As AI agents start searching for suppliers, negotiating terms, and initiating payments on a company’s behalf, the old assumption that a human approves every transaction is breaking down. A new report from Sunrate and Mastercard, Beyond Automation: Defining Agentic Global Payments, argues that speed alone will not make this shift viable — businesses will need what it calls a “Trust Layer”: infrastructure that verifies an agent’s identity, defines its authority, and records what it actually did.
The report frames this as fintech’s move from Know Your Customer to Know Your Agent, or KYA, built on three pillars: protecting credentials so agents never handle raw account details, capturing the intent behind a transaction, and enforcing governance that can authenticate an agent and revoke its permissions when needed.
The stakes are especially high for Southeast Asia, where startups juggle multiple currencies, jurisdictions and compliance regimes, and where, according to Gartner, half of all AI projects are abandoned after the pilot stage, often over unresolved risk controls. The report’s wager is that the winners in agentic payments will not be the startups with the flashiest AI interface, but those that can prove to banks, auditors and regulators that their agents’ actions were authorised, limited and traceable.
REGIONAL
SEA tech funding surges to 12-month high in July: Tracxn data shows the region’s startups closed 17 rounds last month, a 25.53% jump from June and 180.9% higher than a year earlier, as capital concentrated into fewer mega-deals.
Graas raises US$17M, buys Trustana for retail AI agents: The Singapore retailtech firm’s acquisition adds product-attribute and inventory data to its AI agents, aiming to close the gap between chatbots and SKU-level accuracy for online sellers.
K2 Therapeutics raises US$50M for global biotech push: The fresh funding positions the Singapore-based drug developer to compete internationally, addressing a gap in the city-state’s biotech scene: a steady pipeline of venture-backed drug developers built from day one.
Touchstone backs Vietnam’s N2TP AI research infrastructure: Unlike Vietnam’s earlier wave of consumer apps and fintech platforms, N2TP is building infrastructure for scientific research, where success is measured in hypotheses, experiments and patents rather than clicks.
Morph bets on stablecoins as the next rail for digital commerce: The Singapore firm argues stablecoins have outgrown their crypto-trading roots, offering freelancers and cross-border teams a faster, cheaper settlement rail than traditional banking channels.
What PayNow Gen 2 gets right, and what it risks under-valuing: The proposal to attach structured data to payments could let businesses reconcile transactions automatically, a back-office upgrade the columnist argues is more consequential than QR-code convenience.
Why Singapore’s AI finance race is now about data, not models: A new Forrester-cited analysis argues Singapore’s finance chiefs have moved past testing AI tools and now face a harder problem: making models work across messy, fragmented regional finance data.
Ryde taps HERE to improve ride-hailing routes and ETAs in Singapore: The tie-up with the mapping and location-data provider targets the “invisible layer” behind the app — traffic data, dispatch logic and arrival estimates — where rides are often won or lost.
Singapore’s next test in online child safety policy: As Australia, the EU and UK shift child protection into a political frame of its own, the columnist argues Singapore’s social media rules must evolve accordingly.
SEA’s biggest-market-first expansion logic is dead: Ranking markets by size and entering the largest first no longer works, the columnist argues, as founders increasingly need to sequence expansion by regulatory readiness and customer fit instead.
Vietnam’s born global startups are rewriting the playbook: Capital flowing into Vietnam-founded startups with global operations hit an all-time high in 2025, as founders increasingly skip the “win at home first” stage altogether.
Filipino virtual assistants are winning the remote-work race: Drawing on years in customer service and support, the writer argues the Philippines’ “I’ll try” work culture — not just cost — explains its outsized share of the global VA market.
Malaysia’s ZUS Coffee explores IPO to raise US$245M: Owner Zuspresso is working with financial advisers on a possible Bursa Malaysia listing that could value the coffee chain at around RM4 billion, with the offering potentially landing as soon as mid-2027.
Maybank: Shopee margins have bottomed, growth ahead: Sea Limited’s results reinforced the view that Shopee margins have bottomed, with management now expecting e-commerce adjusted EBITDA to surpass US$1 billion this year on rising ad take rates and VIP contribution.
Sea’s Q2 revenue jumps 48% to US$7.8B, income up 11%: Shopee and Monee drove the beat, with Shopee GMV up 28% and Monee’s loan book surging 62% to US$11.1 billion.
MSCI drops GoTo from Indonesia index over liquidity: The index provider cited low liquidity after GoTo’s shares stayed pinned near the exchange’s minimum tradable price for months, a technical call the company says is unrelated to its business performance.
U Mobile taps OpenAI to become an AI-enabled telco: The Malaysian telco gets early access to OpenAI’s frontier models across customer service, network operations and cybersecurity, marking OpenAI’s first telecoms partnership in Malaysia.
INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
ZERC’s founder on cracking SEA’s cooling crisis with paint: Parked cars in the region can hit cabin temperatures of 70-90°C within minutes — the radiative-cooling startup’s founder explains why a coat of paint, not air conditioning, is the fix.
The photographer who bet his business on AI, not against it: Rather than defend the craft against generative AI, SnappyFly founder Vincent Chow chose to drive the technology’s use in product photography himself, betting his Singapore firm on the shift.
INTERNATIONAL
Kospi enters bull market as crypto risk appetite fades: The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both rallied on AI-linked namessuch as CoreWeave and Super Micro, while Asian equities mirrored the optimism even as digital-asset markets lost momentum, the columnist notes.
Does US$1,780 support hold the key to an Ethereum rally: Ethereum developers are pushing an aggressive roadmap toward 10,000 transactions per second alongside quantum-safety upgrades, technical shifts the columnist ties directly to the coin’s next price move.
