In a year when artificial intelligence (AI) dominated the global investment conversation and every fund manager worth their carried interest was racing to stake out positions in deeptech, Vietnam’s private equity market made its biggest sectoral bet on something considerably more prosaic: food, beverages, and everyday consumer goods.

According to the Vietnam Innovation and Private Capital Report by DO Ventures and Boston Consulting Group, consumer staples attracted US$1.2 billion in private equity investment in 2025, the highest single-sector allocation in a decade. In a year when total PE deployment hit a record of US$3.96 billion, consumer staples alone accounted for roughly 30 per cent of the entire market. This was not a rounding error or a one-off anomaly. It was a deliberate, large-scale conviction bet by some of the most sophisticated capital allocators operating in Southeast Asia.

Also Read: Vietnam’s AI funding just grew 13x in two years. Now comes the hard part

The question is why and what it reveals about how serious investors actually think about Vietnam’s growth story beneath the tech-forward surface narrative.

A 100M-person consumption engine

Vietnam’s population crossed 100 million in 2023, making it the third most populous country in Southeast Asia after Indonesia and the Philippines. But the more important numbers are not the headcount, but the demographic composition and the income trajectory behind it. Vietnam has one of the youngest median ages in the region, a rapidly expanding urban middle class, and a sustained multi-decade record of GDP growth that has consistently outpaced regional peers. Per capita income has more than doubled over the past decade and is projected to continue rising sharply through the end of the decade.

For consumer goods companies, this combination of large and growing population, rising incomes, accelerating urbanisation, and shifting consumption habits is precisely the macroeconomic environment that generates durable, compounding revenue growth. The thesis is not complicated: as Vietnamese households earn more, they spend more, trade up to branded products, shift from wet markets to modern retail, and increasingly purchase food and beverage products with margins capable of supporting institutional investment at scale.

This is a story that global consumer PE firms know well, having played it out in China, India, and Indonesia over the previous two decades. In each of those markets, the early movers who invested in consumer staples during the inflexion point of middle-class formation generated outsized returns. Vietnam is at or near that inflexion point now.

Why PE, and why now

Private equity is structurally well-suited to the Vietnamese consumer opportunity in ways that venture capital is not. VC is designed for high-risk, high-uncertainty bets on business models that may not have proven themselves commercially. Consumer staples companies, such as established brands, predictable revenue streams, and physical distribution networks, are precisely the kind of assets that PE investors can underwrite with conventional financial analysis, apply operational improvement playbooks to, and exit at a premium through strategic sales to multinationals or domestic conglomerates hungry for bolt-on acquisitions.

The timing of the 2025 surge also reflects a specific market dynamic. Vietnam’s consumer sector has been consolidating steadily, with stronger brands gaining share at the expense of fragmented, subscale competitors. PE investors are positioning to back consolidators, including companies with distribution reach, brand equity, and operational efficiency to absorb market share and, ultimately, serve as acquisition targets for global fast-moving consumer goods giants looking to establish or deepen their Vietnam footprint.

Also Read: 48 PE investors, US$3.96B deployed, and not a single IPO exit in five years. Something is broken.

The doubling of active PE investors to 48 in 2025 has also intensified competition for quality assets, which tends to concentrate capital into the most defensible sectors. Consumer staples, with their resilient cash flows and relatively transparent valuation frameworks, offer a degree of predictability that is scarce in the current environment.

The modern retail inflexion

One structural shift accelerating the consumer staples investment thesis is the rapid modernisation of Vietnam’s retail infrastructure. Traditional trade — wet markets, small independent shops, informal distribution — still accounts for the majority of consumer goods sales in Vietnam, but modern trade is growing fast. Supermarket chains, convenience store networks, and e-commerce platforms are expanding aggressively, and their growth is directly beneficial to branded consumer goods companies that have the product quality and marketing capability to compete on modern retail shelves.

E-commerce, in particular, is reshaping the distribution economics of the sector. Platforms including Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop have given consumer brands direct access to a nationwide customer base without the capital expenditure required to build physical distribution.

For PE-backed consumer companies, this is a margin and velocity story: the ability to reach consumers more efficiently, gather data on purchasing behaviour, and iterate product offerings creates compounding competitive advantages that drive valuation uplift over a typical five-to-seven-year investment horizon.

The risks that the headline number obscures

The US$1.2 billion figure is impressive, but it arrives with caveats. Consumer staples investments in Vietnam are not immune to macro headwinds that affect every asset class. Global commodity price volatility, particularly in agricultural inputs, packaging materials, and energy, can compress margins rapidly in food and beverage businesses. Vietnam’s export-oriented manufacturing sector, which underpins much of the consumer income growth story, is exposed to trade policy shifts and global demand cycles that are difficult to forecast.

There is also a valuation question. The intensity of PE competition for consumer assets in 2025 raises the possibility that entry multiples have stretched beyond what underlying fundamentals justify. If the exit environment remains constrained and the report’s own data on the absence of VC and PE-backed IPOs over the past five years suggests it does, then even well-performing consumer businesses may find it difficult to generate the exit returns that justify aggressive entry pricing.

None of this invalidates the underlying thesis. Vietnam’s consumer story is real, durable, and supported by demographic forces that do not reverse on a quarterly earnings cycle. But the smartest investors in the room are not just buying the macro narrative; they are underwriting specific companies with specific competitive positions, and the quality of those underwriting decisions will determine whether 2025’s record consumer staples allocation looks prescient or premature in five years.

Also Read: From frontier to emerging: How Vietnam’s stock market rewrote the ASEAN playbook in 2025

What is clear is that the most sophisticated private capital in Vietnam is not waiting for the country to become something it isn’t. It is betting heavily on what Vietnam already is: a massive, fast-growing domestic market with an appetite for better products. Sometimes the most contrarian trade is the most obvious one.

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A lithium battery explosion in a Singapore residential garage is not the kind of event that typically sparks a deeptech startup. But for Muriel Demarcus, a seasoned infrastructure risk professional with three decades of managing billion-dollar projects across Europe and Asia Pacific, it was the moment everything clicked.

“My neighbour’s garage burned to the ground,” she recalls. “A lithium battery exploded. Nobody was hurt, but it was a close call, and it stopped me in my tracks. I had spent thirty years managing billion-dollar infrastructure risks. And here was a failure mode sitting in a residential garage that no system had caught, because no system was looking.”

Also Read: The AI upskilling wave is real but the gap it leaves behind is growing

That singular moment of frustration led Demarcus to upskill in AI in Singapore, revisit a question she had been asking in control rooms for decades, and eventually found Marsham Edge, a platform built around a deceptively simple but deeply difficult premise: in high-stakes environments, an alert you cannot explain is an alert you cannot act on.

