Philippine venture capital in 2026 looks like a barbell: heavy plates at both ends and a thin steel bar in the middle. At one end sit grant-funded prototypes and university incubators. At the other are Series B and later rounds for companies that already make money. The stage in between, where a startup turns early traction into a real business, has all but disappeared.
The numbers come from Gobi Partners’s Solo Horizons: Redefining Scale for the Philippine AI Economy report. Series A deal value in the Philippines has fallen 98 per cent so far this year. Series B value has jumped 795 per cent and now makes up roughly three-quarters of all capital deployed. Series C and beyond is up 233 per cent.
Also Read: One founder, many agents: The Philippines’s answer to a vanishing Series A
That is not a funding winter in the usual sense. Money is flowing, but it is flowing past founders who need US$2 million to US$5 million to hire a sales team and prove a product can scale. Deal count slipped only 8.1 per cent while deal value fell 64.5 per cent, and seed deal count actually doubled, albeit with smaller cheques. More founders are starting out. Fewer have anywhere to go next.
Risk capital that has stopped taking risks
Part of the explanation is regional. By Tracxn’s count, Singapore absorbed 94 per cent of disclosed Southeast Asian startup funding in the first nine months of 2026. International limited partners prefer Singapore holding structures to companies incorporated in emerging markets. It is the same pattern that has seen late-stage deals revive while early-stage founders stay under pressure across the region.
Sector bias does the rest. Fintech took 78 per cent of Philippine deal value this year, up from 68 per cent in 2025. Investors have good reason to like the category: GCash’s record quarter shows what a payments business can become once it starts lending. But when nearly four of every five pesos go to one vertical, “venture” starts to look like private credit with better marketing.
Pure-play AI-native startups raised less than one per cent of national deal value. It is the most striking line in Gobi’s data. It says more about how AI is arriving in the Philippines than about any shortage of ambition.
AI arrives as a feature, not a founder
AI is mostly entering emerging Southeast Asian markets through established companies. IT services and enterprise software firms such as Thinking Machines Data Science, Stratpoint Technologies, Amihan Global Strategies and Sprout Solutions sell it through consulting and integrations. That is commercially sensible, and it fits the argument that the Philippines does not need to build AI to have an AI advantage.
Also Read: The AI exit window is wide open. Southeast Asia isn’t standing anywhere near it
It also leaves standalone AI product companies stranded. Series A funds, their natural backers, have retreated. Series B investors want revenue these founders have not yet had the money to build. Meanwhile, 1.89 million BPO workers face automation with only 53,500 training seats. A country that only consumes AI built elsewhere risks absorbing the job losses without capturing the gains.
Mynt’s IPO is a payday, mostly for someone else
Optimists point to October. Mynt, the parent of GCash, won SEC approval in September and went on to raise ₱60.9 billion (about US$960 million), including its over-allotment option. It is the largest IPO in Philippine history. The shares ended their first day of trading flat.
The headline figure flatters the venture story. Mynt says the listing generated nearly ₱10 billion (about US$160 million) in fresh capital, and most of the proceeds went to existing shareholders selling part of their stakes. That is how exits are meant to work. But it means the money lands with conglomerates and global investors who have no particular reason to write cheques to Manila AI startups.
One detail deserves more attention than the valuation. Some 140,725 GCash users put about ₱1.1 billion (US$17 million) into the offer through the in-app GStocks platform. That shows Filipino savers have an appetite for local tech, and it is exactly the kind of domestic risk capital the Series A gap lacks. It is also worth remembering that Malaysia carried the region’s IPO market this year. One Philippine listing does not make a pipeline.
The state can cushion the fall, not carry the load
Public money has stepped in. Government and grant funding rose from under one per cent of Philippine deal value in 2025 to about nine per cent this year. But the Startup Venture Fund is small. It is run by the National Development Company with the Department of Trade and Industry under the Innovative Startup Act. Its latest report showed just ₱16.7 million (about US$265,000) invested across two startups, with three more deals approved through ten accredited partners.
House Bill 6481 would move that support to a private-led fund-of-funds modelled on Israel’s Yozma programme. Under that model, professional fund managers pick the deals and the state takes a minority stake with no say in running them. The instinct is right. Yozma worked because it drew private money in, not because officials picked winners.
The report suggests further fixes. One is a government-endorsed convertible note, similar to Japan’s J-KISS, to clear up the legal uncertainty around SAFEs. Another is angel tax breaks like South Korea’s, which let investors deduct 30 to 100 per cent of early-stage investments. A third is compute credits and matching R&D grants for AI developers testing products in regulatory sandboxes.
Also Read: Founders’ playbook: What it really takes to scale beyond Series A
The angel incentive is the most underrated of these. A Series A gap is ultimately a shortage of local people willing to risk losing money on local companies. Tax relief is the cheapest way to change that calculation, and newly liquid shareholders and executives are the obvious targets. Until that happens, some founders will turn to venture debt, which is now reaching smaller startups, to fill a gap it was never designed for.
None of this makes Philippine investors irrational. Series B is where the risk-adjusted returns look best today. But a barbell only works if someone loads both ends. If the middle stays empty, there will be few Series B candidates left by 2029. And the country will keep importing the AI products its BPO workers are paid to operate.
The post Manila has a Series B boom and a Series A funeral. Mynt’s record IPO won’t fix that appeared first on e27.