e27

13/01/2026

🚀 InnoPad Taipei will become Taiwan’s first landing hub for international startups, offering funding, talent, and market support. Discover what this means for founders.

https://loom.ly/rRWXM88

InnoPad Taipei launches in 2026 as Taiwan’s first landing hub for international startups, offering funding support, talent development, and market access.

13/01/2026

Stop watching the market. Be the market. 🚀 The Asian Financial Forum (AFF) 2026 is the premier convergence of global finance, government, and business leaders.

👉 Register: https://e27co.e27.co/qt2m

Your next deal, your next investment, your next partnership is waiting in Hong Kong, Jan 25-27. CEOs, investors, decision makers—this is your exclusive invite.

13/01/2026

AI video is becoming a practical growth tool for Southeast Asia as GliaCloud scales faster, smarter content creation for businesses. 🎥🌏 See how this shift is taking shape.

https://loom.ly/UsEY5AI

Startup Island TAIWAN

From publishers to online retailers, GliaCloud is using Thailand as a launchpad to scale AI video creation across Southeast Asia through the Global Pass programme.

13/01/2026

🌱 Beauty innovation today is built on collaboration, not just labs.

Hear how Lex Bradshaw-Zanger explains ’Oréal’s open innovation strategy through the Big Bang Beauty Tech Innovation Program across Asia and the Middle East. 👩‍🔬🤝

L'Oréal Paris

https://loom.ly/h_c2uVY

L'Oréal’s Chief Marketing & Digital Officer for South Asia Pacific, Middle East and North Africa Lex Bradshaw-Zanger explains how open innovation is helping the world’s beauty leader accelerate its innovation pipeline in the region.

13/01/2026

Smart cities need data, but they also need trust. 🌆🔐
AIRA shows how privacy-conscious infrastructure can modernise urban services while limiting personal data exposure.
Explore the full story → https://loom.ly/D0s-0i4

Startup Island TAIWAN

Through Taipei’s Global Pass programme, AIRA is unlocking smart-city growth by upgrading existing CCTV systems with lightweight, hardware-light AI.

12/01/2026

Cloud visibility is quickly becoming a strategic advantage for ASEAN enterprises as multi-cloud complexity grows. 🌏☁️ Elite Cloud explains how cost transparency and continuous optimisation support smarter scaling and resilience.

Learn more 👇

https://loom.ly/ezKa-D8

As companies scale across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, hidden cloud waste becomes a costly strategic risk. Elite Cloud examines why cost transparency, paired with actionable optimisation, is now core to digital resilience.

12/01/2026

Another important shift is unfolding in Southeast Asia’s tech ecosystem, and this one sits at the very end of the startup journey. The fourth article in this series draws from the SEA Tech Annual Funding Report 2025 by Tracxn and looks at how exit strategies across the region are changing. After years of muted public markets and acquisition-led outcomes, Southeast Asian startups are beginning to see a viable path to the public markets again, and many are choosing to exit on their own terms.

Read the full article here: https://e27.co/the-ipo-window-is-open-and-sea-startups-are-walking-through-20260112/

A few insights that stood out:

• Southeast Asia recorded 15 IPOs in 2025, a 67% increase from 2024

• Public markets are reopening for tech companies with scale and profitability

• The average IPO market cap jumped to US$510M, up from US$110M a year earlier

• Standout listings included TCBS (US$4.1B Mcap) and Superbank (US$1.3B Mcap)

• The acquisition market slowed, with 57 deals completed in 2025

• Acquisitions fell 21% YoY, continuing a multi-year decline

• Average acquisition value dropped sharply to US$60.8M

• Dropsuite’s US$270M acquisition by NinjaOne was the largest deal of the year

• Exit-stage investors like 500 Global and Grab benefited from IPO-led outcomes

What this signals is a maturing ecosystem. Instead of relying on strategic buyers or distressed exits, Southeast Asian startups are increasingly building toward public-market readiness. The IPO window may not be wide open for everyone, but for companies with scale, discipline, and clear economics, it is very much open.

With fewer acquisitions and larger listings, Southeast Asian founders are choosing stock exchanges over strategic buyers to exit on their own terms

11/01/2026

Continuing this article series on how Southeast Asia’s tech ecosystem is being reshaped, the third piece looks at what investors are now choosing to fund. Drawing again from the SEA Tech Annual Funding Report 2025 by Tracxn, this article highlights a clear shift in priorities across the region. As growth narratives cool and AI moves from hype to infrastructure reality, capital is rotating away from consumer-facing software and toward the foundational layers that make the digital economy work.

👉 Read the full article here:https://e27.co/infrastructure-takes-the-throne-in-southeast-asia-tech-20260109/

A few insights that stood out:

• Enterprise infrastructure became the most funded sector in SEA in 2025

• The sector raised US$2.3B, a 70% increase from 2024

• Infrastructure funding is up 12x compared to 2023, signaling a structural shift, not a blip

• Data centres alone accounted for US$1.9B of total infrastructure funding

• Mega rounds for Princeton Digital Group and Digital Edge anchored investor confidence

• Investors are prioritising compute, storage, and cloud capacity over application-layer bets

• Fintech funding declined to US$1.5B, down 21% YoY and 42% from 2023

• Despite the drop, late-stage fintech players like Airwallex and Thunes still attracted capital

• Enterprise SaaS funding also fell 38% YoY, reflecting reduced appetite for speculative software

• Capital is moving toward AI-ready foundations rather than feature-driven products

Taken together, this marks a shift in how investors are thinking about value creation in the region. Instead of betting on the next flashy interface, capital is flowing into the steel and concrete of Southeast Asia’s digital future.

