Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission has blocked Delivery Hero’s sale of foodpanda Taiwan to Grab, scuttling a US$600 million all-cash deal agreed in March. The regulator said the remedies on offer could not offset the harm to competition.
The sticking point is Uber. The US company holds about 13.1% of Grab, a legacy of their 2018 regional deal, and the commission argued the stake would blunt rivalry between a Grab-owned foodpanda and Uber Eats, even though Grab’s dual-class structure caps Uber’s votes at 3.9%. It also cited the 2018 merger itself, for which Singapore’s competition watchdog fined both companies about US$9.5 million. There is a further twist: Uber agreed in July to buy Delivery Hero, leaving it on every side of the table.
This is the second time in under two years that Taipei has stopped the sale, after it rejected Uber’s US$950 million bid in December 2024.
Foodpanda Taiwan generated US$1.8 billion in GMV last year, and the deal would have handed Grab just over half the market. Delivery Hero can appeal.
For Southeast Asia, the ruling is a preview: if Uber’s Delivery Hero deal closes, regulators across the region will face the same cap-table questions.
Editor.
REGIONAL
Singapore security robot maker Kabam Robotics to shut down: The startup gave customers no reason for the closure in its email. SingHealth has deployed its robots at hospital facilities, and it remains unclear what happens to existing deployments or staff; LinkedIn lists 54 people linked to the firm.
VinFast’s US$500M Philippine plant bets on exports, not local demand: Built for 200,000 vehicles a year, the plant could produce six times local EV demand forecast for 2026. Construction starts in Q1 2027, while VinFast’s Q2 loss from continuing operations widened 128% to US$1.2B.
Carro launches Singapore’s first car-loan securitisation at US$350M: The MAS-approved vehicle buys loans from subsidiary Genie Financial Services and lets multiple lenders join through notes or direct loans. Carro, which transacted over 120,000 vehicles across eight markets in FY2026, wants to diversify funding for regional expansion.
Malaysia’s US$110M startup push runs into a deal-matching problem: Budget 2027 tasks Khazanah’s Jelawang Capital and KWAP’s Dana Perintis with deploying US$110.4M into startups. Investors say money is not the bottleneck; finding everything meant to accompany it is the harder part.
Ex-PropertyGuru CEO’s Genie Health raises US$3M to unify health data: The Singapore startup’s seed round, led by the Nadathur family office, funds an app that pulls screening reports and wearables into one view, targeting health data now scattered across PDFs, smartwatches and clinic records.
Homage turns in-house care software into a product as Singapore ages: The home care company is commercialising the rostering and visit-note tools built for its own care managers, betting Singapore’s super-aged shift will lift demand for back-office automation across providers.
Thunes opens a real-time payout corridor into Venezuela: The Singapore payments firm now routes instant transfers through Venezuela’s interbank platform, targeting a market where remittances hit about US$6B in 2025, roughly 7% of GDP, half of it sent from the US.
UK and Singapore widen cooperation on tokenisation, AI and quantum: The 11th UK-Singapore Financial Dialogue covered Project Guardian, stablecoins and MAS’s SAFR framework for AI agents handling financial tasks, alongside post-quantum migration and transition finance.
Circle says stablecoins fit Vietnam’s cross-border leg, not checkouts: With 17-21 million Vietnamese holding digital assets, Circle argues USDC could cut pre-funding delays in remittance settlement while recipients still receive dong, as Vietnamese law bars digital assets as payment.
Sunway lines up WeRide, Neolix and AutoFlight trials in Malaysia: The transport ministry has conditionally approved a pilot of two autonomous buses on BRT-Sunway Line. The driverless delivery and eVTOL plans still await technical testing and regulatory clearance.
Taiwan brings 33 startups to SWITCH 2026 in Singapore: Led by the National Development Council-backed Startup Island TAIWAN, the delegation exhibits at Sands Expo from 27 to 29 October as part of Taiwan Tech Week in Singapore.
INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
SEA’s US$1T digital economy target slips to 2035 as AI props up hope: This year’s e-Conomy SEA report projects US$368B in GMV for 2026, up 17%, but pushes the trillion-dollar milestone back five years, with AI now carrying the region’s optimism.
Global founders turn inward while SEA entrepreneurs look abroad: HSBC’s Global Entrepreneurial Wealth Report 2026 finds the share eyeing international expansion fell six percentage points globally, while Southeast Asian business owners buck the inward turn.
HK and Taiwan founders ride the AI boom; Southeast Asia misses out: A year after ranking among HSBC’s most cautious respondents, founders in Hong Kong, Taipei and Shanghai are now the most upbeat in HSBC’s survey, a turnaround Southeast Asian peers have yet to share.
SEA merchants must now optimise their listings for AI shopping agents: Shopee went live inside ChatGPT across seven markets in June and Lazada runs its Qwen-powered agent Lazzie, so sellers who optimised for human shoppers must now win over machine buyers too.
Techable’s Amulya Vishwanath: physical AI is still in its LEGO era: The ex-Nvidia marketer turned VC says robotics’ ChatGPT moment awaits foundational hardware and software building blocks such as actuators and hands, and calls talent access her firm’s moat.
INTERNATIONAL
Bain Capital commits up to US$250M to Hong Kong’s FundPark: The package starts with US$100M upfront, with US$150M more subject to conditions. FundPark has lent US$10B cumulatively to over 40,000 online sellers across Asia, underwriting with real-time sales data.
