I’ve lived across Southeast Asia long enough to know what the heat feels like in five different cities.
Jakarta. Ho Chi Minh City. Singapore. Kuala Lumpur. Manila.
They all feel different. But they’re all on the same clock.
I’m not a climate scientist. I’m not a fund manager with a climate mandate. I’m someone who has spent over a decade moving across this region, watching capital flow, watching ventures rise and fold, watching ecosystems get built and ignored. I write about impact capital every week. But this week I want to write about something more personal.
I don’t have kids. My relationship with the future works differently from most people my age. It runs through two dogs, a meditation practice, and a stubborn, quiet belief that this region doesn’t have to end the way the projections currently suggest.
That’s why I keep watching climate when the room has moved on.
And right now the room has very much moved on.
The AI gravity problem
Every founder pitch I see has an AI angle. Every fund narrative has pivoted to include intelligence, automation, and agents. I get it. The returns are real. The narrative is loud. The FOMO is louder.
But here’s what’s getting drowned out.
Jakarta is sinking. Literally. Parts of North Jakarta have already dropped several metres, and the projection hasn’t changed. Ho Chi Minh City floods regularly now in ways it didn’t a decade ago. Manila’s coastal communities are being quietly relocated. Bangkok is dealing with saltwater intrusion. Singapore, the most climate-prepared city in the region, is spending billions on sea walls and still isn’t sure it’s enough.
This isn’t future risk. This is the current reality.
And yet. According to Tracxn data tracking SEA climate tech, funding in 2026 so far has recorded only four rounds totalling roughly US$17 million. That’s down nearly 60 per cent from the same period last year. Meanwhile, global AI funding crossed US$100 billion in the first half of 2025 alone.
The attention gap is real. And it’s widening.
Also Read: Funded: I keep a notebook by my bed with one question about SEA climate
The observer’s dilemma
I sit at the edge of the climate ecosystem. Not fully inside it. More like someone with their nose pressed against the glass, taking notes.
What I see from out here is a gap between urgency and attention. The urgency is accelerating. The attention is fragile and easily stolen by whatever narrative is loudest that quarter.
In 2021, it was crypto. In 2023, it was generative AI. In 2025, it was agents. Climate was supposed to have its moment in between. It did, briefly. Then the room moved again.
The venture building in climate didn’t move. They’re still here. Rice decarbonisation tackling one of SEA’s largest methane sources. Seaweed biostimulants are replacing chemical fertilisers across smallholder farms. Biochar carbon removal. Agrifood waste converted to sustainable fuels. Decentralised solar reaching communities the grid forgot. These aren’t concepts. They’re operating companies with revenue, with farmers, with real emissions reductions happening right now.
They just don’t trend.
The handful of funds that stayed committed to this space know this. SEEDS Capital, Entrepreneur First, East Ventures, SGInnovate and 100×100 formerly Wavemaker Impact, which just rebranded after spinning out as an independent fund manager with a fresh US$100 million mandate to build 50 climate companies across SEA and India, have done the unglamorous work of showing up round after round. Between them, they represent what conviction actually looks like in a space that doesn’t reward impatience.
Everyone else mostly came once.
What the future generation inherits
I think about this a lot. Not in a guilt-ridden way. More practical.
The cities I’ve lived in across this region are places people love. Street food at midnight. Communities that take care of each other. Chaos that somehow works. There is a version of 2040 where all of that is still here, adapted, resilient, figuring it out.
And there is another version.
Also Read: Investing in impact: High-growth tech for climate and community
The IPCC estimates that without significant intervention, Southeast Asia faces GDP losses of up to 11 per cent by 2100 due to climate impacts. The Asian Development Bank puts the region’s climate adaptation financing gap at over US$100 billion annually. Indonesia’s JETP commitment alone sits at US$21.6 billion. Vietnam’s at US$15.5 billion. The money being talked about is enormous.
The money actually reaching climate ventures at the early stage is not.
The capital deployed in the next five years will have more influence over which version of 2040 shows up than most people in the venture ecosystem currently acknowledge. That’s not an activist talking. That’s just what the data says when you read it without the AI hype in the background.
The ask isn’t to stop building AI
It’s to hold both.
The founders building climate ventures in SEA right now don’t need sympathy. They need capital that stays. They need fund managers who treat climate the same way they treat AI – as a structural bet on where the world is going, not a checkbox on an LP deck.
900 backers have put money into climate tech in SEA, according to recent data. You can count the ones who kept showing up on one hand.
The next generation doesn’t get to choose the cities they inherit. But the people reading this do get to choose where they put their attention and their capital right now.
I’m watching. Still at the window. But watching closely.
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The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.
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The post Funded: AI is having its moment, climate is having a crisis. SEA can’t afford to confuse the two appeared first on e27.