Southeast Asia’s financial services dealmaking held steady in the first half of 2026, with 31 disclosed M&A deals matching 2025 levels, even as disclosed deal value fell to US$936M from US$1.6B, according to EY’s latest financial services M&A analysis.
Wealth and asset management emerged as the standout gainer: deal volume nearly tripled to eight from three, while disclosed value jumped to US$145M from just US$800,000 a year earlier, reflecting rising demand from the region’s growing affluent population across Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand.
Banking and capital markets, still the largest segment by value, cooled to 14 deals worth US$669M, down from 20 deals worth US$1.1B, as regulation and legacy-system complexity slow full-scale acquisitions.
Insurance recorded more deals (nine versus eight) but smaller total value (US$123M versus US$478M). Foreign acquirers grew more selective (five deals, down from seven), but committed larger sums, US$410M versus US$344M, signalling international appetite for Southeast Asian financial assets persists despite near-term caution. EY expects larger transactions to return in the second half of 2026 if financing conditions improve.
REGIONAL
Malaysia stays Grab’s top market with US$622M in H1 revenue: The ride-hailing and delivery giant generated more revenue from Malaysia than any other market in the first half of 2026, underscoring the country’s outsized role in Grab’s recovery story.
ZUS Coffee weighs IPO to raise at least US$245M: The Malaysian coffee chain is exploring a public listing that could value it significantly higher than its last private round, signalling renewed investor appetite for SEA consumer brands.
VinFast and Gowa Motor to open 30 EV showrooms in Indonesia: Vietnam’s EV manufacturer is forming a joint venture with Indonesia’s Gowa Motor to accelerate its regional expansion amid intensifying competition from Chinese rivals.
Vietnam and Singapore firms to digitise cross-border LC verification: Technology companies from both countries are partnering to automate letter of credit verification, targeting a process still dominated by paper and manual checks.
Malaysia’s sovereign AI bet: Local context is the new startup moat
Malaysia’s AI Nation 2030 plan wants the country to move from an AI buyer to a producer, betting that locally trained models fluent in Bahasa Melayu can outperform generic global platforms in high-value domestic use cases.
Malaysia maps an inclusive AI future for farmers and small shops
Malaysia’s National AI Action Plan aims to give 1.5 million MSMEs and smallholders scalable access to AI tools, targeting up to 70% less manual labour in palm oil operations through shared platforms and vetted datasets.
Deepgram sets up APAC base in Singapore for multilingual Voice AI
Deepgram is establishing its Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore, backed by a strategic investment from EDBI, after seeing a 96% year-on-year jump in API requests across the region’s 20-plus markets.
INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
It’s not just tariffs: Why Chinese capital is flowing into ASEAN: KPMG’s Lisa Li tells e27 that Chinese firms are moving beyond tariff-dodging, drawn by Southeast Asia’s consumption potential and cheaper land and labour, with private firms now outpacing state-owned players.
Datakrew’s Hyundai pilot tackles the EV battery forecasting problem: Singapore’s Datakrew wrapped a year-long study with Hyundai CRADLE and GetGo, pulling 3.6B data points from 70 EVs to forecast battery health months in advance, within a claimed 3% prediction-error band.
Four lessons from GITEX Global: What Dubai’s AI playbook means for SEA: Sam Altman and UAE minister Omar Sultan Al Olama’s GITEX sessions revealed talent, not capital, as the real AI bottleneck, alongside energy supply emerging as AI’s next major constraint.
INTERNATIONAL
Anthropic’s annualised revenue surges to US$6.5B: The AI safety startup has seen explosive commercial uptake, with revenue growing rapidly as enterprise demand for Claude accelerates globally, putting pressure on OpenAI’s market dominance.
Uber and Pony.ai plan 2,000 robotaxis across Europe: The ride-hailing giant is expanding its autonomous vehicle push into European markets with Chinese AV firm Pony.ai, a deal that could reshape its long-term driver model.
SoftBank pours US$200M into construction robotics firm Gravis: The Japanese conglomerate’s latest bet targets construction automation, a sector it sees as ripe for disruption given chronic global labour shortages.
Groq valued at US$3.5B after fresh funding round: The AI chip inference startup closed a new round following its Nvidia deal, with investors betting its speed advantage over GPU-based rivals will hold as LLM demand scales.
Wispr raises US$280M at US$2B valuation beyond dictation: The voice AI startup is pushing into broader agentic use cases after its rapid growth in speech-to-text, backed by significant new capital at a unicorn valuation.
SpaceX officially closes its Cursor acquisition: The move confirms Elon Musk’s aerospace company is expanding into developer tools, with Cursor’s AI coding platform now folded into SpaceX’s growing technology portfolio.
