Day: October 14, 2026

When Singapore’s offices emptied out in 2020, flexible work was sold as the cure for an overworked city. Employees would get their commutes back, set their own hours and finally see their families at dinner.

Six years on, the cure appears to have come with side effects. According to the Jobstreet by SEEK Singapore Workplace Culture Study 2026, 52 per cent of employees say workplace stress has increased since 2019. Only 27 per cent say they have gained more flexibility and work-life balance.

Also Read: Building burnout-resistant teams

Employers broadly agree. Some 48 per cent of them say stress has risen, while 30 per cent think the balance has improved. Nearly half of both groups (46 per cent of employees and 45 per cent of employers) say job scopes have become more demanding.

In short, Singaporeans gained control over where they work, not over how much they work.

The flexibility paradox

The study’s central finding is a contradiction that many remote workers will recognise. Flexible arrangements changed the location and timing of work, but not its volume or complexity. Once the office walls disappeared, so did many of the natural boundaries that used to end the working day.

The commute that once marked the start and finish of work is gone. So is the shared understanding that leaving the building means being off duty. What replaced them, for many, is a state of constant, low-grade availability: the laptop on the dining table, the Slack ping at 9.30 pm, the “quick call” during school pickup.

This happened even as Singapore formalised flexible work. The government’s Tripartite Guidelines on Flexible Work Arrangement Requests, which took effect in December 2024, require employers to properly consider workers’ requests for flexible arrangements. The guidelines govern access to flexibility. They say nothing about how much work fills those flexible hours.

The finding fits a wider pattern e27 has tracked: burnout is no longer just a personal problem but an operations problem.

Same storm, different worries

The study suggests both sides see the same forces reshaping work, but feel them in very different places.

AI and automation are cited as a primary driver of workplace change by 56 per cent of employees and 53 per cent of employers. Economic uncertainty, inflation and the cost of living are named by 53 per cent of employees and 46 per cent of employers.

Also Read: The Philippines uses AI as a burnout shield; Singapore uses it for deep work

From there, the concerns split along predictable lines. For employees, the pressure is personal. Sixty per cent cite salary growth and the cost of living as their main worry, 48 per cent are focused on job security, 37 per cent struggle to protect work-life balance, and 33 per cent feel squeezed by competition for roles. It is the anxiety e27 contributors have described as global uncertainty turning into workplace anxiety.

For employers, the pressure shows up on the balance sheet and the org chart. Fifty-two per cent are preoccupied with how AI and automation will change workflows and team structures. Forty-nine per cent are wrestling with salary expectations in an inflationary environment, and 24 per cent cite restructuring and running leaner teams.

That last figure is the hinge of the whole story. When nearly a quarter of employers are running leaner teams, the work does not vanish with the departed headcount. It gets spread across whoever is left. That would explain why job scopes have grown, and why stress has risen alongside flexibility. Working from anywhere has become a convenient way to absorb the extra workload.

It is a local version of what e27 has called Big Tech’s efficiency paradox of record profits and record layoffs. There is also a regional warning attached: the AI layoff trap points straight at Southeast Asia.

Where the money is going, and where it isn’t

The most revealing data in the study concerns employers’ spending plans. The money is overwhelmingly flowing into technology and skills: 34 per cent of employers plan to invest in AI and digital skills, 25 per cent in new workplace technology tools, and 23 per cent in upskilling and reskilling.

The measures most likely to relieve the pressure employees describe are far lower on the list. Only 14 per cent plan wellbeing and mental health initiatives, 13 per cent plan workload management improvements, and just 12 per cent plan to hire more people to ease the workload.

Put bluntly, companies are trying to solve a capacity problem with software. Training a stretched employee to use an AI assistant may make them faster. It does not give them fewer things to do. Without changes to workload or headcount, technology investment risks simply raising the speed at which already exhausted people are expected to work.