Three agents, one mission

At the heart of Marsham Edge are three AI agents Argo, Ken, and Deb — each of which owns a distinct layer of the detection pipeline.

Argo manages data ingestion, validation, deduplication, and provenance tracking. It also monitors the platform’s own API endpoints for vulnerabilities — a design decision drawn from real-world AI system breaches.

Ken runs the detection engine, selecting and optimising a model stack that includes CNN-LSTM for deep pattern detection, Random Forest for classification, and a proprietary four-trigger hybrid engine covering statistical envelope, rate density, geometric spike, and physics-informed residual analysis.

Deb is the coordinating layer: routing tasks, assembling findings into structured briefings, and delivering them via dashboard, WhatsApp, or Signal.

“A single-model system gives you an answer,” Demarcus says. “Our agent team gives you a process: secure, detect, and brief. No black boxes. Every decision attributable.”

The multi-agent architecture is a deliberate departure from how most AI systems are designed. “Most AI systems are monolithic: one model does everything. That is brittle. When the model fails, it fails silently and completely.”

Explainability as architecture, not add-on

The word “explainability” gets thrown around liberally in AI marketing. Demarcus has built it into the foundation of how the system works.
When an alert fires, operators do not receive a generic “anomaly detected” flag. They see which of the four triggers fired, the exact numerical threshold crossed, the reasoning behind the decision, and the source data. In the battery thermal use case, an alert reads something like: Trigger D fired. Actual thermal rate: 4.2°C/min. Physics model predicted: 2.1°C/min. Residual: 3.2σ. Risk state: Watching brief (50 per cent). Recommended action: Reduce load in 45 seconds or critical state predicted.

This approach also addresses the hallucination problem that plagues large language model-based systems in safety-critical contexts. Marsham Edge does not rely on third-party LLM APIs for detection. The detection engine runs on customer infrastructure, using proprietary models grounded in statistical and physical laws that structurally eliminate generative ambiguity.

Also Read: Forget the cloud: Why AI is becoming the new heavy industry (and what investors must know)

A two-trigger gate further reduces false alarms: no single noisy sensor can trigger an alert. Two independent triggers must fire simultaneously before the system issues even a Watching Brief.

The battery problem nobody has solved

One of Marsham Edge’s most compelling use cases is early warning of lithium-ion battery thermal runaway, and Demarcus speaks about it with the urgency of someone who has witnessed it firsthand.

Thermal runaway is notoriously difficult to detect because the failure mode is exponential. By the time a conventional sensor hits its threshold, the reaction is frequently irreversible. Most industry tools monitor temperature thresholds and voltage drops, triggers that fire too late.

Marsham Edge’s approach fits a physics-informed energy-balance model (Newton’s Law of Cooling) to each battery’s individual thermal signature, then continuously compares the measured rate of temperature change against what physics predicts. Validated against datasets from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Sandia National Laboratories, and NASA, the platform demonstrated early-warning windows of 220 to 359 seconds ahead of standard hardware-level 80°C threshold alarms. “That is the difference between a controlled intervention and a fire,” Demarcus says flatly.

Deployed, validated, and winning hackathons

Although the startup is less than a year old, Marsham Edge already has live deployments. In May 2026, the full agent team completed an integration test against a synthetic OSINT dataset: Argo quarantined all four malformed records; Ken detected 18 of 18 campaign posts with zero false positives (F1 = 1.00); Deb delivered a structured analyst briefing in three minutes and seven seconds.

Shortly after, the platform was deployed on a live client dataset of 174 silica exposure measurements from an underground mining operation in New South Wales, Australia. Ken identified 31 exceedances — 17.8 per cent of the dataset — with a peak reading of 0.273 mg/m³, or 5.5 times the legal limit of 0.05 mg/m³. Argo flagged the client’s documented use of banned compressed air as a factor that elevated their prosecution risk from Category 2 to Category 1.

It is against this backdrop that Demarcus won the Epic Hackathon Singapore, competing against teams she describes as “half my age.”

“Younger founders often build fast and ask questions later. That is valuable. But in safety-critical environments, speed without accountability is dangerous,” she says. “The hackathon confirmed what I already believed: experience matters. It teaches you which signals are important and which are noise. The agents handle the noise. I handle the accountability.”

Building for the regulatory future

Demarcus is not merely solving today’s operational problems. She is positioning Marsham Edge at the convergence of three trends she sees as inevitable: mandated explainability under frameworks like the EU AI Act and Singapore’s AI Verify programme; the shift to edge and on-premise deployment in regulated industries unwilling to route sensitive data through third-party clouds; and the broader move from monolithic models to specialised agentic architectures.

“We are building for the regulatory future, not the regulatory present,” she says.

Also Read: How Asia’s factories are leading the way in industrial AI

The next stop is VivaTech Paris, where she intends to pursue sovereign cloud partners, defence AI integrators, and investors who grasp that explainability is fast becoming a compliance requirement rather than a product differentiator.

“What the global tech community should understand is this: Singapore is not just a financial hub. It is a defence and critical infrastructure nexus. We are building a platform that solves a universal problem, black-box AI in high-stakes environments, from a country that values security, sovereignty, and trust.”

One year in, with live deployments and independent validation already in hand, Marsham Edge is making a credible case that the next frontier in AI is not raw capability; it is accountability.

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Singapore enterprises are deploying AI agents at the highest rate in Asia-Pacific, yet are also among the most likely to pull them back after going live, according to new research by communications tech company Sinch.

The report, titled The AI Production Paradox, found that 82 per cent of Singapore enterprises have rolled back or shut down a deployed AI agent, a rate eight percentage points above the global average. The finding is particularly striking given that Singapore simultaneously recorded the highest AI agent deployment rate in APAC at 72 per cent.

The study, based on an independent survey of 2,527 senior decision-makers across 10 countries and six industries, suggests that for many enterprises the central challenge around AI agents has shifted — from getting them into production to keeping them there.

“The real risk across APAC isn’t moving slowly, it’s scaling on infrastructure that can’t keep up,” said Wendy Johnstone, Executive Vice President, APAC at Sinch.

A regional pattern of high deployment, high failure

Singapore’s experience reflects a broader trend across Asia-Pacific. The region recorded the highest AI agent deployment rate globally, with 67 per cent of enterprises already operating AI agents in production — five percentage points above the global average. Yet 83 per cent of APAC enterprises have experienced an AI agent failure, the highest failure rate of any region surveyed and nine points above the global average.

