Southeast Asia AI startups raised $8.54B across 347 deals since January 2023, and Singapore took $7.45B of it. Our analysis of those deals across six ASEAN markets found one company, data centre operator DayOne, holding $2.57B of the total. That is 30.1% of every AI dollar the region has attracted in three and a half years, from a single balance sheet.
On this page
- Southeast Asia AI Funding Reached $8.54B Across 347 Deals
- Singapore: The $7.45B Hub That Anchors Southeast Asia AI
- Indonesia, Vietnam and the Emerging ASEAN AI Markets
- Top 15 AI Startups in Southeast Asia by Funding
- FinTech Leads the AI Verticals Reshaping Southeast Asia
- Early-Stage Dominance and the Series B Gap
- Frequently Asked Questions About Southeast Asia Artificial Intelligence
- Methodology
Southeast Asia AI Funding Reached $8.54B Across 347 Deals
The region’s AI funding curve bends hard in 2026. Southeast Asia artificial intelligence funding ran at $1.09B across 69 deals in 2023 and $1.49B across 113 deals in 2024, then $2.28B across 90 deals in 2025. The first half of 2026 alone brought $3.67B across 75 deals, more than 2023 and 2024 combined.
Compute drives most of that jump. DayOne closed a $2B Series C led by Coatue in January 2026, the largest AI round the region has recorded, a month after drawing a €500M mezzanine facility from Brookfield. Strip the Series C out and H1 2026 still lands at $1.67B across 74 deals, more than double the $711.8M booked in the first half of 2025. The infrastructure round exaggerates the trend rather than inventing it.
Deal sizes tell the same story from the other end. The median tracked round is $6.0M against a mean of $24.6M, a gap created by 14 financings at or above $100M. For most founders in Singapore, Jakarta or Ho Chi Minh City, Southeast Asia is still a $5M to $10M market.
| Year | Deals | Total Funding |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 69 | $1.09B |
| 2024 | 113 | $1.49B |
| 2025 | 90 | $2.28B |
| 2026 (H1) | 75 | $3.67B |
Source: Bot Memo analysis of 347 deals (January 2023 to June 2026)
Singapore: The $7.45B Hub That Anchors Southeast Asia AI
Singapore accounts for 278 of 347 tracked deals and $7.45B of $8.54B in funding, or 87.3% of regional capital against 80.1% of deal volume. The city-state wins bigger rounds, not only more of them.
Three things drive that. Sovereign capital shows up as a co-lead rather than a passive limited partner: GIC co-led Atlan‘s $105M Series C with Meritech Capital Partners, and Temasek co-led Amperesand‘s $80M Series A with Walden Catalyst Ventures in November 2025. Government commitments are large and dated. And the city sits on the route Chinese-founded AI teams take when they move offshore.
The capital flow reaches well beyond compute. Airwallex raised a $330M Series G led by Addition at an $8B valuation in December 2025, and has since raised again at $11B, building cross-border payment rails from dual headquarters in Singapore and San Francisco. Tyme Group took $250M in a Series D backed by Nubank for AI-driven digital banking in emerging markets.
Acrab, a Singapore agentic-compute company backed by Vertex Holdings and Vertex Ventures SEA & India, came out of stealth in June 2026 having raised more than $350M since inception. Its chief executive previously ran Arm China as co-CEO, which is the kind of hire Singapore now gets and Jakarta does not.
Manus and the Limits of a Singapore Address
Manus is the case every VC in the region should read twice. The AI agent startup was founded in Beijing, relocated to Singapore in mid-2025, and raised $75M from Benchmark at a $500M valuation weeks after its March 2025 launch. Meta announced a roughly $2B acquisition at the end of December 2025 and closed it in early January 2026.
China’s National Development and Reform Commission then ordered the deal unwound on 27 April 2026 on national security grounds, the first forced reversal of a closed cross-border AI acquisition. Meta began separating from Manus operationally in June 2026, and a Tencent-led consortium is reported to be negotiating a buyback at the same valuation.
A Singapore holding company did not change where regulators judged the company to belong. Founder nationality and code provenance travelled with the business. Any China-founded startup planning a Singapore redomicile as an exit path should price that risk in now, not at signing.
Why Singapore for AI?
