Southeast Asia’s tech startups have raised more funding in the first ten months of 2026 than almost anyone in the ecosystem would have forecast in January. Add up the monthly figures in Tracxn’s latest snapshot and the region has drawn about US$16.55 billion between January and October.

October alone delivered US$3.68 billion across 14 rounds, according to Tracxn. That is 1,666.2 per cent higher than September 2026 and 933.7 per cent higher than October 2025, when the tally stood at roughly US$356 million.

The month-on-month figure, however, is measured against a revised September total, and that revision is part of this story.

Also Read: SEA tech funding surges to US$2.8B in Q1 2026, more than doubling year-on-year

Those are dramatic numbers. They are also the kind that have appeared, vanished and reappeared all year. Read e27’s monthly tracker coverage end to end, and a different picture of 2026 emerges: not a broad recovery, but a market that lurches between drought and deluge, and whose headline totals are written by a few companies, several of them Southeast Asian mainly by address.

Four months, four-fifths of the money

On Tracxn’s October chart, January (US$2.28 billion), June (US$2.81 billion), July (US$4.64 billion) and October (US$3.69 billion) together account for about US$13.4 billion, or 81 per cent of the year’s funding. The other six months shared roughly US$3.1 billion between them, an average of about US$520 million a month.

The swings have been violent. January’s surge, powered by DayOne’s US$2 billion round, was followed by a February so thin that e27’s tracker at the time recorded just US$76 million across 13 rounds, down about 96.5 per cent month-on-month. March bounced to US$378 million across 23 rounds, the busiest month of the year by deal count. April slid again, to US$143 million across 16 rounds, 82.49 per cent lower than March 2026 and 42.72 per cent lower than April 2025.

May edged up 32.50 per cent from April to US$209 million across 11 rounds, but was still 43.64 per cent lower than May 2025, and Silicon Box’s US$150 million round alone made up more than 70 per cent of it.

Then came the mid-year spike. June brought US$3.75 billion across 17 rounds as first reported, a 1,572 per cent jump from May. July went further, reaching US$4.779 billion across 17 rounds, a 12-month high. August cooled to US$1.171 billion across 13 rounds, down 74.78 per cent from July 2026 but 582.75 per cent above August 2025.

September’s tracker then recorded just US$81 million across 11 rounds, 93.07 per cent lower than August 2026 and 86.30 per cent lower than September 2025, before October’s rebound.

The second half has already outrun the first. Using the October snapshot, July to October produced about US$9.7 billion, against US$6.84 billion for the whole of January to June.

Source: Tracxn monthly snapshots. “First reported” is each month’s own tracker; the October snapshot column reflects Tracxn’s later revisions.

The mega-cheque ledger

Strip the year down to its biggest transactions and the pattern is hard to miss. DayOne raised twice, US$2 billion in January and US$2.5 billion in June. Kling AI’s US$2.8 billion and Ant International’s US$1.2 billion made up about US$4 billion of July. Sharpa’s US$669.7 million led August. Supabase appeared in June with US$500 million and again in October with US$150 million. Manus topped October with US$500 million.

Also Read: Southeast Asia startup funding finds a floor, but not a rebound

Add Airwallex (US$320 million), SiliconFlow (US$294 million) and Ajaib (US$270 million), and 11 rounds across ten companies come to about US$11.2 billion — roughly two-thirds of the year’s total as it now stands.

What these deals share is infrastructure: data centres, AI models and agents, developer backends, payment rails, robotics. Consumer internet, the engine of Southeast Asia’s last boom, barely features on any month’s top-deal list.

That tilt is rational. Capital-hungry categories with global demand can absorb large cheques, and investors chasing the AI build-out want exposure to the picks and shovels rather than thin application layers. But it also means the region’s headline number now tracks a handful of capital-intensive businesses far more closely than it tracks the health of its startup base.

Southeast Asian, by postcode

The harder question is how much of this money is Southeast Asian in any meaningful sense. When e27 reported July’s figures, it noted that Kling AI and Ant International are Chinese in origin but headquartered in Singapore. June’s coverage flagged that Supabase is not a Southeast Asia-specific business in the traditional sense.

