Day: September 16, 2026

OpenAI has appointed Sanjay Deshmukh as its first Vice President of Asia Pacific sales, a hire that signals the ChatGPT maker is moving beyond product launches and into the harder work of building an enterprise sales machine across one of its fastest-growing markets.

Based in Singapore, Deshmukh will lead OpenAI’s commercial efforts across the region as more companies in Asia Pacific adopt AI tools for everyday business operations.

He reports to Chief Revenue Officer Dali Rajic and will work alongside OpenAI leaders including Kiran Mani and Oliver Jay, along with the company’s regional teams.

Also Read: AI gold rush: How OpenAI’s Singapore expansion could reshape the startup ecosystem

A veteran of enterprise software’s Asia playbook

Deshmukh’s appointment brings more than two decades of enterprise technology experience to OpenAI’s regional push. He joins from Elastic, the US-based search and data analytics software company, where he served as VP for Asia Pacific and Japan, a role he took on in 2025 to scale the company’s regional business, expand its partner ecosystem and deepen customer relationships.

Before Elastic, he spent time at Snowflake as senior VP for ASEAN and India, and prior to that built a long track record at VMware, including stints as VP and MD for Southeast Asia and Korea, and VP of end-user computing for Asia Pacific and Japan. His career also includes earlier roles at Citrix and SAP in India.

That trajectory (data platforms, cloud infrastructure, enterprise software, and now generative AI) mirrors the broader shift many enterprise sales leaders in the region are making, as companies that once sold storage, analytics or virtualisation now compete to sell AI capability instead. It also gives OpenAI a leader who has already built go-to-market teams from scratch in Southeast Asia, rather than one parachuting in cold.

Why Singapore, and why now

The hire lands at a moment when OpenAI is dramatically scaling up its physical and financial commitment to the region. The company first set up a presence in Singapore in 2024, pointing to Singaporeans’ unusually high per-capita use of ChatGPT, and has since deepened that bet considerably: in May 2026, it signed a memorandum of understanding with Singapore’s Ministry of Digital Development and Information at the ATxSummit, committing more than SGD300 million (~US$234 million) to establish its first Applied AI Lab outside the United States. That initiative, branded “OpenAI for Singapore,” spans enterprise AI deployment, talent development and wider public access to AI tools, and is expected to grow OpenAI’s Singapore-based technical team to more than 200 roles over the coming years.

More recently, the tech giant has reportedly been in talks to lease around 100,000 square feet across five floors of Shaw Tower in Singapore’s Beach Road district, a scale of office commitment that would dwarf its original regional footprint and put it among the largest AI company leases in Southeast Asia.

Also Read: Why GIC is backing Anthropic over OpenAI

Against that backdrop, hiring a dedicated Asia Pacific sales chief looks less like a symbolic appointment and more like a necessary piece of infrastructure. Building labs and signing government agreements is one thing; converting curiosity about AI into paid enterprise contracts across a region as fragmented as Asia Pacific — spanning wildly different languages, procurement norms, data regulations and levels of digital maturity — is another, and it needs someone who has done it before.

A crowded field of rivals

OpenAI is not the only AI company racing to plant its flag and its salespeople in the island nation. Anthropic, its closest rival in frontier AI development, has already secured roughly 100 desks at a flexible workspace in Ocean Financial Centre and has been actively hiring enterprise account executives across the region, including roles that require navigating government procurement frameworks in Singapore, India’s regulatory regime and processes across Australia and New Zealand. Anthropic has also been projecting rapid revenue growth, aiming to more than double its annualised revenue run rate in 2026 as enterprise adoption accelerates.

Beyond Anthropic, OpenAI faces entrenched competition from Google — which recently strengthened its own Asia Pacific presence with a DeepMind lab launch and whose Gemini models are already bundled deeply into enterprise tools used across Southeast Asian businesses — and Microsoft, which has spent years embedding Copilot into the Office and Azure ecosystems many regional enterprises already run on. Nvidia, too, has expanded its presence in Singapore with a new research centre focused on embodied AI and infrastructure efficiency, reinforcing that the competition for the region extends well beyond chatbots into the wider AI stack.

