The 27 SEA biotech firms betting on cells, fermentation, and code

Southeast Asia’s startup story is usually told through ride-hailing, fintech, and e-commerce. But a quieter, stranger, and potentially more consequential sector is taking shape in the region’s labs, farms, and hospitals: biotech.

Founders are using fermentation to turn waste into biomaterials, growing seafood and fat from cells, building AI tools for cancer care and heart scans, engineering crops for tougher climates, and developing diagnostics designed specifically for Asian populations. It is not an easy sector to build in; biotech demands patient capital, deep technical talent, complex regulatory navigation, and long commercialisation cycles.

Also Read: Asia’s biotech boom: Innovation, investment, and a new era of discovery

Yet the sheer breadth of companies now emerging from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines suggests the region’s life-sciences ecosystem has moved well past the experimental stage, and is beginning to challenge assumptions about where deeptech gets built.

Below is a list of 27 biotech firms that are redrawing the region innovation map:

RWDC Industries (Singapore)

RWDC ferments used cooking oil into PHA, a fully biodegradable biopolymer that’s meant to replace single-use plastic in straws, cutlery and packaging.

Protenga (Singapore/Malaysia)

Protenga runs “Smart Insect Farms” that turn organic waste into black soldier fly protein for aquaculture, animal feed and pet food.

Engine Biosciences (Singapore/US)

Engine Biosciences combines AI with wet-lab biology to map gene interactions and speed up cancer drug discovery.

Us2.ai (Singapore)

Us2.ai uses AI to automate the reading of echocardiograms, cutting a process that takes cardiologists many minutes down to under two.
Founders: James Hare, Dr Carolyn Lam, Dr Yoran Hummel and Paul Seekings

AMILI (Singapore)

AMILI runs Southeast Asia’s first gut microbiome bank, building an Asia-specific database to power diagnostics and personalised nutrition.

KYAN Technologies (Singapore)

KYAN applies “small data AI” to match cancer patients with the most effective drug-dose combinations, developed with NUS and UCLA.

ImpacFat (Singapore)

ImpacFat cultivates omega-3-rich fish fat from stem cells, aimed at alt-meat, cosmetics and supplements.

Qarbotech (Malaysia)

Qarbotech makes QarboGrow, a carbon-quantum-dot photosynthesis enhancer that boosts crop yields without genetic modification.

NLYTech Biotech (Malaysia)

NLYTech develops biodegradable, plastic-free packaging materials made from natural ingredients as an alternative to single-use plastics.

Vulcan Augmetics (Vietnam)

Vulcan builds affordable, modular robotic prosthetics designed to click together like building blocks.

Teora (Singapore)

Teora develops biologics that manage disease in agriculture and aquaculture without relying on chemical pesticides.

KINNVA (Singapore)

KINNVA is a synthetic-biology company using fermentation to turn waste streams into biochemicals for food, feed and cosmetics.

Sinhke (Vietnam)

Sinhke builds AI-powered hardware that measures shrimp larvae health before farmers commit to large-scale cultivation.

Virdalis (Singapore)

Virdalis is building a cultivation and data platform around duckweed, the world’s fastest-growing flowering plant, as a soy alternative for animal feed protein.

Allozymes (Singapore)

Allozymes runs an ultra-high-throughput microfluidics platform that screens millions of enzyme variants a day, effectively an “enzyme discovery engine” for pharma, food and chemical industries.

FathomX (Singapore)

FathomX is an NUS/NUHS spin-off building AI to improve the accuracy of mammograms, particularly for dense breast tissue common among Asian women.

REVIVO BioSystems (Singapore)

An A*STAR spin-off building “organ-on-a-chip” 4D human skin models to replace animal testing for cosmetics and pharma compounds.

Advanx Health (Malaysia)

Malaysia’s first consumer DNA-testing company, offering genetic reports on health risk, nutrition and fitness traits.

KosmodeHealth (Singapore)

An NUS Food Science spin-off extracting proteins and fibres from food-processing waste to formulate functional foods and biomedical bio-ink.

Imagene Labs (Singapore)

A subsidiary of Asia Genomics offering saliva-based DNA testing for personalised nutrition, skincare and fitness products across Asia.

Meatiply (Singapore)

Meatiply is a multi-cell-type cultivated meat company that produced Asia’s first cultivated smoked duck breast.

Singrow (Singapore)

An agri-biotech firm that cross-bred and gene-edited the world’s first tropical-climate strawberry, grown in an indoor vertical farm.

Dendrotonics (Philippines)

Develops biodiversity-restoration technology to make degraded land ecologically and commercially productive again.

QuikPath (Singapore)

Built a self-administered RT-PCR Covid-19 screening technology designed to scale rapid, accurate infection monitoring.

ETBio (Singapore)

Harnesses microalgae to build next-generation air filtration solutions.

Ternion Biosciences (Singapore)

Provides high-throughput cardiac safety screening assays used in preclinical drug development.

CloudSeq (Singapore)

CloudSeq runs an NRF-backed cloud platform built to handle big data for healthcare and agricultural genomics.

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