Enterprise infrastructure overtakes fintech as Southeast Asia investors chase data centres, cloud capacity, and AI-ready foundations for the region’s cycle

10/01/2026

Continuing this article series on Southeast Asia’s shifting tech landscape. The second piece looks at a quieter but more concerning trend emerging from the SEA Tech Annual Funding Report 2025 by Tracxn. While headlines suggest capital is flowing back into the region, the underlying story is about who is actually getting funded and who is being left out. The data points to a growing divide where scale and survival matter more than experimentation, and where access to capital is increasingly limited to those already inside the circle.

👉 Read the full article here: https://e27.co/southeast-asias-startup-boom-is-becoming-a-closed-club-20260108/

A few insights that stood out:

• Total SEA tech funding rose 7% to US$5.2B, but the growth was entirely top-heavy

• Late-stage funding surged 194%, reaching US$3.9B

• Seed-stage funding collapsed 57%, falling to just US$214M

• Early-stage funding (Series A and B) dropped 64% to US$1.1B

• The number of first-time funded startups fell 62%, from 283 to just 107

• Investors are clearly prioritising proven business models and paths to profitability

• Mega-rounds are back, with nine deals above US$100M in 2025

• Large raises by companies like Airwallex and MiniMax now account for a disproportionate share of capital

• The innovation pipeline is narrowing even as late-stage giants grow stronger

If the first article showed where capital is going, this one raises a harder question about who gets to participate at all. Southeast Asia’s startup boom is not disappearing, but it is becoming far more exclusive.

Capital surged in 2025, but nearly all gains flowed to late-stage giants as seed and early-stage funding collapsed

09/01/2026

Kicking off a new series 👋

This series takes a closer look at how Southeast Asia’s tech ecosystem is shifting as capital becomes more selective and growth narratives mature. The first piece draws from the SEA Tech Annual Funding Report 2025 by Tracxn, which tracks where money actually flowed across the region over the past year.

Rather than broad regional optimism, the data tells a much more concentrated story about power, trust, and scale, and how one city is increasingly becoming the default home for serious tech capital in Southeast Asia.

👉 Read the full article here: https://e27.co/jakarta-trails-as-singapore-tightens-its-grip-on-tech-capital-20260107/

A few takeaways that stood out to me while reading it:

• Singapore captured 91% of all tech funding in SEA, pulling in US$4.7B in 2025 alone

• Jakarta came in second, but at just US$212M, the gap is no longer close

• Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Ho Chi Minh City barely registered in comparison

• Investors are clearly prioritising regulatory certainty and deep liquidity over pure growth stories

• Late-stage mega rounds are driving the numbers, not early experimentation

• Deals like Princeton Digital Group and Digital Edge show Singapore’s strength in infrastructure and fintech

• Singapore is also leading on the supply side, with 41% of new startups founded in the last two years

• Early-stage support from players like SEEDS Capital is reinforcing a self-sustaining loop

• The region is not out of ideas, but capital is concentrating where risk feels most manageable

This is just the first article in the series, but it already raises a big question for the region: what happens when one city becomes the default answer for both founders and investors?

Singapore’s US$4.7 billion haul dwarfed Jakarta and regional peers as late stage mega rounds reshaped funding flows.

09/01/2026

Startup of the Week: BrndIQ — Helping brands stay visible in an AI-first world

Meet BrndIQ on e27: https://e27.co/startups/brndiq/

Meet Randall Choh, Founder of BrndIQ, a startup built around a growing but often overlooked problem. Brands spend heavily to earn attention, and a single mention in the right place can be worth hundreds or even thousands. But as discovery shifts from search engines to AI chat interfaces, many of those hard-earned brand mentions are becoming invisible. BrndIQ was created to ensure companies can see exactly where they appear inside AI-generated answers so those opportunities are never lost.

Early on, the team uncovered a critical insight. Missing a brand mention in Google is frustrating, but missing one in AI is far more damaging. AI answers become the source of truth, and unlike traditional search, there are no rankings, logs, or click data to fall back on. This pushed BrndIQ to rethink visibility entirely and build a new layer that continuously tracks brand presence across platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and more. The goal is simple but urgent: make sure brands know when and where they show up in AI conversations that influence decisions.

BrndIQ’s approach is shaped by its team culture. Coming from tech, growth, and data backgrounds, the team moves quickly, tests aggressively, and focuses only on what helps brands capture the real value of AI mentions. By staying close to actual customer behaviour rather than theoretical metrics, they’re able to adapt alongside how AI discovery is rapidly changing.

Looking ahead, BrndIQ’s next milestone goes beyond visibility. The team is working toward turning insights into action by helping brands improve their presence over time across multiple AI models and buyer journeys. This shift from simply seeing AI mentions to actively optimising them marks an important step toward measurable AI discovery performance.

Get featured on e27 like BrndIQ. Create your startup profile at e27.co/startupprofile and share your milestones at e27.co/milestone/post

08/01/2026

🚀 Asia's biggest financial forum is happening 26-27 January 2026 in Hong Kong! 🇭🇰

The Asian Financial Forum is THE platform where real deals happen and innovations get funded.

What's in store:
🤝 720+ curated investor meetings
💰 280+ investors actively seeking opportunities
🌍 3,600+ participants from 60+ countries
🎤 130+ elite speakers
🏢 140+ exhibitors across fintech, tech, and finance

Amazing showcase zones:
- Deal-Making Programme
- InnoVenture Salon
- FintechHK Startup Salon

Perfect for founders & innovators in: Fintech | Deep Tech | Healthcare | Green Energy | Clean Tech | Food & Agriculture | Infrastructure | Real Estate

Co-organised by Hong Kong SAR Government and HKTDC with 70+ international delegations!

📅 26-27 January 2026 | 📍 Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre

🔗 Register now: https://e27co.e27.co/ebie