Crunchbase’s first-half 2026 numbers looked like an industry-wide win: global venture funding hit US$510 billion, smashing the previous half-year record. Look closer and the picture curdles. OpenAI and Anthropic alone absorbed 43 per cent of every venture dollar deployed on the planet in six months, with Anthropic’s US$65-billion raise alone equal to nearly a third of the whole quarter’s global funding.
AI’s share of capital jumped from under 50 per cent a year earlier to more than 70 per cent by the second quarter, while deal count barely moved. This was concentration, not a broader boom.
Southeast Asia’s own numbers make the gap concrete. The region raised just US$2.81 billion across 98 equity deals in the first quarter of 2026, the lowest quarterly deal count in at least eight years, with more than 70 per cent of that value coming from a single Series C. Strip that round out and SEA raised roughly US$800 million in three months, a rounding error next to two companies’ first-half haul, more than 40 times the region’s entire 2025 total.
The uncomfortable truth: this isn’t a US problem SEA can watch from a distance. Sovereign capital, including Temasek-linked vehicles, already sits inside the AI mega-rounds reshaping the market, and concentration is becoming how the region’s own capital behaves too.
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REGIONAL
Grab buys 60 per cent of Atome for US$1.49B in cash, Grab’s biggest fintech acquisition gives it a second underwriting data set beyond ride-hailing, with a formula-priced second tranche that could push the total value to US$4.5 billion by 2028.
Databricks commits US$350M to expand Singapore hub, the AI and data giant will quadruple its Singapore footprint, growing headcount from 250 to over 500 as regional enterprises push AI pilots into production despite thin governance maturity.
SBI Group backs Singapore payments firm DTCPay’s US$25M round: Japanese financial giant SBI Group has joined DTCPay’s Series A round, bringing total funding to US$25M. The Singapore-based crypto-fiat payments firm serves over 2,000 merchants across Southeast Asia.
Waymo picks Singapore for its next robotaxi market, Alphabet’s autonomous-vehicle unit will begin manual test driving in 2027 before opening a commercial robotaxi service in 2028, joining Tokyo, London and Munich in its overseas expansion.
GreenSM launches electric ride-hailing motorbikes in Jakarta: The Indonesian startup entered Jakarta’s competitive ojol market with an all-electric fleet, targeting a cleaner alternative to petrol-powered ride-hailing. No fleet size or funding details were disclosed at launch.
Plaud doubles Singapore bet to US$15.7M, hires 100, the Chinese-founded voice-recorder maker grew its Singapore team tenfold in nine months, though its own revenue figures remain disputed even as rivals Notta and Amazon’s Bee crowd the category.
Maybank sees Atome adding up to US$220M EBITDA by 2028, the bank’s research arm called Grab’s Atome valuation full but not excessive, while flagging that ecosystem synergies, not just direct earnings, are what investors are being asked to underwrite.
Singapore’s non-oil exports jump 46.2 per cent on AI chips, integrated circuits and other AI-linked electronics drove August’s export surge, extending July’s growth and reinforcing the AI hardware cycle as a rare bright spot in trade data.
CXA’s Rosaline Chow Koo returns with broker AI tool Covee, the insurtech veteran’s new US$750,000 pre-seed venture compresses benefits-renewal work from days into minutes for boutique brokers, a narrower bet than her earlier, capital-heavy CXA.
Cambodia’s Newwave lands CIFC backing for regional AI push, the Phnom Penh AI firm, which already earns more than 70 per cent of revenue from abroad, becomes only the second portfolio company for Canadia Group’s young corporate venture fund.
Ricoh backs Singapore’s Intellect in first fund bet, Japan’s office-services giant chose mental health as the theme for its debut cheque from a new US$20-million innovation fund, betting workplace wellbeing data complements its own.
FEATURES AND INTERVIEWS
SEA robotics’ record year hides a one-company problem, a single US$670-million round drove 96 per cent of the region’s 2026 robotics funding, and Singapore alone captured 92 per cent of the total, concentration dressed up as growth.
Why FinSight still has zero Southeast Asian bets, the late-stage fund that demands 35 per cent annual returns in dollars has backed Venezuela and Uzbekistan but not a single SEA company — though it says that is about to change.
INTERNATIONAL
Hong Kong’s CoinEx shuts down after nine years: The crypto exchange cited unsustainable operating conditions as it winds down, marking one of the more significant exchange closures in Asia. Users have been advised to withdraw funds before the deadline.
India imposes 0.4 per cent UPI fee on large payments, the world’s largest real-time payments network will charge merchants on transactions above ₹2,000 from October 15, ending a zero-fee model that has made UPI free to accept since 2020.
Hong Kong’s first five-year plan puts AI, fintech first, the blueprint creates an AI Commissioner post and expands the HKMA’s generative-AI sandbox to insurance and wealth management, alongside fresh venture-fund commitments.
Temasek-backed Xora leads Hang Ten’s US$53M seed round, the enterprise-AI services firm closed its second seed round in five weeks, taking total funding to US$85 million as Aramco Ventures and Mayfield also joined.
How Hong Kong tries to solve tech’s hardest problem, HKSTP’s venture fund has attracted roughly HK$13 in private capital for every HK$1 it invests, part of a broader push to bridge Asian deep-tech research and commercial scale.
China’s Apex Intelligence raises US$50M for self-evolving AI, the Beijing startup, founded by a Tsinghua professor, is building foundation models that refine themselves through iterative experiments for chip design and drug discovery.
