An iron lamp stood beside the household gods in a rented room in Nicopolis.
Epictetus heard a noise at the window, ran down, and found the lamp gone. He decided the thief had acted on a motive that made sense to the thief. Tomorrow, he told his students, you will find one of earthenware.1
He had been robbed of the wrong thing, and he fixed it by owning a cheaper lamp.
On 28 August, KPMG published the number that describes the room you are raising in. Singapore fintech drew US$499 million across 53 deals in the first half of 2026, down from about US$1.45 billion across 97 deals a year earlier. KPMG calls it the most subdued first half in close to a decade.
The halves inside the half matter more. The first quarter was US$88 million across 26 deals.
The second was US$411 million across 27, and one US$320 million cross-border payments round in June carried almost two-thirds of the entire six months.
Take that round out and about US$179 million was split between 52 deals, roughly US$3.4 million each. The subtraction is CÈ’s, not KPMG’s.
The meeting you have been chasing since January is a seed cheque wearing a Series A calendar.
The meeting you have been chasing since January is a seed cheque wearing a Series A calendar.
Every dollar that skipped Singapore landed somewhere.
Global fintech investment climbed from US$72.2 billion in the second half of 2025 to US$103.1 billion in the first half of 2026, and the Americas took US$86.9 billion of it. Asia-Pacific fell from US$7.1 billion to US$4.6 billion across the same two halves.
It moved inside Asia too. China-based startups took an estimated US$16.5 billion in the first quarter, 60 percent of all Asian startup funding and the region’s strongest quarter in more than three years. In the week KPMG published, Japan’s SBI agreed to pay US$270 million for a fifth of the Jakarta broker Ajaib.
Every one of those decisions sits in Epictetus’s second column.
He sorted the world into two columns and told his students to live inside the first. Allocation belongs to the second, next to the weather and other men’s opinions. No founder in Singapore moves US$86.9 billion back across the Pacific by pitching harder.
The first column is shorter and it is yours. Your revenue line. Your burn, and whether the round is load-bearing at all.
Nothing in that column waits on a partner’s calendar. A customer who pays in October is a decision you can make in September, and it clears no investment committee.
Fifteen of the 27 deals Singapore fintech closed in the second quarter were seed and early stage. That is the honest size of the cheque on offer this year, so rebuild next year’s plan on US$3.4 million and find the month it breaks.
The capital that did arrive paid for margin on revenue that already existed: artificial intelligence and machine learning featured in 18 of the 53 deals and US$365.9 million of the disclosed value.
If the plan survives only at the number on your slide, the plan is the iron lamp.
If the plan survives only at the number on your slide, the plan is the iron lamp.
Epictetus kept the room lit. He changed what a thief could carry out of it.
Footnotes
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Lucian records that after Epictetus died, an admirer paid three thousand drachmas for the earthenware lamp, hoping the wisdom came with it. ↩