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by 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. <a href="https://seaofstartups.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">seaofstartups.substack.com</a>

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Recent Episodes

July 15, 2026

The $7.4 Billion Lie

You have seen the number this week, probably five or six times, from five or six people who all copied it from the same report. Southeast Asian tech funding hit 7.4 billion dollars in the first half of 2026. More than double last year. Recovery is here, the drought is over, break out the good coffee.It is true. It is also one of the most misleading true things I have read all year. Because 4.5 billion of that 7.4 billion went to a single company. One. A data-centre operator. Take that one company out, and on the exact same set of numbers, the region did not double. It went sideways, and depending on how you count, slightly down.And while we are here: when did we start counting data centres as startup funding at all? That is a genuine question, and it is going to matter more than it sounds.One landlord, not a regionHere is the full picture, because the detail is where the headline falls apart. First half of 2026, 7.4 billion raised across Southeast Asia, against 3.2 billion in the same six months last year on the same source. On paper, up 130 percent.Now pull the thread. Of that 7.4 billion, 4.5 went to DayOne, a Singapore-registered data-centre operator, across two Series C rounds to fund a build-out. That is more than 60 percent of everything that flowed into the entire region, in one company, for concrete and cooling and racks.This is not a knock on DayOne. They did nothing wrong. Raising four and a half billion dollars is not a crime, it is a very good year. The problem is not the company. The problem is that we take their balance sheet and hand it to founders across five countries as if it were their momentum. Strip DayOne out and the region raised roughly 2.9 billion in six months, which is less than the 3.2 billion it raised the year before. The honest headline is not “funding doubled.” It is “one landlord had a great six months, and everything else went slightly backwards.”It gets worse when you look at where the money sat. Singapore captured 6.9 of the 7.4, over 90 percent, and still climbing. So this is not a Southeast Asian story. It is a Singapore data-centre story. And even that is a little bit of a fiction, because much of the physical build is not in Singapore at all. It is in Johor, across the causeway in Malaysia. The concrete goes up in Johor, the capital gets booked in Singapore, and the statistics tell you Singapore is booming. The map and the money have stopped agreeing with each other.One caveat to hold onto, because it trips people up. Around the same time, KKR and Singtel bought ST Telemedia’s data-centre business for about 5.2 billion. Huge, and real, but that is mergers and acquisitions. One company buying another. It is not venture funding and it is not in the 7.4 billion. If someone stacks the two and tells you data centres pulled in ten billion, they are double-counting.The money went into concrete. Whether a founder in KL, Jakarta or Ho Chi Minh City ever sees a cent of it is a separate question, and so far the answer is no.And here is the part that should sting. Fintech. Payments. The thing this region was supposed to be about, the super-apps and the wallets and the great Southeast Asian consumer story we told for a decade. Fintech raised 685 million dollars in the first half. Not a slow year. A sector that is basically over as the headline act, and nobody held the funeral.So the founders leave, into a narrower doorNow widen the lens, because the timing matters. The same six months that Southeast Asia congratulated itself on 7.4 billion, global venture funding hit a record 510 billion, a record half driven almost entirely by the AI hype. Of that 510 billion, two companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, raised 217 billion between them. Two American AI labs pulled in 43 percent of all the startup funding on Earth in six months.Put the numbers side by side. All of Southeast Asia raised 7.4 billion, and ex-landlord, call it 2.9. Two AI labs in San Francisco out-raised our entire region by something like 75 to one. We are a young market, I get that. But 75 to one, two companies against a region, is not a gap you shrug off.So what does a smart, ambitious founder do with that information? Some of them are already answering it. They are leaving. Founders who launched in Singapore in 2025 packed up in April and May and moved to the Bay Area. This has always happened, but it is becoming a steady trickle, which is worse, because a trickle does not make the news. It just quietly drains the pool.Here is where I want to be careful, because there is a lazy version of this story. The lazy version is: the money is in San Francisco, so move there and get funded. That is not true anymore. The money in the US has concentrated too, and not just by geography. It