Amilo has completed its fourth acquisition in four years, folding Vietnam-based cross-border specialist SG Link into its network as it chases a bigger prize: becoming the operating layer for Southeast Asian merchants selling overseas.
SG Link, now rebranded ShipX, connects sellers to more than 220 destinations and pools shipment volumes so smaller exporters can access freight rates usually reserved for bigger players, a real gap in a region where a merchant can list on Amazon or Shopify in minutes but still lose days to customs paperwork, tariff swings and vanishing parcels.
The deal is notable less for its size than for what it says about Amilo’s playbook: buy operators with a licence, a trade lane or a specialist capability, then migrate them onto one shared technology stack rather than leaving them to run separately. That repeatable model is now the company’s real bet, according to CEO Arun Mambully, who says AI is layered on top of that standardised base to sharpen routing, customs checks and customer support.
Amilo faces bigger rivals in Ninja Van, J&T Express and global players like DHL, but is wagering that owning the full stack, from warehousing to cross-border shipping, beats renting pieces of it.
REGIONAL
MoneyHero’s Q2 revenue slides 13% despite rising cash rewards: The Nasdaq-listed fintech aggregator’s second-quarter revenue fell to US$15.8M as cash incentives to users jumped 77% to US$5.1M, while its net loss for the first half widened 256% to US$7.95M.
Tesla incorporates Vietnam unit as VinFast dominates EV sales: Tesla Motors Vietnam has been registered in Ho Chi Minh City with US$3M in charter capital, a filing that signals US ambitions in a market where VinFast already holds 42% of car sales.
VinFast founder hands CEO roles to his two sons: Pham Nhat Vuong’s eldest son Quan Anh becomes VinFast Global CEO, while younger son Minh Hoang takes over ride-hailing arm GSM, as Vingroup hands control to a younger generation.
TrueMoney and Fireblocks bring blockchain payments to Thai users: Thailand’s leading e-wallet is partnering with Fireblocks to expand its baht-pegged THBT token under a central bank sandbox, letting up to 20,000 users swap and spend crypto without touching a seed phrase.
Google Cloud opens Singapore hub to build AI products globally: The new Singapore Engineering Center links AI research with product development, working with Grab and DBS on real-time multilingual models and agentic financial workflows for global deployment.
GXBank and IFC unlock US$110M in Malaysian MSME lending: Malaysia’s digital bank will extend credit to underserved micro-entrepreneurs after the World Bank’s IFC agreed to absorb early default risk on up to US$110M in loans.
Singapore takes 92% of SEA’s US$1.1B robotics funding: Southeast Asia’s robotics sector has raised US$1.1B across 51 companies since 2021, with Sharpa’s US$670M Series D alone driving a record US$696M haul in 2026 so far.
OpenAI names first APAC sales chief amid Singapore expansion: Former Elastic and Snowflake executive Sanjay Deshmukh will lead OpenAI’s commercial push in Asia Pacific as the company builds out a Singapore lab and eyes a five-floor office lease.
AI boom cushions Southeast Asia against tariff and weather risks: Moody’s Analytics says AI-driven exports and data-centre investment are propping up ASEAN growth at 4.8% this year even as tariffs, inflation and El Niño threaten the outlook.
Singaporean founders’ Lightsage raises US$4M for AI agent analytics: The San Francisco-based startup, founded by Jun Liang Lee and Sean Er, wants to help software companies understand why coding agents recommend rival products over theirs.
Philippine EV sales to grow 11% even as car market shrinks: BMI forecasts electric vehicle sales climbing to 32,776 units in 2026 as fuel costs and cheaper Chinese brands offset an 8.7% slide in overall vehicle sales.
FEATURES AND INTERVIEWS
Why Beyond Border thinks visas are now a founder’s job: Former Airbnb China COO Kum Hong Siew joins the Singapore-founded immigration platform as it expands into Latin America, with CEO Fred Ng debunking the ‘Einstein visa’ myth around O-1s.
The 90-second Japanese pitch that opens doors in Tokyo: A new guide from Blackbox JP argues that a short, imperfect self-introduction in Japanese shortens the ‘psychological distance’ foreign founders face more than fluency does.
INTERNATIONAL
Nvidia’s Huang tells Trump ‘we’re not going to let’ AI slow: Jensen Huang put President Trump on speakerphone at the All-In Summit after the pair dismissed Dario Amodei’s call to pace AI development, with Trump calling slowdown fears ‘a hoax’.
China calls AI-slowdown warnings ‘fear-mongering’: Beijing’s foreign ministry pushed back on Dario Amodei’s call to pace AI development, as Trump separately mocked the Anthropic CEO for ‘pretending to be a perfect little angel’.
Obama urges Democrats to make AI a ‘central agenda’: The former president told Hakeem Jeffries Democrats need “a very clear plan” on AI’s economic and safety risks once they regain the House, warning the technology is moving fast.
OpenAI buys smartphone camera startup Glass Imaging for US$300M: The Los Altos-based company, founded by ex-Apple engineers behind Portrait Mode, uses neural networks to improve smartphone photos — fuelling speculation about OpenAI’s own hardware ambitions.
