Southeast Asia’s e-commerce story has long been framed as a consumer triumph: cheap prices, endless deals, and frictionless convenience. But this model is beginning to show strain where it matters most: at the merchant level.
What makes the current moment interesting is not just rising platform costs, but the growing disconnect between headline metrics and lived reality. A 13.5 per cent take rate sounds manageable until sellers account for advertising, logistics, and incentives that can push total costs beyond 30 per cent. At that point, scale becomes less about growth and more about survival.
Yet merchants remain locked in. Platforms still control demand, and leaving them often means losing visibility altogether. That dependence is the real moat, and the real risk.
The bigger question is what breaks first: seller margins or the subsidy-driven pricing model. If the ecosystem cannot transition from incentives to structural efficiency, the current equilibrium may not hold.
For founders and investors, the opportunity is shifting. The next wave may not be about owning transactions, but about helping merchants survive them.
Regional
SEA merchants trapped in a high-cost e-commerce squeeze: While Shopee’s GAAP take rate hit 13.5%, sellers report all-in costs exceeding 30% of GMV; yet platform dependence, with 85% of regional commerce flowing through major players, makes exit feel like voluntary invisibility.
Shopee, TikTok Shop, and Lazada now control SEA e-commerce: Platform GMV in Southeast Asia reached US$157.6B in 2025, up 22.8%, but Shopee, TikTok Shop, and Lazada now command 98.8%of regional platform commerce, leaving no room for another large horizontal marketplace.
Quick commerce is a fight for frequency, not just speed: MomentumWorks argues that platforms like Shopee, Grab, and Lazada are using instant delivery not to win a logistics race, but to build habitual urban demand; the platform that wins habit wins far more than any single basket.
Vietnam’s Farmnet secures US$11.75M institutional loan: TechCoop’s trading arm raised a senior secured loan from impact investor Symbiotics, the first offshore institutional borrowing by a Vietnam-incorporated TechCoop entity, to scale agricultural commodity trading across 641 co-operatives nationwide.
Indonesia’s Baskit raises US$9.9M to take supply chain model regional: The profitable AI-enabled distribution startup, backed by Cento Ventures and HSBC Innovation Banking, is expanding into the Philippines after three years mastering Indonesia’s fragmented offline trade channels.
Choco Up launches US$30M private credit facility for APAC SMEs: Partnering with tech-driven credit specialist CHUAN, Singapore’s Choco Up is targeting Asia’s US$2.5T SME funding gap with AI-powered underwriting that promises approvals in hours, not months.
Animoca Brands secures Hong Kong stablecoin licence: Through its joint venture Anchorpoint, with Standard Chartered and HKT, Animoca is one of only two entities out of 36 applicants to receive an HKMA stablecoin issuer licence, gaining a regulated settlement rail for digital assets.
eFishery founder faces 10-year jail term in Indonesia: Prosecutors asked the Bandung District Court to sentence Gibran Huzaifah after he admitted to inflating the aquaculture startup’s revenue, with alleged losses exceeding 69B rupiah and investor confidence severely damaged.
TikTok disables 780,000 underage accounts in Indonesia: TikTok became the first platform to report compliance action under Government Regulation No. 17/2025, disabling accounts held by users under 16, while Roblox failed to fully comply due to lingering stranger-chat features.
Indonesia’s e-commerce child safety rules spark industry confusion: Ministerial Regulation 9 of 2026 requires platform self-assessments to set child access limits, but industry players are questioning whether high-risk classifications were assigned to major marketplaces before those assessments were even completed.
Nadiem questions Chromebook corruption loss calculation: A LinkedIn post by Gojek co-founder Nadiem Makarim argued that trial testimony, including from resellers and procurement officials, challenges the 1.5T rupiah state-loss figure cited by prosecutors, noting two independent audits found no markup.
Singapore businesses hit an AI automation wall: A HubSpot survey of 700+ local business leaders found that while nearly two-thirds use AI daily, only 18% have deployed fully autonomous agents, with data quality and legacy integration gaps becoming more acute, not less, as organisations scale up.
Interviews & Features
From chatbots to creators: Indonesia’s AI startups to watch: A new wave of Indonesian startups is applying AI across finance, healthcare, content, and commerce, highlighting how local innovation is shaping practical, scalable solutions in Southeast Asia’s evolving digital economy.
Share2Inspire founder: your CV isn’t failing, it’s being misread: Samuel Rolo, a veteran of Deloitte and AstraZeneca, built a career intelligence platform that scores CVs against applicant tracking systems — arguing most rejections stem from formatting and presentation failures rather than lack of capability.
A founder built an AI agent for himself, then turned it into a micro-SaaS: What started as a personal productivity tool called Seraphina, handling content, replies, and community management, grew to 2,000 users and became a layered business model spanning SaaS, education, and consulting.