has concentrated by story. Look inside that record US number and 86 percent of it went to AI. The same brutal filter is running there, just on a different axis. In Southeast Asia the filter is one landlord. In the US it is one narrative, and if you are not telling it, the cheque book stays shut.Think about what that does to the bar. There used to be a respectable way to raise. You grew triple, triple, double, double, double. You built a business that compounded, showed durable revenue, and that was a clean Series A. That founder today walks into a room in San Francisco and gets a polite no, because the person across the table is not looking for durable. They want a thousand-x. They want the AI story that eats a category in eighteen months, and a healthy business that doubles every year sounds boring next to it.You did not escape the filter. You swapped a filter you understood for one that is even harder to clear.And I want to be fair, because it would be easy to turn this into a loyalty test, and that is not honest. The founders who leave are not traitors. They are moving toward the center of gravity, and San Francisco genuinely is the center of gravity for building right now, especially in AI. But nobody should sell you the fairy tale that the flight to SFO ends with a term sheet. The center of gravity is also the most crowded, most selective room on the planet, and this year it is writing cheques for exactly one kind of story.Whether the founder stays or goes, the answer is the same shape. Here, the money went to a building, not a founder. There, the money goes to one narrative, not a founder. Either way, the ordinary, good, growing company, the backbone of any real startup scene, is the thing nobody is funding. We built a region that funds the warehouse and exports the talent, and the place we export it to only wants that talent if it can promise a miracle.Fewer deals, but not better onesThere is a comeback I always get here, and it is a fair one. Deal count is down, sure, but that is discipline. The market matured. Fewer, bigger, better deals. Quality over quantity. This is healthy.I would love to believe that. In the first half of 2026 there were 127 funding rounds across the region, down from 153 a year earlier. Fewer deals, yes. But look at where the money inside them went. Six billion of the 7.4 went into just twelve rounds of a hundred million dollars or more. Twelve rounds took six billion. The other 115 rounds, every seed cheque, every Series A, every founder not raising nine figures, split roughly 1.4 billion between them.That is not discipline. Discipline is looking at a hundred good companies and carefully backing the best thirty. This is a hundred companies looking up at twelve giants eating almost everything, and scrapping over the crumbs. When the top twelve deals take 80 percent of the capital, that is not a mature market. It is a bare cupboard with one very full shelf.And before anyone tells me last year was some golden baseline we have fallen from, no. Last year was the same shape. In the first half of 2025, fintech was carried by three deals that made up more than half of all fintech funding, and Singapore took over 90 percent of the pie even then. The concentration is not new. It is not a one-off. It is the structure. Southeast Asian venture has run on “one or two deals carry the whole region” for at least two years straight. The only thing that changed in 2026 is that the one deal got bigger, so the number got louder, and the lie got easier to tell.Read the middle of the listLet me be clear about what this is and is not. This is not doom. I am not telling you the region is dead, or that nobody should build here, or that we should all give up and move to California. Plenty of good companies are being built here right now, quietly, with real revenue, and they deserve better than to be background noise behind a data-centre headline. Which, again, I still do not understand why we file under startup funding at all.What I am asking for is honesty about the number. Stop reading 7.4 billion as a sign of health. It is not. It is the balance sheet of one landlord plus a rounding error for everyone else. If you want to know how Southeast Asia is actually doing, do not look at the top deal. Look at deal number three, and deal number fifty, and deal number 127. Look at whether a seed-stage founder in Kuala Lumpur can raise a real round without moving to Singapore first. Look at whether the best people are staying or leaving.Right now, on the honest read, the top of the market is a landlord, the middle is thin, and the sharpest founders are heading to the airport. Until the number without the landlord starts going up, we are not narrating a recovery. We are narrating a story we would like to be true.Real. Raw. Relatable. If this one annoyed you, good. That means you were paying attention. Tell me where I am wrong. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://seaofstartups.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">seaofstartups.substack.com</a>

July 8, 2026

Who Owns the Scarce Thing?