That may be a rational short-term bet for employers watching costs. But the bill tends to arrive later, in the form of burnout, declining work quality and the quiet departure of the high performers who have the most options elsewhere.

Fixing the design, not the location

The study’s recommendations are less about where people work than about how the work is designed. They are practical rather than revolutionary.

• First, companies should run regular workload and priority audits that compare targets against actual headcount, so that scope creep is caught before it becomes chronic stress.
• Second, when business goals change, managers should state explicitly what will be paused or dropped, rather than stacking new priorities on top of old ones.
• Third, middle managers need proper training to run distributed teams and protect boundaries. Other research has found that the manager has an outsized effect on wellbeing at work. Fourth, performance should be judged on outcomes rather than responsiveness or how visibly “online” someone appears. That matters in a city where two in five employees already feel watched at work.

None of this is new to HR professionals. The hard part is that each step costs management time and, in the case of hiring, real money, which is exactly what most employers are not budgeting for.

A caveat on the numbers

The figures presented here do not come with sample sizes, survey dates or a methodology, so they are best read as directional rather than definitive. The comparisons with 2019 are also based on what respondents remember, not on data tracked over time.

Also Read: SEA’s CEOs want innovation, but employees feel stuck in execution mode

Still, the overall shape is hard to dismiss when both employees and employers report it. Neighbouring markets have treated flexibility as a competitive advantage; in the Philippines, flexible work is no longer a perk but the price of talent. Singapore’s experience suggests flexibility alone is not enough. Unless companies also limit how much work it carries, the freedom to work from anywhere can turn into the obligation to work from everywhere.

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Southeast Asian companies are not short of money for AI. Most of them simply can’t get their projects past their own IT and security teams.

That is the uncomfortable picture painted by the Southeast Asia findings of Adobe’s 2026 State of AI Readiness Report, released today. The study surveyed 461 senior executives in the region and found that 73 per cent of companies are increasing their AI investment year-on-year. Yet 48 per cent are still working on their first AI use case, or have given up after a failed attempt.

Also Read: Everyone has adopted AI. Almost nobody is ready for it

In other words, budgets are going up while results are standing still.

About 57 per cent of organisations are stuck in what the report calls the “Frozen Middle”. They are piloting or deploying AI without the coordination needed to scale it. For agentic AI, meaning systems that can carry out multi-step tasks on their own rather than just answer prompts, the figure is 40 per cent. Some 79 per cent of the region’s companies sit at an early stage of AI readiness, the highest share anywhere in Asia Pacific.

The findings echo a theme that keeps resurfacing on these pages: Southeast Asia doesn’t have an AI adoption problem, it has a scaling problem.

Where the good ideas go to die

The most striking number in the report is the attrition rate. Only 15 of every 100 AI ideas make it into production.

The biggest losses do not happen in the lab or the boardroom. About 36 per cent of AI proposals fail to get past IT evaluation. A further 18 per cent are rejected at security review, and that rejection rate nearly doubles in highly regulated industries such as banking and healthcare.

Read one way, that is a story about bureaucracy strangling innovation. Read another, it is a story about gatekeepers doing their jobs. Many AI proposals arrive at IT with no clear data plan, no security model and no owner. e27 has previously reported on the hidden risk of unchecked agent privileges, and a security team that waves every agentic pilot through would be failing at its own job.

The more useful question is why so many proposals reach IT in a state that deserves rejection. The report’s answer is that nobody owns them.

The ownership vacuum

Only 12 per cent of Southeast Asian companies have an AI owner with budget authority, meaning someone who can both make decisions and pay for them. Among the companies Adobe classifies as Leaders, that figure is 89 per cent.

Measurement is just as thin. Only 8 per cent of companies measure AI return on investment comprehensively, and most track usage (how many people logged in) rather than quality (whether the output was any good). Meanwhile, 81 per cent of businesses say their AI skills shortfall stayed the same or got worse over the past year. That is consistent with what we have  seen in Malaysia’s AI skills gap and elsewhere in the region.

