Section
Founders
Long, unhurried profiles of the operators shaping the region's next decade.
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Founders Interview
BeLive’s founder on the pivot, the takeover, and the number he skipped
The BeLive founder tests every large call against arithmetic, which explains the platform he killed, the takeover he refused, and the one question he would not answer.
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Founders Essay
Temasek is moving up to S$78 billion into AI, and four of its five targets are businesses a startup cannot become
Temasek will take AI-related exposure from six percent of a S$518 billion book to as much as fifteen by 2031; read the five segments it named and the founder’s market turns out to be on the buyer’s side of the ledger.
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Founders Interview
Repricing after ten years (the advisers never looked at his results)
Allan Ling built two agencies on execution, burned out on both, and is now trying to sell judgement instead. The interesting part is what he did when he was contradicted.
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Founders Essay
Harry Stebbings turned 2,750 podcast interviews into a US$400m fund.
A podcast just financed a US$400 million venture fund. In a region where trust outranks capital, the case for founders owning their own press writes itself.
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Founders Essay
Why SEA founders are building their own models (a worse one that answers beats a better one that can be switched off)
Indosat and GoTo just shipped Sahabat-AI, a small open model built for Bahasa Indonesia. The reason has less to do with performance than with who can switch the rented alternative off.
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Founders Essay
Indonesia sentenced Gojek’s co-founder to ten years over a laptop procurement
On 30 June a Jakarta court sent Nadiem Makarim to prison for ten years without finding he took a cent, and the part every Southeast Asian founder should study is how a lawful call became a crime.
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Founders Essay
What Singapore’s S$1 billion deep tech top-up actually changes
Budget 2026 puts a billion dollars behind Singapore’s deep tech founders through a scheme that only moves when private investors move. The math it changes, and the math it leaves exactly where it was.
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Founders Essay
The four-person company that does thirty people’s work (and rents the difference)
The same subsidised AI operators are warned not to lean on is, from the founder’s chair, the thing that lets four people do the work of thirty; in a region that has always starved origin, that moves the binding constraint.
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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.
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Founders Essay
Southeast Asia’s biggest rounds are no longer the companies worth studying.
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.
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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.