A passport is not a clever piece of paper. Anyone with a good printer and bad intentions can fake one. What makes it work is the government standing behind it, an authority that vouched for the holder and can withdraw that vouching the moment something goes wrong.

Evin McMullen has spent a decade thinking about that distinction. “Humans rarely trust each other directly; we trust the institutions that will hold someone to account if they lie,” says the co-founder and CEO of AmanTrue, who studied the anthropology of information systems at Yale before building digital identity products at Disco and Billions. AI agents, she argues, are being asked to earn trust the hard way, on their own merit. “That is like building in the void.”

Also Read: Southeast Asian tech leaders are learning to trust AI agents, but not with production

The timing of that argument is no accident. Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) has rolled out a starter kit for testing AI agents, an accreditation scheme with five approved third-party testers and a frontier AI security taskforce. Its guidance examines what an agent does, which tools it touches and what sensitive data it can reach, not merely what it outputs.

Yet, as e27 has reported, nothing yet compels anyone to use accredited testing. And companies are already stuck. An Adobe survey of 461 Southeast Asian executives found that 18 per cent of AI proposals die at security review, while only 12 per cent of firms have an AI owner with budget authority.

AmanTrue, which launched a couple of weeks ago, is betting that the missing piece is not a better exam but a better passport.

Trust needs a chain of accountability

McMullen’s starting point is that agents are stochastic. “An agent cannot reliably earn trust behaving well in a demo,” she says. “The past is not necessarily prologue.” What agents need instead is what people already have: “someone accountable standing behind it, a clearly defined mandate, and a record of data and action that can be checked.”

That is the logic behind AmanTrue’s Agent Passport, a credential derived from the verifiable identity of whoever deploys the agent, and Border Control, a gateway that sits on the receiving system’s side and decides what an agent may ask and do.

An identity vendor arguing that testing is not enough is, of course, exactly what you would expect. McMullen concedes the point more readily than most. Pre-deployment testing, which she says Singapore does “unusually well”, catches whether a model reasons badly, misuses a tool or falls for a prompt injection. “A passport does none of that. It will happily identify a badly behaved agent.”

What identity covers, she argues, is the stretch after launch: who is accountable for a live agent, what it was authorised to do and proof of what it did, across systems the tester never saw. “Testing is about the agent’s competence before launch. Identity is about its authority and accountability after launch. You need both, and anyone who tells you one replaces the other is selling you half a solution.”

Whose border, whose rules

The harder test is cross-border, which in Southeast Asia is the default rather than the edge case. Picture an agent from a Singapore bank acting on a Malaysian insurer’s system, a scenario the region’s insurers are only beginning to confront.

In McMullen’s model, the receiving side is sovereign. “Border Control sits on the insurer’s side and enforces the insurer’s rules, not the bank’s.” The insurer chooses which issuers it trusts. When two registries disagree, she points to trust frameworks “built the way visa and correspondent-banking arrangements were built between countries over time”.

That analogy cuts both ways. Visa regimes and correspondent banking took decades of treaties, scandals and fines to mature. Agents are unlikely to wait that long.

Also Read: AI agents broke into 100 firms for pocket change. SEA’s online shops fit the target profile

On a subtler threat, an agent quietly firing hundreds of narrow yes-or-no questions to rebuild a record it was never meant to see, her answer is more concrete. Each field carries a rule, most probing questions are refused before they are answered, and every query is written to a ledger recording who asked, what was checked and which rule decided. “A flood of oddly specific questions from one agent is exactly the signal an audit or an anomaly check is there to catch.”

The answers that stayed vague

Not every question drew a straight reply. Asked why AmanTrue needed to be a company separate from Billions Network, McMullen offered a single line: “Different products, capabilities, users, and strategies.”

AmanTrue’s website names TikTok, Microsoft and HSBC as running technology the team built, while noting they are not AmanTrue customers. Asked how many paying institutional customers it has, and whether any are in Southeast Asia, the company said it “has not yet publicly disclosed our working relationships”.

On the Billions token, the answer was a firm no. AmanTrue does not depend on it and can run on a sovereign cloud, a national data centre or a client’s own servers. “We make independence a deployment fact, not a promise,” she said, adding that “any implication otherwise is a misunderstanding of our competence”. Banks and ministries will still ask, given the long-running debate over whether AI agents need crypto rails.

