GoTo’s first quarterly profit is less a triumphant endpoint than a revealing pivot point for Southeast Asia’s tech narrative. After years of subsidy-fuelled expansion, the company has finally demonstrated that scale can translate into earnings, but only after becoming a markedly different business.
The headline numbers — positive net income, rising EBITDA, and strong cash flow — signal a long-awaited shift in discipline. Yet beneath them lies a more nuanced reality: profitability is being driven disproportionately by fintech, not by the ride-hailing and delivery engine that built GoTo’s brand. Payments and lending, with their superior monetisation dynamics, are now doing the heavy lifting, while on-demand services mature and grow more slowly.
This evolution raises a strategic question. Is GoTo still a super app, or increasingly a fintech platform with logistics attached? The answer matters because fintech brings both higher margins and higher risks, especially around credit quality, where disclosures remain thin.
Equally notable is what enabled this milestone: fewer incentives, tighter pricing, and a leaner corporate structure. Profit has arrived not through expansion, but through restraint.
For investors, the signal is clear. The era of growth at any cost is over. The next test is whether this new, narrower GoTo can sustain profitability without sacrificing relevance in an intensely competitive market.
REGIONAL
GoTo’s first quarterly net profit driven by fintech arm: Indonesia’s biggest digital ecosystem posted a first-quarter net profit of US$10.2M, reversing a US$21.8M loss a year earlier, with fintech revenue surging 58% to US$113.6M, now carrying the bulk of the investment case as on-demand growth slows.
eFishery founder handed nine-year jail sentence: Gibran Huzaifah was convicted of corporate deception, embezzlement, and money laundering after eFishery’s alleged revenue manipulation erased US$300M in investor value, rattling confidence in private-market due diligence across Southeast Asia.
TrueMoney Philippines winds down after a decade: The digital payments and remittance firm is ceasing all commercial operations in the country, having served over 5M customers and 20,000 SMEs across payments, lending, and insurance since its launch.
Indonesia mandates suspension reporting for under-16 accounts: Platforms must now publicly disclose how many accounts belonging to under-16 users they suspend, with rules affecting 70M children, though digital rights groups warn age checks expose sensitive data and are easily bypassed.
TikTok Go by Tokopedia targets Indonesia’s F&B market: Launched on April 29, the local services feature bridges content and offline visits via videos, live streams, and location-based discovery, as daily dine-in merchant orders reportedly rose more than 20 times in 2025.
Roblox moves to comply with Indonesia’s under-16 curbs: The US gaming platform has begun rolling out compliance measures following Jakarta’s tighter online rules for minors, though specific steps were not disclosed by the country’s communications minister.
Malaysia’s Qarbotech wins Grand Prix at SusHi Tech 2026: The agritech startup beat 820 applicants from 60 countries to claim JPY10M (US$62,000) for its nanocarbon photosynthesis-boosting agent, signalling growing global resonance for tropical-climate agritech solutions.
Cata raises US$5.3M to democratise F&B app tech: The Singapore-based consumer app platform closed an oversubscribed seed round led by Portage, enabling independent F&B and retail operators to launch branded apps with loyalty, payments, and CRM within days, with Germany as its first international market.
Cube raises US$3.7M to solve e-commerce data chaos: The Bangkok-based market intelligence startup secured Series A funding led by Betatron Venture Group to expand AI-enabled product tagging into North Asia and Latin America, targeting brands flying blind on fragmented digital shelf data.
FORMAS.AI closes US$3.98M pre-seed for AEC design platform: Led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, the oversubscribed round will fund a platform orchestrating 60-plus AI models for architects, with users across 135 countries already generating over 500,000 designs organically since November 2025.
SiamDL raises US$7.8M to expand AI lending in Thailand: The Bangkok-based lender secured an oversubscribed Series A from international investors to scale its proprietary AI credit-scoring system, targeting underserved consumers and micro-entrepreneurs with thin financial records through its Bank of Thailand-licensed apps.
Philippines talent gap threatens strategic sector growth: A Monroe Consulting report warns that transformation is outpacing talent readiness across energy, finance, and tech, with above-market salary increases of 7–10% projected for automation, cybersecurity, and AI engineering roles.