October’s largest deal makes the point more sharply. Manus moved from China to Singapore in July 2025, sold itself to Meta, saw that deal unwound by Beijing, and has now raised more than US$500 million in a round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with existing backers Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund joining. IDG Capital makes Tracxn’s list of October’s most active VCs on the strength of that single deal.

Kling AI, Ant International and Manus alone account for about US$4.5 billion of 2026’s funding. That capital is real, and Singapore’s ability to attract it says something genuine about the city-state’s institutions. It says far less about whether a seed-stage founder in Surabaya or Da Nang can close a Series A.

Deal counts refuse to budge

Volume tells the quieter story. Across the ten months, Tracxn logged between 11 and 23 rounds a month (147 in total), or an average of just under 15. Monthly totals swung by thousands of per cent; deal counts barely moved.

Most rounds remain small and early. In January, 11 of 12 were seed or early stage. April had 14 of 16, May nine of 11, June 14 of 17, July 12 of 17, September nine of 11, and October 11 of 14, split between five seed and six early-stage rounds, with just three late-stage deals. In no month with a published breakdown did late-stage rounds exceed five.

October’s smaller deals show the texture of that pipeline. Orochi Network, NEU Battery Materials and Salary Hero are listed at US$8 million each, followed by Ailytics (US$7 million), Parallel Loop (US$6.6 million), Aliena (US$6 million), Blue Whale Energy (US$4 million) and Genie Health (US$3 million).

Also Read: SEA’s venture capital shifts from mega-rounds to AI and SaaS

These are useful businesses in earned-wage access, battery recycling, enterprise AI and health data. They are also cheques that would have passed almost unnoticed in a single week of 2021. The squeezed middle ( the Series B and C rounds that turn promising startups into regional champions) is where the gap sits. As e27 observed in June, a healthier recovery would show steadier month-on-month funding and more Series A and Series B rounds, not just bigger totals.

No investor owns the year

The most-active-investor lists churn heavily from month to month. Iterative led January with three rounds. Beenext, Bluehill VC, Korea Investment Holdings and ORZON Ventures topped February; Asia Partners, Kairous Capital, EDBI and Vertex Ventures led March. Altara Ventures and Kaya Founders each backed two rounds in April, sharing the list with Source Code Capital and Accel.

May’s list was SEEDS Capital, Vertex Ventures, EDBI and Accel, each with a single round. Monk’s Hill Ventures and SEEDS Capital stood out in June; Singtel Innov8, Lollapalooza Capital, Altara and Breakthrough Energy in July; Integra Partners in August; and Vertex Ventures, with two rounds in dtcpay and HiveBotics, in September.

October’s list features Cento Ventures (Salary Hero, Finfra), ADB Ventures (Blue Whale Energy, Finfra) and SG Growth Capital (Ai Lytics, Blue Whale Energy), each with two rounds, plus IDG Capital with Manus. Vertex Ventures is the closest thing the year has to a constant, appearing in March, May and September, with sister fund Vertex Growth backing Acrab AI in August. Accel, Altara, EDBI and SEEDS Capital each feature twice. Even so, no investor has topped a month with more than three rounds.

Two threads run through the churn. State-linked and development capital keeps surfacing — SGInnovate, EDBI, SEEDS Capital, SG Growth Capital and ADB Ventures all feature. And climate is creeping onto the list, from Breakthrough Energy in July to ADB Ventures and SG Growth Capital co-backing Blue Whale Energy in October.

Also Read: Southeast Asia’s funding winter is real. Its building winter isn’t

When public and quasi-public money is doing a growing share of the steady lifting, that is a sign of policy commitment. It is also a sign that private early-stage capital has yet to return in force.

The numbers keep moving

One more caveat matters for anyone quoting these figures. Tracxn revises its monthly data as rounds are disclosed late, and the revisions are large. February, first reported at US$76 million, now appears at US$433 million in October’s chart. March has moved from US$378 million to US$508 million, and May from US$209 million to US$571 million. June has moved the other way, from US$3.75 billion to US$2.81 billion. December 2025, cited at US$491 million in January, now shows US$192 million.

