Friday, 24 July 2026 · SEA Deal Ticker

SEA Deal Ticker Fri, 24 Jul

Singapore banks the day: a payments mega-round, cancer biotech, an AI-materials lab.

The year's biggest SEA cheque isn't a startup's: Singapore's Ant International closes a $1.2B Series A — TNGlobal

The Alipay+ and Antom parent, backed by Ant Group and Alibaba, will fund cross-border-payment and agentic-commerce expansion across four business lines reaching 150 million merchants and two billion accounts.

Positive-sum angle: Payment rails domiciled in Singapore at this scale hand SEA merchants a home-region clearing layer instead of routing every cross-border sale through a Western processor.
Southeast Asia rarely funds frontier cancer biotech: Singapore's Tikva Allocell raises $8M toward an IND — TNGlobal

The Series A, led by Kantharos Capital, funds IND-enabling work on an off-the-shelf cell therapy for B7-H3-positive solid tumours, with a regulatory submission planned for year-end 2026.

Positive-sum angle: A cell-therapy platform licensed from Baylor and built out in Singapore gives the region a path to manufacturing cancer treatments locally, not importing every breakthrough.
Materials that took years now take months: CuspAI and A*STAR open a five-year Singapore discovery lab — TNGlobal

The five-year tie-up pairs CuspAI's AI discovery platform with A*STAR's autonomous labs — including Southeast Asia's first fully autonomous MOF lab — across semiconductors, carbon capture and advanced electronics.

Positive-sum angle: Compressing discovery-to-synthesis from years to months hands SEA's deep-tech and chip-packaging ambitions a materials edge that can't be bought off a shelf.