While San Francisco and New York continue to lead in overall AI city rankings, the most significant developments are occurring further east. According to the inaugural AI Cities Index by The Observer, six of the world’s top ten AI hubs are now located in East and Southeast Asia. Seoul has claimed the global top spot for implementation, highlighting a city’s capacity to deploy AI across business, government, and public services.
Seoul’s leadership is built on years of robust digital infrastructure investment, a powerful semiconductor cluster anchored by industry giants like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, and dedicated municipal committees that assist small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in adopting technologies they might otherwise struggle to fund independently. Meanwhile, Singapore ranks fifth globally in implementation, demonstrating that a smaller market can achieve outsized success when policy, talent, and enterprise adoption are closely aligned.
The index, which evaluates 57 cities across 36 countries, also reveals a dramatic narrowing in the global AI landscape. The performance gap between Chinese and US AI models has shrunk to just 2.7%, down from a massive 31.6% in 2023.
For Southeast Asia’s larger economies, the findings present a challenging reality. Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines do not need another Silicon Valley; rather, they require localized, city-level clusters equipped with talent, cloud infrastructure, and patient capital to transition AI from experimental pilots to core operational systems. Currently, Singapore remains the only regional player firmly established in the top tier.
REGIONAL
SEA funding hits US$7.25B in H1, but DayOne alone took 62%: Strip out DayOne’s US$4.5B Series C and the region raised US$2.75B. Deal volume sank to its lowest since 2018, Indonesia managed just US$104M, and median Series A shrank to US$8M, per the Kickstart–DealStreetAsia report.
GCash parent Mynt lines up 20+ cornerstone investors ahead of IPO: BlackRock funds, IFC, Schroders and T. Rowe Price anchor the institutional tranche of what Reuters says could be a US$1.3B raise, the largest share sale in Philippine history. Pricing lands on 1 October.
Grab executives buy US$30M in stock amid share slump: Insiders signal confidence as the stock trades below recent highs. Senior Grab executives collectively purchased $30M in company shares, a move typically read as a bullish internal signal during periods of market weakness.
Kopi Kenangan founder raises personal stake via secondary share purchase: The founder’s acquisition of additional shares on the secondary market signals confidence in the coffee chain’s trajectory ahead of a potential liquidity event.
Animoca Brands pauses Currenc merger, delays IPO plans: The Hong Kong-based Web3 firm has put its merger with Currenc on hold, pushing back its IPO timeline amid shifting market conditions and strategic reassessment.
Bits Media lays off 21 staff after Gobi-backed restructuring: The Gobi-backed digital media firm cut 21 employees as part of a broader restructuring effort, reflecting continued pressure on ad-driven media businesses in SEA.
Nadiem Makarim’s prison sentence cut to 9 years on appeal: A Jakarta court reduced the Gojek co-founder’s sentence, a development with significant implications for Indonesia’s startup ecosystem and investor confidence.
Citi, HSBC back iPiD’s US$16M Series A to verify payees across borders: Foundation Capital led the round for the Singapore firm, whose tech already sits inside Citi Verify. It will fund US and Europe expansion and stablecoin products, though iPiD has given no timeline for its digital-asset tools.
Ex-Sea Malaysia CEO Howard Soh to lead Khazanah’s Jelawang Capital: Soh, who launched Lazada, Zalora and Foodpanda in Malaysia, joins from LemmaTree on 1 October. He inherits Malaysia’s national fund-of-funds, part of Khazanah’s MYR1B (US$245M) Dana Impak push to crowd private capital into local venture.
Alpha JWC ups Kopi Kenangan stake as revenue climbs 62%: Tybourne Capital and Horizons Ventures also raised their stakes in the ongoing round. The coffee chain’s Q2 EBITDA rose 86%, and it has opened 221 outlets this year, taking its footprint past 1,500 across seven markets.
3cat raises US$4M Series A to take used phones to the Philippines: The Malaysia-born, Singapore-incorporated retailer is betting that rising smartphone prices will push more Southeast Asian consumers, for whom the phone is both a work tool and a status symbol, towards pre-owned devices.
Malaysia’s EV sales double as local assembly replaces imports: Sales hit 47,508 units in January–August, up 103%, led by Proton’s e.MAS 5. But Kenanga expects a gradual shift, citing fuel subsidies and just 6,904 public charging bays against a 30,000 target for 2030.
NUS Enterprise rebrands as NUSX, adds Munich and Shanghai outposts: Its new AI engine, Nova, scores patents for licensing potential and ranks likely buyers, tackling a world where 70-80% of university patents never get licensed. NUSX wants one NUS venture earning US$100M a year by 2035.
A*STAR nearly doubles A*Start Central’s space for deeptech founders: The hub grows to 18,000 square feet, adding dedicated labs, metal 3D printing and an RF shielding room. Its 100-plus ventures have raised US$1.25B; about 30% came from outside A*STAR.