On the 2am scenario, a rogue agent and a revoked passport, no figure was offered. Revocation is enforced at the point of use, so the next check fails; how quickly depends on “the process of the issuer, the setup of the system, and the nature of the revocation protocol”. For a CISO who has read about the agent that lied, that latency is precisely the number they will want in writing.

AmanTrue also walks into a crowding field. Microsoft and Okta have extended their identity platforms to cover AI agents, card networks such as Visa and Mastercard are building protocols to authenticate agents that shop and pay, and “Know Your Agent” is fast becoming payments’ next compliance phrase. A newly launched specialist will have to show why a bank should not simply wait for its existing identity provider to add the feature.

Who signs the cheque

The Adobe numbers raise an awkward question for any vendor: if nobody owns the AI budget, who buys? McMullen calls that critique “half right”. Governance is a genuine bottleneck, she agrees, but the budget does have an owner: “whoever is accountable when an agent gets something wrong.” In a bank, that is the CISO and the chief risk or compliance officer; in government, the ministry that owns the service.

These are the people rejecting proposals at security review today. Her pitch is that provable actions give them a reason to say yes, and in doing so create the accountable owner the org chart lacks. “Rather than replace governance, the technology gives governance something tangible to enforce.” It echoes a wider regional shift, where AI governance is moving from promises to proof even as enterprises remain unsure who referees their agents.

Do not wait for the breach

Should Singapore make agent identity mandatory for regulated sectors? McMullen would not mandate a product, “mine included”. She would mandate an outcome: anyone deploying an autonomous agent against regulated systems must be able to prove which agent acted, on whose authority and what it did. The case for not waiting is blunt. Leaked personal or health data is something “you cannot un-leak”.

Also Read: Banks want AI agents to move money, as long as someone is accountable

She is candid about the conflict. “I have a commercial interest in that answer, so weigh it accordingly.”

That is fair advice. But her central observation holds regardless of who is selling the fix. Singapore has built a rigorous exam hall for AI agents. What it has not yet built is the border post, where every time an agent tries to act, someone checks whose name is on its passport.

The post AI agents need someone standing behind them, says AmanTrue CEO Evin McMullen appeared first on e27.

On paper, Malaysia’s trade figures read like a victory lap. Technology-related exports jumped about 55 per cent year-on-year in September, and the monthly trade surplus hit its second record high of MYR 34 billion (US$8.38 billion).

When looking closer, though, the boom appears to be largely borrowed.

In a new note, CGS International argued that the surge has been powered mainly by a global appetite for memory-related products, not by Malaysia winning a bigger share of the market. The gains have also yet to show up where they matter most to ordinary Malaysians: in wages, jobs and fresh investment.

Also Read: AI boom pushes chipmakers to expand across Asia Pacific, FedEx report finds

That distinction is not academic. A country that rides a demand wave gets carried back down when the wave breaks. A country that gains competitiveness keeps its position after the tide goes out.

A boom built on memory

The growth has been narrow. It is concentrated in electrical and electronics (E&E) products, particularly memory, solid-state devices and integrated circuit (IC) parts, all of which have benefited from demand tied to AI and the data centre build-out reshaping the region’s chip supply chain.

Electrical machinery accounted for roughly 40 to 50 per cent of Malaysia’s export growth so far this year. The US was the single largest contributor to the increase in shipments, adding about 10 to 15 per cent to export growth.

The trade map tells its own story. Malaysia’s widening surplus with the US is offset by deficits with China and Taiwan. In plain terms, components flow in from East Asia, are assembled, tested and packaged in Malaysia, and then shipped out to American customers. CGS International describes this as Malaysia acting as a conduit within the global technology supply chain. Conduits are useful. They are rarely where the money pools.

The scoreboard that hasn’t moved

To test whether Malaysia is genuinely outperforming, CGS International used Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA), a measure that compares how much a product weighs in a country’s exports against its weight in global trade. If Malaysia were winning, its RCA index would climb.

It has not. Malaysia already holds a competitive position in IC parts and solid-state devices, but the latest data shows no significant improvement in its RCA score despite the sharp rise in exports. The research house’s reading: Malaysia is benefiting from a bigger pie, not grabbing a larger slice.

The memory numbers make the point neatly. Malaysia’s memory exports rose 243 per cent year-on-year to date. The World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) forecasts global memory sales growth of 249 per cent. Malaysia, in other words, is swimming slightly slower than the current.