Also Read: For Singapore, the real AI race is institutional, not just technological

For Southeast Asian founders and enterprise buyers, this clustering of AI heavyweights in Singapore has an upside: more competition typically means faster product iteration, more localised support and better pricing pressure. But it also means the region is becoming a genuine battleground, not just a market to be served from headquarters and leadership hires like Deshmukh’s are as much a signal of intent as they are an operational necessity.

What comes next

OpenAI’s Singapore ambitions now rest on three pillars: the Applied AI Lab focused on national priorities such as education, healthcare and public services; a much larger physical office footprint; and now a sales organisation built by someone who has spent a career selling into the region’s toughest markets. Whether that combination translates into durable enterprise revenue, as opposed to headline-grabbing announcements, will likely become clearer over the next year, as Deshmukh’s team moves from hiring plans to actual customer wins.

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Southeast Asia’s e-wallet giants have spent a decade making digital payments boring, in the best sense. Tap to pay, scan a QR code, top up a prepaid line: no jargon, no friction, no need to understand what happens underneath. Now TrueMoney wants to apply the same trick to blockchain.

The Ascend Money-backed fintech, Thailand’s leading digital wallet by user traffic, has partnered with Fireblocks, the digital asset infrastructure provider, to power the next phase of Thai Baht TrueMoney (THBT), a token pegged to the baht that lets users dabble in programmable, blockchain-based payments without ever touching a seed phrase.

Also Read: SEA’s stablecoin boom has a dollarisation problem nobody’s pricing in

THBT Phase 2 runs under the Bank of Thailand’s Enhanced Regulatory Sandbox for programmable payments, a controlled environment the central bank uses to test blockchain applications before deciding whether and how to let them loose on the wider market. It is a telling detail: even in one of the region’s more crypto-curious jurisdictions, this kind of product still needs a regulatory playpen.

Hiding the plumbing

The pitch is straightforward. Self-custody wallets, where users hold their own private keys, remain one of the biggest barriers to mainstream crypto adoption: lose the key, lose the funds, with no customer service line to call. Fireblocks’s embedded wallet technology folds directly into the TrueMoney app instead, handling custody in the background while offering what the companies describe as an assisted recovery process if a user’s credentials go missing.

Ran Goldi, Fireblocks’s SVP for Payments and Network, put it plainly: users do not want to think about Web3, they just want things to work. It is a reasonable read of the market. Southeast Asia has shown limited appetite for crypto as crypto, but a strong appetite for payment rails that happen to be faster, cheaper or more flexible than what came before.

Also Read: Invisible banking — how embedded finance is quietly rewiring SEA’s economy

Practically, THBT holders can spend the token on discounted digital coupons through THBTStore, or swap it for six other supported digital assets via Ascend Bit, TrueMoney’s affiliate operating under Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission digital asset sandbox. For tourists and expats already holding supported tokens, the companies say the same rails let them convert into THBT and spend or cash out in baht, a small but genuine attempt to smooth crypto-to-fiat friction for visitors, a persistent headache in a country that draws tens of millions of foreign arrivals a year.

Why Fireblocks, and why now

Fireblocks brings scale rather than novelty to the deal. The company says it has secured more than US$16 trillion in digital asset transfers and stood up over 750 million wallets globally, credentials that matter more to a regulator weighing systemic risk than to an end user tapping “swap” on their phone.

For TrueMoney, outsourcing the cryptographic heavy lifting means it can focus on distribution and user experience — arguably its real strength — rather than building institutional-grade digital asset infrastructure from scratch.

Apinand Dabpetch, Managing Director of Ascend Bit and Group Head of Wallet & Growth at TrueMoney, framed the deal around trust and compliance rather than technology for its own sake, arguing that security and regulatory alignment are what let TrueMoney extend digital asset access without cutting corners. That emphasis on compliance is not incidental; it is the entire basis on which the Bank of Thailand and the Thai SEC have allowed this experiment to proceed at all.