Also Read: Scaling beyond AI pilots: Six-move Capability Cycle

“Organisations that establish clear ownership, shared measures of success and stronger collaboration between business and IT will be best placed to move beyond isolated pilots and achieve sustainable impact,” said Jeremy Willmott, Senior Director, Digital Strategy Group Asia Pacific at Adobe.

It is a sensible prescription, if not a new one. Many consultants have offered similar advice, and e27 contributors have argued that Singapore’s AI adoption problem is not worker resistance but weak execution.

What the Leaders do differently

The Leaders are a very small club: 6.3 per cent of Southeast Asian respondents, or just 27 organisations. They have scaled AI across multiple workflows and built an operating model to sustain it. According to Adobe, they convert pilots to production at nearly four times the rate of other companies.

They also outscore the regional average by 67 per cent on ownership and accountability, and by 59 per cent on embedding AI into everyday processes. They keep their “destructive failure” rate, failures that cause real damage rather than lessons, below 1 per cent. By contrast, more than a third of companies repeat the same AI mistakes. And 41 per cent of Leaders say their single most effective move was funding the employees who were already making AI work.

That last finding is perhaps the most practical in the report. The fastest route to scale often runs through the staff member who quietly built a working tool in a spreadsheet, not through the vendor’s pitch deck. It fits other regional research showing that workers are sprinting ahead of their bosses in AI adoption.

Read the fine print

Before boards rewrite their AI strategies around these numbers, a few caveats are worth noting.

First, the sample. The research was conducted by Incisiv on Adobe’s behalf. It covered only organisations with at least US$100 million in annual revenue, 60 per cent of which earn more than US$1 billion. Startups and the SMEs that make up most of Southeast Asia’s economy are not in the picture.

Second, the Leaders’ statistics rest on just 27 companies in the region. When the report says 89 per cent of Leaders have a budget-holding AI owner, that comes to roughly 24 companies. That is enough to suggest a pattern, but not enough to prove it.

Third, the headline conclusion is partly built into the method. The report says organisational readiness, not technology or spend, is the strongest predictor of whether AI scales. However, Leaders were defined in the first place by combining deployment speed with “operating model maturity”. Finding that Leaders have mature operating models is therefore close to circular. The more interesting finding is the negative one: globally, company size, industry and reported AI spend did not predict Leader status.

Finally, Adobe sells AI tools to enterprises. It has an obvious interest in persuading companies that the obstacle to AI value is organisational, not technological. The company’s own earlier research found GenAI adoption rising in Asia while ROI remained elusive. This year’s report reads like the sequel.

Also Read: Why most enterprise AI in APAC is still stuck in the proof-of-concept room

None of that makes the diagnosis wrong. The pattern of rising spend, stalled pilots and nobody in charge matches what founders selling into Southeast Asian enterprises describe privately. Telcos and universities are now setting up joint efforts, such as Singtel’s RE:AI tie-up with the SIT-NVIDIA centre, specifically to close the deployment gap.

For B2B AI startups, the lesson is blunt. The buyer who signs the pilot is often not the person who can take it to production. Until someone with a budget owns the outcome, the region’s AI spending will keep rising faster than its returns.

The post Adobe study finds 57 per cent of SEA firms stuck in AI’s “Frozen Middle” appeared first on e27.

India’s MakeO has raised US$10 million in a round led by Singularity AMC, with unnamed funds and family offices also participating, eight months after the Mumbai-headquartered dental aligner company agreed to absorb Singapore’s Zenyum.

The cheque, disclosed in a statement on October 13, is modest by the standards of the clear aligner category’s go-go years. But it lands on a business that now claims something few consumer healthtech companies in the region can: more than SGD70 million (US$54.7 million) in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and sustained profitability on an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) basis.

Also Read: The most-funded healthtech startups in Southeast Asia: A decade in review

The money has three jobs. It will fund Zenyum’s dentist network expansion across Southeast and North Asia, strengthen the group’s technology, and expand manufacturing capacity. Zenyum also said it continues to evaluate acquisitions across India and other parts of Asia, a signal that the shopping basket is not yet full.