Southeast Asia’s GameFi markets each play different roles in Web3: A Vietnamese expat living in Manila argues that the Philippines is a consumer-amplifier, Indonesia a scale-user market, and Vietnam a builder hub, with the 2026 gaming market projected at US$14.86B and maturing toward fun-first, stablecoin-integrated models.
Singapore’s AI adoption gap: from tools to real-world impact: Experts from AI Singapore, JJ Innovation, and Knovel Engineering say adoption lags not from reluctance but from poor data readiness, cultural resistance, and a critical need for “plus-skilling” — upskilling existing roles rather than wholesale retraining.
International
OpenAI to spend over US$20B on Cerebras chips over three years: The deal, which could give OpenAI warrants for up to a 10% stake if spending hits US$30B, reflects surging demand for AI inference computing and a US$1B commitment toward funding new data centres.
Some OpenAI investors question its US$852B valuation: After two product roadmap shifts in six months and a recent US$122B raise, backers worry the enterprise and coding pivot could weaken ChatGPT’s position against Anthropic and a resurgent Google ahead of a potential IPO.
Perplexity’s revenue jumps 5x to US$500M: CEO Aravind Srinivas announced the revenue leap, from US$100M, alongside 34% headcount growth, with the AI search startup targeting a further 2x revenue increase in 2026 using the same lean team and its Computer product.
SoftBank raises US$3.6B in high-yield bonds amid AI debt surge: The sale, comprising US$1.5B in dollar notes and €1.8B in euro bonds, came as its AI investment push drove borrowing costs higher, with its 10-year dollar coupon at a record 8.5% and shares down 35% since November.
Snap cuts 1,000 jobs as AI takes over code generation: With AI now producing over 65% of new code, Snap is laying off 16% of its workforce and closing 300 open roles, expecting annualised savings of more than US$500M by the second half of the year.
Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings to exit in June: Following a failed Warner Bros Discovery merger and a stock drop of about 9%, Hastings will not stand for re-election as Netflix posts Q1 revenue of US$12.25B, up 16%, while forecasting its slowest growth in a year.
Saudi PIF raises Lucid investment with US$550M in convertible stock: The funding accompanies Uber’s additional US$200M commitment and a purchase commitment of at least 35,000 Lucid vehicles, as the EV maker expands its robotaxi fleet ambitions.
Nas Daily creator raises US$27M for AI business builder: Nuseir Yassin’s Nas.com secured the Series A round led by Khosla Ventures, with 500 Global, V Ventures, and Factorial Capital also participating, though valuation and use of funds were not disclosed.
Naver plans IPO for Naver Financial after Dunamu share swap: The deal would give Naver Financial full ownership of Upbit operator Dunamu, targeting a listing within five years, though Korea’s proposed Digital Asset Basic Act and an ongoing antitrust review could affect structure and timing.
Robotaxi market projected to reach US$168B by 2035: Counterpoint Research links the forecast to AI advances, larger fleets, and wider commercial rollouts, with the US and China accounting for most deployments, led by Waymo, Tesla, Baidu’s Apollo Go, WeRide, and Pony.ai.
India’s AI firms pursue acquisitions to build full-stack capabilities: As enterprise clients consolidate vendors and shift from trials to larger deployments, Tracxn recorded five deals in four months, including C5i’s US$45M-US$50M acquisition of UK-based Datavid.
Cybersecurity
DeFi faces twin blows from falling yields and a US$285M hack: Lending rates on Aave have dropped below the US Federal Reserve’s benchmark, while a North Korean-linked group’s theft from Drift has shaken confidence in the US$97B sector as firms pivot toward tokenised traditional assets.
AML compliance is becoming PropTech’s biggest opportunity: With Australia’s Tranche 2 reforms bringing 80,000 real estate professionals under AML obligations from July 2026, and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan tightening rules, founders who build identity verification and beneficial ownership tools are entering a mandated, rapidly growing market.
Semiconductor
TSMC expands 3nm production across Taiwan, Arizona, and Japan: The chipmaker is building new 3nm lines in Taiwan for H1 2027 mass production, with its second Arizona fab set for H2 2027 and a second Japan plant using the 3nm process targeting 2028 — all driven by AI, automotive, and IoT demand.
Nvidia CEO warns US AI export limits are backfiring: Jensen Huang argues that restricting advanced hardware forces rivals to build independent systems, framing the real technology race as a contest over energy grids and software ecosystems rather than chip speed alone.
China’s semiconductor and robotics sectors lead AI-driven hiring: Data from 51job and Zhaopin shows electronics and semiconductors drew 1.5x more applications than other sectors, robotics recruitment rose 36.6% year-on-year, and demand for AI engineers is running three times supply, pushing salaries to US$95,000 for generative AI roles.