Also Read: She watched her neighbour’s garage burn down. Now she’s building AI that explains itself before disaster strikes

Among the most immediate operational consequences, 45 per cent of APAC enterprises cited support team overload as the primary outcome when an AI agent fails. In Singapore, 44 per cent of enterprises reported the same. Given that one in three APAC enterprises sends more than 100 million messages per month, even a contained AI agent failure carries the potential to escalate quickly into broader disruption affecting customer satisfaction and brand trust.

Governance gap persists despite compliance focus

Despite 75 per cent of Singapore enterprises prioritising investment in trust, security and compliance, the research identified a significant governance shortfall. Only 27 per cent of Singapore enterprises report fully mature guardrails — the lowest figure in APAC and well below the global average of 35 per cent.

Across the region, the link between governance and AI advancement was found to be 48 per cent stronger than the global average, with enterprises that established proper governance before deployment recording better outcomes.

The research points to communications infrastructure as a critical but underserved factor in AI agent success. While 82 per cent of Singapore organisations rated high-performance infrastructure as essential or very important, just seven per cent said their current provider was fully meeting their needs — one of the lowest satisfaction figures among all markets surveyed.

As a result, 91 per cent of Singapore enterprises are currently evaluating new communications providers, five percentage points above the global average. On average, Singapore enterprises are planning AI agent deployment across 3.1 channels, with WhatsApp and web-based chatbots among the most common integration points.

Also Read: Vietnam’s biggest PE bet of 2025 was not on tech. It was on what 100M people eat every day

Notwithstanding the challenges, AI agents remain a clear priority. Some 40 per cent of Singapore enterprises plan to increase AI investment by more than 25 per cent compared to the prior year, with businesses focusing on selective, sustainable expansion rather than rapid scaling.

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Wall Street delivered a distinctly split performance on Tuesday, 16 June 2026, as investors aggressively rotated capital out of technology giants and into cyclical sectors. This massive shift sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its two consecutive record closes, pushing the index just a fraction away from the 52,000 milestone. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite both finished in the red. These major indices paused their momentum after a massive rally on Monday. That previous surge stemmed directly from a breakthrough peace framework between the United States and Iran.

Geopolitical relief and a subsequent collapse in oil prices drove much of this market dislocation. Optimism surrounding a tentative deal to end the conflict between the United States and Iran pushed energy prices below US$80 a barrel. This marks the 1st time crude traded at those levels since March. Lower oil and transport costs immediately eased broader corporate inflation worries across the global economy and energy producers.

Brent Crude plunged 5.06 per cent to settle at US$78.96 per barrel. West Texas Intermediate slipped 5.82 per cent to close at US$76.05 per barrel as traders executed a rapid unwind of risk premiums. This energy deflation directly impacted government bonds. The United States 10-Year Treasury Yield held tight near monthly lows at 4.426 per cent. Softer oil numbers effectively blunted core inflation expectations and gave fixed-income markets a brief respite from the relentless pressure of rising consumer prices.

Also Read: Bitcoin’s major resistance sits in the US$67,000 to US$69,000 zone: What’s the next move?

This monetary uncertainty triggered a violent sector rotation across the equity markets. Money flowed swiftly away from semiconductor and artificial intelligence leaders commanding high valuations in the technology sector. Capital rerouted toward cyclical heavyweights, banking institutions, and manufacturing equities. The corporate winners and losers on Tuesday perfectly illustrate this dramatic pivot. SpaceX climbed 4.83 per cent to close at US$201.80. The stock briefly hit an intraday high of US$225.64. This surge following the initial public offering pushed the total market value of the aerospace company past Amazon.

Conversely, major artificial intelligence hardware players pulled back sharply. Advanced Micro Devices plummeted over seven per cent. Micron Technology dropped six per cent. Broadcom shed four per cent, and Nvidia gave up two per cent. The market routinely overvalues the current artificial intelligence hype cycle while ignoring the foundational infrastructure of true decentralisation. This mispricing creates incredible opportunities for those who understand the long-term trajectory of technological convergence and human-centric design.

The cryptocurrency market stabilised and turned green, shaking off weeks of aggressive capital outflows. Much like traditional equities, the broader digital asset ecosystem experienced a sharp relief bounce directly following the news of a preliminary United States and Iran ceasefire agreement. Market short liquidations reached US$373 million as traders forcefully closed their losing short positions. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index recovered significantly to 23, which indicates Fear. This represents a massive climb out of the extreme fear lows in the one-digit numbers from exactly one week prior.

I have always maintained that digital assets offer a superior form of speculative engagement compared to traditional stocks. The resilience of the crypto market during macroeconomic stress proves that decentralised networks possess intrinsic value beyond mere fiat speculation. Investors finally recognise the structural superiority of permissionless financial rails that operate independently of centralised banking hours.

Also Read: Why Bitcoin just surged past US$65,000 while oil crashed 4%

Bitcoin led this digital asset recovery, trading at US$66,449.38 with a gain of 0.9 per cent. The premier cryptocurrency experienced a brief intraday spike above US$67,000 following the Middle East peace framework announcement. Institutional investors maintain incredibly strong conviction despite the broader market volatility. MicroStrategy acquired another 1,587 BTC for US$100 million. This aggressive accumulation strategy by corporate treasuries signals a profound lack of faith in the traditional fiat banking system and corporate balance sheets.

I see this corporate behaviour as a validation of the core thesis behind decentralised digital scarcity from my position as a web3 founder. Traditional financial institutions and corporations quietly hedge against the very centralised monetary policies they publicly support. This hypocrisy underscores the fundamental flaw in the current global financial architecture and accelerates the migration toward decentralised alternatives. Smart investors now recognise that digital assets provide the ultimate hedge against systemic fiat failure and endless currency debasement.

The macroeconomic backdrop shifted further as the Warsh Federal Reserve meeting began. The Federal Open Market Committee kicked off its two-day policy meeting on Tuesday. Investors focus intently on the 1st press conference of incoming Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh taking place tomorrow. Market participants desperately search for signals on the future global monetary direction and monetary policy.

I watch these centralised monetary rituals with deep scepticism. What about you? 

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The table above is conservative. In markets where local payment methods are the primary way people transact: GoPay and OVO in Indonesia, Mada and STC Pay in Saudi Arabia, PromptPay in Thailand, an airline that accepts only international cards is structurally invisible to a large portion of its addressable market. That is not a payment problem. That is a market access problem.

The complexity airlines were not built to handle

To understand why airline payments fail so often, you need to understand the unique complexity stack airlines operate within. No other vertical faces quite this combination.