The combined group says it works with roughly 1,100 partner dentists across India, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan.

The deal behind the round

That dentist figure is, for now, largely the arithmetic of a merger rather than fresh growth. When the two firms announced their tie-up, Toothsi had about 500 partner doctors and more than 50 dental centres in India, while Zenyum had 600 doctor partners.

MakeO agreed to acquire Zenyum in February. Zenyum’s own framing at the time was more diplomatic, describing it as a “merger of equals” because both businesses had similar top lines and complementary geographies. Financial terms were never disclosed, and Zenyum CEO Julian Artopé declined to comment on valuation or the post-merger shareholding split.

The structure tells its own story. MakeO co-founder Arpi Mehta remains group CEO and Artopé continues to run Zenyum, with Mumbai as the group headquarters and Singapore retaining control of Southeast and North Asia operations. Crucially, Toothsi’s vertically integrated, US FDA-certified aligner platform now designs, manufactures and exports aligners for the whole business across Asia. Put simply: India is the factory, Singapore is the shopfront.

For Zenyum, it marks a notable turn. Founded in 2018 by Artopé and Frederik Krass, the startup raised a US$13.6 million Series A in 2019 and followed it with a US$40 million Series B led by L Catterton in 2021, backed by Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV), RTP Global, Partech and others. Back then, Artopé was on a mission to help Asia smile more and Zenyum reported a fourfold revenue jump in 2020.

Five years later, a Series B-stage Singapore brand folding into an Indian peer is another data point for a regional exit market that increasingly favours trade sales over IPOs.

Also Read: ADA acquires India’s Algonomy in push beyond customer data into AI-led action

MakeO, for its part, has been on the acquisition trail. The Zenyum deal was its second acquisition in six months, and the company had earlier merged its Toothsi and Skinnsi brands under the MakeO umbrella in 2022. It raised a US$16 million bridge round in 2024 backed by Ashish Kacholia and 360 One Asset.

Reading the fine print

The headline numbers deserve a closer look. ARR is a natural metric for software subscriptions, but aligner treatment is largely a one-off purchase, topped up with consumables such as toothbrushes and retainers. The group did not explain how it calculates the figure, whether it is an annualised run rate, or how much comes from repeat customers.

The profitability claim also comes with an asterisk. EBITDA strips out depreciation and amortisation, which are precisely the costs that matter for a company expanding manufacturing capacity and carrying acquisition-related intangibles on its books. Being EBITDA-positive is a real achievement in a sector that has burned cash freely, as Carsome’s run of profitable quarters in used cars has shown is possible elsewhere. But it is not the same as net profit.

Then there is the size of the round. At under a fifth of the stated ARR, US$10 million looks like targeted growth capital rather than a war chest, which makes the continued talk of acquisitions intriguing. Either deals will be small, or more capital will follow. The valuation, and the identity of the participating family offices, remain undisclosed.

A crowded mouth

The rival landscape is formidable. Align Technology’s Invisalign remains the global category leader and sells through orthodontists and dentists across Asia. Swiss implant giant Straumann pushes its ClearCorrect brand, while China’s Angelalign has scaled aggressively in its home market and beyond.

The cautionary tale is SmileDirectClub, the US direct-to-consumer pioneer that collapsed into bankruptcy and shut down in late 2023, partly because cutting dentists out of the loop invited regulatory and clinical pushback. Zenyum and Toothsi have both leaned the other way, routing patients through in-person dentist consultations, which is why the partner network figure sits at the centre of this announcement.

The wider funding climate adds pressure. Southeast Asian healthtech endured a funding drought in 2024, and the investors still writing cheques increasingly want businesses built around healthcare workflows rather than flashy apps. Consolidation is picking up too, with Zeya Health acquiring ConnectLah to build booking rails for clinics.

