Macao has a replica of Venice built inside a casino resort, complete with gondolas and a painted sky. Kerala has Alappuzha, which tourism brochures have called the Venice of the East for longer than anyone can remember.

Two small places, two Venices, and one shared headache: both are tired of being known for one thing.

Macao’s one thing is gambling. Gaming still made up 56.4 per cent of its GDP in 2024, and the government wants non-gaming industries to account for about 60 per cent of GDP by 2030. Kerala’s one thing, apart from the backwaters, is the Gulf. Remittances hit INR 2.17 lakh crore (about US$26 billion) in 2023, or 23.2 per cent of the state’s net domestic product, according to the Kerala Migration Survey. The state exports talent and imports money, and it knows that bargain will not last forever.

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In May, I spent a few days at BEYOND Expo 2026 in Macao, among humanoid robots, AI glasses and a Rubik’s Cube that doubles as a games console. I came away convinced of Asia’s hardware edge.

This week I was back home for Huddle Global 2026 at Kovalam, listening to the Chief Minister talk about startup debt, the silver economy and the port at Vizhinjam. Somewhere between the two, a thought refused to leave me: Macao is running the same experiment as Kerala, only with more neon. Here are five things Kerala can borrow, and one it should leave behind.

Bring the robot, not the render

The first thing that struck me at BEYOND was how little of it lived on a slide. Matrix Robotics’s humanoids walked the floor. A Hong Kong startup had wired sensors into a football shin guard. Another had built an instrument that reads a player’s mood. You could touch, wear or argue with almost everything.

Indian startup events, Kerala’s included, still lean on the stage: pitch decks, panels, ministers and memoranda. Huddle Global’s inaugural session alone produced a string of MoUs, yet the only hard money on display was a US$2 million round for climate-intelligence startup mistEO. Paper is cheap. Prototypes are not.

Kerala is not starting from zero. Kerala Startup Mission’s Maker Village in Kochi has incubated hardware startups since 2016. The next Huddle should give their products the best spot on the beach and let investors trip over them. Even Hong Kong, which talks a big game on robotics, has learnt that demos must survive real life; it is building a test track for robots that keep failing outside the lab.

Say the scary number out loud

The most useful thing I heard in Macao was a prediction of mass extinction. Allen Zhang, CEO of Matrix Robotics, told me 50 to 60 per cent of China’s humanoid robotics companies would not survive the next two to three years. He said it calmly, the way a cardiologist reads out your cholesterol.

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He was just as frank about his own maths. A humanoid that costs about US$80,000 today could drop to roughly US$27,000 within two years if his vertical-integration bet pays off. And, he argued, data, not hardware, is the real bottleneck: there is no internet-sized archive of physical behaviour to train robots on.

Compare that with how targets are announced at home. Kerala wants 100 deeptech companies worth Rs 100 crore (about US$11 million) or more. Fine. But a target without a mortality rate is a horoscope. Which of today’s deeptech startups have paying customers? How many will die, and what will the state learn when they do? As founders keep discovering, deeptech’s real bottleneck is customers, not ambition.

Candour is not pessimism. It is how serious investors know you have done the sums.

Trust is the product, and Kerala has 2.2 million potential backers

Cheryl Tang, Indiegogo’s Head of APAC, did not pretend crowdfunding’s reputation was intact after years of scams and vanished campaigns. The fix she described was not marketing. It was paperwork: factory photos, production videos, legal registrations and a second review by payment partner Adyen before a campaign goes live.

She was also blunt about why Southeast Asia is crowdfunding’s toughest market. E-commerce is so good that nobody wants to wait a year for a gadget.

Kerala sits on the opposite opportunity. Some 2.2 million Malayalis live abroad, most in the Gulf, and they are famously loyal to anything that smells of home. That is a ready-made backer base for Kerala-built products, from health devices to Malayalam-first apps.

But diaspora money flows only where trust exists. If the state wants that capital in startups, it should borrow Indiegogo’s playbook: verify before you promote, publish what you checked, and show where the money went.

Malayalis know better than most how quickly a cooperative bank scandal can drain trust that took decades to build. Startups will not get a second chance either.

Build for appooppan and ammoomma

The warmest story at BEYOND came from Jiang Tao of Initiai.on, who started out simply trying to write a song for his wife. Today its app Yinchao lets millions of people compose music with AI. Many users, Tao told me, make songs for parents and grandparents. A custom composition that once cost upwards of US$2,000 is now within reach of anyone with a phone.

Read that again with Kerala in mind. It is one of India’s fastest-ageing states, and the government has set up a dedicated department for the elderly. I argued this week that Kerala’s grandparents may be its smartest startup bet as mentors. Yinchao suggests they are customers too, and not just for pill reminders. Kerala’s silver economy should include joy: music, memories and video calls with grandchildren in Toronto and Doha.

A startup that builds for appooppan and ammoomma (grandpa and grandma, in Malayalam), with the bill paid by children abroad, has a business model hiding in plain sight in millions of family WhatsApp groups.

Lean on the neighbours, and do the compliance before the scolding

Macao is tiny, and it does not pretend otherwise. Its new five-year plan leans hard on Hengqin, the neighbouring island zone across the water, and on the wider Greater Bay Area for land, factories and customers.

Kerala has neighbours worth leaning on too. Vizhinjam port, a short drive from Kovalam, is now a deep-water transshipment hub that needs logistics software, maritime tech and trade finance. Bengaluru and Chennai have the capital and the corporate buyers. Brussels, through the state’s startup centre there, offers a door into Europe.

Matrix Robotics taught me the second half of this lesson. Zhang said the company would store data locally in every Western market it enters, before anyone asks, having watched the scrutiny that dogged Huawei and DJI. Kerala founders eyeing Europe should treat GDPR and EU product rules the same way: build for the regulator before the regulator comes knocking.

The one thing Kerala should leave in Macao

Not everything travels well. Macao’s diversification is directed from the top, bankrolled largely by casino concessionaires obliged to invest in non-gaming projects, and shaped by Beijing’s plans for the Greater Bay Area. Kerala is a loud democracy where every policy is argued over in the Assembly, in union halls and on prime-time television.

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That makes Kerala slower. It also gives it something a casino economy struggles to build: a literate, healthy workforce and a society that keeps asking who benefits. Kerala should keep that instinct. A startup boom that leaves out women founders, or treats gig workers as collateral, is not a model worth importing from anywhere.

Still, Macao has one habit Kerala should envy. It is honest about its dependency. It puts a number on gaming’s share of the economy and sets a date to shrink it. Kerala should do the same with remittances: name the number, set the date, and make startups the yardstick of progress.

Two Venices, both trying to prove they are more than a postcard. Macao has the head start and the neon. Kerala has the people. The only question is which one learns faster.

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Image Credit: Sayyid Ahmed Murfique

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