Uber adds Zipline drones to its Eats delivery network: Zipline’s autonomous drones will fulfil food delivery orders through Uber Eats, marking a meaningful step toward commercial drone logistics at scale.
YouTube to count views from the first second of playback: The platform’s updated view-counting policy will affect creator metrics and ad measurement, with knock-on implications for how brands allocate digital spend.
Meta faces trial over social media addiction claims: Facebook and Instagram are under legal scrutiny in a landmark US trial that could set precedent for platform liability over user harm and algorithmic design.
AI automation startup Relay shuts down, staff joins Google Chrome: Despite early traction, Relay could not survive in an increasingly crowded agentic AI market, with its team acqui-hired into Google’s browser division.
SEMICONDUCTOR
Nvidia invests US$1.5B in SoftBank’s data centre unit behind OpenAI project: The chipmaker’s stake in SoftBank’s data centre developer deepens its position across the AI infrastructure stack and signals growing alignment between two of the industry’s most influential players.
NXP breaks ground on expanded Malaysia factory at 900,000 sq ft: The Dutch chipmaker’s facility expansion signals sustained foreign investment in Malaysia’s semiconductor manufacturing base, reinforcing the country’s role in global chip supply chains.
AI demand lifts Malaysia’s chip sector, but not every player wins
HSBC research shows Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam are primary beneficiaries of the AI infrastructure boom, though companies without direct AI exposure face rising memory-chip costs squeezing margins instead.
CYBERSECURITY
Apple users hit by spyware alerts in unprecedented numbers: Security investigators report a surge in spyware notifications sent to Apple users globally, raising urgent questions about the scale and origin of the targeting campaign.
AI
Agentic AI adoption doubles to 51% among Singapore firms: A ServiceNow survey found that more than half of Singapore businesses now deploy agentic AI, the sharpest year-on-year jump recorded, outpacing adoption rates in most comparable economies.
Alipay launches agentic commerce platform for Chinese merchants: The payments giant is giving merchants AI-powered tools to automate customer interactions and transactions, a move that could influence how SEA super-apps evolve their merchant offerings.
Anthropic CEO frames AI backlash as a trust crisis: Dario Amodei argues that public resistance to AI is not about the technology itself but about institutional credibility, calling on the industry to prioritise transparency over capability announcements.
Zuckerberg’s AI vision fails to convince sceptics: Analysts and observers push back on Meta’s AI roadmap, questioning whether its open-source strategy and consumer AI products can generate the returns the market expects.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
SEA solved distribution: Now fintech must scale on the balance sheet: Fathhi Mohamed argues Southeast Asia’s public payment rails have turned fintech into a utility business, where cheap, sticky deposits now matter more than another million app downloads.
Not every cheque keeps every door open for SEA founders: Surabhi Pandey writes that a funding round now carries a geopolitical footprint, urging founders to run due diligence on investors the way investors scrutinise them, to protect long-term strategic optionality.
AI won’t just automate tasks, it will repackage responsibilities: Daniel Tan argues the deeper shift isn’t task automation but the redesign of recurring responsibilities into reviewable, delegable systems, changing how individual contributors must think about ownership.
Your AI isn’t producing bad creative, your brief is: Aleks Farseev cites WARC research showing 88% of marketers produce more creative with AI, yet only 45% see a genuine quality lift, blaming stale demographic-only briefing.
Why Southeast Asia doesn’t need to pick a side in the AI race: Jan Alvin Pabellon argues the region’s advantage lies in connecting rival tech ecosystems rather than choosing between them, building trust infrastructure instead of competing on model scale.
AI is not the advantage, build what competitors cannot copy: Christopher Jackson urges SEA SMEs to protect know-how through trade secrets or patents rather than relying on AI-generated polish, which rivals can replicate just as quickly.
Strategic chokepoints: Designing leverage without owning everything: Niharika Ray argues durable market power comes from sitting at points where uncertainty must be resolved — trust, compliance, settlement — rather than from owning the entire value chain.
Social intrapreneurs can change the world too: Dr Erwin Chan writes that entrepreneurial change inside organisations doesn’t require founding a startup, just the discipline to pilot a scoped idea using existing budget and headcount.
The US$46,300 question: How low can Bitcoin go before buyers return: Anndy Lian notes Bitcoin’s Coinbase premium has stayed negative for 90 days as AI infrastructure spending diverts capital away from crypto, with a bear pennant pointing toward US$46,300.
Despite the rally, the CMC Fear and Greed Index stays at 39: Anndy Lian writes that Bitcoin’s 2.23% surge to US$64,300 and a cooling Fed rate outlook haven’t shifted sentiment, with the index still signalling market fear despite bullish technicals.
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