A crowded, cautious field

TrueMoney does not lack company in Southeast Asia’s e-wallet arena. It holds a dominant share of Thailand’s wallet traffic, but competes regionally with the likes of GrabPay, ShopeePay, GCash in the Philippines, and GoPay and OVO in Indonesia, none of which have moved as visibly into stablecoin-adjacent tokens for retail users. That gives TrueMoney a plausible first-mover edge in “crypto-inside” payments, though it also means the company is testing unproven consumer demand largely alone.

Fireblocks, meanwhile, operates in an increasingly contested wallet-infrastructure market that includes BitGo, Anchorage Digital, Copper and Ripple’s custody arm, most of which focus on institutional custody rather than consumer-facing embedded wallets of this kind. That positioning — infrastructure for businesses building products for ordinary users, rather than a custodian holding assets on institutions’ behalf — is where Fireblocks is trying to differentiate itself, and this THBT deal is a reasonably concrete example of what that looks like in practice.

The real test is adoption, not architecture

THBT Phase 2 opened for applications through 31 December 2026, with room for up to 20,000 Thai and international participants, a modest pilot scale that suggests both companies are still gathering data rather than chasing headline user numbers. Incentives are geared toward getting people to try the swap function at least once: 30 THBT for a first transaction of that size or more, and up to 50 per cent off digital coupons paid for in THBT.

Sign-up bonuses are a well-worn tactic for bootstrapping usage of anything new, crypto or otherwise, and they say little about whether users will stick around once the discounts end. The more interesting question is whether “invisible” blockchain infrastructure can actually change behaviour in a market where cash and QR codes already work well enough for most people.

TrueMoney and Fireblocks are betting that convenience, not ideology, is what finally gets ordinary users transacting on-chain. Southeast Asia’s payments history suggests that bet is not unreasonable, but it has also broken plenty of well-funded ambitions before.

The post TrueMoney and Fireblocks want Thai users on blockchain rails without them noticing appeared first on e27.

Amilo has completed its fourth acquisition in four years, folding Vietnam-based cross-border specialist SG Link into its network as it chases a bigger prize: becoming the operating layer for Southeast Asian merchants selling overseas.

SG Link, now rebranded ShipX, connects sellers to more than 220 destinations and pools shipment volumes so smaller exporters can access freight rates usually reserved for bigger players, a real gap in a region where a merchant can list on Amazon or Shopify in minutes but still lose days to customs paperwork, tariff swings and vanishing parcels.

The deal is notable less for its size than for what it says about Amilo’s playbook: buy operators with a licence, a trade lane or a specialist capability, then migrate them onto one shared technology stack rather than leaving them to run separately. That repeatable model is now the company’s real bet, according to CEO Arun Mambully, who says AI is layered on top of that standardised base to sharpen routing, customs checks and customer support.

Amilo faces bigger rivals in Ninja Van, J&T Express and global players like DHL, but is wagering that owning the full stack, from warehousing to cross-border shipping, beats renting pieces of it.

REGIONAL

MoneyHero’s Q2 revenue slides 13% despite rising cash rewards: The Nasdaq-listed fintech aggregator’s second-quarter revenue fell to US$15.8M as cash incentives to users jumped 77% to US$5.1M, while its net loss for the first half widened 256% to US$7.95M.

Tesla incorporates Vietnam unit as VinFast dominates EV sales: Tesla Motors Vietnam has been registered in Ho Chi Minh City with US$3M in charter capital, a filing that signals US ambitions in a market where VinFast already holds 42% of car sales.

VinFast founder hands CEO roles to his two sons: Pham Nhat Vuong’s eldest son Quan Anh becomes VinFast Global CEO, while younger son Minh Hoang takes over ride-hailing arm GSM, as Vingroup hands control to a younger generation.

TrueMoney and Fireblocks bring blockchain payments to Thai users: Thailand’s leading e-wallet is partnering with Fireblocks to expand its baht-pegged THBT token under a central bank sandbox, letting up to 20,000 users swap and spend crypto without touching a seed phrase.

Google Cloud opens Singapore hub to build AI products globally: The new Singapore Engineering Center links AI research with product development, working with Grab and DBS on real-time multilingual models and agentic financial workflows for global deployment.