The gains have also come from volume rather than pricing power. Memory shipment volumes in mid-2026 reached about three times their 2023 levels. That matters because volume growth depends on factory capacity, while soaring memory prices tend to reward front-end producers, the companies that design chips and fabricate wafers. Malaysia’s strength lies in the back end: assembly, testing and packaging, where margins are thinner.

There is one encouraging signal. OECD Trade in Value Added data suggests Malaysia is capturing a larger share of domestic value added, meaning more of the economic value from each export is staying in the country.

Where are the pay cheques?

The broader economy has yet to feel the boom.

Employee compensation in the E&E sector has stayed broadly flat since 2022-2023, according to CGS International. Employment in the industry did not grow significantly in the first eight months of 2026.

Also Read: AI demand lifts Malaysia’s chip sector, but not every player wins

Investment is the starker gap. Quarterly approvals in the sector have hovered between RM5 billion and RM10 billion (roughly US$1.2 billion to US$2.5 billion), far below the RM40 billion to RM80 billion (about US$9.9 billion to US$19.7 billion) peaks of the 2021-2023 investment boom.

The research house offers a caveat: wages, hiring and investment typically lag exports, so the benefits may still arrive. There is some evidence for that. Manufacturing capacity utilisation rose to 87.7 per cent in June 2026, its highest since 2015. Factories running that hot usually have two choices: expand or turn away orders.

Still, “it’s coming” is an argument that needs the cycle to cooperate. And the cycle may not wait.

The cycle is already cooling

CGS International expects E&E export momentum to moderate. WSTS forecasts global semiconductor sales growth to slow from about 90 per cent in 2026 to 27 per cent in 2027.

Malaysia’s exports are likely to follow. Because it sits at the back end of the supply chain, it may also feel the slowdown later than others, a delayed hangover after a party it mostly catered.

Climbing the value chain, again

The policy challenge, the research house said, is to sustain growth beyond this demand cycle by moving up the value chain, particularly into advanced packaging and semiconductor services. It views the National Semiconductor Strategy as a more pragmatic plan, with realistic targets for developing the industry and capturing more value.

Malaysia is not alone in this ambition. Thailand is targeting a US$80 billion semiconductor push to move beyond assembly, and neighbours from Singapore to the Philippines are chasing the same higher-value work. At home, startups such as GreatAsic, which is betting on indigenous chip design, and FusionAP hint at what an upgraded industry might look like, though they remain small against the scale of the task.

The constraints are real. The US is weighing tariffs under Section 232, a trade law that lets Washington impose duties on national security grounds, with the second phase of the measures still pending. Malaysia also faces shortages of skilled workers, electricity and other resources, pressures sharpened by the data centres crowding into Johor and competing for the same power grid.

These, CGS International warned, could limit Malaysia’s ability to fully capitalise on the semiconductor upcycle and attract further investment.

Also Read: 15 Southeast Asian semiconductor startups moving beyond assembly

The record surpluses are worth celebrating. But a boom that lifts exports without lifting wages, jobs or competitiveness is less a transformation than a good season. Malaysia’s task is to make sure the next downturn finds it higher up the ladder than this upturn found it.

The post Malaysia is selling more chips, but it isn’t winning more of the market appeared first on e27.

At about 4.20am Singapore time on October 30, while most of Southeast Asia’s crypto traders were asleep, money began leaving Binance. By the time the region’s markets opened, the world’s largest crypto exchange had suffered the biggest theft in crypto history.

Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis has now published its reconstruction of the attack. It puts the loss at about US$6.4 billion across multiple blockchains, slightly above Binance’s own estimate of US$6.3 billion. It attributes the theft to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-backed hacking group that has spent years targeting exchanges, DeFi protocols and investors to fund the regime.

Also Read: North Korea’s hiring scam just cost Binance US$6.3B. SEA’s engineers are on the shortlist

The attribution will get the headlines. The more revealing part of the report is how quickly everything happened. This hack was a race between a thief and the small number of companies that can freeze stablecoins, and neither side fully won.

How the attacker got in

According to Chainalysis, the attacker’s operating wallet on Ethereum was funded through Tornado Cash, a mixing service that hides where money came from. That wallet submitted valid signed authorisations that allowed a Binance hot wallet to run code the attacker had deployed. A hot wallet is an internet-connected wallet that exchanges use to process everyday withdrawals. The attacker then used that code to sweep the wallet’s assets into addresses it controlled. Other affected Binance wallets appear to have sent funds through ordinary signed transfers.

