ATR is a daily newsletter, but we have switched to three times a week for the summer and while I’m in Europe. Despite that, the news has come thick and fast this week. Today, we’re contrasting the growth of CXMT and China’s domestic AI players with the volatility of Korea’s winners. We plan to be back on Friday with an issue looking more specifically at what’s happened in Southeast Asia this week so stay tuned.

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Outside of Asia Tech Review, I run Fully Drafted, a communications and consulting company focused on traditional comms, thought leadership and investor relations. Get in touch if you think we can help you.

China’s CXMT surges as Korea’s AI chip champions stumble

A week is a long time in the world of AI stocks. In the space of just days, memory maker CXMT went public and became China’s most valuable stock and SK Hynix, the memory king that’s become akin to a GameStop meme stock, has cratered by 25%.

CXMT’s (ChangXin Technology Group) market debut was a moment of history. The company raised 57.92 billion yuan ($8.6 billion) and its stock jumped nearly 500% on its Shanghai STAR Market debut to become China’s most valuable company. The IPO is the country’s largest since Agricultural Bank of China raised $22 billion in 2010.

Regular readers know CXMT is the world’s fourth-largest producer of DRAM memory, which is crucial to electronics. It is one of the key component makers as China builds out its own self-sufficient ecosystem for AI, right from models to chips, cloud, data centres and more.

CXMT’s timing was ripe given that AI-related stocks surged in the first half of 2026. Zhipu and MiniMax enjoyed stellar debuts in Hong Kong as the world’s first AI stocks to go public, while SK Hynix and Samsung are flying with record profits. Added to that, China is being acknowledged as the disruptor in world AI order thanks to Kimi from Moonshot, DeepSeek and more. CXMT combined those two tailwinds to create a monster IPO.

The stock might look pricey for now, but it has created billions in profits for its backers, which include Alibaba and at least five state-owned banks. The returns were so high that its chairman’s net worth rose past $15 billion, while he pledged to give more than $5 billion of the sum back to employees. (Alibaba made around $464 million, or 20X, on its investment, one of a series of big returns from its AI deals.)

In contrast, South Korean stocks plunged on concerns of China’s threat. The KOSPI rose with the gains of SK Hynix and Samsung but it closed down 6%, marking an 18% fall over five days of trading.

There were always concerns about the volatility of AI stocks. We noted last month that credit from brokers to retail traders rose by more than 60% this year. Now, Korea has clamped down on retail access to leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs) which were hit hardest by these drops. Singapore’s MAS is among those raising concern around the broader potential economic impact of AI stock fatigue.

The situation wasn’t helped by SK Hynix missing its earnings estimates this week.

That’s despite yet another set of impressive results, including 557% growth in operating revenue which hit a record 60.54 trillion KRW ($42 billion). Our friend Tim Culpan at Culpium has a deeper look at exactly what happened.

The volatile stock crashes didn’t come out of thin air and CXMT’s listing has been coming for some time. We first noted it back in 2023 and again in January of this year as the plans gathered momentum. So neither event was unexpected and they don’t usher in a drastic new period of world order. In both cases, the writing was on the wall, and that’s exactly why we follow developments closely in ATR.

For more on CXMT, SCMP has a profile of its chairman, Zhu Yiming.

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Deals

Moonshot AI closed a $3.5 billion round at a $35 billion valuation, exceeding its original $1-2 billion target thanks to the impact of its Kimi K3 model. Now it is said to be planning a new round at a $50 billion valuation before a Hong Kong IPO [Bloomberg]

In more news: Moonshot is said to be figuring out how to get its hands on more Nvidia Blackwell chips, which are banned on US export rules, in order to develop its next Kimi K4 model. That’s despite China’s self-sufficiency strategy becoming more sophisticated and wide-ranging [The Information]

Vantage Data Centers is considering selling its Malaysia business for about $2 billion as investors chase AI-driven data centre assets in Southeast Asia [Bloomberg]

AirTrunk secured a $2.3 billion green loan for a Malaysia data centre, adding more financing to Southeast Asia’s AI infrastructure buildout [Bloomberg]

Sixth Street, SK Telecom, GIC and La Caisse are bidding for a major stake in Bain-owned Southeast Asian data centre firm Bridge [Bloomberg]

Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal is targeting a $500 million valuation for his new startup Temple, which is preparing to debut its wearable at Rs 80,000, or about $930 [Economic Times]

SoftBank is eyeing a deal to buy a former Sony payments company as it looks to strengthen its settlements business, extending the Japanese group’s push deeper into fintech infrastructure and digital payments [Nikkei Asia]

