AI Reportage
The year the Singapore middle stopped working.
Beijing blocked the Meta-Manus acquisition this month. The architecture of cross-border AI deals built around Singapore neutrality is being read again, by founders who built around it.
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Founders Essay
Singapore now funds 92 percent of regional startups.
The number reads like a triumph for Singapore's industrial policy. Read more closely, it is the visible measurement of a regional ecosystem that has narrowed under pressure, with Jakarta dropping to eight percent.
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Founders Essay
Late-stage SEA funding is up 140 percent in 2026. Seed is down 50.
Late-stage funding in Southeast Asia surged 140 percent in 2026; seed-stage funding fell by half over the same period. The two figures describe one ecosystem, and the description is unkind.
A letter from the editor
Why we started CÈ.
There is no shortage of titles writing about Southeast Asia. Few are written for it. CÈ was started because a generation of operators in Singapore, Jakarta, Bangkok, and beyond deserves a publication that speaks to them as peers; not as a market, not as a story, not as a regulatory landscape, but as a readership.
We cover six concerns: artificial intelligence, the founders building the region’s next generation of companies, modern health, technology beyond the headlines, the cultural and industry events that mark the calendar, and stoicism, treated here as intellectual discipline. The combination is not a coincidence. The people we are writing for hold all six concerns at once.
CÈ is not a newsletter. It is not a feed. It is not a brand magazine for advertisers. It is a publication, in the older sense of the word: paid for by readers, written for readers, and unhurried.
Issue №1 begins with an essay on stoicism, three reports from across the region, and a small index of pieces in progress. We will publish slowly, on purpose. We hope you will read with us.
Jane Ng Editor · Singapore, April 2026
Artificial Intelligence
On the systems being built, and the sovereignty questions they are quietly asking of the region.
AI Essay
OpenAI’s APAC headquarters is in Singapore. The hires are deployment engineers, not researchers.
OpenAI launched a four-billion-dollar Deployment Company on May 12 and made the Tomoro APAC office in Singapore the regional point of contact. The beachhead is in the buyer’s office, not its own.
AI Dispatch
What a ten-person Singapore startup will pay Microsoft to govern its AI agents.
Microsoft moved Agent 365 to general availability on May 1, priced at fifteen US dollars per user per month. The governance layer is the small number. The compute it brackets is the large one.
AI Essay
Malaysia is becoming a jurisdiction. The question is which kind.
Microsoft's $2.2 billion AI commitment to Malaysia is past the half-time mark. The certifications are the visible part of the deal. The data centres are the load-bearing part. Only one wins the strategic ledger.
Founders
Long, unhurried profiles of the operators shaping the region's next decade.
Founders Essay
Late-stage SEA funding is up 140 percent in 2026. Seed is down 50.
Late-stage funding in Southeast Asia surged 140 percent in 2026; seed-stage funding fell by half over the same period. The two figures describe one ecosystem, and the description is unkind.
Founders Essay
The most-funded founders are not the most-watched ones.
Funding measures one thing about a company. Whether the company is worth studying is a different question. The answers have stopped overlapping in Southeast Asia.
Founders Essay
Singapore now funds 92 percent of regional startups.
The number reads like a triumph for Singapore's industrial policy. Read more closely, it is the visible measurement of a regional ecosystem that has narrowed under pressure, with Jakarta dropping to eight percent.
Modern Health
Modern medicine, longevity, and the limits of optimisation.
Health Essay
Thymic health predicts adult mortality. AI now reads it from routine CT scans.
Hugo Aerts’s group scored 28,500 CT scans through an AI model that reads thymic involution; the top-quintile gap was 50 percent on all-cause mortality, 63 percent on cardiovascular death, 36 percent on lung-cancer incidence. Whether any intervention moves the marker is the unanswered question.
Health Field note
ApoB moves first. Biological age moves less than the clinics claim.
Three Singapore principals, ages 47 to 53, six months on structured longevity protocols, paying $38,000 to $94,000 a year. The biomarkers that moved are below. The ones the clinics oversold are below.
Technology
Technology beyond the press release. What is being built, who pays for it, what it costs the rest of us.
Tech Dispatch
MTI raised the 2026 forecast. Manufacturing had its worst quarter since 2023.
Singapore posted Q1 GDP up 4.6 percent year on year. Manufacturing fell 4.9 percent quarter on quarter, the steepest single-quarter drop since 2023. The AI hardware tailwind has rolled off.
Tech Essay
Novo Nordisk handed OpenAI its full operation. Singapore's contract labs are next.
Novo Nordisk's deal with OpenAI is being read as a drug-discovery story. The part that resets Singapore's biotech cluster is the supply chain, the manufacturing schedule, and the corporate operation.
Tech Dispatch
The humanoid robot moment landed in Shenzhen. The first SEA buyers are warehouses in Johor.
Unitree opened UniStore on May 7, the first developer marketplace for humanoid robots, with 1,200 developers and 237 apps at launch. The R1 retails at US$4,900. The math works first in regional logistics, not in CBD towers.
Events
On the moments, cultural, financial, ceremonial, that mark the regional calendar.
Events Essay
The 1.4 million deleted accounts that won’t fix the thing they were deleted for
The June 4 disruption removed a million accounts and froze a few million dollars, and the durable casualty, the one no warrant reaches, is that everyone in a regional chat now half-assumes the other side is running a script.
Events Essay
Singapore Grand Prix, without the conference (and a quarter of a million still buys the suite).
The eighteenth running of the night-race comes in 2026 without the Bloomberg New Economy Forum that used to bracket it. The suite economics still hold; the calendar arithmetic does not.
Stoicism
An applied philosophy for people who still have to make decisions, treated as intellectual discipline rather than wellness.
Stoicism Essay
What You Owe the Room You Built
On dikaiosyne, and the team you cannot afford to keep.
Stoicism Essay
Seneca was the richest man in Rome. He still set aside three days a month to eat dry bread.
On voluntary discomfort, and the two weeks a Singapore founder spends paying for her own coffee.
Stoicism Essay
Memento mori, for the founder counting runway.
On memento mori, and the week a Singapore founder ran the AGM and the oncology ward off the same calendar.
Read CÈ
Market Intel every morning. An issue every Friday.
A daily brief on the signals that matter across Southeast Asia — AI, founders, health, tech, stoicism — plus a weekly long-form issue. Read by C-suite executives, family-office principals, and operators across the region.