What comes next

The clearest clue lies in what MakeO said in February. It flagged selective M&A and partnerships with local dental chains and clinical practices in markets including India, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Also Read: Vietnam’s healthtech boom has a talent problem nobody is talking about

That would mark a strategic shift. Owning clinics, rather than partnering with them, turns an asset-light network into an asset-heavy one, with more control over patient experience but more capital locked in bricks, chairs and staff. It would also put the group in direct competition with some of the very dentists it relies on for referrals.

For now, MakeO has a profitable (on its own definition) pan-Asian platform, an Indian manufacturing base and fresh capital. Whether investors keep smiling will depend on how much of that S$70 million turns into cash that stays.

The post MakeO secures US$10M to scale Zenyum’s dentist network across Asia appeared first on e27.

Southeast Asian companies are spending more on AI and getting little out of it. Adobe’s 2026 State of AI Readiness Report, which surveyed 461 senior executives in the region, finds 73% raising AI budgets year on year, while 57% remain stuck in AI’s Frozen Middle, piloting without the coordination to scale.

Only 15 of every 100 AI ideas reach production. IT evaluation kills 36% of proposals and security review another 18%, gatekeeping that partly reflects the risk of unchecked agent privileges. The deeper problem is ownership: just 12% of firms have an AI owner with budget authority, against 89% among the 27 Leaders, and only 8% measure ROI comprehensively. The findings reinforce e27’s argument that the region has a scaling problem, not an adoption one.

Leaders’ most effective move was funding employees already making AI work, echoing research on workers sprinting ahead of bosses. Caveats apply: the sample covers only firms with at least US$100M in revenue, the Leader cohort is tiny, and Adobe, an AI vendor, has an interest in blaming organisation over technology. The report reads like a sequel to Adobe’s earlier GenAI ROI findings.

Efforts such as Singtel’s RE:AI tie-up with SIT-NVIDIA aim to close that deployment gap.

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REGIONAL

Malaysia’s Budget 2027 earmarks US$110.4M for startups: National fund of funds Jelawang Capital and KWAP’s Dana Perintis will deploy the money, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim told parliament, though e27’s analysis shows the bigger cheques go elsewhere in the budget.

TCGX closes US$600M Asia biotech fund, opens Hong Kong office: The US healthcare investor’s first Asia-focused vehicle was oversubscribed by international institutional investors and will back drug developers across stages. TCGX is also opening in Shanghai, but has not named LPs, cheque sizes or portfolio companies.

BII commits US$1.6B to SEA climate finance over five years: The UK development financier will put up about half and mobilise the rest privately, largely through British Climate Partners, targeting renewables, transmission, EV infrastructure and water in Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand.

Zenyum parent MakeO raises US$10M to grow dentist network in Asia: Singularity AMC led the round. The group, with 1,100 partner dentists across seven markets, has passed US$54.7M in ARR, is profitable on an EBITDA basis and is weighing more acquisitions in India and Asia.

NEU Battery Materials raises US$7.6M to scale LFP recycling: Shift4Good and SGInnovate co-led the round after NEU commissioned a 1,300-tonne-per-year Singapore factory. Both backed its 2023 seed, and NEU’s emissions claims still lack an independent life-cycle assessment.

Vietnamese-founded Drylab raises US$3M for autonomous AI lab agents: Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India led the seed round, with PatSnap joining. The Singapore-based startup’s agents run entire computational research workflows across 800-plus tools, though it has yet to name customers.

UOB and AWS team up on hybrid cloud and AI banking across ASEAN: The MoU creates a dedicated Singapore cloud environment, AWS’s first hybrid-cloud bank tie-up in ASEAN, designed to meet data residency rules while testing conversational banking and personalised services across UOB’s five markets.

VinFast takes 36% of Vietnam’s car market in first nine months: The Vingroup EV maker’s 177,697 domestic deliveries already exceed its full-year 2025 total, and September marked its 25th straight month on top. Toyota trailed in second place with 53,978 units.