September is the sharpest example. Its own tracker put the month at US$81 million; a month later, October’s chart shows US$209 million. October’s 1,666.2 per cent month-on-month jump is calculated against that revised figure, which may shift again. The 933.7 per cent rise over October 2025 rests on a longer-settled base and is the more meaningful of the two comparisons.

The October snapshot also leaves a gap. Its ten largest named deals add up to about US$701 million, leaving close to US$3 billion of the US$3.68 billion headline unattributed to any round shown in the chart.

What 2026 actually tells founders

Read together, the trackers describe a two-speed market. At the top, a small group of infrastructure and AI companies, many with global ambitions and Singapore paperwork, can raise hundreds of millions or billions in funding. At the bottom, a steady trickle of seed and early-stage rounds keeps the pipeline alive. In between, growth capital remains thin.

For founders, the headline totals are a poor guide to their own odds. The more useful figure is the one that has hardly changed all year: roughly 15 rounds a month.

If 2027 is to bring a genuine recovery, that is the number that has to move. Until then, Southeast Asia’s funding boom is less a rising tide than a few very large ships passing through.

The post US$16.5B and counting: Inside the lopsided year that rewrote SEA’s funding charts appeared first on e27.

I spent months building the ultimate autonomous productivity engine to eliminate every bottleneck, until a founder in crisis made me realise that execution is cheap, but presence is priceless.

The terminal window glowed with quiet, rhythmic precision.

By 2:00 am, my home setup had become an autonomous engine. For weeks, every spare hour had gone into wiring AI agents into every crevice of my workflow. Webhooks intercepted partner memos, scripts parsed dense strategy briefs into three-point summaries, and auto-generated follow-ups cleared my inbox before anyone else woke up. Cycle times that once took days collapsed into 90 seconds.

The ambition was intoxicating: sand down every edge, eliminate every human bottleneck, and build an unshakeable fortress of personal productivity. Zero unread pings. Zero friction.

Then an alert pinged through the silence.

It was an audio note from a partner whose startup was burning runway through a brutal pivot. He had sent an eight-minute voice recording from his car. Within 40 seconds, my pipeline ingested the audio, scrubbed the background hiss, generated a crisp four-point risk matrix, and queued a drafted reply:

“Noted the update. Three operational contingencies attached to mitigate board exposure during Friday’s review.”

My thumb hovered over the trackpad to authorise the send.

That was the moment the friction hit. A cold knot formed in my stomach, stopping me cold.

The text was immaculate. The logic was airtight. But in my rush to optimise, I hadn’t even listened to the file myself. I plugged in my headphones and hit play.

There was the sound of car keys rattling against the steering wheel, the background hum of an idling engine, and then a long, ragged exhale before he even spoke. In the third minute, his voice cracked slightly when mentioning his co-founder’s exhaustion. He trailed off mid-sentence, cleared his throat, and tried to force a confident tone that completely collapsed under the weight of panic.

The algorithm had extracted every technical fact, but it was deaf to the human frequency underneath. My system had engineered a masterpiece of clinical detachment to offer a terrified friend. If I hit send, that crisp summary would have functioned like a locked door.

Also Read: The fan vote is broken: Here is what it takes to make people trust it again

In chasing frictionless speed, I had mistaken the sheer volume of output for actual leverage. By automating away all friction, I had nearly automated away the only reason I was in the room in the first place.

I moved the cursor away from Send, closed the draft, killed the execution queue, and dialled his number.

He answered on the second ring, caught off guard. “Did you read the summary? I thought you were asleep.”

“I heard the car,” I said quietly. “Are you alright?”

There was an agonising 10-second silence on the line, the kind of dead air an algorithm treats as dead weight. Then the veneer dropped. For the next 40 minutes, we didn’t touch the risk matrix or look at a financial deck. He talked through the shame of facing his lead investor, the sleeplessness, the fear of failing his team. We navigated the mess together, trading hard, unscripted truths that no prompt could have anticipated.

By the time he hung up, the panic had receded. Trust held firm, and an actual way forward opened up.