Pandai’s low-cost growth playbook earns LSE 100x Impact spot: The Malaysian edutech startup scaled to over one million users with near-zero paid marketing and a 94% monthly retention rate, landing in the LSE initiative that identifies organisations with potential to improve one billion lives.
INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
Netbank CEO: We want to be the full meal, not just ingredients: CEO Gus Poston explains how owning the banking ledger rather than wrapping legacy infrastructure lets Netbank serve fintechs at startup speed, with FY2025 revenue up 88% driven primarily by QR.Ph payment volume growth.
SEON CEO: AI exposes weak risk operations, not fix them: Tamas Kadar warns that automating before defining decision ownership is the industry’s biggest mistake, with fragmented fraud and AML systems creating faster confusion rather than clarity across Southeast Asian markets.
INTERNATIONAL
Anthropic eyes US$900B valuation in new funding round: The Claude maker is in talks with investors for a raise that would top OpenAI’s valuation, as its annualised revenue reportedly hit US$30B driven largely by demand for Claude Code, though no term sheet has been signed.
Parallel Web Systems hits US$2B valuation after back-to-back raises: Founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, the AI search and research API startup raised a US$100M Series B led by Sequoia just five months after its Series A, bringing total funding to US$230M with over 100,000 developers on the platform.
SoftBank plans US listing of AI robotics unit Roze at US$100B: Japan’s investment giant is preparing to spin off an AI and robotics company focused on data centre construction, potentially targeting a public debut as early as 2026 at a US$100B valuation.
Ant International bets on AI commerce infrastructure at scale: The Alibaba affiliate’s payments network now links 150M merchants with 2B consumer accounts across 220 markets, handling 20M daily transactions, while Alipay’s new tool enables merchants to accept payments made by AI agents.
US tech giants set to outspend China 7:1 on AI infrastructure: American hyperscalers led by Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are projected to spend over US$700B on AI infrastructure this year, versus an estimated US$105B by Chinese cloud providers constrained by chip export curbs.
Crypto equities plunge as big tech earnings impress markets: Macro pressures from surging oil prices and a hawkish Fed hammered crypto-linked equities (Robinhood fell 14%, Coinbase 6-8%) even as Bitcoin held near US$76,000, exposing how differently macro cycles transmit through digital asset layers.
CYBERSECURITY
After the breach: How companies respond now defines trust: A Penta report draws on 18 months of stakeholder sentiment data to argue that rapid transparency and visible leadership — not technical containment alone — now determine reputational recovery, with retail carrying the sharpest negative sentiment at minus 77.
SEA’s cyber market races toward US$10B fortress by 2030: With cyberattacks up 85% year-on-year in 2024 and the regional market valued at US$2.8B growing at 28.5% CAGR, Singapore-based Darktrace, Senzing, and CyberArk command 45% market share as detection times collapse from 21 days to 47 minutes.
SEA’s AI-fuelled cyber war: Six defining trends for 2026: As Southeast Asia’s digital economy surpasses US$1T, deepfake phishing attacks spike 150%, quantum-resistant cryptography becomes a regulatory mandate, and ransomware groups hit 40% more Indonesian SMEs, forcing startups and governments into agile defence.
US$1.5B crypto hack exposes exchange security gaps: The largest digital theft ever sent Bitcoin below US$80,000 and swung sentiment from extreme greed to fear overnight, calling for multi-layered technical infrastructure, human-centric protocols, and transparent asset management as the new security standard.
APJ finance faces 3.7B attacks as ransomware victims surge 204%: Akamai’s State of the Internet report found 92.3% of APJ finance sector attacks targeted banks, while zero-day and one-day vulnerabilities drove a 204% jump in ransomware victims, making zero-trust architectures and microsegmentation critical defences.
Diverse IT teams are a cybersecurity weapon, not just good HR: With women comprising only 34-40% of Southeast Asia’s tech workforce, organisations with homogenous teams miss region-specific attack patterns; diverse cultural and technical backgrounds improve threat detection, social engineering recognition, and compliance across borders.