This week the two biggest stories in Southeast Asian tech were not a funding round or somebody’s ninth super app pivot. They were a government chip program in Penang and 3,600 kilometres of fibre being dropped on the seabed between India and Singapore.Two boring stories. Laid side by side, they are the most honest picture of this region you will get right now. Both are asking the same question, the one I ask in every partner meeting at Indelible, the one that decides who gets rich over the next ten years and who just gets used:Who owns the thing that is actually scarce?Malaysia tries to climb a rungOn 1 July, MTDC, the Malaysian Technology Development Corporation, launched the first cohort of Semicon Start Malaysia. Ten companies picked from 39 applicants. A pot of RM10 million for the first phase, up to RM1 million per company, call it US$250k apiece, with Khazanah money in the mix.If you have been in this region as long as I have, your first reaction to “government launches program to build high-tech industry” is a small, tired sigh. We have seen this film. Malaysia has a graveyard of these: grand corridors, MOU signings, innovation valleys, state venture funds that wrote checks into slide decks and got slide decks back. Big announcement, ribbon, photo, handshake. Two years later you go looking for the companies and nobody is home.I had that sigh ready. Then I stopped, because this one has the potential to be different, and the reason why is the whole point of this piece.This time there is a real industry underneath the program. Penang is not a hopeful press release. Penang has been doing semiconductor assembly and testing for decades. A serious slice of the world’s chips passes through Malaysian hands on the way to being packaged and tested. That is not a pitch. That is payroll. Factories that have run for thirty years, and a workforce that already knows the difference between a good die and a bad one.So the bet is not “let’s conjure a chip industry out of nothing.” The bet is much narrower, and potentially much smarter: we already own one rung of this ladder. Can we climb one step up into design, where the money actually sits?The climb has already started without the program. SkyeChip, a homegrown Penang design house doing genuinely hard work (high bandwidth memory, chiplets), listed on Bursa’s Main Market. Before recording this week’s episode I saw a report suggesting Cerebras, the US chip company that also just went public, may be tapping SkyeChip for design work. I have not verified that, so hold it loosely. But the proof point stands either way: a local company has already climbed the exact rung the government now wants ten more companies to climb. Add the National Semiconductor Strategy from a couple of years back, Penang’s own chip design academy, and Selangor standing up a state fund, and you have something rarer than a press release. You have momentum with an industry underneath it.The timing is as good as it has ever been, too. The world wants to diversify where its chips come from. Nobody wants every advanced part made in one strait that could close on a bad Tuesday. Malaysia is neutral, capable, and already in the supply chain. If there was ever a decade to attempt this climb, it is this one.Now the hard part, out loud, because that is what this show is for. Money was never the thing missing here. What has been missing, every single time, is patience and expertise arriving in the same envelope as the cash. A million ringgit and a short program do not build a chip design house. Chip design is a long-term sport played by people who have failed at it a few times first. If Semicon Start is a check and a demo day, it joins the graveyard. If it comes with real design mentors, real customer introductions, and follow-on money that does not vanish when the photo op ends, it has a shot.So the thing to watch is not the RM10 million. It is whether anyone attached to the program has real operating expertise. Money is easy. Knowing what to do with it is the scarce part. Hold that thought.The cable, and what it actually isNow to the seabed. This week it was reported that Microsoft, together with Singapore’s Lightstorm, is leading a consortium building a new subsea cable called I2C: roughly 3,600 kilometres of fibre linking India to Malaysia to Singapore, targeted to go live around 2029, built for AI and data centre demand.Standard disclaimer, because I read these announcements the way I read a pitch deck: this is a 2029 project, consortium details on these things move around, and I have not seen final paperwork, just a news story. Treat the specifics as direction, not gospel.But the direction is what matters. Every few weeks now there is a story like this. A new cable, a new hyperscaler campus, somewhere with cheap power and a friendly minister. And every one of them gets written up as billions pouring into Southeast Asian digital investment. Celebrations all round.Here is what I actually see, and maybe I am a bit cynical: the region being wired up as a very good place to host other people’s compute. The fibre lands here. The data centres sit here. They use our power and our seabed. That is real