Also Read: The sovereign threshold: Why airtight AI decisions are paralysing executive teams

Sitting in the dim glow of the monitors afterward, the lesson crystallised with absolute clarity.

I had spent months trying to turn myself into a faster processor, convinced that eliminating operational drag would make me indispensable. But that night showed me the trap: optimisation is a race to zero. When you automate away your quirks, your hesitation, and your presence, you automate away the only reason people trust you.

I walked away from the endless productivity hack because an agent’s output is only ever an echo of someone else’s playbook. What people actually bet on (what navigates ambiguous chaos, holds relationships together, and sparks real insight) is the uncopyable fingerprint of lived experience and personal presence.

My human edge isn’t a sharper workflow or a clever checklist. My human edge is me.

Let the agents run the logistics. Automate your baseline until the operational floor takes care of itself. But when a decision carries weight, when trust is on the line, and when a relationship matters, refuse the shortcut. Step away from the dashboard, lean directly into the human friction, and do the work only you can do.

—

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 I automated my entire life with AI agents. Then a 2 am voice note exposed the lie appeared first on e27.

During five weeks in the United States, I spent much of my time in New York exploring the intersection of blockchain, finance, and emerging technology. I attended Avalanche Summit, spoke about stablecoins for emerging markets during UN Blockchain Week, and observed how conversations around blockchain were evolving beyond crypto trading.

What interested me most was not which blockchain attracted the most attention. It was a more practical question: what needs to happen before tokenisation becomes a useful financial product rather than another technology demonstration?

For Southeast Asian startups, this distinction matters. The region has entrepreneurs exploring tokenised assets, digital payments, and blockchain infrastructure, but technical feasibility is only one part of building a sustainable business.

Wall Street is exploring a different kind of blockchain market

In March 2026, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), part of Intercontinental Exchange, announced a memorandum of understanding with Securitise to support the development of tokenised securities. Securitise was named the first digital transfer agent eligible to mint blockchain-native securities for corporate and exchange-traded fund issuers on the planned NYSE-affiliated Digital Trading Platform. The initiative includes work on ownership records, on-chain settlement, and the operational standards needed for tokenised securities. In September 2026, Ava Labs disclosed that the NYSE had spent approximately a year testing Avalanche technology for potential use in tokenised securities infrastructure.

The significance is not simply that a major exchange is exploring blockchain. It is that the conversation is moving into the infrastructure behind securities markets: who records ownership, how transactions settle, which intermediaries are responsible, and how investor protections are maintained.

These are not problems a blockchain can solve on its own. A token representing a financial asset does not automatically confer legally enforceable ownership, make an asset liquid, or remove the need for compliance. That is where many tokenisation pitches need to become more specific. A compelling demonstration is not the same as a commercially viable financial product.

In October 2026, BNY and Citadel Securities completed what BNY described as the first use of tokenised assets on a major tri-party repo platform: a two-year US Treasury note settled within minutes on BNY’s private digital ledger before being used as collateral for overnight financing. For Southeast Asian startups, the signal is clear: the next opportunity lies not in tokenisation hype alone, but in building compliant infrastructure that makes real assets, collateral, and institutional capital move more efficiently.

Also Read: Asia’s US$4T tokenisation boom: Why the region will lead the global financial revolution by 2030

The technology is only one part of the equation

Consider BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, known as BUIDL. Launched in 2024 and tokenised through Securitise, the fund expanded to additional blockchain networks, including Avalanche, in November of that year. The expansion demonstrated how a tokenised financial product could be made available across multiple blockchain ecosystems.

Avalanche is also the technology underpinning FIFA’s dedicated blockchain, launched for FIFA Collect in 2025. The platform supports digital collectibles and fan experiences, illustrating a different application from tokenised investment funds. These examples involve different products, users, and business models. They should not be treated as interchangeable proof that every asset or organisation needs its own blockchain.

Instead, they raise useful questions for founders: What does a dedicated network enable that an existing platform cannot? Does moving an asset on-chain improve distribution, settlement, transparency, or user experience? And are those improvements valuable enough for customers to adopt the product? The answers depend on the use case, not the popularity of the underlying technology.