Singapore launched its National AI Strategy 2.0 in December 2023 with a target of tripling the AI practitioner workforce to 15,000. Budget 2024 followed in February with more than S$1B over five years for AI compute, talent and industry development, of which up to S$500M was earmarked for high-performance compute access. In January 2026 the government committed a further S$1B to public AI research through 2030, and Budget 2026 created a National AI Council chaired by the prime minister.
For founders, the practical effect is that a Singapore round can be assembled without leaving the island: a sovereign fund anchors it, a regional VC prices it, and the compute is already procured.
For a wider view of how Singapore ranks against other AI hubs, our AI startup funding breakdown by city places it alongside major European capitals on deal volume.
Indonesia, Vietnam and the Emerging ASEAN AI Markets
Outside Singapore, five ASEAN markets split $1.09B across 69 deals. Each has a different bottleneck.
Indonesia: 22 Deals, $346.2M
Indonesia ranks second in the region on both counts. Indonesian startups cluster in health and financial services, where the addressable population is largest and incumbent coverage thinnest. Halodoc raised $100M in a Series D from PT Astra International Tbk for AI-assisted telemedicine across the archipelago’s 17,000 islands.
Honest, a Jakarta credit card issuer, took a growth round led by Orico that brought its total equity funding to $100M, alongside a separate $40M debt facility from Mizuho Bank. Microsoft committed $1.7B to Indonesian cloud and AI infrastructure in April 2024, then paused parts of that data centre build during a global capacity review in early 2025.
Vietnam: 13 Deals, $113.0M
Vietnam’s deal count runs ahead of its capital, and one round carries the country. Techcoop raised $70M in a Series A from TNB Aura and AVV, applying AI to agricultural supply chains and trade finance from Ho Chi Minh City. That single round is 62% of Vietnam’s tracked AI funding.
Vietnam’s National Assembly passed a standalone Law on Artificial Intelligence on 10 December 2025, effective 1 March 2026, which puts it in the small group of countries with dedicated AI legislation rather than AI clauses inside a broader technology act. NVIDIA is building an R&D centre in Hanoi. The engineering supply is real; the growth capital is not there yet.
Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia
The Philippines logged 14 deals worth $304.4M, almost all of it Salmon, the Manila consumer lender. Salmon raised $88M in June 2025, structured as $60M drawn against a $150M Nordic bond framework plus a $28M equity tranche led by Spice Expeditions, then took a further $100M in debt in April 2026. Credit businesses in the region grow on debt lines, not equity rounds, and the funding mix shows it.
Thailand recorded 12 deals worth $200.0M. Amity raised a $100M Series D anchored by Singapore’s EDBI with Asia Partners and SMDV in March 2026, ahead of a planned IPO. That followed a $41.6M Series C led by Insight Capital, part of a $60M package with parent Amity Corporation. Amity sells B2B generative AI and customer engagement software to enterprises still running legacy stacks, which is the most bankable digital transformation trade in the region.
Malaysia logged 8 deals worth $124.3M, led by Respond.io’s $62.5M Series B from Camber Partners in June 2026. Hyperscaler cloud expansion in the country should widen that pipeline over the next two years.
| Country | Deals | Total Funding | Largest Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| Singapore | 278 | $7.45B | DayOne ($2B) |
| Indonesia | 22 | $346.2M | Halodoc ($100M) |
| Philippines | 14 | $304.4M | Salmon ($100M) |
| Thailand | 12 | $200.0M | Amity ($100M) |
| Malaysia | 8 | $124.3M | Respond.io ($62.5M) |
| Vietnam | 13 | $113.0M | Techcoop ($70M) |
Source: Bot Memo analysis of 347 deals (January 2023 to June 2026)
Top 15 AI Startups in Southeast Asia by Funding
One entry per company, ranked on the capital each has raised in tracked financings since January 2023. Entries that combine two instruments or report a cumulative total say so.
-
DayOne, $2.57B across two instruments: a $2B Series C led by Coatue and a €500M mezzanine facility from Brookfield and a sovereign investor. Hyperscale data centres, Singapore.
-
Acrab, more than $350M in cumulative financing from Vertex Holdings, Vertex Ventures SEA & India and Vertex Growth. Agentic AI compute infrastructure, Singapore.
-
Airwallex, $330M Series G led by Addition at an $8B valuation. Cross-border payments, Singapore.