Airlines sell globally but settle locally. A single booking may involve a passenger in Singapore, an origin airport in Australia, a destination in Japan, a codeshare partner in the Middle East, and interline settlement through IATA’s BSP. The payment that funds all of this needs to work flawlessly across multiple currencies, regulatory regimes, and financial relationships — in real time.

Also Read: The US$0.20 payment that could rewire Asia’s financial rails

At the same time, the distribution landscape has fragmented. Airlines now sell through their own direct channels, through OTAs, through NDC-connected travel management companies, and through GDS. Each channel has different payment capabilities, different fraud profiles, and different customer expectations. A payment infrastructure designed for one channel will fail on the others.

What smart retry alone can recover

Here is something that surprises most airline finance and revenue leaders when they first see it: 20-40 per cent of declined transactions are recoverable. The customer was willing to pay. The card was valid. The money was there. The system just failed to capture it.

Smart retry logic, the ability to automatically reattempt a failed transaction through a different acquirer, with modified parameters, within seconds, is table stakes in e-commerce. It is standard practice at any sophisticated online retailer. In aviation, it remains uncommon.

The reason is integration complexity. Routing a transaction to a different acquirer requires relationships with multiple PSPs, a real-time decision engine that can assess why a transaction failed and select the optimal retry path, and integration with the PSS in a way that does not disrupt the booking flow. Building all of that in-house is a multi-year engineering project. Most airlines do not have the team for it.

This is precisely where orchestration changes the equation. A payment orchestration layer sits between the airline’s booking system and the payment ecosystem, providing a single integration point that unlocks access to multiple acquirers, retry intelligence, and local payment methods simultaneously. The airline gets years of infrastructure in weeks of integration.

The local payment method gap is a market access problem

In 2024, approximately 48 per cent of e-commerce transactions in Southeast Asia were completed using local payment methods: wallets, bank transfers, and local card schemes, rather than international cards. In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the share of local payment instruments has grown substantially as domestic schemes like Mada have matured.

An airline that operates routes into these markets but does not support local payment methods is not just leaving money on the table. It is effectively pricing itself out of the market for a growing segment of travellers who prefer or exclusively use local payment instruments.

The integration challenge is real. Adding GoPay requires a different technical integration than adding Mada. Each has its own API, its own settlement model, its own compliance requirements. For an airline managing a single PSS integration, adding ten local payment methods across five markets represents a significant engineering investment – and ongoing maintenance overhead.

The orchestration model solves this with a hub-and-spoke architecture: the airline integrates once with the orchestration layer, which maintains and manages all individual payment method integrations. When regulations change or a new wallet gains market share, the orchestration layer updates. The airline does not need to re-engineer its checkout.

Also Read: The next phase of payments in Southeast Asia is about more than moving money

3DS: The necessary friction that became unnecessary friction

Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) and 3DS2 are necessary tools. They reduce fraud and protect airlines from chargebacks. But calibrated incorrectly, they become conversion killers.

The core tension is this: 3DS challenges add friction to the checkout flow. Every additional step: a redirect, an OTP, an app-based authentication, creates an opportunity for abandonment. Studies across e-commerce consistently show that conversion drops 10–20 per cent when a 3DS challenge is presented versus when it is not.

The solution is not to remove the 3DS. It is to apply it intelligently. Modern 3DS2 supports frictionless flows – where the issuer authenticates the transaction in the background without user interaction – for low-risk transactions. The trigger for a frictionless flow is rich data: device fingerprinting, transaction history, and behavioural signals. An airline that passes comprehensive contextual data through the 3DS process can dramatically increase its frictionless rate without increasing fraud exposure.

Most airline payment systems do not pass this data. They send the minimum required fields and accept whatever authentication outcome comes back. The result is unnecessary challenges to legitimate transactions, unnecessary abandonment, and unnecessary revenue loss.

The orchestration answer

Payment orchestration is not a new concept in e-commerce. The world’s leading online businesses – including several of the largest travel OTAs – have been running orchestration layers for years. For airlines, it is still early. But the early movers are seeing results.

What a mature orchestration layer delivers for an airline:

• Multi-acquirer routing with automatic failover – no single point of payment failure
• Intelligent retry that recovers 20-40 per cent of initially declined transactions
• Local payment method coverage across all key markets via a single integration
• Market-specific 3DS logic that maximises frictionless authentication
• Real-time analytics on payment performance by route, market, and payment method
• Compliance management across different regulatory regimes

The shift from a single-acquirer model to an orchestrated payment infrastructure is not just a technology upgrade. It is a revenue recovery exercise. For a mid-sized airline processing US$2 billion in annual ticket revenue, a three per cent improvement in payment conversion rate is US$60 million. A one per cent reduction in the decline rate on cross-border transactions is US$20 million. These are not speculative numbers – they are the figures airlines are actually realising when they make the switch.

Also Read: Asia’s student boom is exposing a hidden weakness in global payments

What airlines should do now

The path forward is not complicated, but it requires leadership alignment between finance, technology, and commercial teams – groups that do not always sit at the same table when payment infrastructure decisions are made.

First: audit your current payment performance. What is your decline rate by market? By payment method? By booking channel? Most airlines cannot answer these questions with granularity because their PSS reporting was not built to surface payment intelligence. If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.

Second: map your addressable market against your payment method coverage. If you fly routes into Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, or Thailand, and you do not support the dominant local payment methods in those markets, you have a quantifiable market access gap. That gap has a dollar value. Make it visible to your commercial leadership.

Third: evaluate orchestration as a strategic capability, not a vendor conversation. The question is not which payment gateway to work with. The question is whether your payment infrastructure is architected for resilience, intelligence, and flexibility – or whether you are one acquirer outage away from a catastrophic revenue event.

The airlines that win the next decade will not just be the ones with the best routes or the most frequent flyer programmes. They will be the ones who can sell to anyone, anywhere, in any payment method, without losing the transaction. That capability is available today. The question is whether you will build it before your competitor does.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

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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Walk into any co-working space, accelerator office, or industry event, and you will hear the incessant, almost hypnotic whisper: “Your network is your net worth.”

This axiom has morphed from a helpful reminder into the most sophisticated form of collective time theft in modern entrepreneurship. It pressures founders into a mandatory, ritualistic consumption of generalised networking with the endless coffee meetings, the sprawling conference cocktail hours, and the mastermind group sessions.

The reality is brutal: for the early-stage founder, the cost of maintaining a vast, shallow network far outweighs its actual commercial value. The majority of time spent networking is not productive; it is where founders go to feel validated instead of feeling the painful pressure of real customer acquisition.

This is the Networking-to-Death Trap, and it is quietly killing the focus, the runway, and the structural integrity of otherwise promising companies.

