; GitHouse Co., Ltd.; Godspeed IT Service Ltd.; MIND INTERVIEW; Optiqb AI Technology Ltd.; and Yenprotek AIoT Ltd. The event also featured short pitches from two Thai startups: Pakjai.org and GetLinks.

The showcase gave Thai corporates, investors, and ecosystem organizations an opportunity to examine potential applications in digital health, energy management, carbon reduction, smart agriculture, enterprise operations, AI-enabled recruitment, physical security, and visual technology.

The day concluded with the panel discussion, “Building the Taiwan–Thailand Innovation Corridor,” moderated by Allen John Ku. The panel brought together Warit Chamwudhiprecha, Manager in the Strategy Office at LINE Thailand; Manwoo Joo of Gogolook Thailand; Chayutthon Kim-An, Investment Analyst at Bitkub Ventures; and Yente Yu, General Manager, Thailand, at Crescendo Lab.

The conversation addressed practical conditions for successful cross-border collaboration, including market entry, corporate partnership models, investment readiness, localization, and the role of platforms in connecting technology providers to customers. Warit Chamwudhiprecha identified a gap in AI adoption between large corporations and SMEs, highlighting similar challenges in both markets, including limited technology awareness, compliance capacity, budget, and data-management capabilities. He noted that solutions integrated into widely used platforms, such as LINE, can help accelerate SME adoption in both markets.

Chayutthon Kim-An advised startups entering Thailand to establish an appropriate pricing strategy as part of a broader localization plan. Yente Yu described how Crescendo Lab used early partnerships to gain a deeper understanding of customer needs in Thailand, which contributed to the establishment of its Bangkok office, one of four offices across the Asia-Pacific region. The discussion emphasized that the Taiwan–Thailand relationship is most effective when it moves beyond introductions toward defined commercial problems, credible local partners, and measurable pilots.

Taiwan Tech Solution Day in Bangkok will be followed by Taiwan’s participation at Techsauce Global Summit 2026, taking place from August 26 to 28 at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center in Bangkok. Startup Island TAIWAN and Taiwan Startup Terrace will continue their joint presence at the Taiwan Pavilion, where the 11 Taiwanese startups will present their technologies to international corporates, investors, and ecosystem partners.

The two organizations will also contribute to the summit program through speaking engagements at the Techsauce global summit Muay Thai Stage at 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday, August 26, and 1:10 p.m. on Friday, August 28. The sessions will highlight Taiwan’s startups and Startup Island TAIWAN’s collaborations across the region, extending the Bangkok dialogue to a wider Southeast Asian audience.

About Startup Island TAIWAN

Startup Island TAIWAN is Taiwan’s national startup brand, established by the National Development Council to showcase Taiwan’s startup ecosystem internationally and support the global expansion of Taiwan-based startups. Through our extensive network and partnerships across Japan, Korea, Singapore, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States, we bridge Taiwan’s startups to partners and communities that matter for boosting their global business, creating a platform for globalized innovation. www.startupisland.tw 

Media Contact

Miriam Clapp
Senior Manager, Startup Island TAIWAN
miriam@startupisland.tw

_________

Want updates like this delivered directly? Join our WhatsApp channel and stay in the loop.

This article was Sponsored by Startup Island TAIWAN

We can share your story at e27 too! Engage the Southeast Asian tech ecosystem by bringing your story to the world. You can reach out to us here to get started.

The post Taiwan Tech Solution Day in Bangkok Strengthens Taiwan–Thailand Innovation Ties Through Cross-Ministry Collaboration appeared first on e27.