The conversations I joined in New York kept returning to a central question for Southeast Asian founders: how can blockchain move beyond technical demonstrations to solve real financial problems? That is the lesson I would bring back to Southeast Asia: start with the problem, not the token.

Southeast Asia is already exploring the institutional path

The region does not need to wait for New York to invent its tokenisation market.

Singapore’s Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) established Project Guardian to bring policymakers and financial institutions together to explore asset tokenisation. Its work spans tokenised funds, bonds, foreign exchange, and other financial products, with attention to interoperability, custody, settlement, and regulatory requirements. MAS has also reported live implementations emerging from the initiative.

This is an important model because it treats tokenisation as a market-structure challenge, not just a technology rollout. Financial institutions need standards, counterparties, operational processes, and a clear understanding of how a new product fits existing rules.

Also Read: Real world tokenisation fireside chat with Anndy Lian: Unpacking the landscape

The lesson for Southeast Asian founders is that regional opportunities will not be identical across countries. Singapore’s financial-market infrastructure and regulatory initiatives differ from the conditions in Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, or Thailand. A product that works in one jurisdiction may need a different legal structure, distribution model, or compliance approach in another.

The bridge between global infrastructure and local markets

New York gave me a closer view of the institutions and infrastructure providers shaping the next phase of blockchain-based finance. My work across Southeast Asian startup communities has also shown me why international connections matter: local founders may have a strong product idea but need access to technical expertise, distribution partners, capital, or regulatory knowledge to turn it into a viable business. The opportunity is not to import every model developed in the United States. It is to understand what those models solve, then identify which problems are relevant to Southeast Asian customers.

For founders, that means starting with customer needs and working backward toward the technology. For investors and ecosystem builders, it means evaluating tokenisation projects on commercial traction, legal clarity, and the quality of their partnerships, not just the size of the opportunity they claim to address. Tokenisation may reshape parts of financial infrastructure, but the technology itself is not the business model.

—

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 Start with the problem, not the token: What Wall Street’s tokenisation push means for Southeast Asian founders appeared first on e27.

Strip Malaysia out of the numbers, and Southeast Asia’s public markets in 2026 look less like a listing venue and more like a waiting room.

Southeast Asia recorded 56 initial public offerings (IPOs) raising US$3 billion in the first nine months of 2026, according to EY data released on Thursday. That is down from 76 listings and US$3.45 billion a year earlier, a 26 per cent fall in deal count and a 13 per cent drop in proceeds.

Also Read: 48 PE investors, US$3.96B deployed, and not a single IPO exit in five years. Something is broken.

The third quarter was bleaker still. Twenty IPOs raised US$500 million, against 26 listings worth US$2.1 billion in the same quarter of 2025. In money terms, that is a fall of roughly 76 per cent.

One market, two-thirds of the deals

Malaysia logged 38 IPOs raising US$1.62 billion in the nine-month period, up from 37 listings and US$992 million last year. Proceeds rose about 63 per cent. Put another way, Malaysia accounted for 68 per cent of the region’s listings and more than half of the capital raised.

It kept going in the third quarter, too, with nine IPOs raising US$167.2 million, up from eight deals worth US$94 million. Nghia Trung Nguyen (Neil) of Ernst & Young PLT’s capital markets team said the stronger proceeds point to continued investor appetite for quality companies with compelling growth prospects.

The caveat is size. Malaysia’s average third-quarter deal raised under US$19 million. Bursa Malaysia is winning on breadth, not on the kind of blockbuster that moves regional league tables, and this is happening in a country whose Budget 2027 handed startups US$110.4 million while the bigger cheques went elsewhere.

Singapore lists more, raises less

Singapore had eight IPOs raising US$1.28 billion, compared with seven listings and US$1.54 billion a year earlier. More deals brought in 17 per cent less money. In the third quarter, three IPOs raised US$227.6 million, down from six that raised US$1.53 billion, a drop of around 85 per cent.

Chan Yew Kiang, EY’s Asean IPO Leader, credited the Equity Market Development Programme, launched in February 2025, with injecting liquidity into local exchanges. He also said “more needs to be done by corporates to improve liquidity and post-IPO performance.” That is a polite way of describing a market where the region’s most anticipated tech IPO of the year turned out to be a landlord.