economic activity and I am not pretending it is nothing. But ask the only question that matters. Who owns the compute? Who owns the demand sitting on top of that cable? Generally, not us. The demand is offshore, the models are somebody else’s, and the margin, the part where value actually compounds, is in Seattle and San Francisco, not Johor.We are the landlord renting out the ground floor, being told to feel grateful for the rent.I am a capitalist. Rent is not a dirty word. It is a perfectly good business, and Singapore has run that playbook for fifty years. But do not confuse being the landlord with owning the building. A region cannot tell itself it is climbing the value chain when what it is actually doing is leasing the basement to the people who own the value chain.This is where the cable and the chips rhyme. Same story, pointed in opposite directions. Malaysia’s chip program is a country trying to own more of the building. The cable is the region agreeing to stay one rung down. One is a strategy. The other is a lease dressed up as a strategy.What is actually scarceValue flows to whoever controls the scarce thing. It always has, AI or no AI. Find what is scarce, own it, and the money flows to you. Own something abundant and you compete it down to nothing.So: in Southeast Asia right now, what is actually scarce?I will tell you what is not. The technology is not scarce. The model is not scarce. Models are commoditizing in front of us, between the big labs’ price war and open source, and they will get cheaper and better every quarter whether you do anything or not. Building your moat on the model is building your house on the tide.Here is what is scarce. The customer who already trusts you. The physical network that took years and real pain to build. The license from a regulator who does not hand them out twice. Distribution into the towns and small shops that no hyperscaler in the world will ever bother to map. The workflow nuance that took ten years of unglamorous work and cannot be copied in a weekend of clever prompting.That is the scarce layer. That is the thing worth owning.Where the winners come fromLook back at the two stories through that lens and they light up. Malaysia is trying to move from an abundant thing (cheap, capable labour, which everyone has) to a scarce thing (design capability, which very few have). Right instinct. Own the scarce rung.The founder version of the same move: the winner is not the one who owns the AI and goes hunting for a customer. The winner is the one who already owns the customer and quietly adds AI on top. The lending business that already has the borrowers and now underwrites them better. The logistics operator that already owns the trucks and the routes and now runs them tighter. The distributor who already reaches 10,000 shops and now forecasts demand for them.Those companies will never put AI in the headline. They do not need to. They already own the scarce thing. The AI is just a sharper tool in a hand that already knows the work.I know that is not a fashionable thing to say in 2026. Every second founder I meet opens with the model they are building on, the AI-native this, the agentic that. The funding tallies love it: somebody counts up the AI startups that raised this quarter, puts out a chart, and everyone nods. But that chart measures ambition, not durable revenue. Those are very different things, and the gap between them is where founders and their investors go to die.And here is the uncomfortable part I want founders to sit with. Every wave of cheap capital, every shiny new tool, every drop in the price of intelligence does not close the gap between those two kinds of companies. It widens it. When the tool gets cheap and everyone has it, the tool stops being the difference. The only difference left is the position underneath: the distribution, the trust, the scarce layer. Cheap AI makes owning real distribution worth more, not less.Be honest about what you ownThis is where Indelible puts its money, and I will say it plainly so you can hold me to it. We back people who own the scarce layer, or are credibly climbing one rung towards owning it. Not people standing on top of somebody else’s scarce layer with a nicer logo. (None of this is investment advice. It is simply where my money already is.)So the homework this week, if you are a founder: be honest about what you actually own. Not what is in your headline. What is in your foundations. If the answer is a really good wrapper around somebody else’s model, it is better to know that now. Using a commodity as an input is perfectly fine. Every company will. The question is what you own on top of it.A chip program in Penang. A cable on the seabed. One country trying to climb a rung, one region agreeing to rent out the basement, and underneath both of them, the only question that has ever really mattered:Who owns the thing that is scarce?I write the checks, so I have to be right about this. Come argue with me if you think I am wrong.Real. Raw. Relatable. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://seaofstartups.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">seaofstartups.substack.com</a>

