In a historic shift for Southeast Asia’s tech sector, the crown for the most funded industry has changed hands.
Enterprise infrastructure has emerged as the top-performing sector, raising a total of US$2.3 billion in 2025. According to the “SEA Tech Annual Funding Report 2025” by Tracxn, this represents a robust 70 per cent increase over the US$1.3 billion raised in 2024 and an incredible 12x increase from the US$182 million raised in 2023.
Also Read: Southeast Asia’s startup boom is becoming a closed club
The driving force behind this infrastructure boom is the region’s hunger for digital storage and processing power. Data centre providers alone accounted for US$1.9 billion of the sector’s total, led by massive rounds for Princeton Digital Group and Digital Edge. Investors are pivoting away from application-layer software and toward the physical and cloud-based foundations that allow the broader digital economy to function.
While infrastructure soared, the region’s traditional darling, fintech, faced significant headwinds. The sector saw total funding drop to US$1.5 billion, a 21 per cent decrease from 2024 and a 42 per cent collapse from the US$2.6 billion raised in 2023. Despite this decline, the vertical remains a core pillar of the ecosystem, with internet-first business payments and internet-first remittance platforms like Airwallex and Thunes still managing to attract significant late-stage capital.
The enterprise applications sector also struggled to maintain momentum, raising US$1.42 billion in 2025. This reflects a 38 per cent decline compared to the US$2.3 billion raised the previous year. It appears that the era of speculative investment in “software-as-a-service” (SaaS) platforms is being replaced by a more pragmatic focus on “hard” tech and the AI-ready infrastructure required for the next decade of growth.
Also Read: Jakarta trails as Singapore tightens its grip on tech capital
Investors are essentially moving from building the fancy rooms of the digital house to investing in the steel and concrete of the foundation itself
The post Infrastructure takes the throne in Southeast Asia tech appeared first on e27.