SoftBank’s $40 billion loan backing its OpenAI stake has added 21 new lenders, broadening the financing base behind Masayoshi Son’s biggest AI bet as the Japanese group keeps pushing deeper into frontier AI infrastructure and investment [Bloomberg]

Markets

Shein is about to go public, and its pre-listing documents showed it lost $99 million during the first quarter despite net income of over $2 billion last year (Shein also disclosed it is being investigated by the FTC, but it did not give specifics) [Reuters]

Zepto has reportedly dropped its IPO valuation to $3 billion post-money to get the listing over the line, that’s despite a previous valuation of $7 billion and approval from SEBI to go public [Moneycontrol]

China’s DexForce is planning to be the latest robotics and AI firm to go public in Hong Kong [Bloomberg]

Japanese chipmaker Kioxia became the MSCI World Index’s top-performing stock this year, but now it faces a costly AI-driven race to expand flash memory capacity [Bloomberg]

GoTo Group posted its second straight quarterly profit with net income of 350 billion IDR ($19.4 million) as net revenue rose 31% to 5.7 trillion rupiah ($350 million) [Bloomberg]

Bukalapak reported revenue up 29% and positive adjusted EBITDA, improving the Indonesian e-commerce group’s profitability profile after years of pressure on listed tech platforms [Tech in Asia]

AI and Chips

In major news, a Chinese state-backed company has reportedly begun making immersion deep ultraviolet lithography machines. This would mark a major step in Beijing’s efforts to localise chipmaking equipment and reduce reliance on foreign suppliers for advanced semiconductor production [The Information]

That report sent shares of ASML, the Dutch firm which dominates lithography systems, to their lowest level since early June [Bloomberg]

Meta allowed Chinese ad partner GatherOne to run thousands of Facebook and Instagram promotions for AI apps that generate non-consensual sexual imagery, according to the Tech Transparency Project [Bloomberg]

Hackers used an autonomous AI agent in a cyber-espionage campaign against Thailand’s Ministry of Finance, according to analysis that found exposed attacker infrastructure that revealed hundreds of files while the intrusion was still in progress [The Record]

India’s Krutrim laid off 20-25 employees, nearly half its workforce, in a second restructuring after scaling back its full-stack AI strategy [Economic Times]

Taiwanese prosecutors detained an Nvidia employee and searched the company’s offices as part of a widening probe into alleged AI chip smuggling to China [Bloomberg]

Cursor launched a lower priced monthly 649 INR ($6.80) plan for the Indian market, going below its $20 Pro tier for the country which is its third-largest market and top location for ‘power users’ [TechCrunch]

OpenAI wants to use Korea as a testbed to launch its first hardware device early next year, according to President Lee Jae Myung [Korea Herald]

The Trump administration banned imports of new Chinese-made humanoid and quadruped robots and connected power inverters, citing risks to US AI and energy infrastructure [Reuters]

Lenovo Capital is doubling down on AI investments, targeting robotics, coding agents and infrastructure as AI companies make up nearly a third of its portfolio [SCMP]

US chipmaker Marvell Technology will invest $250 million in India over three years, doubling local headcount as it expands technology, talent and infrastructure capabilities [Reuters]

In other news:

India relaxed foreign investment rules to let e-commerce companies own inventory for export-only sales of domestically made goods, giving Amazon and other platforms more room to build India-based global-selling operations while keeping domestic online retail restrictions unchanged [Reuters]

In a national first, South Korea’s KB Kookmin Bank will launch USD corporate cross-border payments on JPMorgan’s Kinexys blockchain network in August for import-export payments across 10 countries [The Block]

Baidu has started testing autonomous vehicles in London through Lyft and Freenow, joining the race to launch commercial robotaxis in the UK [TechCrunch]

Swiggy Instamart named former Myntra CEO Nandita Sinha as CEO from August 3 after Amitesh Kumar Jha resigned to pursue other opportunities [Economic Times]

India’s state-owned Bank of Baroda disclosed that an employee email compromise exposed certain data, but it claimed core banking systems were not affected [The Record]

Malaysia’s digital economy agency withdrew support for Malaysia Blockchain Week after backlash over former OnlyFans creator Ms Pui Yi’s planned after-party DJ set [Bloomberg]

I’m still traveling in Europe, but Asia is where the action is right now. Chinese memory giant CXMT is about to go public in Shanghai in an IPO that will raise nearly $10 billion and flex China’s tech self-sufficiency strategy. Meanwhile, Korean firms are splurging the cash they’ve raked in from AI on deals in the US and beyond. That’s our first stop in today’s newsletter.

