The Podcast

SEA of Startups

Candid conversations on what's actually happening across Southeast Asia's startup and venture landscape — the deals, the operators, and the shifts that move the region. Hosted by Kevin Brockland.

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Latest Episode

October 7, 2026

Seed is booming. Not here.

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...

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All Episodes

Twelve doors out: Southeast Asia's exits are back, and the buyers are flying in

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...

Count who gets paid: the least glamorous AI money in Southeast Asia

Somebody is going to stand on a stage in Singapore this month and tell you two things. Southeast Asia now has more than 60 profitable tech startups. And the region is in the middle of a $4 billion AI boom. Both numbers are true. Both are also lies. Not made up. Lies the way your...

Exposing the AI panic: who actually profits?

This week a guy who, as far as anyone can tell, had never posted anything in his life put up a thread about artificial intelligence and got 170 million eyeballs on it in five days. A former Anthropic employee, or so the byline says. Within 48 hours you had Senator Bernie Sanders...

The tourists went home: who is actually left to fund Southeast Asia

Last week one of the firms that taught this region what seed capital even looks like quietly admitted that it will not raise another Southeast Asia fund. 500 Global showed up in KL, in Jakarta, in Bangkok more than a decade ago, when honestly almost nobody in the Valley could...

Southeast Asia's Superapps Finally Made Money. Do Not Copy How.

Three of the biggest companies this region has ever produced just did something they had never done before. They made money. Sea, the Singapore company behind Shopee and Garena, posted a net profit of 487 million US dollars in a single quarter, on 7.8 billion dollars of revenue....

Next, Owned by Whom?

As you read this, thousands of people are in a convention hall in Bangkok. Techsauce Global Summit, 26 to 28 August, at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center. Three hundred sessions, hundreds of exhibitors, and one word on every lanyard and every panel title. The word is...

Industrial Policy in a Startup Jersey

There is a company in Singapore that has raised close to half a billion US dollars and has never sold a single thing. Not a small amount of revenue. None. It has a chip. It has a box. It has a founder story, a serious set of engineers, and one of the bigger names in Singaporean...

A salary is not ownership

In 2022, at the Vietnam Venture Summit, forty one funds stood up and pledged one and a half billion dollars for Vietnamese startups. The pledge covered the three years from 2023 to 2025. Through May of this year, Vietnamese founders raised twenty eight point eight million...

Malaysia does not have a money problem

On the twenty seventh of July, in a bank tower in Petaling Jaya, the Malaysian government announced more than five billion ringgit of financing for Malaysian startups. It has been a week. I still cannot tell you who is giving it. Not because it is a secret. Because nobody...

When the bust ends in a courtroom

For a decade, Indonesia was not a story about Southeast Asia. It was the story. Two hundred and eighty million people, most of them young, most of them coming online for the first time with a phone in their hand. Gojek, Tokopedia, a parade of unicorns. Every global fund with a...

Just passing through: how Malaysia keeps funding the people who leave

Over the past few weeks, three Malaysia stories hit the news that, on the surface, have nothing to do with each other. A government pension fund answered in Parliament for nearly RM200 million lost in a fish farming startup that turned out to be a fraud. A celebrity founder and...

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,...

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...

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...

The Mirage and the Fork in the Road

Start with two numbers and a question. In May, startups in this region raised $472 million. More than double what they raised in April. Read only that line and you would think the drought had broken. Now the second number. That doubling was built almost entirely on two checks....

Oil, iron, and idle money: what the war is really doing to Southeast Asia

Start with a sliver of water between Iran and Oman. On a normal day, roughly a fifth of the world’s oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz. This year it stopped being normal. When the strait seized up, Brent jumped 10 to 13 percent in a single session into the low 80s and kept...

We Called It a Funding Winter. I Think We Built for an Exit That Was Never There.

Singapore just released its report on venture funding for 2025, and almost every write-up reads the same way. Funding winter. Capital’s gone quiet. Hold the line, it’ll come back. I think that’s the wrong story. I’ve been sitting with these numbers for a few days, and the more I...

Chatbots to Agents and where Liability Lands

I hopped into a taxi in Bangkok last week and the driver, a man north of fifty, spent the ride telling me what he was building with AI. Not complaining about the economy. Not asking where I was from. Telling me about his project. I’ve been turning that over ever since, because...

The Philippines Just Drew a Line With Washington. Malaysia Just Rewrote Its IPO Rules. And the Whole Region Is Doing Something Nobody Is Tracking as One Story.

There’s a version of this week that looks like two unrelated news stories from two different countries. The Philippines hosted a US Undersecretary of State for a site unveiling. Malaysia’s securities regulator released a public consultation paper on its small-cap exchange. Two...

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