July 1, 2026

One Winner, Six Shipwrecks

Since 2017, Southeast Asia has produced exactly one tech IPO that made public investors real money. One. And this week, the Philippines is getting ready to bet its entire year on the next one.So this week I want to talk about who is buying, who is selling, and which side of that trade you actually want to be standing on.Four stories, and they braid into one. We open with the good news, because there usually is some. Then we follow the money all the way to the part nobody puts on the deck.The smart money showed up twice in one weekStart with the hopeful, because it is real and it is specific.This week two of the most serious institutions on the planet made their first proper bet on Southeast Asia. Not a press tour. Not a memorandum of understanding. Actual money into actual companies.The first: MIT, the university, joined the cap table of a Singapore company called PVX Partners. Not a flashy name, I had not heard of them before this. They do cohort-based financing for user acquisition. In plain terms, they fund the marketing spend for mobile games and consumer apps, and they get paid back out of the revenue those users generate. It came on the back of a ten-plus-million-dollar round with names like General Catalyst, and I think a DraftKings vehicle in there too. As far as I could find, this is MIT’s first major disclosed startup bet in the region.The second, and this one landed the day before I recorded: Pfizer Ventures, the drug giant’s venture arm, made its first Southeast Asian startup investment into a Singapore biotech called Engine Biosciences. Engine does AI-driven precision oncology, hunting cancer drugs with machine learning. They just opened a Silicon Valley office to go with the Singapore base.Here is why this is not just a funding roundup. When an elite American endowment and Big Pharma’s investment arm both pick Singapore companies for their opening move, in the same week, that is not a coincidence. That is a signal about where sophisticated capital now thinks the edge is.These are not tourists chasing a hot round. PVX is unglamorous infrastructure. Engine is deep science. Both are the kind of bet you make after you have done the work.Hold that thought, because the rest of this is about what happens to the money that was already here when it tries to leave.The Philippines is betting its whole year on one listingOn the 27th, Mint, the company behind GCash, filed its registration with the Philippine SEC and its listing application with the stock exchange. The number: up to 92.3 billion pesos, roughly 1.5 billion US dollars at up to ten pesos a share, targeting a fourth-quarter debut. If it prices at the top, it is the largest IPO in Philippine history.Sit with the context. The Philippines’ IPO count for 2026 before this filing was zero. Nothing. So the country’s first listing of the year is also the biggest it has ever had. And it is a fintech, which if you have listened before you know is my home-turf bias made concrete.GCash put financial services into something like 90 million pockets. It is the rare regional company that is genuinely profitable. The pitch writes itself: the people who made GCash a habit can now own a piece of it. I want this to work. Let me say that plainly.Now the part that worries me, out loud, because that is the point of these episodes.The float is about 12%. Twelve percent of the shares go to the public market. The public is being sold a fairly thin slice while insiders keep the rest. And to fit GCash into its main index, the exchange is now considering cutting its own minimum public float rule from 20% down to as low as 12%.Take that in. The benchmark is bending its own rules to accommodate one company. When a market reshapes itself around a single listing, and that listing is carrying the whole nation’s IPO year on its back, that is not a recovery. That is concentration risk wearing a party hat.The real question: does GCash trade well enough to reopen the pipeline for everyone waiting behind it, or does one wobble set the Philippine market back another two years?To answer that honestly, you cannot just look at GCash. You have to look at what happened to the last batch of regional champions that rang the bell.Indonesia got a stay of execution, not a clean bill of healthWhile Manila is opening a door, Jakarta is trying to keep one from closing.On the 24th and 25th of June, MSCI, the index provider whose decisions quietly move billions in passive money, deferred its decision on whether to downgrade Indonesia from emerging-market status to frontier. They kicked it to November. Indonesia keeps the badge, for now.Why was it even on the table? MSCI said, in effect, that it cannot trust the market. Lack of transparency in who actually owns the shares. Suspected coordinated trading that makes it hard to know what a fair price even is, or how much stock is genuinely free to trade. And the market rallied on the news.Here is where I get off the celebratory bus. That rally is celebrating a delay, not a