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South Korea’s AI earnings are financing a raft of global deals

South Korea has been a major economic beneficiary of the AI boom. Now that financial windfall is touching other countries and companies across the globe through a series of deals.

Samsung, which has posted record results thanks to its surging memory business, is said to be in talks to invest in Mistral in a deal that could value the French company at €20 billion, or $22.8 billion, according to the Financial Times. Arguably Europe’s most prominent AI firm, Mistral develops a model that ranks among the world’s top ten based on usage through OpenRouter.

Mistral has been making inroads in Asia. It has accelerated hiring in its Singapore office, which opened at the beginning of last year, with a focus on winning business in the public sector and financial services. In Europe, it just struck a deal with Microsoft to help it scale its distribution through Azure. A deal with Samsung can give it an edge in Korea, and maybe other countries, by virtue of it being neither American nor Chinese.

Elsewhere, the FT also reported that Korean firms are using their cash piles to grow their production capabilities in the US:

Foreign direct investment executed by South Korean groups in the US during the first quarter more than doubled year on year to $10.2bn, the highest in nearly five years, according to the finance ministry in Seoul. It rose nearly 15 per cent to $25.7bn for the whole of 2025.

We know SK Hynix has committed tens of billions of dollars to building out its US presence, it also created a service business on American soil and has pledged to invest $10 billion into innovative US companies. Samsung, meanwhile, backed AI data-centre cooling startup ZutaCore as part of a recent $100 million round and it backed AI chipmaker Groq last year.

The deals make sense as investments in the future and new possibilities for the Korean duo, which sit on the frontier of AI technology, but also they provide a new source of capital after China’s M&A was effectively snuffed out. Deals like ByteDance’s $1 billion acquisition of Musical.ly in 2017 or Tencent’s purchase of Riot Games in 2015 were from a different era, but no other nations have stepped in to fill the gap.

Korea’s moves are going the other way, too.

President Lee Jae Myung visited Silicon Valley to actively court tech companies to explore partnerships and deals as he continues to make AI the centrepiece of his vision for the future, which includes an $880 billion investment plan. He is also hoping to encourage US investors to back Korea’s emerging tech firms.

The major deals include Nvidia and SK Group announcing a $500 billion initiative around AI data centres and memory, while Nvidia will invest $1 billion in Naver to help finance a South Korean AI data centre being developed with Brookfield. The goal is to allow Naver to more than triple the facility’s size and use Nvidia AI computing hardware.

As the summer ends, look for more deals that bridge Korea and the US. I’m particularly interested in seeing how SK Hynix, a name that wasn’t widely-known before this year, cashes in on its new found status with startup investments in the US.

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Memory giant CXMT on the cusp of blockbuster China IPO

ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) will list in Shanghai today following China’s second highest IPO in history, which raised 66.6 billion CNY ($9.8 billion).

Like SK Hynix and Samsung, CXMT is ideally placed to profit from the AI boom as it develops the memory chips required for AI servers, as well as regular technology like smartphones. The company is the world’s fourth largest manufacturer of DRAM, dynamic random access memory, and the largest in China, which makes it a key player in the domestic push for technology self-sufficiency.

Indeed, CXMT is key to developing China-made data centres that can work with Chinese AI chips and models to give a fully independent tech stack.

Now though, China’s memory chip challengers are turning the AI hardware squeeze into leverage.

CXMT reportedly raised prices, even for major names like Huawei and signed major supply deals with ByteDance and Tencent. With revenue in Q1 increasing 719% to reach $7.5 billion, CXMT is on a roll.

Its IPO will be a major milestone for Beijing.

Outside of the self-sufficiency strategy, a major float is proof that the long-term and government-funded approach to building CXMT can be replicated, whilst generating significant returns for investors.

Deals

Embedded AI startup PsiBot, also known as Lingchu Intelligence, is set to close nearly $100 million in funding at a $1.48 billion valuation [Bloomberg]

Grab made a strategic investment in Vietnamese EV charging company EBOOST, with plans to deploy more than 6,000 charging ports for cars and motorbikes in Vietnam by early 2028 [TechNode Global]

Mirae Asset completed its acquisition of a 92.06% stake in South Korean crypto exchange Korbit for about $93 million [The Block]

ServiceNow invested $40 million in Indian banking software firm BusinessNext at a $700 million valuation [TechCrunch]

Singapore robotics data infrastructure startup Ropedia raised $22 million in Pre-Series A funding, taking total funding to $30 million [TechNode Global]