INTERVIEWS AND FEATURES

17 SEA startups that can actually prove their social impact: In a funding winter, founders stretch the social impact label to cover anything with a farmer or a recycling bin in the deck. e27 picks 17 startups taking the harder route of proving it.

Singapore workers won flexibility, then lost their evenings: Jobstreet’s study finds 52% of employees report higher stress since 2019, against 27% citing better balance. Leaner teams spread the workload, yet only 12% plan to hire to ease the pressure.

Vietnamese shoppers ask AI first, then check Google before buying: Ho Chi Minh City-based Q&Me finds 62% of buyers use AI, including generative tools, to research purchases, but Google search remains the final checkpoint before most shoppers commit.

INTERNATIONAL

Moonshot execs seek settlement with Recurrent.ai ahead of HK IPO: In Hong Kong arbitration since 2024, Recurrent.ai accuses the Kimi maker’s CEO and CTO of misleading investors and moving or deleting AI data, seeking 10.5% of Moonshot’s original shares, potentially worth over US$700M. Yang denies wrongdoing.

Firmus pulls US$5B Australian IPO, will turn to private capital: Investors balked at a roughly US$31B valuation, three times its August round, for an operator running 42MW of a 1GW target. Firmus is building AI factories in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, with OpenAI anchoring two Malaysian sites.

IMF tips Vietnam to lead SEA growth at 8.4% as global GDP slows: The fund projects 3.1% world growth in 2026, with Malaysia at 5.2% and Singapore at 5%. SEA gains from the AI cycle mainly through trade and manufacturing, not by building AI infrastructure.

CYBERSECURITY

TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi warns of AI agents’ cybersecurity risks: Speaking at DBS Asia Future Forward in Singapore, Chew said users may grant AI agents broad permissions, including access to credit cards, without grasping the consequences, and urged firms to stop staff sharing trade secrets with public chatbots.

Igloo exports cyber insurance to Turkey in first move beyond APAC: Through Aktif Bank’s Sigortayeri, the Singapore insurtech will sell cover for cyberbullying and fraud to the N Kolay app’s eight million users for about US$43. Mitsubishi Corporation brokered the deal.

Microsoft’s Brad Smith wants breach alerts for rogue AI agents: Calling AI a weapon and a tool that threatens global cybersecurity, Smith argued the UK, not the US or EU, should lead safety rules, and said voluntary pledges only bind responsible companies.

SEMICONDUCTOR

TSMC posts record US$46.7B Q3 revenue on AI chip demand: Sales rose 50% year on year and topped TSMC’s own guidance of US$44.6B to US$45.8B, as well as analyst forecasts. Full earnings, with margins and outlook, land on 15 October.

Sumitomo Bakelite adds chip packaging lines in Singapore and Suzhou: The Japanese firm expects to roughly double underfill material capacity for AI and satellite chips, with Singapore output from early 2029. It also completes its US$190M purchase of Kyocera’s chemical business this month.

FedEx report finds AI boom pushing chipmakers across Asia Pacific: The AI race now hinges on where chips are made, how far they travel and whether supply chains survive the next geopolitical shock, putting logistics resilience on the agenda for SEA manufacturers.

a16z sends infrastructure team to South Korea to court chip firms: Partner Raghu Raghuram will meet Korean AI hardware firms and officials weeks after the US$1.1B Machine Age Fund launch, eyeing semiconductor and robotics partnerships as the country cements its role as AI’s memory backbone.

AI

Anthropic test agent sent false murder tip to Philadelphia police: The city’s spam filter caught the July tip, and Anthropic took over two months to spot it. Police called the delay unacceptable, and Anthropic is now cutting its internal evaluations off from the live internet.

Satya Nadella calls for an ’emergency brake’ on AI models: Microsoft’s CEO wants every meaningful model action logged with tamper-proof evidence and an authorised person able to pause a model mid-task. Firms should assume a model is compromised from the start, he argued.