The opportunity overload

The core problem with generalised networking is that it generates opportunity overload.

Every handshake, every business card exchanged, every LinkedIn acceptance carries a micro-cost of processing. A founder who attends four events a week is bombarded with low-signal, high-volume inputs: invitations to irrelevant podcasts, pitches from overpriced service providers, and advice from mentors who solved a problem five years ago in a different market.

This noise does not lead to strategic insight; it leads to strategic paralysis.

Also Read: Networking is expanding, but execution still lags

The founder becomes addicted to the possibility of a major connection, chasing the mythical US$100 million deal that will come from a cold introduction, while neglecting the grinding, essential work that generates reliable, compounding revenue:

• Deep customer conversations: The only person who truly matters to your survival is the customer willing to pay a high price to solve their acute pain. These customers are not found at generalised networking events; they are found through focused, vertical outreach in their specific industry trenches.
• Core product fortification: Every hour spent debating the merits of a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation at a founder retreat is an hour not spent improving your product’s stability, security, or core feature set.

The generalised network promises immediate comfort and psychological support, but it delivers crippling distractions. It replaces the necessary, painful isolation of deep work with the soft, seductive illusion of being busy.

The power of vertical isolation

The most successful disruptive companies are built through selective, vertical isolation. This strategy focuses on generating leverage through depth, not breadth.

• Rule 1: Isolate the customer: Your network should not be comprised of other founders; it should be comprised of your ideal, paying customers and the two or three most influential experts who speak their language. Do not attend a “Tech Startup Mixer”; attend a conference for Heads of Supply Chain in the Cold Storage Industry, even if you are only selling software.
• Rule 2: The two-hour rule: The founder’s calendar should treat external meetings as a limited, precious resource. If the meeting does not directly result in a signed contract, a critical hire, or the resolution of a technical dependency within the next 90 days, it must be ruthlessly relegated to a low-priority slot or rejected entirely. The opportunity cost of a two-hour networking lunch is easily $500 worth of focused engineering time.
• Rule 3: Optimise for the asynchronous win: Leverage your community for knowledge exchange only when it is asynchronous and non-disruptive. Use highly specialised, focused online forums or private communication channels where the input is highly targeted and searchable. This allows the founder to extract the high-value insight without suffering the time commitment of a live conversation.

Also Read: What are some networking benefits that are essential for startups?

The general community operates on the principle of serendipity, where the hope is that a random encounter will solve your biggest problem. The serious founder operates on the principle of design, meticulously engineering the exact inputs needed to reach a specific, immediate business outcome.

Founders need to be ruthlessly honest about their calendar. Most networking is a sophisticated form of peer review, where founders seek validation from each other to avoid the terrifying, objective judgment of the market. The time spent collecting hundreds of shallow contacts is time stolen from building the product so unique that those contacts would eventually chase you.

Look at your calendar for the last month. How many hours were spent in meetings or events that generated revenue, versus hours spent in meetings that generated only optimism? If your company’s survival depends on the random chance of a handshake, is your business model strong enough, or are you mistaking socialising for strategy?

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

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The Philippines is carving out a distinctive path in Southeast Asia’s economic development by prioritising infrastructure reliability as a core productivity driver.

The “Philippine Private Capital Report 2026” by Foxmont Capital Partners highlights a key insight: while headline-grabbing mega-projects draw attention, it is the everyday dependability of utilities and services (power, water, internet, ports, and transport) that consistently unlocks firm-level productivity gains. That lesson is immediately relevant not only inside the Philippines but across fast-growing economies in Southeast Asia.

Reliability: the hidden productivity factor for firms

For many Philippine small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the cost of unreliable infrastructure is a day-to-day reality. Frequent power interruptions, variable water pressure, and intermittent internet connectivity lead firms to “self-insure.”

Also Read: From agritech to AI ops: 15 startups driving Philippines’s innovation shift (Part 2)

Common responses include buying backup gensets (diesel generators), installing water storage and purification systems, and subscribing to multiple internet providers or deploying satellite/4G/5G failovers. These risk-mitigation costs are real and persistent: they reduce available cash flow for investment in productivity-enhancing technologies, staff training, or capacity expansion.

This dynamic plays out across the archipelago in ways that district-level statistics can obscure. In Metro Manila, rolling brownouts and overloaded distribution transformers are a drag on manufacturing and business process outsourcing (BPO) firms that require continuous operations.

In secondary cities—like Cebu, Davao, and Iloilo—infrastructure reliability can be the difference between attracting an export-oriented factory or losing a contract to a more predictable location in Vietnam or Thailand.

For agricultural processors in Mindanao, irregular electricity and logistics delays increase post-harvest losses and reduce competitiveness.

The takeaway is that policymakers should measure more than installed capacity or kilometres of new roads. Operational metrics—uptime, variance, frequency of service interruptions, repair response times—are the practical measurements that determine whether infrastructure actually supports business.

Regional value chain integration depends on predictability

Reliability matters not just for domestic operations but for the Philippines’s ability to link into regional value chains. ASEAN economies are competing to attract deeper segments of electronics, automotive, and high-value manufacturing supply chains. These sectors require predictable inputs, just-in-time delivery and stable utilities. A factory that must maintain its own generators to meet contract uptime clauses faces higher operating costs and lower margins than one located where the grid is consistently reliable.

The Philippines has a comparative advantage in skilled labour and an English-speaking workforce, making it attractive for higher-value services and certain light manufacturing. But to capture a larger share of electronics or automotive component manufacturing relocating from China, reliability gaps must be closed.

Southeast Asian neighbours such as Vietnam and Malaysia have made notable progress in grid stability and logistics efficiency in recent years; the Philippines’ unique geography—an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands—raises the bar for integrated solutions that combine national grid upgrades with localised microgrids, improved port handling and seamless digital logistics.

Policy progress—and persistent, localised challenges

There are encouraging developments. Administrative digitalisation—examples such as digital company registration via eSPARC—has lowered fixed costs and simplified formalisation for businesses, demonstrating how procedural digitisation can complement physical infrastructure reliability.

Also Read: Why 2025 is a milestone year for startup funding in the Philippines

Similarly, regulatory changes to telecommunications foreign ownership rules have been aimed at fostering competition, attracting more capital, and improving service quality. When combined with incentives for private investment through public-private partnerships (PPPs), these reforms can magnify the impact of physical infrastructure upgrades.

However, challenges remain. Geographical disparities in service quality are stark: urban centres may enjoy multiple fibre routes and near-continuous power, while remote islands rely on ageing diesel plants and maritime supply chains vulnerable to weather. Local government units (LGUs) display uneven digital adoption: some provinces streamline permits and provide online business services, while others still depend on paper-based processes that delay firm expansion.