GXBank and IFC unlock US$110M in Malaysian MSME lending: Malaysia’s digital bank will extend credit to underserved micro-entrepreneurs after the World Bank’s IFC agreed to absorb early default risk on up to US$110M in loans.

Singapore takes 92% of SEA’s US$1.1B robotics funding: Southeast Asia’s robotics sector has raised US$1.1B across 51 companies since 2021, with Sharpa’s US$670M Series D alone driving a record US$696M haul in 2026 so far.

OpenAI names first APAC sales chief amid Singapore expansion: Former Elastic and Snowflake executive Sanjay Deshmukh will lead OpenAI’s commercial push in Asia Pacific as the company builds out a Singapore lab and eyes a five-floor office lease.

AI boom cushions Southeast Asia against tariff and weather risks: Moody’s Analytics says AI-driven exports and data-centre investment are propping up ASEAN growth at 4.8% this year even as tariffs, inflation and El Niño threaten the outlook.

Singaporean founders’ Lightsage raises US$4M for AI agent analytics: The San Francisco-based startup, founded by Jun Liang Lee and Sean Er, wants to help software companies understand why coding agents recommend rival products over theirs.

Philippine EV sales to grow 11% even as car market shrinks: BMI forecasts electric vehicle sales climbing to 32,776 units in 2026 as fuel costs and cheaper Chinese brands offset an 8.7% slide in overall vehicle sales.

FEATURES AND INTERVIEWS

Why Beyond Border thinks visas are now a founder’s job: Former Airbnb China COO Kum Hong Siew joins the Singapore-founded immigration platform as it expands into Latin America, with CEO Fred Ng debunking the ‘Einstein visa’ myth around O-1s.

The 90-second Japanese pitch that opens doors in Tokyo: A new guide from Blackbox JP argues that a short, imperfect self-introduction in Japanese shortens the ‘psychological distance’ foreign founders face more than fluency does.

INTERNATIONAL

Nvidia’s Huang tells Trump ‘we’re not going to let’ AI slow: Jensen Huang put President Trump on speakerphone at the All-In Summit after the pair dismissed Dario Amodei’s call to pace AI development, with Trump calling slowdown fears ‘a hoax’.

China calls AI-slowdown warnings ‘fear-mongering’: Beijing’s foreign ministry pushed back on Dario Amodei’s call to pace AI development, as Trump separately mocked the Anthropic CEO for ‘pretending to be a perfect little angel’.

Obama urges Democrats to make AI a ‘central agenda’: The former president told Hakeem Jeffries Democrats need “a very clear plan” on AI’s economic and safety risks once they regain the House, warning the technology is moving fast.

OpenAI buys smartphone camera startup Glass Imaging for US$300M: The Los Altos-based company, founded by ex-Apple engineers behind Portrait Mode, uses neural networks to improve smartphone photos — fuelling speculation about OpenAI’s own hardware ambitions.

Sam Altman rules out an OpenAI IPO before 2027: Altman said going public in 2026 would be ‘ill-advised’ given ongoing safety debates, even as OpenAI has filed confidentially and hired bankers for a future listing.

Larry Ellison cancels planned US$7.5B sale of Oracle stock: Oracle’s co-founder scrapped a filing to sell 50 million shares as the stock trades down 22% this year on heavy data-centre spending; the company gave no reason.

Roblox lets creators build games with AI and sell them off-platform: New tools unveiled at Roblox’s developer conference let creators publish AI-generated games as standalone apps and cash out via a new wallet, as the feature expands to Singapore.

Amazon Prime Video adds short-form news clips to chase TikTok: The streamer is rolling out on-demand local and national news clips to its News hub, joining Netflix, HBO Max and Disney+ in courting Gen Z viewers.

CYBERSECURITY

Revolut discloses customer data breach via fake government emails: Fraudsters impersonated a government agency’s email domain to extract customer IDs, passports and account statements from the British fintech, which says a ‘limited’ number of users were affected.

Trezor customers hit by phishing after email provider hack: A breach at marketing platform Brevo let hackers send 347,000 phishing emails to Trezor wallet owners, the second such incident in weeks.