The Philippines and Vietnam do not appear in EY’s tally at all. Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand account for every one of the 56 deals, even though GCash operator Mynt won SEC approval in September for an offering of up to US$1.63 billion.

Indonesia’s empty first half

Indonesia’s contraction was the sharpest. Seven listings raised US$121.3 million, against 23 IPOs worth US$919.6 million a year earlier, an 87 per cent collapse in proceeds. EY describes the country’s third quarter as “some improvement”, but six IPOs against nine last year is still a decline. The more striking detail is that six of Indonesia’s seven listings came in the third quarter, which means the region’s most populous market managed one IPO in the whole first half.

Also Read: Why Southeast Asian agritech must build for acquisitions, not IPOs

Thailand was thinner still, with three IPOs raising US$21.3 million, down from eight deals worth US$57.6 million. Two third-quarter listings brought in US$10.9 million. That is a slim runway for an ecosystem where corporate investors are gaining power as venture funding retreats, and where AI group Amity is reshaping its cap table ahead of a planned listing.

EY blames the backdrop

Chan listed the reasons. Regulatory reforms across the region and a muted economic outlook dampened sentiment in the second quarter. Conflicts in the Middle East and near-term uncertainty made aspirants cautious. He also pointed to weak post-IPO performance and the US Federal Reserve’s rate hike.

All of that is real, but most of it applies everywhere. The same macro headwinds did not stop Asia Pacific from posting its strongest numbers in years. The more telling admission is about aftermarket performance: issuers and their bankers have watched recent listings trade poorly and decided to wait.

Chan was cautiously optimistic about one escape route. Regulatory changes in the US and China, he said, could push companies towards cross-border listings in Southeast Asia, although “the process can be long and complex.” For now, that is a hope rather than a pipeline.

Greater China took the lunch

Asia Pacific recorded 399 IPOs raising US$93.2 billion in the first nine months, up 14 per cent in volume and 79 per cent in proceeds. In the third quarter alone, 151 IPOs raised US$45.9 billion, double the US$22.8 billion of a year earlier. EY attributes most of the growth to the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, helped by southbound capital flows, strong domestic liquidity, and the growing use of anchor investors and pre-IPO financing structures.

Globally, 908 IPOs raised US$290 billion, a 153 per cent jump in proceeds even as deal count slipped 2 per cent. Southeast Asia’s share of Asia Pacific proceeds works out to about 3 per cent, and about 1 per cent of the global total. The average global IPO raised roughly US$319 million. The average Southeast Asian one raised around US$54 million.

For founders, the gap is the story. Capital is flowing to scale, to AI and to deep liquidity pools. The AI exit window is wide open, but Southeast Asia isn’t standing anywhere near it, while India’s IPO boom is rewriting the exit playbookfor the same global investors Southeast Asian startups are courting.

Also Read: Hong Kong and Taiwan founders are cheering the AI boom. Southeast Asia isn’t in the room

Nguyen’s advice to would-be issuers was to be “realistic about market timing and investor expectations.” He said a strong equity story backed by sound fundamentals, governance and a clear growth strategy will decide who lists successfully. Read plainly, the market is rewarding boring, profitable companies, and Southeast Asia’s venture-backed class of 2026 has not yet shown it can be either.

The post Malaysia carried Southeast Asia’s IPO market in 2026. The rest of the region went quiet appeared first on e27.

Young Singaporeans are the best prepared in the Commonwealth to ride the AI wave, according to a new index. The more useful lesson for Southeast Asia, however, sits with Australia, the country in third place: having the technology is the easy part.

The Ayre Index, launched this week at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua and Barbuda, scores all 56 member states on how well their 15- to 29-year-olds are positioned to benefit from AI. Singapore leads with 77.6 out of 100, followed by Malta on 75, Australia on 71.0, Britain on 70.8 and Canada on 70.2.