SoftBank is said to be weighing an acquisition of European robotics startup Gravis Robotics as it pushes deeper into AI-powered robotics [Bloomberg]

Bain Capital and LY Corp. are weighing a higher joint bid for Japanese online marketplace Kakaku.com, escalating a bidding war with EQT after Kakaku.com shares rose nearly 60% this year and lifted its market value to about $3.9 billion [Bloomberg]

Monk’s Hill Ventures is restructuring its leadership and operations as the Singapore VC shuts its Indonesia office and consolidates its investment team in Singapore [DealStreetAsia]

Markets

JD.com received formal notice of EU regulatory concerns over its $2.5 billion bid for German electronics retailer Ceconomy, a move that could require concessions to secure approval [Reuters]

Tencent’s share price fell the most in over a year, dragging Chinese gaming stocks lower as investors grew concerned about its mobile gaming business and some funds rotated back into AI-related names [Bloomberg]

Chinese robotics company AgiBot is said to be pursuing a Hong Kong IPO and has hired Citic Securities, CICC and Morgan Stanley as sponsors [SCMP]

Semight Instruments is considering a second listing in Hong Kong after shares in the Chinese semiconductor test-instrument maker surged roughly 2,200% since its April debut [Bloomberg]

Indonesia’s Danantara has taken control of four state-owned investment managers overseeing a combined 170 trillion rupiah ($9.5 billion) in assets, creating the country’s largest asset manager [Business Times]

Chinese GPU maker MetaX confidentially filed for a Hong Kong listing and is reportedly targeting an IPO by the end of this year [SCMP]

AI and Chips

The US is scrutinising China’s global AI push, with officials examining how Beijing is spreading its models and warning that foreign models found stealing American IP could face sanctions, though Chinese models already account for nearly 60% of US company token usage on OpenRouter [Bloomberg]

Almost 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator, urged the Trump administration not to cut off access to Chinese open-weight AI models [Politico]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said China’s open-source AI models pose no threat to the US but efforts to ban them do [Axios]

White House science adviser Michael Kratsios accused China’s Moonshot of improperly using US AI models and Nvidia GB300 chips accessed in Thailand to build its Kimi K3 system [Bloomberg]

But OpenAI president Greg Brockman said he is unsure if Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 was distilled from OpenAI technology [Bloomberg]

TCS acquired land parcels in Vizag and Pune that could become sites for OpenAI’s first Indian data centres [Economic Times]

Wistron opened a $700 million facility in Fort Worth, Texas, to produce Nvidia superchips [WSJ]

Volkswagen’s China-based joint venture Carizon is expanding its partnership with Horizon Robotics to accelerate advanced self-driving development [WSJ]

TSMC’s US manufacturing push is increasing costs and squeezing margins as the chipmaker commits $200 billion to American facilities, with overseas fab expansion expected to dilute gross margins by 2 to 4 percentage points over the next several years [CNBC]

Alibaba’s mapping unit Amap unveiled an upgraded ABot robotics framework that combines five specialised foundation AI models for navigation, manipulation, reasoning and control, claiming a 92.9% outdoor navigation success rate using standard cameras and basic road networks [SCMP]

DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng said in a rare four-hour investor talk that China’s AI gap with the US is mainly compute, not talent, while arguing open source and restrained profits are central to DeepSeek’s AGI strategy [Inside China]

Crypto

Coinbase is expanding its Singapore operations and plans to grow local headcount to 200 despite global restructuring [Business Times]

Crypto exchange HTX has been rotating wallets across four blockchains to dodge sanctions screening since UK authorities sanctioned the platform in May, according to TRM Labs, which said the platform retires hot wallets and funding addresses every few hours across TRON, Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain and Solana [The Block]

Circle is partnering with South Korea’s Kakao and Toss to explore USDC-powered blockchain payment infrastructure and digital asset services, expanding the stablecoin issuer’s push into one of Asia’s most active retail crypto markets [The Block]

In other news:

China started issuing robotaxi permits again in some cities after a months-long freeze triggered by a Baidu robotaxi outage in Wuhan, with regulators resuming licences gradually after an industry-wide safety review [Bloomberg]

Delhi High Court ruled in favour of OpenAI in a copyright lawsuit brought by Indian news agency ANI, finding that OpenAI’s use of ANI content to train ChatGPT did not amount to copyright infringement [Reuters]

Amazon is being investigated by the US Senate Small Business Committee for allegedly letting China influence the company’s online marketplace [Bloomberg]