SEMICONDUCTOR

Dutch chip-security firm Fortaegis raises US$50M Series A: Serendipity Capital led the oversubscribed round for Fortaegis, whose silicon-embedded encryption keys claim 200-times-faster connection speeds, as it scales production across the US, Europe, Singapore and Japan.

OpenAI deepens Samsung tie-up on next-generation chips: The expanded partnership points to tighter supply-chain coordination between frontier AI labs and Korean chipmakers as compute demand accelerates.

AI

Anthropic’s Amodei calls for AI labs to ‘pace the frontier’: Dario Amodei is committing Anthropic to embedded third-party safety evaluators and urging rivals to coordinate common standards, with Altman and Musk both voicing support.

Microsoft’s new AI code bars models from hacking or deception: The document sets ‘absolute constraints’ against cyberattacks, deepfakes and nuclear-weapons assistance, forbidding models from using deceptive methods to evade human oversight.

Fields Medallists accuse AI labs of threatening mathematics research: Twenty-five Fields Medal winners signed an open letter warning that AI labs racing to solve famous problems risk attribution disputes and discourage open research sharing.

Anthropic’s AI agent spent hundreds of pages fighting a CAPTCHA: A safety report transcript shows Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model spending most of a 1,022-page chain-of-thought log trying to bypass hCaptcha checks while planting malware on PyPI.

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

The CLARITY Act vote could swing crypto to US$2.73T or US$2.6T: Anndy Lian argues a Senate cloture vote on crypto regulation is driving Bitcoin’s resilience even as a 5% Treasury yield and looming Fed hike batter tech stocks.

The Fed, not Bitcoin fundamentals, is driving crypto’s next move: Anndy Lian writes that Bitcoin and Ethereum are trading as risk assets ahead of the Fed’s rate decision, with US$76,000 and US$2,450 as key support levels.

AI doesn’t need crypto — but AI agents might: Astrid Dang argues blockchain may finally find product-market fit with machines rather than humans, as AI agents need wallets and stablecoins to pay for APIs autonomously.

Why most AI pilots succeed and then quietly fail at scale: Mahesh Tanwani’s six-move ‘Capability Cycle’ argues that Klarna’s stumble and recovery show scaling AI requires diagnosing failure and redesigning workflows, not just expanding a pilot.

Everyone has adopted AI, but few firms are ready for it: Jayce Tham writes that only 20% of Southeast Asian firmshave meaningfully scaled generative AI, with low employee trust undercutting Singapore’s high adoption numbers.

The SaaS apocalypse will be selective, not total: Muthhukumar Malaiiyyappan argues AI won’t turn companies into software builders but will let incumbents absorb features faster, leaving thin AI wrappers most exposed.

India’s IPO boom is changing where startups choose to list: Shashwat Tewary writes that domestic investors now fund roughly three-quarters of Indian IPOs, making a domestic listing a credible choice for founders once bound for New York.

Why middle powers like Britain must learn to prioritise: Shawn Balakrishnan argues that Singapore’s disciplined foreign policy offers a model for Western powers now facing diminished diplomatic capacity.

GPT-6 Astra moves faster — but marketing data hasn’t caught up: Aleks Farseev warns that OpenAI’s new computer-using agent finishes tasks in half the time of its predecessor, but risks automating bad decisions on fragmented data.

What Southeast Asian edutech can learn from AI’s limits: Daniel Brooks argues that AI education tools need to fit local languages and curricula, citing a World Bank review showing mixed edutech results in the region.

Using AI to win has nothing to do with productivity: Nabeel Mungaye argues that shared AI productivity gains cancel each other out — the ‘Red Queen Effect’ — and real advantage comes from extending a firm’s existing moat.

The missing link in your customer’s mobile app journey: Leo Vu argues that deep linking, not more ad spend, is the fix for fragmented mobile purchase journeys, pointing to Vietnamese brokerage MB Securities.

The post Ecosystem Roundup: Amilo’s fourth buyout in four years bets on cross-border shipping appeared first on e27.

Grab Holdings is done dabbling in consumer lending. The Nasdaq-listed superapp operator has announced that it will pay US$1.49 billion in cash for a controlling 60 per cent stake in Atome Financial, the buy now, pay later (BNPL) and digital lending arm of Advance Intelligence Group (AIGL).