Also Read: Malaysia wants 300,000 AI jobs by 2030. Talent will decide if it gets there

The bar is not low. Only 15 of the Commonwealth’s 56 countries meet the study’s readiness benchmark of 53, while 41 fall below it. New Zealand finishes ninth and India eleventh.

Top of a very uneven class

Singapore’s win deserves some context. The Commonwealth is a club of very unequal economies, and Malawi and Lesotho finished last, with only Mauritius, South Africa and Nigeria among the Commonwealth’s 21 African members reaching the benchmark. Beating that field is not the same as topping a global ranking.

The researchers are also careful about what they measured. They caution that the index tracks conditions associated with readiness rather than the AI competence of individual young people. In other words, it scores the soil, not the crop.

Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei are all Commonwealth members, but the published materials do not disclose where Malaysia or Brunei landed. That is a pity for a country where only 37 per cent of 163,000 workers are getting AI training.

Australia’s access-to-jobs problem

Australia’s scorecard is where the index gets interesting. The country scores 8.7 out of 10 for access to technology and 7.5 for digital and AI capability. On conditions that support decent jobs, business creation and the move into employment, it scores just 5.3.

The foundations are also slipping. A 2025 national assessment found that 37 per cent of Year 10 students met the national standard for digital literacy, down from 46 per cent in 2022.

Canberra’s states are responding. Queensland is rolling out Corella, an AI platform for teachers and students in state schools. Victoria has launched an A$8.2 million (about US$5.4 million) programme to train 1,300 workers in AI. That is a meaningful start, but small against an estimated 5.4 million Australians aged 15 to 29.

The same pattern runs through Southeast Asia: high device and app adoption, weaker routes into good work. Banks may insist that AI will create jobs, but the region should read the fine print first, especially as AI reshapes the entry-level tech roles young people have traditionally used as a first rung.

The US$53 billion maybe

Using International Monetary Fund scenarios, the researchers estimate AI could make Australia’s economy A$80.6 billion (roughly US$53 billion) larger after ten years. The range runs from A$40.9 billion in the conservative case to A$120.3 billion in the optimistic one, a near threefold spread.

Also Read: Is our talent pipeline ready for the AI economy? Not in the way we think

That spread is the honest part of the number. Modelled gains of this kind depend on assumptions about adoption, productivity and policy that no index can lock in. “Could” is doing a lot of work.

Professor C. Justin Robinson of the University of the West Indies’ Five Islands Campus put the stakes more plainly. “We need to make sure that the next generation will be able to do more than just consume AI products made elsewhere,” he said. Southeast Asian founders will recognise the worry: Hong Kong and Taiwan are cheering the AI boom while Southeast Asia isn’t in the room.

Who is grading the test

Readers should also know who built the index. The Ayre Think Tank was founded by Antiguan-Canadian philanthropist Calvin Ayre, better known as the founder of online gambling brand Bodog. In 2017, US prosecutors dropped felony charges against him after he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour charge of being an accessory after the fact to the transmission of wagering information. He is also closely associated with Bitcoin SV, a controversial bitcoin spinoff, and more about the index is hosted on calvinayre.com.

None of that invalidates research built on 1,128 sources covering some 732 million young people. It does mean the index is a privately funded project launched in its founder’s home country, not an independent multilateral assessment, and should be read that way.

Ayre’s own pitch is pragmatic. He told delegates that what matters is giving young people “the skills and the chance to get ahead” to start businesses, find jobs or build something themselves. India, already showing the world what AI will do to jobs and education, is a reminder of what scale looks like. Thailand, where AI literacy is reaching office workers rather than the 63 per cent in informal employment, shows how easily that chance skips most of the workforce.

Also Read: Why some Gen Z graduates are skipping AI degrees entirely, and getting better jobs because of it

The takeaway for the region is not who came first. Singapore and Australia have largely solved access. Neither has yet shown it can turn connected, AI-literate young people into founders and well-paid employees at scale, and as Gen Z needs skills AI can’t replicate more than another AI course, that is where governments should be judged. “Governments now have to decide what they’re going to do about it,” Ayre said. On that, at least, he is right.

The post Singapore tops a new Commonwealth AI readiness index, but Australia’s results show where the real gap lies appeared first on e27.