The word “valid” matters. No cryptography was broken. Binance’s systems signed exactly what they were told to sign. The exchange has traced the breach to a compromised laptop belonging to a single DevOps engineer, a point e27 examined in detail last week. Whatever the entry point, the outcome is the same: once an attacker can make an exchange authorise transactions, key security stops mattering.

A 54-minute sprint against the freeze button

Once the funds were out, the attacker faced a split problem. Billions were held in Bitcoin and Ether, which no one can freeze. Billions more were held in stablecoins such as USDT and USDC, which their issuers can blacklist.

So the attacker moved fast. US$500 million in stablecoins went to a wallet set up only to swap them. Over nearly 20 minutes, it converted US$325 million into US$285 million of ETH, giving up roughly US$40 million to get the money beyond the issuers’ reach. Ten minutes later, the remaining US$175 million went to stopover wallets, apparently in an attempt to stay ahead of a blacklist.

It was not fast enough. Freezes began at 5.14pm Eastern Time, 54 minutes after the first outflows. Chainalysis says about US$2.8 billion has been frozen so far. Binance has put its verified frozen total at US$3 billion, of which Tether and Circle together account for about US$2.4 billion.

The other side of the ledger is less reassuring. The attackers still control roughly US$2.4 billion in assets that cannot be frozen.

The awkward truth about who saved the day

The rescue relied on centralisation, the thing crypto was supposed to remove. Stablecoins could be frozen because a company sits behind each one and can switch individual tokens off. In this case, that is a feature. In most other cases, it is a dependency.

For Southeast Asia, this is not an abstract point. Stablecoins are fast becoming everyday financial infrastructure in the region. Nearly half of Asia-Pacific consumers say they are open to using them, and in markets such as Vietnam they have moved from workaround to regulated tool. Yet the power to freeze sits with a handful of issuers, mostly outside the region. That is part of the dollarisation problem the region has yet to address, and why it cannot simply license its way to stablecoin sovereignty.

Also Read: If Binance says user funds are safe, why did Bitcoin still fall to US$77,037.20?

Chainalysis also notes that much of the freezing happened independently, with organisations acting in parallel. That worked this time. But it is improvisation, not a system, and the next response may be slower.

Bitget’s fingerprints

The attribution rests on a specific piece of evidence. Chainalysis investigators watched in real time as funds stolen from Binance commingled on-chain with funds stolen in last month’s Bitget exploit, which had already been attributed to North Korea. That earlier heist cost Bitget US$387.5 million. Chainalysis announced its attribution at 12.30am Eastern Time on October 30, about eight hours after the first outflows. TRM Labs has separately said it has “high confidence” that TraderTraitor was behind the attack.

The pattern now covers the top tier of the industry. Bybit lost US$1.5 billion in February 2025 in a hack the FBI attributed to North Korea and TraderTraitor. Bitget followed last month, and now Binance. Size did not protect any of them. If anything, it made them more attractive targets, and it raises hard questions about the security standards exchanges have promised since 2022.

Laundering on autopilot

The laundering itself may be the most significant new detail. Chainalysis says it is seeing patterns it has not seen before. Thousands of transactions have run in a short period, with funds circulating between addresses and often returning to wallets used earlier in the chain, rather than moving in a straight line.

Many addresses follow the same sequence. They receive exactly 1 TRX, the native token of the Tron network, then receive larger amounts, then forward funds onward. On Tron, a new address has to receive a little TRX before it can be used. The identical first deposit points to a script creating and activating wallets in bulk, not a person moving money by hand.

Also Read: Crypto’s new threat is not a hack, but a knock at the door

That changes the economics of investigation. Laundering that runs on software can generate more noise than human analysts can work through, which pushes investigators towards automated tools of their own. It is worth noting that Chainalysis sells exactly those tools. Its report ends with a pitch for its KYT and Address Screening products. That does not make the analysis wrong, but readers should keep it in mind.

What comes next

Chainalysis expects the stolen funds to keep moving in the coming days. Binance has pledged to cover all losses from its SAFU reserve and company funds. The wider industry, meanwhile, is reconsidering whether so much money should sit with centralised exchanges at all. Standard Chartered has suggested the hack could accelerate a shift towards decentralised exchanges.

That debate will take years. The theft took less than an hour, and the laundering is now running automatically.

The post Binance’s US$6.4B hack was decided in 54 minutes, and the chase isn’t over appeared first on e27.