Addressing these localised disparities requires a two-pronged strategy: strengthen national standards and oversight for reliability metrics, while investing in targeted local capacity building—training municipal engineers, digitising municipal services, and co-financing microgrid or fibre projects in underserved areas.

Sectors such as telecommunications and logistics can be particularly catalytic. More competitive telco markets lower costs for SMEs to adopt cloud services, enabling remote work, digital payments, and e-commerce participation—pathways to higher productivity. Better port modernisation and customs digitalisation reduce lead times for exporters and importers, making Philippine firms more attractive partners in ASEAN supply chains.

Practical measures to improve reliability—lessons for the region
Policymakers across Southeast Asia can draw practical lessons from Philippine and regional experiences:

• Track operational reliability metrics, not just installed capacity. Publish uptime statistics for utilities, average repair times, and frequency of interruptions. Transparent metrics create accountability and help target investments.
• Combine central grid upgrades with localised solutions. In the Philippines, microgrids, solar-plus-storage installations, and targeted distribution upgrades for island economies mitigate the higher costs and logistical challenges of archipelagic connectivity.
• Encourage competition and regulatory clarity in utilities. Relaxed foreign ownership rules in telecoms and investment-friendly frameworks for independent power producers (IPPs) tend to improve service quality and reduce prices over time.
• Digitise processes end-to-end. From online business registration to e-customs and digital permitting, procedural digitisation reduces the time firms spend navigating bureaucracy and complements improvements in physical infrastructure.
• Target SME support. Offer co-financing or subsidy schemes for SMEs to adopt reliable backup solutions in transition periods, paired with incentives to reinvest savings into productivity-enhancing technologies.
• Build resilience into logistics. Port congestion in Metro Manila, for instance, has pushed shippers to use alternative ports like Batangas, Cebu or Subic. Investing in multimodal connections and optimising hinterland links reduces the vulnerability of supply chains to local disruptions.

Broader implications across Southeast Asia

As ASEAN economies industrialise and expand services, the policy lens must shift from merely increasing infrastructure stock to ensuring its day-to-day stability. The Philippines’s experience underscores that predictability—measured in minutes of uptime, not gigawatts of capacity—drives firms’ decisions to invest and integrate into regional value chains.

Countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia face similar trade-offs: where headline projects boost national capacity, it is operational reliability that determines whether firms actually upgrade technology, hire more staff, or enter export markets.

Also Read: Are startups neglecting the future middle-class population in Philippines?

Investors, too, are sensitive to these dynamics. Multinationals assessing factory locations weigh not just cost and labour but the probability of meeting contractual uptime obligations. As Southeast Asia competes to move up the value chain into semiconductors, electric vehicle components and higher-end electronics, infrastructure reliability will increasingly be a differentiator.

Conclusion

The Philippines offers a practical blueprint for unlocking hidden productivity: elevate the operational reliability of infrastructure, pair physical upgrades with digital procedural reforms, and foster competitive utility markets. For Southeast Asia, the message is clear—investing in reliability is not a second-order concern; it is a central, silent engine that will determine whether the region can translate infrastructure projects into sustained firm-level productivity, broader regional integration and long-run economic growth.

The post The hidden tax on Philippine SMEs: Unreliable infrastructure appeared first on e27.

100×100 (previously Wavemaker Impact), the Singapore-based climate company builder behind a clutch of Asia-focused startups, has launched a US$100 million second fund to assemble and scale 50 new firms across Southeast Asia and India.

The move cements a growing trend: investors and builders are shifting from pure software bets to hands-on venture creation to turn climate technologies into commercially viable businesses in the region.

A builder, not just a backer

100×100’s model is deliberate and prescriptive. Rather than seeding existing early-stage startups, the firm partners with seasoned entrepreneurs to co-found companies from scratch. Each venture is designed with an explicit commercial target, US$100 million in revenue, and an emissions abatement ambition of 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over its lifetime. The firm says it will focus on energy, food, materials, and supply-chain sectors where demand, geopolitical shifts, and resource constraints are reshaping markets.

Also Read: Climate tech’s shift from doing good to doing well

Founding partner Marie Cheong framed the thesis succinctly: “Our name reflects our conviction that profit and carbon reduction are not a trade-off, but a multiplier. With Fund II, we are doubling down on a demonstrated strategy with a platform that is ready-to-go.” The quote underlines 100×100’s pitch: build ventures that exploit a ‘green discount’, delivering cost or economic advantages while cutting emissions.

Why Southeast Asia and India matter

The Southeast Asian and South Asian markets are central to 100×100’s strategy for several reasons. The region accounts for a considerable share of global emissions from agriculture, industry, and power generation, while simultaneously undergoing rapid industrialisation, manufacturing reshoring, and infrastructure expansion. These dynamics create fertile ground for technologies that lower costs and emissions, especially those that can be embedded into supply chains or scaled across large, fragmented markets.

Quentin Vaquette, another founding partner, bluntly argued the regional case: “Southeast and South Asia sit at the intersection of the world’s most urgent challenges, holding a disproportionate share of global emissions while increasingly becoming a key region for manufacturing reshoring, AI infrastructure buildout, and food system redesign.”

100×100’s stated target is ambitious: collectively, the ventures it builds should reduce 10 per cent of global emissions, a claim that signals the scale it intends to pursue.

Track record and traction

Fund II follows Fund I, which closed at a US$60 million hard cap in 2023. The firm says its initial cohort has produced fast-moving results: 27 co-founded companies across eight countries, a portfolio survival rate nearly double the median venture capital average, and portfolio companies operating at roughly 1.5 times greater capital efficiency than typical VC-backed startups. External validation includes demand from institutional and strategic backers such as the US Development Finance Corporation, Singapore’s Economic Development Board, and British International Investment, among others.

Also Read: Funded: SEA climate tech has US$1.1B and a problem no one wants to name

The portfolio has produced concrete commercial cases. Rize, a company that reduces methane emissions in rice cultivation and serves smallholder farmers, reportedly delivered US$11 million in revenue in 2025 with 550 per cent year-on-year growth, while improving livelihoods for over 40,000 farmers. Helios, a residential solar provider in the Philippines, is cited as growing at more than 40 per cent month-on-month over the past year. Such metrics are central to 100×100’s argument that its venture-building model accelerates commercial product-market fit faster than traditional funding routes.