-
PixVerse, $300M Series C led by CDH Investments and Alibaba, with Antler, iGlobe Partners and UOB Venture Management participating. Generative video, Singapore.
-
Tyme Group, $250M Series D backed by Nubank. AI-driven digital banking, Singapore.
-
bolttech, $147M Series C led by Dragon Fund, with Sumitomo Corporation and Iberis Capital joining as strategic investors. Embedded insurance, Singapore.
-
Atlan, $105M Series C co-led by GIC and Meritech Capital Partners. Data and AI governance, Singapore.
-
Amity, $100M Series D anchored by EDBI with Asia Partners and SMDV. B2B generative AI software, Bangkok.
-
Halodoc, $100M Series D from PT Astra International Tbk. AI-assisted telemedicine, Jakarta.
-
Salmon, $100M debt facility led by Spice Expeditions. Consumer lending, Manila.
-
EPG, $100M Series B led by Forebright and Silicon Peak. Modular data centre infrastructure, Singapore.
-
Honest, $100M in total equity funding after a growth round led by Orico. Credit cards, Jakarta.
-
Awak Technologies (now Vivance), $81.2M Series B co-led by Vickers Venture Partners and Lion X Ventures. Wearable dialysis, Singapore.
-
Amperesand, $80M Series A co-led by Walden Catalyst Ventures and Temasek. Solid-state transformers for AI data centres, Singapore.
-
Thunes, $72M Series C led by Marshall Wace. Cross-border payment networks, Singapore.
Eleven of the fifteen companies are based in Singapore. The four that are not (Amity in Bangkok, Halodoc and Honest in Jakarta, Salmon in Manila) all sell to consumers or enterprises in their home market, while the Singapore names sell across borders from day one. That split matches the pattern in our AI startup funding statistics, where capital concentrates around a regional customer base rather than a national one.
FinTech Leads the AI Verticals Reshaping Southeast Asia
FinTech takes 116 of 347 deals, 33.4% of regional volume and 2.9 times the next vertical.
| Vertical | Deals | % of Deals |
|---|---|---|
| FinTech | 116 | 33.4% |
| Developer Tools & AI Infrastructure | 40 | 11.5% |
| Media & Entertainment | 34 | 9.8% |
| Marketing & Sales Tech | 30 | 8.6% |
| Manufacturing & Industrials | 25 | 7.2% |
| Health & Biotech | 24 | 6.9% |
| Retail & E-Commerce | 16 | 4.6% |
| Energy & Sustainability | 16 | 4.6% |
| Transportation & Mobility | 15 | 4.3% |
| Food & AgriTech | 12 | 3.5% |
Source: Bot Memo analysis of 347 deals (January 2023 to June 2026)
The structural reason is settlement, not adoption. ASEAN’s ten member states run ten currencies and ten regulators across 622 million people, so a payment that would be domestic in the United States is cross-border here. Thunes connects payment networks in 140+ countries, and Airwallex covers a similar footprint. Those are infrastructure businesses whose margin comes from the fragmentation itself. Our top AI fintech startups list shows how few of the global equivalents face the same regulatory density.
Developer Tools & AI Infrastructure sits second at 40 deals, which is a build-out signal rather than an application market. Atlan on governance and DayOne on compute are laying track that the application layer has not run on yet. Media & Entertainment is third at 34 deals, where PixVerse’s $300M Series C makes Singapore a genuine centre for generative video and the large language models behind it.
Health & Biotech takes 24 deals, low for a region with this much unmet clinical demand. Vivance is commercialising wearable dialysis from Singapore and Halodoc is scaling telemedicine in Indonesia, but two companies do not make a vertical. The same shape appears in Africa’s AI funding across Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, where fintech leads, health lags and infrastructure absorbs the mega-rounds.
Early-Stage Dominance and the Series B Gap
Seed and Series A rounds are 55.6% of tracked deals. Add Pre-Seed and 63.1% of Southeast Asian AI companies sit at the earliest stages.
| Stage | Deals | % of Total |
|---|---|---|
| Seed | 101 | 29.1% |
| Series A | 92 | 26.5% |
| Growth / Series C+ | 39 | 11.2% |
| Pre-Seed | 26 | 7.5% |
| Series B | 20 | 5.8% |
| Other (debt, strategic, undisclosed) | 69 | 19.9% |
Source: Bot Memo analysis of 347 deals (January 2023 to June 2026)
The gap is at Series B. We tracked 20 Series B rounds against 193 Seed and Series A rounds, roughly one for every ten. Series C is thinner still at 13.