Taiwan has loosened foreign-ownership rules for satellite operators, potentially opening the door for Starlink and other low-Earth orbit internet services as Taipei looks to strengthen communications resilience in a crisis [Nikkei Asia]

Flipkart is preparing to enter India’s fast-growing food delivery market with a Bengaluru pilot, taking on Zomato and Swiggy as competition heats up in the category [Business Standard]

Vietnam is weighing a ban on children under 16 posting, commenting or reacting on social media, with a draft decree that would require parents to register and monitor accounts while platforms identify young users and restrict access [Bloomberg]

India’s cybercrime agency directed GitHub to take down Jack Dorsey’s Bluetooth messaging app Bitchat over concerns it could be misused by anti-national elements, sparking legal debate over the government’s power to block repositories [TechCrunch]

Tencent fired a WeChat manager after screenshots of his multimillion-yuan compensation package leaked online and sparked public backlash, highlighting how sensitive pay transparency and internal-data controls have become for Chinese tech companies [SCMP]

Today we look at why Network School, US investor Balaji Srinivasan’s ambitious project to bring online communities together, is likely to move from Malaysia to Kazakhstan after running into the realities of doing business in Southeast Asia.

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Balaji’s Network School looks set to swap Malaysia for Kazakhstan

Balaji Srinivasan, the former Coinbase CTO and long-time tech investor, had a lesson on how politics in Southeast Asia works. Network School, his experimental community for digital nomads, ran into trouble in Malaysia, where it has been ordered to stop operating after nearly two years in the country.

The school is designed to bring online communities together offline to help talent build new businesses, new ways of learning and living together. It has occupied Malaysia’s Forest City, an ambitious project in Johor that was created in the last decade on reclaimed land but is mostly unbuilt.

The deal to place Network School there looked like a win-win, with Srinivasan keen to find a location to test his theory on communities and authorities keen to breathe new life into an area that never reached its potential. But that’s come undone as Network School has been ordered to cease activities after its local licence was revoked.

Johor Chief Minister Onn Hafiz Ghazi claimed one of the company’s premises was operating illegally without a licence. He said that both Malaysia’s King (who is also the Sultan of Johor) and the Johor Crown Prince consented to shutting Network School down.

“The State Government wishes to emphasise that Johor always welcomes high-quality investments that benefit the economy, create employment opportunities, and drive state development. However, no investor, company, or organisation can be placed above the sovereignty of the country’s laws,” Onn Hafiz wrote on X. He encouraged federal agencies to investigate possible immigration and digital-status violations, more on that later.

Srinivasan, however, played down the situation as an administrative error regarding signage. “We have multiple buildings. For one of them we need to change the text of a sign and the status of a license,” he wrote on X.

Immigration controversy

Srinivasan and Network School just got knocked by the local authority in Johor, the strategic Malaysian state bordering Singapore. It looks fairly consequential and might signal an end to the project in Malaysia at least.

Network School has been investigated over possible immigration violations.

Its premises were visited by authorities checking passports and visas of its students last week in response to concerns that Israeli nationals had entered the country on second passports. Srinivasan said the checks had not unearthed any issues, but Malaysian media reported that 19 foreign nationals (of Network School’s 430 registered participants) remain unaccounted for.

Srinivasan said anonymous social media accounts are trying to undermine his project, and he came out swinging on X with a post that questioned whether the global tech community should continue investing in Malaysia.

He claimed Network School has helped bring $25 million in investment to Malaysia so far, connecting global companies and bringing talent to the country. He addressed Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim directly, but it is Johor political leaders (and royal family) who hold the real power here.

Network School was targeted by the activist group MP4P, Malaysian Protest 4 Palestine, which raised concern that Israeli nationals entered Malaysia to take part in Network School. Israel is a complicated topic in Southeast Asia, neither Malaysia nor neighbouring Indonesia recognise it as a nation. Both are majority Muslim countries.

In terms of technology, Israel is a hotbed for major companies and startup founders. But they can’t travel easily in Southeast Asia.

Indonesia doesn’t allow tourist visas for Israeli passport holders, while Malaysia goes further in not allowing Israelis to enter without government permission. They can only do so using a second passport. That’s an issue MP4P raised about Network School and it looks like the real topic that mobilised Onn Hafiz Ghazi. Srinivasan maintains that Network School adheres to all rules and laws.

But the issue is already a national one. Anwar said last week that Israeli nations found in the country via Network School would be deported.

Now to Kazakhstan

The situation looks harsh on Srinivasan, but he is already moving on. Network School signed an MOU with the government of Kazakhstan, which has been pushing into technology and blockchain in recent years and might be the project’s next home.

