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SEA of Startups

SEA of Startups

Di: Decoding the Pulse of Founders Capital & Conviction in Southeast Asia.
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Real, raw, relatable takes on Southeast Asian startups. One investor, the week's news, no script.

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Episodi
  • The $13 billion costume

    The $13 billion costume
    Oct 14 2026
    In the first nine months of this year, startups in Southeast Asia raised more than $13 billion. A record. Depending on whose tracker you believe, that is somewhere between a 120% and a 170% jump on last year.Hold on to that range for a second. Two serious data providers, looking at the same region over the same nine months, cannot agree on the number. That is not an accident, and we will come back to it.Here is the second number, and it is the one I want you to actually feel. Of that $13 billion, seed and angel rounds, the first real cheque a brand new company gets, came to about $270 million. Spread across roughly 90 companies.Sit with the gap. $13 billion at the top of the page. Ninety founders at the bottom, splitting $270 million between them. The money in this region has never been bigger, and it has almost nothing to do with the founder in Manila, KL or Bangkok trying to make payroll this month.I have watched the money here change shape about four times in a decade. Every time, it arrived looking like the boom had finally come. Every time, the headlines said we had arrived. And every time, when you followed the money to the end, it was not here to build a Southeast Asian company at all. It was here for something else.So this week I want to follow the money through all four of its disguises. Then, at the end, I will tell you why, after taking a blowtorch to all of it, I am more bullish on this region than I have been in years. I mean that. This is not a sad story.One. The headline is the trickThirteen and a half billion dollars, nine months, a record. If that is the only line you read, the drought is over and it is time to go out and raise again.Here is what the line does not tell you. Three deals were 54% of that number. Three. Widen the lens to every round of a billion dollars or more, and four deals were about 63% of all the money raised in the entire region this year. Before we have even started, nearly two thirds of Southeast Asia’s record year is a handful of enormous cheques going to a handful of enormous companies.So here is the one habit that will protect you from almost every misleading funding headline about this region. When a number says funding hit a record, your first question is never how much. It is how many. How many companies? Here, more than almost anywhere, one or two giant transactions can carry the whole number and make a starving market look like it just ate a feast.Look at where the money actually sat. Late stage, the Series C and beyond, the pre-IPO money, more than tripled to over $10 billion. Early stage, the seed and Series A, the part of the market where companies are actually born and where the next decade here gets decided, barely moved.Data centres alone were about 35% of all the money. I would love to know when we started counting data centres as startup funding. Video generation tools took another big slice on top.Think about what a data centre is. Power, concrete, cooling, and rack after rack of servers. It is a real estate and energy play with a technology label on the front. Perfectly good business, and we need them. It is just not a Southeast Asian founder with an idea and a laptop. The single biggest category in our record year is, quite literally, buildings.So the record is not founders getting funded. The record is a small number of very large, very late cheques going into physical infrastructure and a couple of foreign technology giants, sitting on top of an early stage market running on fumes. That is not a recovery. That is a costume. A big, shiny, $13 billion costume.To understand the costume, you have to understand the waves that came before it, because each one taught us a bad habit. We are still paying for all of them at once.Two. The hype moneyMost of you lived through this one. Rates were on the floor, capital was effectively free, and it flooded into Southeast Asia from big global funds that had made a fortune in China and were hunting for the next one.The instruction attached to that money was simple. Grow at all costs. Buy the users, buy the market share, buy the headline. Worry about a business model later, or frankly never.For a while it worked the way a sugar high works. Valuations went vertical. Everyone was a soonicorn. The pitch stopped being “here is a company that makes money” and became “here is a rocket, get on before it leaves the ground.” Burn was no longer a warning sign. Burn was the strategy. You were supposed to lose money faster than the next guy, because that proved you were winning the land grab.I sat in rooms where a founder losing $10 million a year was treated as more investable than one quietly making $1 million, because the one making money was clearly not thinking big enough.Then the free money ended. Rates went up, the global funds pulled back, and reality walked in through the front door and turned the lights on.You know the wreckage, because some of it made headlines around the world. eFishery in Indonesia,...
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    30 min
  • Seed is booming. Not here.