It is, by some distance, the biggest fintech acquisition Southeast Asia has seen this year, and a clear signal that Grab wants to stop renting financial infrastructure and start owning it.

Also Read: Atome’s US$88M AUB facility tests the next phase of Philippine BNPL

Atome Financial brings two businesses into the fold: Atome, the BNPL brand familiar to anyone who has checked out on Shopee, Tokopedia or Lazada; and Kredit Pintar, an OJK-regulated digital lender in Indonesia. Together they operate across Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, and claim 25 million cumulative transacted users and a US$1 billion gross loan portfolio.

Why Grab wants a lender, not just a wallet

Grab already runs payments, digital banks, partner lending and insurance under its financial services segment, but it has largely underwritten credit using its own ride-hailing and delivery data, a useful but narrow lens. Atome Financial gives it a second, complementary data set built on retail spending and instalment repayment behaviour, plus a merchant network north of 30,000 brands to cross-sell into.

Alex Hungate, Grab’s President and COO, framed the deal as an extension of what the company already does for its driver-partners. In 2025, the company says 68 per cent of driver-partner borrowers accessed formal credit for the first time through Grab, with half saying they did so specifically to avoid predatory lenders, a statistic that also doubles as Grab’s answer to critics who accuse gig platforms of trapping workers in debt cycles rather than freeing them from informal ones.

For Jefferson Chen, Chairman and CEO of AIGL and CEO of Atome Financial, the sale caps eight years of building what he called a platform meant to serve “everyone” left out of conventional banking. The company has raised over US$500 million historically and was last valued near US$2 billion, a valuation this deal’s structure suggests Grab is willing to exceed only if Atome Financial keeps performing.

The mechanics: pay now, pay more later — maybe

The transaction is split into two phases, and the second is where the real financial engineering sits. Phase 1 closes the 60 per cent stake for US$1.49 billion, of which US$260 million is earmarked as primary growth capital for the business itself rather than a payout to sellers. Grab expects this to complete by Q3 2027, pending regulatory sign-off across five markets, not a trivial hurdle given how differently Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines each regulate consumer lending.

Phase 2 kicks in roughly two years after that, when Grab has agreed to buy the remaining 40 per cent, but not at a fixed price. Instead, the payout is pegged to a formula: 13x annualised adjusted EBITDA weighted at 75 per cent, plus 2.5x annualised revenue weighted at 25 per cent, both measured over the six months before Phase 2 closes. The resulting valuation is collared between a floor of US$2 billion and a cap of US$4.5 billion, with at least half settled in cash.

In plain terms: Grab has protected its downside if Atome Financial underdelivers, while capping how much it pays if the business outperforms. It is a structure that reads less like conviction and more like hedged conviction; Grab wants in, but on terms that punish disappointment.

The inclusion pitch, and its limits

More than 70 per cent of adults in Southeast Asia remain unbanked or underbanked, and Grab’s pitch leans hard on closing that financial inclusion gap. Grab CFO Peter Oey said the deal is funded entirely from existing cash, will not touch the company’s ongoing share buyback, and should be accretive to Group Adjusted EBITDA once it closes. Grab has also revised its 2028 targets upward on the back of the acquisition: US$500 million in Adjusted EBITDA from the combined lending book (which it expects to exceed US$6 billion), and Group-wide targets of US$1.7 billion in Adjusted EBITDA with more than 30 per cent revenue CAGR from 2025 to 2028.

Those are punchy numbers for a company that has spent years explaining to investors why its financial services arm mattered before it had proven itself. Whether combining two AI-underwriting engines actually produces better credit decisions, rather than simply more exposure, is the question regulators, and eventually Grab’s own risk teams, will have to answer as the loan book scales past US$6 billion.