Network School may live on, but Srinivasan will be frustrated since Johor looked like an ideal fit.

It symbolically offers potential in a location in need of regeneration. It is close to the global hub of Singapore. And it appeared to have the backing of Malaysia’s pro-tech leadership and brought positive attention to the country. It didn’t reckon on the politics of Malaysia getting in the way, however.

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Deals

01.ai, the Chinese AI startup founded by ex-Google executive Kai-Fu Lee, is reportedly seeking pre-IPO funding before a planned Hong Kong listing in 2027 [Bloomberg]

Blackstone agreed to invest in South Korea’s Futronic, a supplier of high-precision actuators for industrial robotics and autos, in a deal valuing the company at about 1 trillion won ($675 million) [Bloomberg]

Hyderabad-based Raghu Vamsi Aerospace Group raised $40 million from Norwest and Skegen Asset Management to expand facilities in India, the UK and the US [Economic Times]

Moonshot AI reportedly plans to launch a final funding round in August at a $31.5 billion valuation ahead of its Hong Kong listing, aiming to capitalise on buzz around its newest model to reach a valuation of up to $50 billion [Bloomberg]

Tencent is said to be in talks to acquire mobile gaming studio SuperPlay from Playtika in a deal that could value the business at $1 billion to $1.5 billion [CTech]

Japan’s T2 raised about 5 billion yen ($30.7 million) from 11 investors, including the venture arms of Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, Sumitomo Warehouse and Mitsubishi Logistics, as the self-driving truck startup develops autonomous freight services [Nikkei Asia]

Ant International, the Singapore-based overseas arm of Ant Group, raised $1.2 billion backed by Ant Group and Alibaba to expand merchant payments and enterprise financial services worldwide [Reuters]

Markets

Thailand’s Finnomena filed to list on the Stock Exchange of Thailand, with plans to sell up to 300,000,838 shares, or 15% of post-IPO capital, to fund wealthtech platform expansion [LinkedIn]

China’s Zhongji Innolight started gauging investor demand for a Hong Kong listing that could raise as much as $8 billion, putting the optical transceiver maker on track for the city’s biggest first-time share sale since Alibaba’s 2019 listing [Bloomberg]

Beijing-based GigaAI, also known as Jijia Vision, is weighing a Hong Kong IPO as soon as this year and is nearing a new funding round at a $3 billion valuation [Bloomberg]

South Korea’s exports in the first 20 days of July jumped 52.3% from a year earlier to a record for the period as AI-led demand lifted semiconductor and technology shipments [Bloomberg]

Paytm parent One 97 Communications reported a 79% year-on-year jump in quarterly profit to 2.2 billion rupees ($25.6 million) as it continued its turnaround from last year’s regulatory hit [Bloomberg]

BlackRock, Hillhouse Investment and Temasek are set to be among cornerstone investors in Zhongji Innolight’s potential $8 billion Hong Kong listing, alongside Aspex, JPMorgan Asset Management, Wellington and Jack Ma-backed Yunfeng Capital [Bloomberg]

AI and Chips

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Washington will scrutinise overseas open-source AI models, including from China, and may act if it finds evidence they used stolen US intellectual property [Bloomberg]

US investor Bill Gurley argued that open AI models are a competition force against closed-model incumbents such as Anthropic and OpenAI, pointing to China’s Moonshot, DeepSeek and Zhipu as part of a wider open-model push [Washington Post]

China is said to be considering tighter export controls on AI and semiconductor technologies as Beijing tries to keep advanced domestic AI capabilities at home and mirror US treatment of AI as a strategic asset [Financial Times]

Z.AI completed construction of a 1-gigawatt data centre using only Chinese-made chips and has begun partial operations to develop its GLM AI platforms [Bloomberg]

Hugging Face said an autonomous AI agent breached its production infrastructure the week of July 13, with defenders switching to Z.ai’s open-source GLM 5.2 model on their own infrastructure after unnamed US frontier LLMs blocked incident-response work [The Stack]

SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won said the global AI memory-chip shortage is severe enough that foreign governments are intervening for domestic industries, urging SK hynix to accelerate capacity expansion at home and abroad [Korea Herald]

Taiwanese prosecutors indicted a former TSMC deputy manager for allegedly stealing trade secrets involving national core technologies with the intent of helping China advance its chip ambitions [Nikkei Asia]

South Korea’s Seoul Semiconductor is assessing plans to set up a manufacturing plant in India and is in talks with Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Gujarat, with the company potentially applying for incentives under India’s $13 billion Semiconductor Mission 2.0 programme [Economic Times]