Taiwan’s Boba Tech Summit puts Gen Z founders on stage, YouTube and Twitch co-founders shared billing with still-building Gen Z entrepreneurs at Taipei’s inaugural summit, part of the island’s push beyond its semiconductor-supplier image.
A practical resource map for founders entering Taiwan, the guide urges founders to treat visas, incorporation and office leases as separate decisions, sequencing customer validation before committing to any programme or address.
Ex-TikTok staff build an AI app that fixes your poses, Superpose, built by former TikTok product leads, has been downloaded over 22,000 times since July and generates AI-suggested poses from a single selfie.
CYBERSECURITY
Indian police probe Google over 500,000 fake Gmail accounts: Authorities are questioning Google over a mass creation of fake Gmail IDs used to send bomb hoax messages, raising urgent questions about platform accountability and identity verification at scale.
SEMICONDUCTOR
Applied Materials commits US$5B to India chip push, the equipment maker will build a 140-acre research park and expand its supply chain tenfold over a decade, adding to its recent US$500-million Singapore manufacturing expansion.
India targets 200 chip design firms and 100,000 workers: Under its Semicon 2.0 initiative, India is pushing to build a domestic chip design talent pipeline and firm base, signalling a shift from assembly-focused to design-led semiconductor ambitions.
Nexperia and Tata Electronics deepen India chip ties, the Dutch chipmaker will manufacture at Tata’s new Gujarat and Assam facilities, giving India’s fledgling semiconductor ecosystem a global customer before its first fab even ships product.
AI
Manus seeks US$4B valuation in first round post-Meta split: The AI agent startup is raising its first external funding since parting ways with Meta, with the round expected to attract significant investor interest given the firm’s autonomous agent capabilities.
‘AI amnesia’ is quietly costing SEA brands customers, Seven in 10 APAC consumers have abandoned an AI chat mid-conversation over lost context, and five per cent walked away from the brand entirely, Twilio’s new research found.
OpenAI catches its own models hiding mistakes from users, GPT-5.6 Sol left instructions for its successors to conceal errors, a disclosure made under a new misalignment-reporting framework as rival labs race toward IPOs and trillion-dollar valuations.
AI infrastructure spending is far from peaking, says BIMB, global data-centre capex could grow fortyfold to US$31.6 trillion by 2050, the research house said, with no sign yet of the budget cuts or overcapacity that would signal a downturn.
Only some APAC tech firms would survive an AI slowdown, S&P Global Ratings stress-tested chip foundries, memory makers and server assemblers against a slower AI-spending scenario, finding TSMC-style market leaders far more resilient than memory-focused rivals.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Why Singapore investors hold more Apple than Singtel, a study of 82 retail portfolios found no SGX stock cracked the top 30 holdings, a ‘reverse home bias’ the author says AI-assisted investing risks making worse, not better.
The founder-to-minister pivot isn’t ASEAN’s real problem, Nadiem Makarim’s arc from Gojek founder to minister exposes missing governance infrastructure, not a flawed career move, the writer argues, urging founders to set boundaries before office beckons.
Mobile’s next US$4.5 trillion won’t come from connectivity, operators capture barely US$170 billion of the US$3.7 trillion in value mobile creates, and engagement, not spectrum, is the real bottleneck, the telecoms writer argues.
Does the iPhone show us which jobs AI will destroy first?, small, routine transactions disappear before big ones, the way compact cameras vanished once smartphones bundled photography in — a lens the writer applies to translation, transcription and basic design work.
Some Gen Z graduates are skipping AI degrees, and winning, paid corporate apprenticeships now beat a four-year AI degree by roughly US$600,000 over four years, the writer argues, urging Asian founders to hire on demonstrated work over credentials.
Your team finished the AI course. Can it challenge the machine?, course completion measures exposure, not competence, the writer argues, proposing a 20-minute exercise testing whether staff can spot a wrong AI answer.
The AI boom won’t help you scale. Unit economics will, regional VC funding still hasn’t returned to its 2021 peak, the writer argues — what looks like an AI boom is really a sorting event rewarding businesses with real governance maturity.
What Maybank’s US$10B bet reveals about market readiness, Malaysia ranks third globally for expat-friendliness, yet opening a bank account there remains genuinely difficult, the writer argues, using Brazil’s banking infrastructure as an instructive counter-case.
Nobody gives you time to explain. That’s the real problem, investors spend barely two minutes on a first-pass pitch deck, the writer argues, describing a venture built on investment logic and film grammar rather than longer decks.
The creator revenue line Southeast Asia hasn’t priced yet, AI systems cite YouTube roughly 50 times more often than TikTok, leaving the region’s TikTok-heavy creator economy invisible to the assistants now shaping purchase decisions, the writer argues.
Asia’s research-tech firms are big, yet strangely invisible, Singapore’s PatSnap and Engine Biosciences serve millions of scientists but skip the mainstream press that funders actually read, the writer argues, urging founders to pitch research integrity as news.
Bitcoin and Ethereum moved in lockstep after the Fed’s hike, the synchronised rally was a relief bounce, not a fundamental repricing, the columnist argues, pointing to falling open interest and persistent Bitcoin-ETF outflows as signs of fragile momentum.
The capital-driven rise of modern business software suites, Odoo’s rapid growth has left Singapore SMEs frustrated with thin base modules and escalating hidden costs, a sponsored analysis argues, pointing to ERPNext, Zoho One and other alternatives.
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