Connected cars are becoming prime targets for cybercriminals: From the 2015 Jeep Cherokee remote hack to Tesla’s 2020 keyless entry vulnerability, smart vehicles face growing risks as decentralised security models like DePIN and Soarchain’s blockchain infrastructure emerge as more resilient alternatives to centralised systems.
SEMICONDUCTOR
Samsung Q1 profit surges 8x to US$38.9B on AI chip demand: Record-breaking memory chip revenue driven by AI server demand and tight supply pushed first-quarter operating profit to 57.2 trillion won, surpassing Samsung’s entire full-year 2025 earnings, with strong second-half server memory demand expected as hyperscalers expand AI capacity.
TSMC exits Arm Holdings with US$231M share sale: Taiwan’s chip giant has fully divested its Arm stake acquired at IPO for US$51 per share, selling remaining shares at US$207.65 each through TSMC Partners, adding US$174M to retained earnings and completing a profitable exit from the British chip designer.
AI
Google DeepMind CEO expects AGI arrival by 2030: Demis Hassabis says the 20-year mission to build AGI is precisely on track, urging business leaders to treat the timeline as operational reality, and crediting DeepMind’s early success to pairing deep learning with reinforcement learning ahead of rising GPU power.
SEA’s AI agent opportunity lives in messy workflows: With the region’s digital economy at US$263B GMV, the clearest wins for AI agents are in fraud detection, BPO workflows, and healthcare admin — where operational drag, not a lack of intelligence, is the real bottleneck startups should target first.
How AI agents are quietly rewriting the growth marketing playbook: An always-on AI agent that flagged 18% of monthly ad spend burning with near-zero conversions illustrates how agents amplify human intelligence in marketing — but strategy, cross-functional trade-offs, and accountability still require named human owners, not autonomous loops.
AI agents and the end of the all-in-one employee fantasy: SMEs that have long searched for one person to do everything are finding that AI agents can carry much of the operational load, but the real risk is hollowing out junior talent pipelines before future managers have a chance to build judgment through real work.
Why startup founders shouldn’t trust AI to replace a PR team: A founder’s six-month experiment replacing his PR agency with AI tools produced flawless-looking outreach lists full of outdated contacts and generic thought leadership pieces, revealing that AI accelerates volume but cannot replicate the relational judgment of an experienced communicator.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
ESG tech’s next frontier is defensibility, not measurement: As sustainability disclosures are increasingly held to financial reporting standards, platforms that cannot explain data lineage, who touched a number, when, and why, will fail enterprise assurance tests, splitting the market between workflow tools and auditability-first infrastructure.
APAC founders must treat communication as a leadership skill: In a region where social media backlash goes regional within hours and regulations shift without warning, crisis-ready startups need pre-approved messaging templates, a single source of truth, and media relationships built before they are needed, not after a crisis hits.
The digital transformation lie SMEs have been sold: Most SMEs are drowning in disconnected tools rather than transformed by them, and the hidden tax of bad software — duplicate work, slow invoicing, blind spots — costs real margin daily; the winning platforms will be those that reduce friction before they sell a solution.
Accessibility in business is an ROI driver, not just compliance: With 1 in 4 US adults living with a disability and digital accessibility lawsuits rising annually, businesses that embed inclusive design into websites, documents, and physical spaces improve SEO, reduce legal risk, and expand market reach for all users.
Why exhibition leads fail and how to build a pipeline that converts: Most organisations invest heavily in booth presence but neglect the structured post-event follow-up process where momentum is actually won or lost: clear ownership, contextual data capture, and defined timelines matter more than visitor counts.
When collaboration systems break down in tech-driven workplaces: With 69% of APAC organisations on hybrid models and 6 in 10 employees reporting burnout, leaders must treat collaboration as intentional infrastructure, not a set of perks, using interactive digital tools to restore equity, alignment, and engagement across distributed teams.
Why eSIM is becoming as important as your passport: As global business travel spending grows toward US$1.57T in 2025, eSIM adoption is accelerating because connectivity must now be ready at the moment of arrival, not sorted out after landing, with travel eSIM users forecast to grow from 40M in 2024 to 215M by 2028.
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