Pinterest and Shopee link creator shopping in Indonesia and Brazil: Eligible Shopee Affiliate creators can now connect their accounts to Pinterest and recommend products there, pulling Shopee closer to the moment shoppers first decide what they want, before they ever search a marketplace.
Life Lab Resources raises US$1M to turn food waste into fish feed: The Singapore startup treats food waste as feedstock for aquaculture feed, pairing one of the city-state’s persistent waste problems with the region’s rising demand for more sustainable fish-farming inputs.
Bonbon Mobility gets US$500K to put Vietnam’s car washes online: The Ho Chi Minh City startup is building a digital booking layer for a fragmented market where owners still arrange washes, detailing and maintenance through phone calls and word of mouth, with uneven standards.
GoodARCH brings AI foot scans to Malaysia with US$230K investment: The Taiwan-run arch-support brand is betting a five-minute scan can catch foot problems before they turn into knee or back pain, or before customers quietly start walking less.
SEA startups gain ground in Seedstars’s disability inclusion cohort: Visa Foundation backs the six-month SEED Inclusivity programme, whose third cohort of 15 ventures builds for people with disabilities, with companies linked to Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam alongside India and Pakistan.
INTERVIEWS AND FEATURES
Matchmade.io on selling Indonesian fintech in Singapore: The founder reflects on pivoting from failure to build a cross-border fintech play, offering rare candour on the challenges of selling Indonesia-built financial technology to Singapore’s demanding market.
Cynthia Wihardja’s post puts a human face on TaniHub’s VC fallout: Her brother Donald, ex-MDI Ventures chief, is serving five years over the firm’s TaniHub investment. Her LinkedIn portrait of his prison routine sharpens the ecosystem’s hardest question: where failed VC bets end and crimes begin.
Why SEA’s expansion plans depend on undersea cables nobody sees: In late August, Viettel’s engineers shifted 800Gbps onto one cable, 300Gbps onto another and the rest over fibre through Laos. For startups scaling regionally, that hidden fragility belongs in the cost model.
What KoinWorks’ survival teaches Indonesia’s next SME lenders: The P2P boom that produced KoinWorks, Investree and Modalku has consolidated, and the number of OJK-licensed lenders has fallen sharply since 2022. The survivors now operate inside a far tighter regulatory frame.
Shein’s 70% valuation slide asks whether fast fashion has peaked: Valued at around US$100B in 2022, Shein listed in Hong Kong this month at roughly US$27B as its growth slowed. The piece asks whether the model’s cracks are cyclical or structural.
INTERNATIONAL
Binance invests US$100M in Circle, expands USDC ties: The deal deepens the relationship between the world’s largest crypto exchange and the USDC issuer, with potential ripple effects for stablecoin adoption across SEA’s crypto markets.
Moody’s says AI is splitting Asia-Pacific into a K-shaped economy: Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia should outgrow China this year on AI-led exports and data-centre inflows, but households face weak demand and rate hikes. Moody’s warns the region is exposed if AI sentiment flips.
a16z opens a US$42M founders’ academy for high school graduates: The first year is tuition-free for about 50 students, but the Horowitz Andreessen Academy plans elite-university fees by 2028. Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia and Stripe are among ten corporate partners hoping to hire graduates.
US robotics firm Tacta Systems opens Singapore facility: The Singapore facility marks Tacta Systems’ first Asia-Pacific foothold, positioning the city-state as a regional hub for advanced robotics deployment and R&D.
SEMICONDUCTOR
Thailand approves US$80B chip strategy to build a full supply chain: The three-phase roadmap moves from assembly and testing into wafer fabrication by 2040, targets 230,000 jobs by 2050, and arrives days before Infineon opens its first Thai factory on 1 October.
Nexstrom raises US$12M to grow 2D chip materials on 12-inch wafers: Xora Innovation led the seed round for the Singapore startup, whose chief scientist once led TSMC’s post-silicon research. The hard part is making atomically thin materials such as MoS₂ uniform enough for production foundries.
Qualcomm’s new Snapdragons can run a 30B-parameter model on-device: The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chips, built on TSMC’s 2nm process, target personal AI agents just as Counterpoint forecasts a 14% drop in smartphone shipments this year on soaring memory costs.
CYBERSECURITY
Meta, Singapore Police take down 3.7M scam-linked assets: The joint effort removed or restricted pages and accounts across Facebook and Instagram pushing fake skincare discounts and easy-money investment schemes, the ordinary-looking hooks through which many scams begin.
AI
Anthropic says Claude found a CRISPR-like enzyme system in 21 hours: About 950 agents burned 210M tokens to surface the system hidden in bacteriophage DNA. Humans still ran the lab experiments, and Dario Amodei concedes a Stanford team previously found something similar.
MAS stress test finds 32% of listed firms at risk in an AI crash: A 30% revenue shock and 400-basis-point rate spike would leave firms holding 16% of corporate debt vulnerable, the Financial Stability Review finds. Smaller, leveraged companies and lower-income HDB borrowers look most exposed.