How the venture builder works

100×100 employs a structured process to locate white spaces in high-emissions sectors. The firm says it speaks to over 1,000 experienced founders each year to identify operators with domain expertise who can lead scalable companies from day one. It takes larger equity stakes than traditional VCs and embeds operational support and playbooks into the early stages, effectively trading a higher level of involvement for quicker, more efficient scaling.

The ‘green discount’ concept is worth unpacking: rather than positioning climate products as premium add-ons, 100×100 seeks ideas that reduce unit costs or improve productivity while simultaneously lowering emissions, making them more likely to be adopted at scale in price-sensitive markets across Southeast Asia and India.

Regional implications and challenges

100×100’s expansion is timely, but not without obstacles. Commercialising hardware-intensive or industrial-process innovations in Southeast Asia involves high capital intensity, complex supply chains, and regulatory fragmentation. Local partners, distribution networks and long sales cycles, especially for industrial and agricultural customers, remain hurdles. The firm’s playbook of co-founding companies with experienced founders and taking larger equity stakes is explicitly designed to mitigate some of these operational risks.

Also Read: ‘The next generation of unicorns will be from greentech’: Wavemaker Impact’s Steve Melhuish

For Southeast Asia, the model offers potential benefits beyond emissions reductions. If the builder can scale firms that reduce costs for manufacturers or farmers, the region could capture more value in emerging supply chains, particularly as multinational companies reorient production away from concentrated centres. That could translate into job creation, technology transfer, and greater regional resilience.

What investors are buying

Institutional backers of Fund II are effectively betting on a repeatable engine for climate company creation in markets that are often seen as difficult for pure-play climate tech investors. The claim of near-top-quartile performance, higher capital efficiency, and rapid revenue growth will be closely watched by LPs seeking both impact and returns. Whether the model can consistently produce US$100-million revenue companies and deliver massive abatement across 50 new ventures remains to be proven at scale.

Closing thoughts

100×100’s US$100 million Fund II is a bold bet that the most impactful climate solutions in Southeast Asia and India will emerge from active venture building rather than passive capital allocation. Its early results offer reasons for cautious optimism: fast revenue growth, strong founder engagement, and a focused sector strategy. The coming years will test whether the studio’s playbook can convert ambitious climate and commercial targets into a pipeline of durable, regionally rooted companies that reshape how emissions-intensive industries operate across Asia.

The post A factory for climate startups: 100×100’s US$100M bet on 50 companies in SEA, India appeared first on e27.

After facilitating leadership workshops across different organisations, I began noticing something interesting. Some groups needed constant encouragement just to participate, while others required only a small prompt before the room filled with energy, debate, and shared thinking.

The difference was rarely about intelligence, seniority, or company size. It was about maturity – not the age of the team, but how they think and learn together.

Over time, three patterns consistently emerged whenever I worked with mature teams.

Mature teams are noisy, in the right way

The first sign is noise. Productive noise.

When working with mature teams, a simple question from the facilitator often sparks layered conversations almost immediately. Participants challenge assumptions, build on each other’s ideas, and connect discussions to real operational experiences. The session stops feeling like a workshop and starts resembling an executive conversation already in motion.

This happens because experienced teams carry accumulated reflections into the room. They have navigated crises, misaligned strategies, and difficult decisions before. Training becomes a space to recalibrate rather than to discover leadership for the first time.

More importantly, people speak freely. They are less concerned about appearing wrong or disagreeing publicly because psychological safety already exists within the group. Members trust that expressing a view will not damage relationships or reputations.

For facilitators, this is often the moment when leadership development becomes meaningful. Engagement is no longer driven by exercises; it is driven by ownership. The team treats learning as part of work itself, not an interruption from it.

Also Read: Why Southeast Asia’s edutech must go beyond chatbots to truly transform learning

Mature teams disagree without breaking trust

Another reliable signal of maturity is visible disagreement.

In younger teams, silence is often mistaken for alignment. Participants defer to hierarchy or wait for consensus before contributing. Mature teams behave differently. Diverse opinions surface quickly, and opposing viewpoints are voiced openly.

I teach improv-inspired communication principles, particularly the idea of “yes, and.” Interestingly, mature teams rarely respond with immediate agreement. Instead, they demonstrate a more nuanced version of it. Someone may acknowledge a colleague’s reasoning, introduce an alternative perspective, and then carefully connect both ideas before advancing their own position.

The conversation becomes additive rather than adversarial. Participants feel heard even when opinions diverge, and debate turns into collective sense-making instead of personal validation.

In many leadership trainings, organisations aim to build psychological safety. Mature teams reveal what it actually looks like in practice: trust strong enough to allow challenge without fragmentation.

Mature teams expand the learning beyond the curriculum

My favourite indicator appears when the workshop stops belonging solely to the facilitator.

Mature teams rarely stay confined within the training framework. Participants bring their own vocabulary, experiences, and intellectual references into the discussion, effectively co-creating the learning environment.

In one session on DISC profiling, a participant introduced the concept of analysis paralysis to explain behavioural patterns we were observing in decision-making styles. In another workshop on growth mindset, someone connected the discussion to the psychology of the Dark Triad, reframing leadership behaviour through a completely different lens.

These moments signal something important. Participants are not absorbing content passively; they are integrating it into their own mental models. Learning becomes translation, not repetition.

Also Read: I came back to coding after 20 years, and the fault line on my team was nothing like I expected

Early in my facilitation journey, such moments made me slightly uneasy. Over time, I learned that effective facilitation sometimes means becoming a student in real time, asking participants to elaborate, and letting expertise move in multiple directions rather than one.

When teams feel safe enough to extend the curriculum, leadership development shifts from instruction to collective intelligence.

Maturity is not about time

Team maturity is often mistaken for tenure or organisational age. Yet I have seen long-standing leadership teams remain cautious, while young startup teams demonstrate remarkable openness and ownership.

Maturity is visible in how teams operate daily: how they challenge one another, how they learn together, and whether individuals feel responsible for outcomes beyond their own roles.

The most effective leadership training does not create maturity overnight. Instead, it surfaces conversations teams have avoided, accelerates alignment that is still forming, and gives structure to trust that is already emerging.

And perhaps this is where the real question sits for leaders and organisations: what kind of leadership development do you actually bring into your team? Not just to transfer knowledge, but to shape how your people think together, disagree safely, and build on each other’s ideas in real time.

Because mature teams are not an accident. They are intentionally cultivated through the right conversations, the right reflections, and often, the right facilitation that helps those moments emerge and stick.