Singapore SMEs save time with AI, but messy data stalls scale-up: Small businesses cite time savings as AI’s main payoff, but systems that are not ready stop pilots from running more of the business, mirroring the scaling gap larger firms face.

India’s Clueso raises US$10M Series A for AI business video: Dharana Capital led the round, lifting total funding to US$12M. Clueso, used by Atlassian and Zendesk among 1,000-plus companies, will spend the money on enterprise sales and stronger agentic editing tools.

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

US-China trade enters managed rivalry; SEA firms must adapt: Shawn Balakrishnan argues Trump’s May visit to Beijing produced a transactional framework, including new Boards of Trade and Investment, that Southeast Asian businesses must now plan around.

Deeptech founders should split their funding needs by job: Jun Yan argues one round size hides money doing different jobs, from funding an unproven product to buying equipment, carrying inventory or financing receivables, and each calls for a different kind of capital.

Human work is priced by the hour, machine thought by the token: Sayan Ghosh notes that only machine intelligence prices are falling fast, while timesheets and pricing models still assume human hours, forcing organisations to rethink how they value knowledge work.

Widespread AI tool use does not make a firm AI-ready: Elvis Lau argues that staff using ChatGPT and Copilot daily, plus a handful of production pilots, can still leave enterprises short of genuine AI readiness at the organisational level.

SEA’s SMEs should chase AI value, not just automation: Arnold Warner argues the real question is where AI creates measurable value without disproportionate complexity, cost or risk, a distinction that matters for the region’s small businesses.

Stop building new apps; build inside the ones users already open: Citing Sensor Tower, Manit Parikh notes users open around ten apps a day and global downloads grew just 0.8% last year, so founders should build inside existing platforms.

AI video is fast to generate and slow to make usable: Drawing on his work with AI-generated cinematic video, Jay Chua explains why prompt-to-scene speed is no guarantee of producing a usable video, where most of the effort now sits.

SEA retailers need observability to protect AI customer service: With Singapore offering a 400% tax deduction on AI spend for smaller retailers, Simon Rizkalla argues that real-time monitoring of AI systems decides whether the customer experience holds up.

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A founder I know recently received two term sheets in the same week.

The first was from a regional VC firm with a recognisable brand. The cheque was for US$1.5 million. The terms were reasonable. The partner had introduced himself at a conference six months earlier and had been pleasant in every interaction since.

The second was from an operator who had built and exited a company in the same space ten years earlier. The cheque was for US$400,000. The terms were similar. The operator had spent two hours on Zoom with the founder going through the customer acquisition strategy line by line, and had ended the call by listing six potential customer introductions he could make in the first month.

The founder took the smaller cheque.

When I asked why, his answer was direct. The bigger cheque came with a logo and a partner who would attend his board meetings. The smaller cheque came with someone who could shorten his customer acquisition cycle by six months. Six months of runway was worth more than the US$1.1 million difference.

That decision is becoming more common in 2026. It reflects a quiet but significant shift in how founders are evaluating capital.

The cheque is becoming the easiest part

For most of the past two decades, the cheque was the product. Investors raised funds, deployed capital, and provided light-touch support around the edges. The relationship was simple. The founder got the money. The investor got equity. Everything else was a bonus.

That model worked when capital was scarce and the value of the cheque was higher than anything an investor could provide around it.

Capital is no longer scarce for a growing share of early-stage founders. Solo GPs, family offices, corporate venture arms, angel syndicates, and a hundred new fund structures have flooded the market with capital options. The cheque has become the easiest part of the deal to get.

What is harder to get is everything around the cheque. Customer introductions that close in the first month. Engineering hires who would not have taken the call otherwise. Distribution partnerships that take three years to build from cold. GTM expertise from someone who has scaled the same playbook five times. Cross-border access into markets the founder cannot enter alone.