TSMC is set to raise prices for advanced and mature chip production services by up to 10% in 2027, reflecting higher material, equipment and overseas fab construction costs [Nikkei Asia]

South Korea plans to launch a free homegrown AI chatbot this year as part of an AI for All push to reduce reliance on foreign platforms and make AI services available without monthly subscription fees [CNA]

In other news:

South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service began sanction procedures against Dunamu, the operator of crypto exchange Upbit, over the roughly $30 million hack the platform suffered last November [The Block]

China’s market regulator could announce the outcome of its months-long antitrust probe into Trip.com Group as soon as this week, with the online travel platform facing a possible fine of 2 billion yuan to 6 billion yuan ($280 million to $840 million) [SCMP]

Alibaba’s AliExpress was fined €550 million ($640 million) by the EU in the largest penalty under the bloc’s Digital Services Act, with regulators saying the platform failed to assess unsafe or counterfeit products properly and penalise repeat-offending vendors [Bloomberg]

Singapore’s IMDA said the Personal Data Protection Commission launched a guide on federated learning and updated its synthetic-data guidance to help organisations adopt privacy-enhancing technologies for AI development [TNGlobal]

Japan’s AZ-COM Maruwa Holdings, a logistics services company that counts Amazon Japan as a client, will use the yen-denominated JPYC stablecoin to pay outsourcing fees and salaries to around 2,300 business partners [Nikkei Asia]

Hollywood trade groups are urging Vietnam to impose tougher penalties and faster action against piracy operators and copycat sites as a USTR Section 301 investigation raises the prospect of trade sanctions over anti-piracy enforcement [TorrentFreak]

Vietnam introduced fines of up to $7,600 for unlicenced crypto service providers and advertisers as five exchange applicants await review and the first licences are expected in the third quarter [The Block]

Samsung is setting up a robotics division called RX that will report directly to the CEO as the company pushes to make robotics a core growth business [Reuters]

South Korea suffered a data leak that could affect nearly all current and retired diplomats after a government-run training academy database with about 10,000 records was breached [Bloomberg]

Bybit launched a locally regulated platform in Indonesia after taking majority ownership of PT Enkripsi Teknologi Handal, formerly NOBI, with the new Bybit Indonesia operating under OJK supervision [PR Newswire]

Samsung debuted an AI-powered health assistant as it pushes deeper into personalised digital health and joins a crowded market for AI wellness tools [Bloomberg]

We are back on summer schedule now after a very quiet week due to my travel. Going forward, that means that for July and August we will publish three times a week unless there’s earth-shattering news to share outside of that.

To keep up with our issues, follow us on LinkedIn or WhatsApp. Please do share Asia Tech Review with people you know who want to get smart about Asia tech.

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Highly-rated new Kimi model gives Moonshot AI its moment in the sun

It’s been a major month for Moonshot AI, after it released a highly-acclaimed new version of its Kimi AI model and was linked with a major public listing.

Moonshot is one of China’s ‘Six Tigers,’ a group of AI startup pioneers building frontier models but it fell behind in the narrative as flashier peers MiniMax and Zhipu (Z.ai) went public and DeepSeek grabbed headlines for its rapid rise and competitive products.

But Kimi K3, a new 2.8 trillion-parameter open model with native vision and a 1 million-token context window, is bringing it attention with performance that ranks favourably to Western competitors. The new release is claimed to be the world’s largest open AI model by parameter count. Not only that, but with no guardrails like those of Claude and ChatGPT, some users have found it to be more useful, too.

Demand was so high during the first 48 hours that Moonshot paused all new subscriptions in order to keep up with a huge spike in activity. In response, it will also carve out separate plans for subscribers who want coding usage and those wanting more general workflows to help it handle the increased load.

This publicity comes at a good time, for sure, as Moonshot is reportedly looking to list in Hong Kong potentially by the end of the year and at a valuation of over $30 billion. According to Bloomberg, it has already sent shareholders a request for approval.

The incredible performance of Z.ai’s share price, which is up nearly 1,000% this year despite a 50% pullback over the last month, means all Chinese AI firms will have IPO plans. Kimi’s newfound credibility could make that journey smoother for Moonshot.

Indeed, its initial release sent AI and semiconductor stocks lower as investors questioned whether US AI capex and chip demand are harder to justify if Chinese models win more enterprise usage.

But, markets are a war of narrative. Despite America’s retail investors wondering whether yet another Chinese model is showing up its big spending companies, Transformer News argues its capabilities have been over-stated.