    Seed is booming. Not here.
    Oct 7 2026
    Let me describe a company to you. Real revenue. Customers who pay every month, on time. A product that works and a team that ships. By every standard that mattered three years ago, this is a fundable company. Three years ago it raises a Series A without breaking a sweat. Today it cannot get a second meeting.Nothing about the company changed. The bar moved underneath it while the founder was busy building. That is happening everywhere, in San Francisco, London and Bangalore. But if you are building in Southeast Asia, here is the part almost nobody says out loud. The bar did not move once here. It moved twice. And the second move is one no venture podcast in San Francisco will ever explain to you, because none of them has had to raise a round across six countries at once.So this week I want to walk all the way through it. Why your next round is harder than your last one had any right to be. What it costs in months and in cash. And what I would do on Monday morning if I were sitting where you are.One. The seed mirageThe headline going around is that seed funding in Southeast Asia is up this year. On paper, true. DealStreetAsia’s half-year numbers have seed dollars up 128% year on year to $328 million. Read only the top line and you would think the taps are open and the hard years are behind us.Now look at who got the money. In the first half of 2026, 63 companies in the entire region received their first institutional cheque. Sixty-three. Across six countries, 680 million people and six months. That is not a wave of new founders getting funded. That is a number you could seat on one decent coworking floor in Singapore.Here is the part that should make you suspicious. While the seed total went up, the number of deals across the region fell to its lowest level since at least 2018, and the typical seed cheque got bigger. Hold those two facts together. Bigger cheques, fewer of them than in nearly a decade. That is not money spreading out to more people. That is money piling up on fewer of them.Who gets the fat cheques? Overwhelmingly AI and deep tech. A normal software seed in this region is still one to three million dollars. The AI rounds run at roughly double that and climbing, and they are the ones dragging the average up and making the chart look healthy. The chart is not lying exactly. It is letting you believe something that is not true. When you hear “seed is back,” the honest follow-up is “back for whom.” The honest answer is: for a small number of companies that probably do not look like yours.One more number, same story at a bigger scale. The region raised $7.25 billion in the first half, the strongest half since 2022. Almost all of it was one data centre raise, DayOne’s $4.5 billion Series C. Take that single deal out and the region raised about $2.75 billion, down on the half before and below the same period a year earlier. One deal, one building full of servers, is doing the work of making an entire half-year look like a recovery. I made the same point about exits a week ago. The discipline never changes: how many deals?So here is where we stand. The money that exists is real. It is also concentrated, going to a narrow slice of companies, and the breadth a healthy early stage is supposed to have is not there. The costume says boom. The body underneath says something much tighter.Two. The bar moved, and the Americans admit itNow the thing that actually decides your future: the bar for your next round.Listen to the American shows, 20VC, SaaStr, the ones every founder here has on in the background, and the same confession comes up every few weeks. A partner gets comfortable in the chair and says the quiet part out loud. The bar to raise a Series A today would have been a Series B three years ago. They say it the way you mention the weather, and then they move on.Here are the numbers behind the anecdote. The revenue a company needs to clear a US Series A has roughly tripled. A few years ago, about $1 million of annual recurring revenue got you a serious conversation. In early 2026 the figure doing the rounds is closer to $3.5 million. Not double. More than triple.Graduation fell off a cliff too. Carta, which sees a huge slice of American cap tables, tracks the share of seed-stage companies that go on to raise a Series A within two years. For companies that raised seed in early 2018, that was about 31%. For the early-2022 cohort it was about 15%. One in three became one in six. And it takes longer. The median walk from seed to Series A is now past two years, against roughly a year and a half in the late 2010s.Put those together and you understand what people mean when they say a stage of the market got deleted. Seed became the new Series A. Series A became the new Series B. The old Series A, the round you raised on promise and early traction, quietly stopped existing. The companies standing on it got no warning. They raised their seed, hit the milestones that used to be enough, went out ...
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    33 min
  • Twelve doors out: Southeast Asia's exits are back, and the buyers are flying in