Sam Altman rules out an OpenAI IPO before 2027: Altman said going public in 2026 would be ‘ill-advised’ given ongoing safety debates, even as OpenAI has filed confidentially and hired bankers for a future listing.
Larry Ellison cancels planned US$7.5B sale of Oracle stock: Oracle’s co-founder scrapped a filing to sell 50 million shares as the stock trades down 22% this year on heavy data-centre spending; the company gave no reason.
Roblox lets creators build games with AI and sell them off-platform: New tools unveiled at Roblox’s developer conference let creators publish AI-generated games as standalone apps and cash out via a new wallet, as the feature expands to Singapore.
Amazon Prime Video adds short-form news clips to chase TikTok: The streamer is rolling out on-demand local and national news clips to its News hub, joining Netflix, HBO Max and Disney+ in courting Gen Z viewers.
CYBERSECURITY
Revolut discloses customer data breach via fake government emails: Fraudsters impersonated a government agency’s email domain to extract customer IDs, passports and account statements from the British fintech, which says a ‘limited’ number of users were affected.
Trezor customers hit by phishing after email provider hack: A breach at marketing platform Brevo let hackers send 347,000 phishing emails to Trezor wallet owners, the second such incident in weeks.
SEMICONDUCTOR
Dutch chip-security firm Fortaegis raises US$50M Series A: Serendipity Capital led the oversubscribed round for Fortaegis, whose silicon-embedded encryption keys claim 200-times-faster connection speeds, as it scales production across the US, Europe, Singapore and Japan.
OpenAI deepens Samsung tie-up on next-generation chips: The expanded partnership points to tighter supply-chain coordination between frontier AI labs and Korean chipmakers as compute demand accelerates.
AI
Anthropic’s Amodei calls for AI labs to ‘pace the frontier’: Dario Amodei is committing Anthropic to embedded third-party safety evaluators and urging rivals to coordinate common standards, with Altman and Musk both voicing support.
Microsoft’s new AI code bars models from hacking or deception: The document sets ‘absolute constraints’ against cyberattacks, deepfakes and nuclear-weapons assistance, forbidding models from using deceptive methods to evade human oversight.
Fields Medallists accuse AI labs of threatening mathematics research: Twenty-five Fields Medal winners signed an open letter warning that AI labs racing to solve famous problems risk attribution disputes and discourage open research sharing.
Anthropic’s AI agent spent hundreds of pages fighting a CAPTCHA: A safety report transcript shows Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model spending most of a 1,022-page chain-of-thought log trying to bypass hCaptcha checks while planting malware on PyPI.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
The CLARITY Act vote could swing crypto to US$2.73T or US$2.6T: Anndy Lian argues a Senate cloture vote on crypto regulation is driving Bitcoin’s resilience even as a 5% Treasury yield and looming Fed hike batter tech stocks.
The Fed, not Bitcoin fundamentals, is driving crypto’s next move: Anndy Lian writes that Bitcoin and Ethereum are trading as risk assets ahead of the Fed’s rate decision, with US$76,000 and US$2,450 as key support levels.
AI doesn’t need crypto — but AI agents might: Astrid Dang argues blockchain may finally find product-market fit with machines rather than humans, as AI agents need wallets and stablecoins to pay for APIs autonomously.
Why most AI pilots succeed and then quietly fail at scale: Mahesh Tanwani’s six-move ‘Capability Cycle’ argues that Klarna’s stumble and recovery show scaling AI requires diagnosing failure and redesigning workflows, not just expanding a pilot.
Everyone has adopted AI, but few firms are ready for it: Jayce Tham writes that only 20% of Southeast Asian firmshave meaningfully scaled generative AI, with low employee trust undercutting Singapore’s high adoption numbers.
The SaaS apocalypse will be selective, not total: Muthhukumar Malaiiyyappan argues AI won’t turn companies into software builders but will let incumbents absorb features faster, leaving thin AI wrappers most exposed.
India’s IPO boom is changing where startups choose to list: Shashwat Tewary writes that domestic investors now fund roughly three-quarters of Indian IPOs, making a domestic listing a credible choice for founders once bound for New York.
Why middle powers like Britain must learn to prioritise: Shawn Balakrishnan argues that Singapore’s disciplined foreign policy offers a model for Western powers now facing diminished diplomatic capacity.
GPT-6 Astra moves faster — but marketing data hasn’t caught up: Aleks Farseev warns that OpenAI’s new computer-using agent finishes tasks in half the time of its predecessor, but risks automating bad decisions on fragmented data.
What Southeast Asian edutech can learn from AI’s limits: Daniel Brooks argues that AI education tools need to fit local languages and curricula, citing a World Bank review showing mixed edutech results in the region.
Using AI to win has nothing to do with productivity: Nabeel Mungaye argues that shared AI productivity gains cancel each other out — the ‘Red Queen Effect’ — and real advantage comes from extending a firm’s existing moat.
The missing link in your customer’s mobile app journey: Leo Vu argues that deep linking, not more ad spend, is the fix for fragmented mobile purchase journeys, pointing to Vietnamese brokerage MB Securities.
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