Walmart welcomes AI shopping agents as Amazon shuts them out: Its Agent Gateway MCP server lets approved agents search and buy, while Agent Profiles let shoppers cap each agent’s spending limit and approve transactions. Non-compliant agents get blocked.
Meta’s Muse passes 10M users, with shopping a top use: About 25% of users open the AI agent daily, and over a quarter of engaged shoppers average more than US$200 per purchase. Meta expects Muse to eventually out-earn its social apps per user.
Tesla to sell driverless Cybercabs by year-end despite NHTSA probe: Fleet buyers could run the steering wheel-free two-seater before unsupervised FSD reaches owners in Q2 2027, but regulators are still examining whether Tesla’s safety self-certification holds.
CYBERSECURITY
AI agents hacked 100 firms at US$50 each; SEA’s shops fit the profile: One operator using the Cairn agent platform targeted mid-sized online shops for payment-system access. With only 68.5% of ASEAN SMEs running specialised security software, the region’s D2C brands fit the profile.
New Mexico court orders Meta to pay US$25B over privacy deception: A jury found 43 million consumer-protection violations, each carrying a US$5,000 penalty, partly tied to the Cambridge Analytica-linked app. Meta calls the ruling a tax on speech and will appeal.
Scouter brings a listen-first pitch to Singapore’s busy cyber market: Scouter pitches diagnosing security teams’ real problems before selling products, a rebuke of the slide-deck-and-quarterly-target routine that security leaders at large Singapore organisations know too well.
ChatGPT adds PIN-locked chats, but no end-to-end encryption: Locked chats sit in a separate section with their own memory, secured by PIN or biometrics. OpenAI says the feature does not change data retention, and resetting the PIN deletes everything locked.
SEMICONDUCTOR
BMI: AI capex will keep driving Asia Pacific growth into 2027: Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore gain most from chip and electronics demand, while Malaysia draws data centre investment. BMI flags a hyperscaler slowdown and trade restrictions as key risks.
Chinese chipmaker CXMT’s shares slide 7.8% despite swing to profit: The DRAM maker forecasts January–September net profit of up to US$19.8 billion, reversing a US$790 million loss, as AI drives shortages. Its global DRAM share doubled to 10%, but investors fear a supply glut.
Qualcomm to cut jobs worldwide in performance-focused layoffs: CEO Cristiano Amon’s memo says notices begin in November but gives no headcount; Qualcomm had about 52,000 staff in 2025. Weak handset demand and shrinking Apple revenue weigh on the chip designer, which bets on data centres.
AI
DeepSeek reportedly raises US$15B days after US federal ban: Bloomberg says CATL and Tencent are among potential investors in one of China’s largest rounds, following a US$7B raise in June at a US$50B valuation. A Chinese IPO could follow next year.
GoTo’s 27B model speaks Batak, but who can afford to run it?: The model targets regional languages such as Batak Toba that global chatbots handle poorly, but the cost of running it may decide whether smaller Indonesian firms can actually use it.
Enterprise Singapore commits US$35.2M to push AI into SME factories: The three-year Catalytic AI Solutions scheme pairs SMEs with vendors and trade bodies to deploy proven tools for design, quoting, inspection, energy monitoring and predictive maintenance.
Singapore launches embodied AI challenge built on a Micron use case: Teams worldwide will program robots to service a mock semiconductor chamber, competing for a US$69,000 prize pool. Simulation runs to 31 December, with finals at RoboSG! 2027 in March.
Agentic AI tops Singapore’s job-skill demand, Jobstreet data shows: Jobstreet by SEEK’s AI Gauge shows recruiters rewriting job ads around agentic AI workflows, which raises hard questions for workers whose routine tasks those agents are built to absorb.
Enterprises can’t say who settles disputes between their AI agents: An OutSystems report finds executives confident about keeping individual agents in line, but unsure what happens when agents disagree, a gap that widens as firms chain agents together.
OpenAI buys Orchestra Bio to bolster its Rosalind life sciences AI: The four-year-old startup, which raised about US$20M from a16z and 8VC, builds agents for drug-discovery operations. Its team joins OpenAI’s Rosalind effort, already used by Moderna and Novo Nordisk.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
AI won’t fix messy processes; it just speeds up the mess: A Singapore AI marketing founder, drawing on a talk by Kaliber’s Robert Lai, argues most AI automates broken workflows instead of fixing them, so the disorder simply moves faster.
An AI trainer on turning a 40-hour week into 120 hours of output: The author says AI strips out the grind only when humans stay in the loop, and shares lessons on what to delegate, many of them learnt from AI itself.
A PR firm used Gemini to find which pitches actually pay off: After logging 300 hours on proposals in four months, the author compared five years of pitch proposals against client invoicing records to see which business was worth chasing.
AI took flawless workshop notes, then produced an unusable deck: A strategy workshop went well and an AI tool captured every point, but the resulting deck showed why synthesis still needs judgement, the author argues.
How one creator decides which part of an AI video workflow to fix: When LLM storyboards for a TikTok commerce creator produced loose shots, the author chose to diagnose the pipeline before rewriting scenes by hand.
A Vietnamese software firm audits its backlinks: only two count: The Ho Chi Minh City company assumed its directory listings helped search rankings, but an audit on 15 August found four domains linked, two counted for anything.
Google may already be showing its route to AGI: The author traces Demis Hassabis’s long-held view that AGI needs the right components, arguing Google’s recent moves reveal which pieces it now believes are in place.
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