A crowded lending market just consolidated

The deal also reshapes competitive lines in Southeast Asia’s BNPL and digital lending market, which was already getting crowded before this. Atome has spent years jostling with Indonesia’s Kredivo and Akulaku, both of which have their own bank licences (Bank Neo Commerce and Bank Jago-style partnerships) and aggressive merchant tie-ups. Sea Group’s SeaMoney and GoTo’s GoPayLater have also been pushing BNPL deeper into Shopee and Gojek’s respective ecosystems, effectively daring standalone players like Atome to find a bigger distribution partner or get squeezed. Grab, notably, is GoTo‘s biggest regional rival in ride-hailing and deliveries — so folding a scaled lender into its financial services arm is as much a shot at GoTo’s fintech ambitions as it is a fintech deal in its own right.

Also Read: Indonesia’s minister confirms Grab-GoTo merger is on the table

For founders and operators watching from the sidelines, the takeaway is less about the headline number and more about what it signals: super-apps in this region have decided that owning proprietary credit infrastructure, rather than partnering for it, is where the next phase of the financial services land grab will be won.

The post Grab’s US$1.49B Atome deal signals a deeper race for SEA’s credit economy appeared first on e27.

For many technology startups, the hardest part is not invention. It is everything that comes after.

A breakthrough in a university lab, a working prototype, or even an early customer pilot may prove that a product can exist. It does not prove that a company can scale. To get there, founders need to pay customers, patient capital, production partners, regulatory support, credible governance, and eventually, if the business is strong enough, access to public markets.

That difficult stretch between research and commercial scale is where many promising startups stumble. Hong Kong is now positioning itself as one of Asia’s key bridges across that gap, using a mix of public capital, private investment, industry partnerships and links to the Greater Bay Area’s manufacturing base.

Also Read: How HKSTP’s quarter-century journey offers insights for Asia’s innovation ecosystems

The effort matters beyond Hong Kong. Across Southeast Asia, governments and investors are also asking how to turn research, engineering talent and early-stage startups into companies that can compete regionally or globally. The lesson from Hong Kong is that building an innovation hub is no longer just about funding more startups. It is about connecting the entire commercialisation chain.

The funding gap after product-market promise

The most vulnerable period for many deeptech companies often comes after science has been proven, but before business is mature enough for mainstream capital.

A biotech startup may need years of clinical development before revenue arrives. A robotics company may require costly manufacturing and field testing. A semiconductor company may need specialist equipment, design talent and supply-chain partners long before it can show predictable cash flow.

At this stage, conventional bank lending is often unavailable, while later-stage institutional investors may still consider the risks too high. If capital dries up, companies can lose momentum just when they need to spend more on product development, hiring, certification, production or market entry.

Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation, better known as HKSTP, is narrowing that financing gap. Demonstrating forward-thinking vision, its Venture Fund was established in 2015, and now manages HK$1 billion (~US$128 million) and covers 117 technology companies. According to figures supplied by HKSTP, every HK$1 invested through the fund has on average attracted about HK$13 in private-market investment.

HKSTP also has a separate HK$500 million (~US$64 million) public-private fund under its Co-Acceleration programme. This combines capital with industry resources, investment expertise and market access for deep-tech companies.

That leverage effect is important. Public funding alone rarely builds large companies. But when it helps reduce early risk, pull in private investors and connect startups with customers, it can become a catalyst rather than a subsidy.

From isolated winners to a repeatable pipeline

Hong Kong already has examples of companies moving from its innovation ecosystem to the public markets. HKSTP says 23 companies from its ecosystem had gone public by the beginning of this year, spanning artificial intelligence, life sciences, robotics and semiconductors.

One closely watched case is Insilico Medicine, the AI drug-discovery company that set up an R&D centre at Science Park in 2019 and listed in Hong Kong at the end of last year. Its first AI-designed drug candidate has advanced to Phase III clinical trials, while its IPO raised HK$2.277 billion, or about US$292 million, making it the city’s largest biotech IPO of the year.

Also Read: Why Hong Kong’s metro just became every marketer’s dream

But one listing, or even a handful of them, does not make an ecosystem.
The harder question is whether those outcomes can be repeated. That depends on whether young companies can consistently move from research to pilot projects, from pilots to commercial contracts, from small-scale production to volume manufacturing, and from private capital to public-market readiness.