Early-stage VCs are well supplied here. Antler runs a residency programme across the region and shows up on cap tables from Singapore to Manila, and TNB Aura, AVV and Vertex all price seed and Series A locally. What the region lacks is the $30M to $80M cheque that carries a company from product-market fit to scale, which is why founders who clear Series A often raise their B from a US or Chinese fund, or move.
Companies that do clear the gap raise well. bolttech at $147M, Atlan at $105M and Amity at $100M all landed above $100M at Series C or later. The exit path exists, and it runs through Singapore. Our breakdown of AI startups by funding stage shows the same bottleneck is milder in the US and Europe.
Frequently Asked Questions About Southeast Asia Artificial Intelligence
Which country leads AI startup funding in Southeast Asia?
Singapore leads with 278 of 347 tracked deals and $7.45B since January 2023, taking 80.1% of regional deal volume and 87.3% of the capital. Indonesia is second with 22 deals and $346.2M. The gap reflects Singapore’s sovereign fund participation, its dated government AI commitments, and its role as the destination for AI founders relocating from China.
What are the top AI verticals in Southeast Asia?
FinTech leads with 116 of 347 deals, followed by Developer Tools & AI Infrastructure (40), Media & Entertainment (34), Marketing & Sales Tech (30) and Manufacturing & Industrials (25). FinTech’s lead comes from the region’s currency and regulatory fragmentation, which turns ordinary payments into cross-border problems worth solving.
Is Southeast Asia’s AI market mostly early-stage?
Yes. Seed (101 deals) and Series A (92 deals) are 55.6% of tracked deals, and Pre-Seed adds 26 more to reach 63.1%. Only 20 rounds reached Series B and 13 reached Series C, so the shortage is growth capital rather than new companies. Our AI startups by funding stage analysis shows how that compares with other regions.
How does Singapore’s government support AI startups?
Singapore launched National AI Strategy 2.0 in December 2023 with a target of 15,000 AI practitioners. Budget 2024 added more than S$1B over five years for AI compute, talent and industry development, with up to S$500M of that earmarked for high-performance compute access. A further S$1B for public AI research through 2030 followed in January 2026, and Budget 2026 established a National AI Council. Sovereign funds GIC and Temasek also co-lead rounds directly, as in Atlan’s $105M Series C and Amperesand’s $80M Series A.
Does relocating to Singapore protect a China-founded AI startup?
Not on the evidence of Manus. The AI agent startup moved from Beijing to Singapore in mid-2025 and was acquired by Meta for around $2B in a deal that closed in January 2026. China’s National Development and Reform Commission ordered that deal unwound on 27 April 2026, Meta began separating from the company in June, and a Tencent-led consortium is reported to be buying it back. A Singapore address changed the tax residence, not the regulatory claim.
What is Vietnam’s AI startup potential?
Vietnam logged 13 deals worth $113.0M, with Techcoop’s $70M Series A accounting for 62% of it. The country passed a standalone AI law on 10 December 2025 that took effect on 1 March 2026, and NVIDIA is building an R&D centre in Hanoi. Engineering supply and regulatory clarity are both in place; growth-stage capital is the missing input.
Methodology
This analysis covers 347 AI funding deals across Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia, tracked from January 2023 through June 2026. July 2026 is excluded because the month was incomplete at the time of writing.
All amounts are stated in USD, converted from the announced local currency at the rate on the announcement date. Deal types include venture rounds, debt facilities and strategic investments; the stage table separates them. Company rankings carry one entry per company, ranked on its largest tracked financing. Where a company has disclosed only a cumulative total, or where two instruments are combined into one entry, the entry says so.
Vertical shares count a deal once per vertical it operates in, so a company selling AI payments infrastructure appears under FinTech and under Developer Tools & AI Infrastructure. Percentages are calculated against the 347-deal base.
About the author
Editorial Staff
The Editorial Staff at Bot Memo is a team of writers, analysts, and AI agents dedicated to mapping the global AI startup ecosystem. Led by Chintan Zalani, the team tracks thousands of funding rounds, classifies companies across verticals, and distills it all into actionable intelligence for investors and founders.
