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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

September 9, 2026

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...

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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...

Strip Out One Deal and SEA Raised $800M. A Chip Stock Just Got 95x Oversubscribed. And OpenAI Spent $4 Billion Admitting AI Is Hard to Deploy.

There’s a version of this week that looks like a good week for Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem. The Q1 2026 funding report shows the highest quarterly capital raised since late 2022. Malaysia’s hottest IPO in sixteen years prices and lists next week. OpenAI and Anthropic both...

Four Stories That Explain Southeast Asia Right Now

This week’s episode is a news episode. No guests. Just four stories that I think every founder, investor, and operator in Southeast Asia should be paying attention to right now. Here’s what we cover, and why each one matters. 1. China forced Meta to unwind a completed...

Four people are flying around the moon right now.

On April 1st, 2026 (and no, that’s not a joke) Artemis II launched from the same pad that sent Apollo 10 to the moon. Four astronauts. A 10-day mission. The furthest any human has traveled from Earth in over 50 years. I’ve been following the space industry closely for years, and...

AI-First Starts Inside: What Tiwa York Actually Said (And Why It Should Worry You)

Most AI content gives you a framework. Tiwa York gives you a verdict. The founder who built Kaidee to 35 million users and guided it to a successful exit sat down with SEA of Startups and said what most operators are afraid to say out loud: your team is probably performing AI...

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