For years, Southeast Asian founders were told to win their home market before expanding abroad. Prove the product, build the team, establish revenue, then move into neighbouring countries.

That advice still makes sense. But for startups seeking institutional venture capital, it is becoming less sufficient.

Investors are paying closer attention to the limits of domestic markets, the cost of entering new countries and the size of the eventual exit opportunity. A startup can build a strong national business and still be too small to produce the returns expected by a venture fund.

This does not mean founders should open offices across ASEAN immediately. Premature expansion can drain cash and distract management. It means companies increasingly need to be designed so they can cross borders when the time is right. Regional ambition must be separated from regional sprawl.

The domestic ceiling

The point at which a startup outgrows its home market depends on the country and sector.

Indonesia offers enough domestic scale for some consumer companies to grow for years without expanding. Singapore provides capital and high-value customers but has a limited population. Thailand and Malaysia can support substantial businesses, although specialised startups may work through their largest potential customers relatively quickly.

The constraint is often clearest in business-to-business markets. A startup selling software to Thai insurers, Malaysian hospital groups or Singapore retailers may secure prestigious clients but still face a limited number of similar buyers. The business may be profitable, but its next phase of growth requires another product category, customer segment or country.

Capital creates further pressure. Larger funding rounds often involve investors with regional or international mandates. These funds need to see an opportunity large enough to absorb their capital and generate a meaningful portfolio return.

The same applies to exits. A company serving one narrow national market may have only a limited number of strategic buyers. Regional revenue can widen that pool, but only when foreign operations strengthen the core business. A collection of loosely connected subsidiaries does not create regional scale. It creates complexity.

Also Read: Half the market will not take your money: The access problem for regulated startups

One region, many markets

Southeast Asia looks highly attractive in aggregate. ASEAN has about 684 million people, while the region’s digital economy exceeded US$300 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025, according to Google, Temasek and Bain.

But these totals can be misleading. Southeast Asia is not one unified market. The region contains different languages, legal systems, income levels, payment habits, distribution networks and rules governing data and foreign investment.

A fintech product approved in Singapore may require extensive regulatory work in Indonesia. Software sold in English to Malaysian companies may need a different interface and sales process in Vietnam. A consumer product promoted through social commerce in Thailand may require different pricing and distribution in the Philippines.

ASEAN has made progress towards deeper digital integration, including concluding negotiations on its Digital Economy Framework Agreement in 2026. But implementation still lies ahead.

For startups, the implication is simple: regional expansion is rarely a copy-and-paste exercise. The common core must travel. The edges must adapt.

Build for the second market

A regional strategy begins before a startup registers its first foreign subsidiary.

Technology should be configurable across currencies, languages, tax systems, payment providers and data requirements. If assumptions from the home market are embedded throughout the product, entering another country may require an expensive rebuild.

Contracts and partnerships also matter. An exclusive distributor may provide immediate revenue but restrict future options. A corporate investor may open doors while making competitors reluctant to become customers. A large client may demand so much customisation that the product becomes harder to sell elsewhere.

A useful partnership makes the next sale easier. A poor one leaves the startup supporting another bespoke product and another set of restrictions.

Branding should also travel, but founders should not confuse an English website with an exportable business. Consumer marketing, onboarding and support usually require meaningful localisation.

The deeper test is whether the company’s success can be repeated. A startup may appear scalable because its product is digital, while its sales still depend on the founder’s personal relationships. Overseas pilots can create impressive logos without proving that customers can be acquired consistently or profitably.

The second market reveals whether the company has built a transferable product or merely benefited from local conditions.

Also Read: Investors do not just fund startups. They fund predictability

Why expanding early can fail

Investors’ preference for regional scale should not be accepted blindly. Venture funds need large outcomes. Their economics can push founders towards expansion before the company is ready.

Some businesses are also inherently national. Financial services, healthcare, education and government technology often depend on local licences, regulations and institutional relationships.

Local network effects may not travel either. A marketplace with strong liquidity in Bangkok gains little from building a thin network in Jakarta. A logistics company may create more value by increasing route density at home than by launching scattered operations abroad.

Expansion can also hide weakness. A startup with poor retention may compensate by adding customers in new countries. A series of foreign pilots may generate announcements but little recurring revenue.

The strongest domestic company is often more valuable than the fifth-largest competitor in several countries.