These are the assets that still have scarcity value. The investors who can deliver them are increasingly the ones founders are choosing. The investors who can only deliver capital are increasingly the ones founders are walking away from.

Also Read: Entering Taiwan: A practical resource map for foreign founders

The six things founders are actually buying

Ask a founder raising in 2026 what they want from an investor and the cheque will rarely be the first answer. Here are the six things that come up most often.

• Distribution. Can this investor get my product in front of customers I cannot reach myself. A US enterprise SaaS founder will pay a meaningful premium for an investor who can introduce them to Fortune 500 CIOs. A Southeast Asian consumer brand will pay the same premium for an investor who can open doors at major regional retailers.
• Customer introductions in the first ninety days. Not eventually. Not someday. Specific names, with introductions made within the first three months of the cheque clearing. Every customer an investor delivers in the first quarter is worth more than every customer the founder would have closed without that introduction.
• Hiring leverage. Senior engineering, product, and go-to-market hires are scarce everywhere. An investor who can pull a senior hire from their network in the first six months is delivering value worth multiples of the cheque size. Most founders underestimate how much faster the right hire arrives when the investor has personal relationships with the candidates.
• GTM expertise from someone who has done it. Strategy decks from a consultant are widely available. Operating advice from someone who built and scaled the same model is rare. Founders are increasingly choosing investors based on whether they have run the exact playbook the company needs to execute, not on whether they advise in general.
• Cross-border access. For founders whose markets sit in multiple countries, the value of an investor who can open regulatory, distribution, and partnership doors in the second and third market is enormous. A Singapore founder expanding into Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines needs three different sets of local relationships. The right investor brings two of those sets pre-built.
• Strategic advice when things break. Companies do not run smoothly. Pivots happen. Growth slows. Customers churn. Co-founders leave. The investors who matter are the ones who pick up the phone when the company is in trouble, not the ones who only show up when the metrics look clean.

The investors who can deliver all six are rare. The investors who can deliver four or five are valuable. The investors who can only deliver capital are increasingly being filtered out by founders who have other options.

What this means for investors

The implication for investors is straightforward. The brand of the firm is no longer enough. The value delivered around the cheque is becoming the actual product. Investors who have not built a deliberate value-add capability are about to find themselves losing the deals they used to win on brand alone.

The investors who will keep winning are the ones who have built genuine assets around their capital. A real customer network. A real hiring pipeline. A real distribution rolodex. A real operating playbook in a specific category. Not slogans. Not platform teams. Not marketing claims about being founder-friendly. Actual delivered value that the founder can name and quantify.

Also Read: The 90-second pitch that helps foreign founders crack Tokyo’s networking scene

The brand premium that used to justify a US$1.5 million cheque over a US$400,000 cheque is shrinking. In some categories, it has already disappeared.

What this means for founders raising in 2026 and 2027

Three actions for founders evaluating capital this year.

Before accepting any cheque, write down what you actually need beyond the money. Be specific. Three named customers you cannot reach. Two senior hires you cannot recruit. One distribution channel you cannot build alone. Then evaluate every investor against that list. The right investor is the one who can deliver the most items on that list, not the one with the biggest cheque.

Ask every investor for three specific examples of value they delivered to a recent portfolio company. Not a general claim. A specific story. Which founder. What was the problem. What did the investor do. What was the outcome. The investors who can answer this question crisply are usually the ones who deliver. The ones who answer vaguely usually do not.

Be willing to take less money to get the right partner. The compounding value of an investor who delivers around the cheque can be ten times the differential in cheque size over three years. A founder who optimises for cheque size in 2026 is optimising for the wrong variable. The variable that matters is what the cheque comes with.

The investor-founder relationship is being rewritten. The investors who recognise that the cheque has become the easiest part of the deal will keep winning. The founders who recognise that the cheque is no longer the most valuable part of an investor’s offer will spend the next decade building with the right capital partners around them.

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The post The new value test for investors: What founders are actually buying when they take your cheque appeared first on e27.