Is US$63,750 the only line between Bitcoin and US$62,000?: Total crypto market capitalisation fell 1.24% in 24 hours, a move the columnist reads as investors treating digital assets through a strictly macroeconomic lens rather than a technical correction.
5 US VC shifts every SEA founder should be tracking: While a Silicon Valley founder can get a term sheet within a week of a warm introduction, the piece argues SEA founders face a slower, more institutional fundraising process worth understanding.
Investors sue Selena Gomez over mental health startup: Plaintiffs who invested nearly US$1.2 million in Wondermind allege the singer and her mother committed securities fraud, claiming promised partnerships never materialised.
OpenAI hires Wiz’s Dali Rajic as CRO amid shake-up: Dali Rajic takes over sales after Denise Dresser’s nine-month tenure, the latest in a run of executive departures including COO Brad Lightcap and Fidji Simo.
Accel closes oversubscribed US$550M India fund in weeks: The firm still holds 55%+ of its previous fund undeployed, betting on AI applications, consumer internet, fintech and manufacturing.
Bluehill.VC closes maiden US$42M India deeptech fund: The Chennai firm’s debut fund will build a portfolio of 15-16 companies across defence, semiconductors and space.
CYBERSECURITY
The new ransomware playbook exposing ASEAN banks’ gaps: A regional bank learned of its own data breach from a regulator, not the attackers, a disclosure failure the piece says is becoming the norm across Southeast Asian financial institutions.
Education, energy, travel see rising cyber attack volumes: Organisations faced an average of 2,336 attacks per week in July, up 3% from June and 16% year-on-year, according to new Check Point Research data cited in the piece.
Crypto’s new threat is not a hack, but a knock at the door: A new Chainalysis report estimates more than US$30M lost to physical attacks on crypto holders, as Thailand and its neighbours become fronts in a distinctly offline category of crime.
Uber Freight probes breach claimed by hacking gang: The Helix group claims to have exfiltrated mailboxes, cloud storage and dispatch documents from the logistics subsidiary.
AI
Moving past the chatbox: agentic AI’s hidden enterprise risks: As APAC enterprises graduate from simple chatbots to fully autonomous AI agents, the piece warns that Model Context Protocol integrations bring governance and security risks many teams are unprepared for.
The hidden problem inside AI teams isn’t skills, it’s culture: An SME chief executive’s frustration over stalled AI adoption points to a workplace-culture gap that the writer says tools alone cannot fix.
From KYC to KYA: how AI agents are reshaping payment risk: As businesses deploy AI agents that can search, negotiate and pay suppliers autonomously, “know your agent” checks will soon matter as much as knowing your customer.
AI is not the beginning of drug discovery, it is the accelerator: Computational drug discovery predates generative AI by decades, tracing a lineage from molecular docking and QSAR modelling to today’s large models.
The language tax: Why AI skips your startup when buyers ask in Thai: AI assistants answer fluently in Thai, Vietnamese and Bahasa Indonesia but only recommend firms visible in those languages’ own sources, leaving startups invisible to their own regional buyers.
From chatbots to payment agents: AI’s next role in SEA commerce: A new report examines AI’s harder test in payments, where compliance failures are costly, once agents are plugged into real transaction workflows.
Sovereign AI starts long before the AI model: Infrastructure debates once about latency and cost are increasingly about where data can legally reside, shaping AI strategy before a single model is chosen.
The diagnosis is becoming free, the operation is not: AI will make differential diagnosis widely accessible, but the treatment that follows will remain expensive and unevenly distributed.
If AI can’t find your startup, does your startup exist?: Founders are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude what they know about their own companies, a new front in startup PR.
The scarcity mindset is killing creativity, not AI: At Upscale Conf in San Francisco, speakers argued a scarcity mindset inherited from pre-AI resourcing constraints, not AI, is what’s limiting creative work.
The next AI payments boom may happen in the back office: The bigger AI shift is unfolding quietly inside finance teams, procurement departments and treasury desks few outsiders see.
How to choose the right AI marketing agency: Unlike traditional agencies, AI-driven ones work with real-time data and continuous experimentation, promising shorter cycles and lower costs.
SEMICONDUCTOR
NXP breaks ground on expanded Malaysia chip factory: Dutch chipmaker NXP is building a900,000 sq ft facility in Malaysia, deepening Southeast Asia’s role in global semiconductorsupply chain diversification away from China.
Singapore chip parts maker UMS posts 90% Q2 profit jump: UMS Holdings beatexpectations on surging demand for semiconductor components, reflecting a broadrecovery in the chip equipment cycle that benefits Singapore’s precision engineering sector.
Nvidia’s US$500B manufacturing plan: risky but calculated: The chipmaker’s massivedomestic production bet hinges on repurposing ageing GPUs into a supply chain asset, amove with downstream implications for AI infrastructure buyers across Southeast Asia.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
How to make volunteer efforts actually sustainable: What starts as a simple conversation often spirals into paperwork, appeals and multi-agency coordination — a structural strain that burns out community volunteers.
Platform illusions: When ‘ecosystem’ is just a feature bundle: The word “ecosystem” appears in investor decks with near-magical confidence, even when what’s built is little more than bundled integrations and a marketplace tab.
You can’t force a tailwind, you can force your readiness for one: A decade into building, annual planning cycles stop being useful, since money arrives in bursts rather than evenly — making readiness the more valuable discipline.
The hidden cost of ‘gray work’ draining your team: Employees hired for one function increasingly find themselves buried in overlooked administrative tasks that compound quietly over time.
Good ideas are everywhere, venture capital isn’t: Airwallex’s decision to headquarter in Singapore rather than Melbourne was about more than location, since investors back the surrounding environment as much as the founders.
The system behind the smile: making volunteer efforts sustainable: Volunteer-driven community initiatives fail without structural support; the piece outlines frameworks for turning goodwill into durable, scalable operations.
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