This is particularly relevant for Southeast Asia, where many ecosystems have become more sophisticated over the past decade but still face commercialisation bottlenecks. The region has produced major consumer internet, fintech and logistics companies, yet deep-tech sectors such as robotics, biotech, advanced manufacturing and semiconductors need a different kind of support structure. They require patient capital, technical infrastructure, enterprise customers and links to industrial supply chains.

Hong Kong’s pitch is that it can bring some of these pieces together.

Why the Greater Bay Area matters

Hong Kong’s strength is not only its capital market. It also has research universities, professional services, intellectual-property protection and access to international investors. But its broader commercialisation advantage lies in its connection to the Greater Bay Area.

The GBA links Hong Kong with cities including Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Dongguan and others in southern China. For hardware, robotics, biotech tools and semiconductor-related startups, that proximity can be significant. Companies can tap engineering expertise, suppliers, prototyping facilities and manufacturing capacity across the region while using Hong Kong for finance, legal structuring and global market access.

In practice, this means a startup may conduct R&D in Hong Kong, source components from Dongguan, work with manufacturing partners in Shenzhen, raise capital from international investors, and eventually sell into Asia, Europe or North America.

That model reflects how modern commercialisation actually works. Innovation no longer sits neatly inside one city. Research, funding, product development, production and customers are often spread across multiple markets.

For Southeast Asian founders, the parallel is clear. A Singapore-based medtech company may test products in Vietnam, manufacture in Malaysia, raise capital from regional funds and sell to hospitals across Indonesia or Thailand. The challenge is not simply to invent, but to coordinate a regional pathway from invention to adoption.

Taking technology to customers

This is the context for HKSTP’s Co-Development & Investment Conference, or CDIC, a six-day programme spanning Hong Kong, Dongguan and Hangzhou.

The programme brings together founders, investors and industry representatives in what HKSTP describes as a “Tri-Party Ecosystem”. The aim is to combine capital with commercial matching, giving technology companies access to possible applications and financing while helping investors identify companies with growth potential.

The inclusion of industry use cases is crucial. Startups do not scale because investors like a pitch deck. They scale because customers find a product useful enough to buy, integrate and keep using.

That distinction matters more as technology becomes easier to build. AI tools, cloud infrastructure and open-source software have lowered the barrier to developing new products. But they have not lowered the difficulty of selling into regulated industries, integrating with enterprise systems or proving return on investment to customers.

Technical validation answers the question: does it work? Commercial validation asks a tougher one: will anyone pay for it at scale?

Each CDIC location appears to serve a different role. Hong Kong contributes capital, financial infrastructure and international connectivity. Dongguan offers access to manufacturing and supply chains. Hangzhou adds another major technology and R&D cluster.

Also Read: Hong Kong’s pitch to SEA: “We want to be your super partner”

Together, they point to a more pragmatic model of ecosystem building: bring startups closer not only to investors, but also to factories, customers and sector experts.

IPO as a test, not the destination

Hong Kong’s public markets are another part of this pathway. The city’s listing regimes under Chapters 18A and 18C have created routes for biotech and specialist technology companies that may not yet meet conventional profit or revenue requirements.

That matters because deep-tech companies often require long development cycles before they resemble traditional listed businesses. Biotech firms, for instance, may need years of clinical trials. Advanced hardware companies may have high upfront capital expenditure before revenue scales.

A public listing can give such companies access to growth capital and allow early investors to return money to their own backers. Those returns can then be recycled into the next generation of startups.

Still, an IPO should not be mistaken for the end goal. The real test is whether companies can build durable businesses after listing, withstand public-market scrutiny and keep investing in innovation.

For Hong Kong, the commercialisation push is therefore about more than producing the next unicorn or IPO candidate. It is about proving that research, capital, manufacturing and market access can be joined into a repeatable system.

For Southeast Asia, watching that experiment will be useful. The region has no shortage of entrepreneurial energy. Its next challenge is building stronger bridges between invention and industry.

The final mile remains the hardest part of the journey. Hong Kong is betting that ecosystems which can make that stretch less punishing will have the edge in the next phase of Asia’s tech economy, and HKSTP is leading the charge locally to make that happen.s

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