And perhaps that is the real goal of any leadership development effort: not merely to teach new skills, but to help teams grow into environments where learning, disagreement, and contribution happen naturally – with the right support to make those moments visible, and meaningful, when they matter most.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

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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In my previous article, I traced how the companies that built the internet lost the distinct cultures and identities that made them formidable, optimised into homogeneity by the same growth logic that made them successful. Now I will move to examine how AI has impacted this process. 

The first thing to understand about Big Tech’s AI pivot is that it was not a strategic decision.

Across all AI-centric announcements in Big Tech, the language is identical: Transformative. At scale. Across our entire product surface. It’s not just the language; the investor calls, consumer messaging, acquisitions, and internal decks all follow the same patterns and ideas. 

Every major technology company is now, officially, an AI company, having arrived at this conclusion within roughly the same window, having made roughly the same infrastructure bets, and having restructured roughly the same proportion of their workforces to fund them. The probability that this represents independent strategic convergence of all these organisations is frankly ridiculous. They are making strategic calls simply based on what their competitors are doing to maintain an illusion of “competitiveness”. 

René Girard, the French anthropologist and literary theorist, called it mimetic desire: the observation that humans do not independently decide what to want, but want what they see others wanting. Applied to organisations, it produces what he called a mimetic crisis, which refers a state in which rivals, having imitated each other into near-identical positions, stop competing over what is actually valuable and start competing over the appearance of competition.

This is supported by DiMaggio and Powell, who observed that organisations under pressure from external stakeholders (like investors) don’t innovate, but imitate the competition, converging on whatever behaviour their peers have already legitimised, purely because it’s seen as safe and deals with the anxiety of innovation uncertainty. 

The AI pivot is, therefore, a mimetic crisis at an industrial scale. The fear of missing a rival’s gain has become more powerful than any assessment of whether the gain is real. 

The AI pivot is, by any honest reading, a mimetic crisis. Every major technology company is now, officially, an AI company. The announcements are indistinguishable, and all contain the same words in the same order: transformative, at scale, across our entire product surface. What is harder to find, in most cases, is evidence that this is producing value for the people who use the products.

Studies from Goldman Sachs and MIT have questioned whether enterprise AI spending generates productivity gains proportionate to the investment. The technology is being deployed ahead of demonstrated value, which is not a description of a confident strategy. It is a description of mimetic panic, as nobody wants to be the company that missed the wave.

Meanwhile, the jobs supposedly being augmented by AI are being eliminated by the same companies making the loudest noise about AI’s transformative potential. The mimetic crisis requires a resolution, and Girard argued that resolution historically comes through the scapegoat mechanism wherein the community unifies around the sacrifice of an arbitrary victim, temporarily relieving the tension of rivalry.

Also Read: A 65% probability explains the next likely move for Bitcoin as leverage clears

In corporate terms, it refers to the moment when the AI bubble deflates, and a single company is singled out as the cautionary tale while the larger players quietly reassess this investment.

What the bubble produces

To understand where mimetic capital flows when it chases a narrative ahead of validated products, consider Cluely.

Cluely was founded in 2025 by two Columbia University students, one of whom had been expelled for using an earlier version of the tool to cheat through an Amazon technical interview. The product was honest about this: an AI overlay that sits invisibly on your screen during video calls and feeds you answers in real time.

Within months, it had raised US$5.3 million in seed funding, then a US$15 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at approximately US$120 million. All of this, for a company with an unclear business model, a viral marketing strategy, and revenue numbers that turned out, in March 2026, to be fabricated. The CEO admitted on X that the US$7 million ARR figure he had given to TechCrunch the previous summer was a lie.

The company has since rebranded as an AI meeting note-taker.

Cluely is not an anomaly, but is a case study in what DiMaggio and Powell’s mimetic isomorphism looks like at the level of venture capital: under conditions of uncertainty, investors copy other investors. As the field signals that this is the kind of company worth investing in, the logic of missing out becomes more powerful than the logic of performing due diligence. By 2025, AI captured close to 50 per cent of all global venture funding: over US$200 billion, up from 34 per cent the year before.

The terror of being the one who missed the next OpenAI has become more powerful than any assessment of individual companies. The object of desire ( AI value) has receded and has been replaced by an obsession to win the investment war.

The most significant threats to the monoculture are being built by companies quietly constructing alternatives to the platforms the monoculture depends on.

Linux desktop usage has historically been a running joke: it’s always the year of Linux on the desktop, but never quite. Framework, a new age PC and laptop manufacturer with a distinct cultural identity around repairability, now ships laptops with Linux as a first-class option, which sold out prior to its Windows counterpart.

Lenovo ThinkPads come with Linux pre-installed. The developer community has shifted significantly toward Linux-based workflows. This is not yet a mass-market story, but it represents, in DiMaggio and Powell’s terms, coercive isomorphic pressure running in reverse: an external force that makes the dominant platform’s continued stagnation costly, rather than safe.

The gaming front is more significant. Windows has historically been the stickiest consumer use case: the reason people tolerated everything else about it. Valve’s Steam Deck changed that. A Linux-based device that runs an enormous proportion of the Steam library with fewer power requirements.

SteamOS is now expanding beyond the Deck due to its contributions to the WINE platform and the Proton compatibility layer (both of which are free). Valve quietly built a gaming ecosystem that no longer requires Windows to function. That is a disruption in the structural sense, which has led to Windows and Xbox’s newfound focus on improving their services as of late.

Also Read: Emotional intelligence makes AI training stick

The reckoning

The current market is an example of DiMaggio and Powell’s iron cage: organisations that have become so optimised for legitimacy to appear correct to investors, regulators, and each other, that they have lost the ability to actually be anything in particular.

The companies that built the internet had something the current iteration has optimised away: cultural density, the very thing that makes a company relatable and marketable to consumers in choice-based markets like consumer technology.

Girard was clear about how mimetic crises resolve: scapegoats. The dot-com correction produced its scapegoats in companies like Pets.com and Webvan. The scapegoat is never the system itself, but an organisation within the system, selected to make the system appear self-correcting. Cluely may serve this function, or it could be a tech giant, or another one of the thousands of new-age tech companies. 

What breaks the cycle is the alternative. Valve didn’t announce a strategy to challenge Windows; it simply built a device, then a platform, then an ecosystem, until the alternative structurally competes with the market leader. Framework didn’t publish a manifesto; it simply made excellent products in line with its simple mission of repairability and customisability.

The irony is that isomorphism has made differentiation easier, not harder. When every large tech company looks, sounds, and feels the same, being genuinely excellent at something specific and being honest about what you believe in is a competitive advantage of unusual power. The only problem is that the conditions that produce that kind of strangeness are precisely what institutional success destroys. 

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

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 The AI bubble and its reckoning — Part 2 appeared first on e27.