Governance
After eFishery, Southeast Asian investors underwrite governance before growth. A founder's checklist by funding stage for raising in 2026.
Mastercard, PayMongo, and Paymentology launch a Virtual Prepaid Card with business functions, giving Filipino SMEs instant access to spend management tools without a bank account.
Fintech
Wallet, card, checkout, or passthrough capital — your first financial product is determined by how deep your customer relationship is and who controls the payment data today.
After eFishery, Southeast Asian investors underwrite governance before growth. A founder's checklist by funding stage for raising in 2026.
Wallet, card, checkout, or passthrough capital — your first financial product is determined by how deep your customer relationship is and who controls the payment data today.
Grab is still only at 9% financial-services revenue, but the pattern across Sea, GoTo, and Maya is clear: once the audience is built, the wallet line is the one that quietly takes over the P&L.
Enterprise AI’s $20 seats are not a bargain but a temporary subsidy that will snap back into usage-based bills big enough to shock any company that built core workflows on fake prices.
Embedded finance is not a future adjacency for software companies; it is a second revenue line unlocked the moment you have weekly engagement, money flowing through your product, and user trust to hold a balance.
The Philippines built a $40 billion IT services industry — and almost none of the ownership. AI is about to expose that gap.
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Grab is still only at 9% financial-services revenue, but the pattern across Sea, GoTo, and Maya is clear: once the audience is built, the wallet line is the one that quietly takes over the P&L.
Enterprise AI’s $20 seats are not a bargain but a temporary subsidy that will snap back into usage-based bills big enough to shock any company that built core workflows on fake prices.
Embedded finance is not a future adjacency for software companies; it is a second revenue line unlocked the moment you have weekly engagement, money flowing through your product, and user trust to hold a balance.
The new AI design tools are very good at producing form, and very bad at the part that actually matters in fintech.
Southeast Asia's scam economy is a digital infrastructure problem — and it matters for every founder building on the region's financial rails.
The Philippines built a $40 billion IT services industry — and almost none of the ownership. AI is about to expose that gap.
Vanity metrics die fast when your CFO demands grounded unit economics. Tonik's Wanda Pascua on building a revenue-first marketing org in a low-trust market.
This article is based on a conversation with Niña Terol Aquino, CEO and Co-Founder of FoundHer, and the gap that's costing the Philippines one of its biggest economic opportunities.
Indonesia’s startup boom didn’t just stall — it got repriced, as the eFishery and TaniHub scandals turned “growth at all costs” into a permanent trust tax on every Indonesian founder raising capital.
The Philippines’ startup problem is not talent, funding, or ambition—it is exit arithmetic. When capital markets cannot absorb high-growth companies, venture outcomes collapse regardless of founder quality or capital deployed.
January clarified the rules of participation in Southeast Asia’s tech ecosystem. Capital, exits, and AI deployment now reward preparedness, positioning, and institutional alignment.
For anyone building in SEA over the next 24 months: incorporate in Singapore and engineer unit economics for 12-month payback, or accept that institutional venture capital is structurally unavailable.