AI
The next AI race is being fought in the physical world: As AI expands into connected devices, wearables, and industrial systems, trust — not model quality — becomes the decisive factor for enterprise adoption, with reliability, latency, privacy, and resilience under imperfect conditions determining which companies scale.
Why founders cannot afford to outsource judgment to AI: Drawing on Gojek’s and Grab’s founding stories, this essay argues that Southeast Asia’s regulatory fragmentation and cultural complexitymean contextual judgment, which AI cannot replicate, remains a founder’s deepest moat and most durable competitive advantage.
The agentic economy needs a new management discipline: As AI agents take over entry-level tasks and hybrid workforces emerge, the author coins “H-AgR”, Human and Agent Resources, arguing that Singapore’s January 2026 AI Governance Framework sets a regulatory floor, but enterprises must build governance structures well above it.
AI adoption in APAC is a customer acquisition problem, not just an ethics one: Western-trained AI marketing tools systematically deprioritise underserved segments, which are often less saturated and more loyal once reached, making bias correction a growth strategy, not a compliance exercise, for APAC startups.
Inclusive AI isn’t optional; it’s Asia’s competitive edge: With Asia holding 60% of the world’s population across linguistically diverse and economically varied communities, AI built without inclusion baked in will not just replicate bias — it will scale it — making DEI-AI literacy a leadership imperative, not an HR function.
NTU researchers build AI-powered biochip for 20-minute disease detection: The Singapore team’s platform combines nanophotonic structures with AI image analysis to simultaneously detect three disease-linked microRNAs, achieving over 99% accuracy in lab tests without requiring PCR amplification.
Thought Leadership
Why Southeast Asian startup founders should flow, not force: Drawing on psychology, Daoism, and physics, this column argues that the most durable startups align with structural macro trends rather than force outcomes, and that founder mindset coherence is not soft advice, but operational infrastructure.
Narrative clarity is a strategic advantage in SEA’s tough market: As investors tighten scrutiny and customers compare across borders, the companies that scale in Southeast Asia will be those that articulate a clear, consistent story, not just those with the strongest technology.
The advice trap: true stories missing their conditions: Most business advice shared on conference stages is accurate, but stripped of the market timing, team dynamics, and sequencing that made it work, meaning founders who follow maps drawn for different terrain often fail not from bad judgment, but from misapplied wisdom.
Digital growth in Asia: how startups can avoid costly pitfalls: From overlooking mobile-first design to ignoring local payment methods, neglecting data analytics, and treating PR as an afterthought, nine common digital marketing mistakes are quietly killing startups across Asia’s fast-growing but fragmented digital economies.
AI is redefining software development and CEOs must lead: Generative AI tools are accelerating development cycles and creating new roles like prompt engineers and AI workflow architects, but organisations clinging to outdated delivery models risk being outpaced by leaner competitors who have aligned leadership, talent, and process around AI.
The missing rung: how automation is quietly breaking the career pipeline: AI has not just replaced repetitive jobs; it has eliminated the entry-level roles that once served as informal training grounds, creating a generation of workers entering management without the foundational decision-making experience grunt work once provided.
Asia’s logistics startups are turning to AI to solve the last-mile puzzle: With 253M online shoppers projected by 2030 and a 15% failed delivery rate in COD markets, AI-powered route planning, demand forecasting, and dispatch automation are cutting fuel costs by 20% and improving delivery times by 30% across the region.
In the age of AI, people matter more than ever: Vietnam, Singapore, and Thailand are all investing heavily in AI literacy programmes, but the real edge for organisations lies in creating psychological safety, rewarding results over hours, and actively funding employee upskilling — not just deploying better tools.
Why founders should stop hustling and start automating: Manual workflows are a growth ceiling, not a badge of honour, and using tools already at hand like Excel, Google Sheets, and Airtable to build systems that run without the founder is what separates sustainable scaling from perpetual firefighting.
APAC’s esports broadcast innovation is rewriting the global playbook: Driven by mobile-first audiences in Indonesia and the Philippines, data-hungry viewers in Korea, and creator-led communities in India, Southeast Asia’s demand for multi-angle streams, real-time analytics overlays, and localised production is redefining what fans expect from live competition globally.
Asia’s water crisis needs blockchain, IoT, and AI, not desalination alone: With 12 of the world’s 17 most water-stressed nations in Asia and a US$800B infrastructure gap, smart water grids powered by IoT sensors and AI forecasting, combined with blockchain-enabled transparency, offer a more sustainable path than ecologically damaging desalination.
AI doesn’t talk nonsense; you just need to learn how to talk to it: Many first-time users give up on AI after receiving poor responses, but the problem is rarely the model, it is the question. Treating prompts as directions, not commands, and asking AI to critique its own output transforms the experience dramatically.
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