Choose the second market carefully

A credible regional strategy does not begin with a map covering all of ASEAN. It begins with a reasoned choice of the next country.

The best second market usually shares customers, regulations, supply chains, language or commercial partners with the first. A Thai enterprise software company may choose Malaysia because procurement can be conducted in English and multinational customers operate in both countries. A Singapore fintech may retain its regulatory base at home while targeting larger customer pools elsewhere. A Vietnamese consumer company may accept the greater cost of entering Indonesia because the potential scale justifies it.

The best second market does more than add revenue. It lowers the cost or risk of entering the third. A customer in Malaysia may become a reference in Singapore. Approval from one regulator may support an application elsewhere. A regional distributor may open several markets through one relationship.

The number of countries is therefore a poor measure of success. A better question is whether each new market creates assets that can be reused.

Also Read: Startups keep scaling ops before they scale data — Here’s why it backfires

What investors should test

Cross-border revenue is useful evidence, but its quality matters. A recurring contract secured at full price is more meaningful than a discounted pilot arranged through the founder’s network.

Investors should ask:

Does the same customer problem exist in the next market? Will buyers pay a similar price? How much of the product must change? Can the existing team support the launch? Will localisation damage margins?

They should also examine what remains centralised. Engineering, finance and data may support the whole group. Sales, compliance and partnerships may require local control.

A company has achieved regional scale when additional markets reinforce a common system. It has merely expanded geographically when every country adds roughly as much complexity as revenue.

Southeast Asia will continue to produce successful domestic startups. Not every company needs venture capital, and regional expansion should not be treated as a measure of ambition.

But founders seeking large institutional rounds increasingly need a credible route beyond the first country. That does not require immediate expansion. It requires early decisions that preserve the possibility.

The question is no longer simply whether a startup can win at home. It is whether entering the next market will make the company more valuable, or merely more complicated.

—

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 In Southeast Asia, winning at home may no longer be enough appeared first on e27.

Ask a Hong Kong engineer why their product deserves a place abroad and you will often hear the same answer: the city is the hardest test bed they know. Towers scramble satellite signals, space is scarce, labour is expensive and safety rules leave little room for error. Survive that, the argument goes, and most other cities feel easy.

Three companies travelling with the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) delegation are taking that pitch to Singapore Urban Mobility Week, taking place this week from 4 to 6 November. Trunk Tech builds driverless trucks for ports. FJDynamics delivers 3D scanners and autonomous robots Aerovision Technology Limited (Aerovision) makes thermal detection systems, driving simulators and satellite-jamming detectors.

One already runs a live deployment at Tuas Port. The other two are still knocking on doors. All three see Singapore as Hong Kong’s closest twin: dense, wealthy, short of manpower and obsessive about safety. Whether that kinship turns into contracts is what the week will test.

Also Read: Waymo’s Singapore entry raises the stakes for autonomous mobility in Asia

Trunk Tech: Taking the driver out of the port

Founded in 2017, Trunk Tech builds Level 4 autonomous trucks and the software that runs them as a fleet. Dr An Lifeng, Partner and Head of Product Center, frames it as a two-step plan. “Our first step is to create an AI driver, one that can replace the human driver, moving cargo and handling loading and unloading more safely and for longer,” he says. “The second step is to build an AI fleet manager.”

Each truck reads its surroundings and makes its own decisions, but it also shares what it sees with the fleet, which computes the best move for every vehicle. At a container terminal, the operating system assigns hauling jobs, the fleet plans routes and time windows, and the trucks handle exceptions themselves.

The headline number comes from China. Trunk Tech helped design a new terminal with no drivers from day one, supplying the vehicles, roadside units and cloud platform. “The smart zero-carbon terminal reduces staffing levels by 60 per cent versus traditional terminals.” An says. 

Singapore is familiar ground. Trunk Tech hosted Economic Development Board officials two years ago, then met more than 30 representatives from government, port groups, Changi Airport Group and YCH Group last year. It also became a licensed supplier to PSA and began volume deliveries for Tuas Port, which An calls “an extremely large-scale project”. The system is now in commercial operation.

The company now wants a local partner for truck integration, project delivery and on-site support. Its next frontier lies beyond the terminal gates: hauling between terminals and industrial parks, then intra-city and point-to-point freight.