fix. When the index provider tells you it cannot work out who owns the shares or what they are really worth, that is not a paperwork problem. That is a governance warning about the entire market.And look at the response. Indonesia is leaning on Danantara, the sovereign fund, plus insurance and pension money, to add buying support and prop up the exchange. Think about what that means. To pass a test about transparency and genuine free float, the answer is to bring in state and pension money to hold the market up. That is close to the opposite of the thing they are being asked to prove.A frontier downgrade is not abstract. It would force passive funds to sell Indonesian equities mechanically, which raises the cost of capital for every late-stage founder in the country dreaming about an IPO on that market, especially now without the hype cycle. November is closer than it sounds.Manila might be opening up, maybe. Jakarta is one review away from being pushed out. Hope on one side, risk on the other. So let me put some numbers on which way this bet usually goes.The receiptsI promised you a number at the top. Here it is with the receipts. Since 2017, this is how Southeast Asia’s big tech IPOs have actually treated the public investors who bought in.SPAC valuations are listing marks, not day-one closes. Dollar figures are dragged by weak pesos and rupiah. Current values approximate.One winner. Sea Limited went out at a $4.9 billion valuation and trades somewhere in the $56 billion range today. Everything else is a shipwreck. Grab is down around 60% from its listing cap. GoTo lost roughly nine-tenths of its value. Bukalapak is trading below the cash it raised. Converge, the one Philippine name I could pull, is the cautionary tale sitting right next door to GCash.Now the caveats, out loud, because the show runs on honest data. The SPAC valuations were listing marks, not day-one closes, and several fell on the open. Currency matters too: weak pesos and rupiah drag the dollar figures down. On a per-share basis the returns are often worse than the market-cap numbers suggest, because of share issuances along the way.But the base rate for this region is brutal. If you bought the Southeast Asia tech IPO story over the last eight years, with one exception, you lost money.What actually breaks the curseHere is the thing that matters. Almost every one of those shipwrecks went public unprofitable, floated at the very top of the cheap-money window on a growth-at-all-costs story.GCash is not that. GCash actually makes money. That is the one real thing that could break the curse.The curse was never the business. The risk is the entry price. GCash is reportedly chasing a valuation around eight to nine billion dollars, against roughly five billion in the private market just a couple of years ago. That is the exact same “premium to the last round” framing that came right before every name on the shipwreck list.History says it is not company quality that determines whether public investors win. It is the price on the day they are let in. Buy low, sell high. If Mint prices for perfection at the top of the range, the regional base rate says the valuation compresses toward fundamentals first and compounds later, if you are patient. Converge, down 40%, is what impatience looks like.Who holds the penHere is the thread that ties the week together.This was the week Southeast Asia’s public markets stopped pretending to be a pure growth story and started behaving like state-managed plumbing. A fintech bends an exchange’s rules to get listed. A country leans on its sovereign fund to keep its emerging-market badge. And underneath all of it, the smartest new money in the world, MIT and Pfizer, is quietly buying into private companies at the early stage, where the value actually gets made, long before any of this public-market theater begins.Notice where the sophisticated capital is putting its chips. Not into the IPO. Into the cap table, years earlier.So my filter for all of it, and yours, should be the same question: who actually holds the pen here? Who decides what gets built, what gets listed, what gets propped up? More and more in this region, the answer is governments and sovereign funds, not founders and not public investors.If you are a founder who is not a conglomerate heir or a sovereign-fund favourite, that should tell you exactly where to aim, and exactly who to raise from.That is the week. If it was useful, the most useful thing you can do is send it to one founder who is about to get excited about an IPO. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://seaofstartups.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">seaofstartups.substack.com</a>

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What is SEA of Startups?: Real, raw, relatable takes on Southeast Asian startups. One investor, the week's news, no script. <a href="https://seaofstartups.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">seaofstartups.substack.com</a>
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