Meta launches AI glasses in Singapore, eyes four more ASEAN markets: Prices start at S$349 (US$273). Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines follow later this year, with Muse, Meta’s AI agent, set to handle bookings and other multi-step tasks hands-free.
70% of APAC consumers quit AI support chats that forget them: Twilio: Yet 84% of businesses believe their AI agents recognise returning customers. Only 22% of firms tell customers upfront that they are talking to a bot, though 70% of consumers want that disclosure.
Vision AI gives pipeline operators eyes on remote corridors: Pipelines run for hundreds of kilometres through terrain operators struggle to watch. Vision AI turns existing infrastructure into a continuous monitoring layer for physical activity along remote rights-of-way.
Grab and OpenAI launch AI training targeting 30,000 partners: The programme aims to upskill Grab’s merchant and driver partners across Southeast Asia, marking one of the region’s largest platform-led AI literacy initiatives to date.
Shrinking AI chips to power next-gen wearables: Advances in miniatised AI chip design are enabling a new class of low-power wearables, with implications for consumer tech and health monitoring markets across SEA.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Why Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam may be losing the AI race: Singapore added S$1B (US$786M) for AI R&D, Indonesia wants 9M skilled digital workers by 2035, and Vietnam has elevated AI nationally. The author argues these headline commitments mask a race all three are quietly losing.
SEA’s digital investors may be diversifying in the wrong direction: App-based investing is curing home bias, but the author warns of a new concentration risk: millions of retail investors piling into the same handful of familiar global companies.
SME support in SEA needs connection, not more invention: Capital, training and compliance help for small businesses already exist. The author argues the gap is a system that links them around a single business journey, instead of leaving owners to assemble the pieces.
SEA’s next healthtech winners will fit clinical workflows first: An impressive AI model is not enough in Southeast Asian healthcare, the author argues. Startups that slot into how clinicians and hospitals already work stand a better chance than those selling standalone intelligence.
Asian investors no longer choose between crypto and TradFi: Gold shows the shift: Asian investors want the same assets as before, but new access routes strip out the brokerage accounts, fixed trading windows and siloed capital that traditional markets demand.
Asia’s ETF boom is outgrowing the infrastructure behind it: Asia is now the world’s fastest-growing ETF market, with assets, issuers and products multiplying. The question is whether the market plumbing underneath can keep pace with investor demand.
Containerisation shows why AI spending may continue without returns: BCG found 94% of organisations would keep investing in AI even without returns in 2026. The author borrows from shipping history to explain why infrastructure bets can outlast disappointing near-term payoffs.
AI will redesign how companies work, not just replace jobs: Drawing on enterprise deployments in Southeast Asia, the author argues the better question is how much more an organisation can accomplish once AI becomes part of how it operates.
AI won’t be your employee, but it changes what needs managing: The bigger shift is not faster drafting or summarising, the author argues, but a change in which work managers must oversee once AI takes on tasks inside everyday operations.
Your startup has an AI strategy. Where is its human strategy?: Fresh from LEAP in Saudi Arabia, the author notes founders obsess over what AI makes faster. The harder question is what people on the team should still own, and how to develop them.
Healthcare AI needs better context, not more data: Doctors never read every textbook before treating a patient; they weigh history, symptoms and patterns. The author argues clinical AI should work the same way, prioritising relevant context over sheer volume.
AI speeds up first drafts, not client decisions: A video producer finds clients now arrive with AI-generated scripts and visuals. The bottleneck has moved from producing a first draft to helping clients decide what they actually want.
How AI is reshaping precision farming: Remote sensing that flags nutrient gaps and plant stress is turning farming into a data-driven system, the author argues, one promises tighter precision and higher yields.
Build vs buy: Why custom low-code tools are winning in 2026: Three in four organisations now embrace low-code. The author argues off-the-shelf software designed for every industry rarely fits specific needs, pushing more businesses to build their own tools.
Why scaling operations before data backfires for startups: Startups double headcount and add channels while still running on spreadsheets and gut-check meetings. The author explains how that data gap surfaces months later, when decisions start to break.
How one company escaped a culture of endless status meetings: Standups, syncs and stacked status calls eventually replace the work they were meant to support. The author explains how rebuilding the meeting culture began with asking which check-ins earned their place.
The founder’s dilemma: Why over-planning a startup backfires: Over an iced coffee in Kuala Lumpur, the author saw that chasing the perfect project tool, wiki and 18-month roadmap had shaped their startup the way it once shaped their over-planned trips.
What 16,625 publisher price lists reveal about backlink costs: ESBO Ltd, the author’s link-building agency, published its entire publisher database across 53 languages. The data shows founders what links really cost, and why the priciest placements are rarely just links.
Building an agency in Bangladesh, from the inside: Part 1: Ngital’s founder recalls client meetings where the buyer had already decided what they wanted within ten minutes, and what those early pitches taught the agency about selling in Bangladesh.
Why Ethereum keeps failing to break the US$2,800 wall: Even as Wall Street closed near record highs on 23 September and a tech rebound lifted Asian equities, Ethereum’s bulls stalled again at the same resistance level.