    Twelve doors out: Southeast Asia's exits are back, and the buyers are flying in
    Sep 30 2026
    There are two ways out of a company in Southeast Asia.One of them is loud. On 20 October, GCash will ring the bell at the Philippine Stock Exchange in the biggest listing that country has ever done. Cornerstone investors with names like BlackRock and T. Rowe Price. A valuation that starts with a number most Filipino founders will never see in their lifetime.The other is quiet. A few weeks earlier, on 8 September, private equity firm Navis Capital closed the sale of a chain of premium Malaysian supermarkets, Village Grocer, Ben’s Independent Grocer and a few others, to a Thai retailer. No bell. No cameras. Just a wire transfer and, reportedly, around five times the money they put in more than a decade ago.For years the complaint about this region was that there were no exits. Great companies, nowhere to sell them. That complaint just stopped being true. The door is cracking open. But before anyone pops the champagne, walk through it with me and look at who is standing on the other side. Because it is almost never a Southeast Asian.One. Six and a half times the money, four more companiesHere is the number that made me put this on the docket. In the first half of this year, venture-backed companies in Southeast Asia returned $5.65 billion in exits, per DealStreetAsia. Trade sales, listings, the lot. In the first half of last year, that figure was $856 million.Call it a six and a half times jump in twelve months. Hear only that and you would think the drought is over, and the region has finally figured out how to give investors their money back.Here is the part that gets buried. That $5.65 billion came from twelve exits. Twelve. The year before, it was eight. The value went up more than six times. The number of companies actually getting out went up by four.Sit with that, because it is the whole story of this market right now. The money is real. The breadth is a mirage. Twelve companies is not a wave of liquidity. Twelve companies is a handful of very large outcomes, and everybody else is still sitting in the waiting room.We saw the same trick with funding. The region raised $7.25 billion in the first half, the strongest since 2022. Sounds fantastic, until you notice that deal volume fell to its lowest level since at least 2018, and a single data centre deal carried the headline. Strip that one out and regional funding actually fell. The median Series A cheque shrank. The average founder is not living in the record. The average founder is living in the drought.When you see “exits are back” or “funding hits a record,” your first question is always the same. How many deals?Two. The loud door, and who already has a keyThe public market. The listing. The dream. And in the Philippines, that dream is about to come true in a very big way.GCash, the wallet on almost every Filipino phone, is going public through its parent, Mynt. The offer could raise around 80 billion pesos, roughly $1.4 billion, and closer to $1.6 billion with the overallotment. At the top of the range, Mynt is worth 669 billion pesos, about $11.5 billion. It is the largest listing in the history of the Philippine Stock Exchange, and it beats the old record, Monde Nissin, comfortably. More than 20 cornerstone investors are in, BlackRock and T. Rowe Price among them. The offer period opens on 6 October. Trading starts on the 20th.I want to be genuinely positive here, because this matters and I am on record as bullish on the Philippines. For a decade, the knock on Manila was that it could not host a listing like this. Any serious technology company would have to go to Singapore or New York to find money deep enough. GCash is proving that wrong on home soil. That is a real milestone, and Filipino founders should take a moment with it.Then I put the investor hat back on and read the cap table out loud, because Real. Raw. Relatable. means I do not just clap at big numbers.GCash is not a scrappy startup three friends built in a Makati garage. Mynt is a joint venture between Globe Telecom and the Ayala group, one of the most powerful families in the country, and Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of China’s Alibaba. The anchor buyers flying in are the giant American asset managers. So the biggest technology listing in Philippine history is, honestly described, a telco and a Chinese fintech giant selling a slice of their joint venture to Wall Street.That is not a criticism of the deal. It is a great deal, and GCash is a great company. It is a question about the pattern. If the only way to a landmark listing is to already be owned by a conglomerate and a foreign tech giant before you start, what exactly does that prove for the founder with no conglomerate behind them?Across the region in the first half, there were 47 listings raising about $3 billion. Healthy on paper. But reliable public liquidity for a venture-backed technology company still exists on a very short list of exchanges. Malaysia will point out that Bursa has been busy, and ...
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    20 min
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