Also Read: PSA, Granite Asia launch US$50M fund to scale supply-chain innovation

FJDynamics: Digitising the city, one scan at a time

FJDynamics was founded in Hong Kong. It now has about 1,000 employees, more than 60 per cent of them in R&D, and serves customers in more than 120 countries. Its technology portfolio includes high-precision positioning, 3D LiDAR scanning, digital mapping and intelligent equipment solutions for construction, agriculture, landscaping and facility management.

Group CFO Kiki Zhang keeps the philosophy plain. “Innovation should not be complicated or expensive,” she says. “It should solve real problems, improve productivity and make people’s jobs easier and safer.”

In Singapore, FJDynamics is exploring opportunities with the Building and Construction Authority and other relevant government agencies, industry stakeholders and local partners on construction digitalisation, virtual inspections and practical technology adoption. It has also undertaken a tree-scanning and digital-mapping pilot involving NUS and is developing a local operational presence to support customers and projects. The company is introducing its crane and heavy-lifting solutions to help improve safety in challenging construction-site conditions. “Singapore is much more than a sales market,” Zhang says.

Her focus is on a particular challenge: the shortage of experienced, skilled workers willing and able to operate in demanding environments such as construction sites, alongside high operating costs and complex infrastructure maintenance needs. LiDAR-based tools can help teams capture reliable site information for inspections and asset management. Intelligent equipment and assisted-operation solutions can reduce repetitive manual tasks and exposure to hazardous working conditions.

FJDynamics has already demonstrated the practical value of many of these solutions in Hong Kong. In Singapore, Zhang hopes to work with government agencies, transport and infrastructure operators, contractors, industry specialists and local companies on more pilot projects and application-led development, backed by the company’s growing local support capabilities. The ambition is to adapt proven solutions to Singapore’s needs and build long-term partnerships that deliver measurable value on the ground.

Also Read: How Hong Kong solves tech’s hardest problem: the final mile to market

Aerovision: From smouldering cargo to rehab clinics

Aerovision’s method, says General Manager Horace Cheung, is to find a pain point in logistics, transport or property management, build a core technology to fix it, then hunt for other industries that need the same fix.

Its thermal detection system began as a way to spot air cargo burning inside with no outward sign. It adjusts to ambient conditions and tells sunlight-heated cargo apart from internal heat, which cuts false alarms. The same system now screens passenger luggage at Hong Kong International Airport and flags water leaks and overheating equipment in buildings.

In Singapore, Aerovision is proposing it to the Land Transport Authority for the Bukit Panjang LRT. The target is “pitting”: arcing between a train’s carbon brushes and the power rail melts small dents into the metal, which raise resistance and generate heat. Abnormal heat patterns tell maintenance crews which rail sections need attention.

The simulators have taken a stranger route. Aerovision built one to train aircraft tow tractor drivers, since aircraft cannot reverse on their own, and a container truck simulator for a local university that won an award in Geneva. Then Singapore visitors saw something else in it: rehabilitation. Force-feedback steering, a motion platform and in-cabin sensors that track performance make it useful for patients recovering from trauma. A partner is now promoting it to hospitals and rehab centres. “It was something we never expected our system to be used on,” Cheung admits.

Singapore is Cheung’s preferred entry point among the region’s markets. “We don’t sell them a canned food solution,” he says. And he wants to see the market first-hand: “I always stick to my own eyes and ears when it comes to verifying and validating the information.”

Also Read: Hong Kong builds a test track for robots that keep failing outside the lab

The HKSTP badge and the Hong Kong stress test

Why travel in a delegation? For Cheung, it is credibility: buyers vet unknown vendors hard, but HKSTP’s screening works as a trusted gateway. An sees Hong Kong, where Trunk Tech opened an AI innovation centre in 2024, as the bridge between mainland firms and global markets.

All three point to the same edge: university talent, mainland manufacturing next door, and a city that punishes weak products. Building its jamming detector among Hong Kong’s towers, Aerovision had to beat signals bouncing off buildings. “If your solution works in Hong Kong, then it will work pretty much anywhere,” Cheung says.

Marking HKSTP’s first dedicated mobility mission in Singapore during Singapore Urban Mobility Week (4–6 November 2026), the HKSTP Pavilion will showcase 10 Park companies featuring breakthrough mobility solutions. Leveraging this government-led engagement platform, the mission facilitates direct engagement with key transport authorities, industry leaders, and potential partners across Singapore’s mobility ecosystem.

The post HKSTP drives Hong Kong mobility innovators to test and scale in Singapore appeared first on e27.