But take a step back and actually look at the evidence. While Kimi K3 is certainly a very good model, by the company’s own admission, it is not at the frontier. That means that unlike Claude Mythos or GPT-5.6 Sol, it likely does not have dangerous cyber capabilities.

Similarly, Chinese companies can’t keep releasing open source models forever. It helps get attention and close a lead, but once its top models reach parity with Claude and ChatGPT, there will need to be some guardrails. We’ve written before that Beijing is already said to have opened discussions around restricting models outside of China, for example. There are also legitimate concerns around distillation.

Still, the narrative is clear, and that is that Chinese models continue to gain credibility and undermine the free-spending nature of America’s best AI firms. For now, at least.

China puts AI into its geopolitical strategy

The Kimi launch was one of many announcements and developments from WAIC, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, a Chinese event held in Shanghai that attracted 3,000 exhibits from more than 1,100 companies including many of China’s top names. The main takeaway, though, was politics.

We suggested before that China’s AI firms could be the next global technology land grab, and comments from Chinese Premier Xi Jinping at WAIC make that reality seem likely.

The themes were as you might expect, as Reuters reports:

In a speech to the opening ceremony of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, Xi urged countries to seize the “historic opportunity” of open-source AI, and pledged to help developing nations build AI capabilities, warning against the emergence of “new historical injustices” from unequal access to the technology.

Xi’s speech, which is translated on SCMP, included a rallying call to encourage open source, openness and collaboration, as well as security and control. He strictly called out “placing one country’s security over that of others” and claimed that AI development should not be from one single country.

It’s, of course, easy to make these comments when you are behind, which China certainly is. But Xi placed a lot of emphasis on building a global community and development for all countries.

Xi announced the WAICO Alliance which, ostensibly an alliance to develop AI worldwide, looks like a political play. Its founding 29 member countries include Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia, South Africa, Senegal, Russia and Pakistan. That included a five-year pledge to open training and seminar opportunities (5,000 to be oddly specific) and AI application centres with regional bodies from Asia, Africa, Latin America and beyond.

This certainly looks like the next political-tech crossover. Now we wait to see how much of the nice-sounding rhetoric makes it into practical policy, and, if so, which Chinese companies stand to benefit.

In a similar way to how Huawei and ZTE networked much of the world and Xiaomi, Huawei again and others made smartphones affordable in scores of countries, Z.ai, Moonshot, DeepSeek and others seem poised to build usage in the developing world. They’re cheap and accessible. Plus China is building its position in response to the US government’s intervention with the rollout of Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models, and later OpenAI’s newest models.

Elsewhere from WAIC, key news included:

• Alibaba launched a preview of its Qwen3.8 Max model, claiming the system rivals top frontier AI models and trails only Anthropic’s Fable 5

• BrainCo unveiled a brain-to-robot platform that lets users control robots through thought alone

• StepFun showcased agents that run across a smartphone and its own operating system

• Alibaba’s chip design unit T-Head will open-source SAIL, the software stack for its Zhenwu AI chips

• ZTE unveiled the NaviX Ultra, billed as the world’s first agentic AI smartphone, with ByteDance’s Doubao in tow

• Dongfang Suanxin (DFSX) unveiled an AI chip road map built around software-defined computing and 3D-stacked near-memory architecture as it tries to reduce dependence on Nvidia and export-restricted components

• MiniMax showcased its M3 multimodal large model

Deals

DeepSeek’s first external funding round valued the Chinese AI lab at CNY350.88 billion ($51.82 billion), after a fund backed by consumer goods firm Anhui Korrun invested CNY2.9 billion ($428 million) for an indirect 0.8265% stake [Reuters]

Indian AI coding startup Emergent raised a $130 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, helped by $120 million in annual run-rate revenue and more than 200,000 paying customers [TechCrunch]

Indian smart-ring maker Ultrahuman is reportedly in talks to raise about $60 million from Steadview Capital and Blume Ventures at a $360 million-$400 million post-money valuation [Economic Times]

Rize, a Singapore-based sustainable rice platform, raised $31 million led by BNP Paribas Asset Management Alts to take its total investment to $47 million, it emerged from the 100x100 fund we previewed last month [Rize]

Singapore-based pQCee raised $3.9m in seed funding co-led by SGInnovate and Lotus One Investment, with the post-quantum cybersecurity startup planning to expand across Asia, the US, Europe and the Middle East. [TechNode Global]

Hyundai will buy SoftBank’s roughly 10% stake in Boston Dynamics, giving it full control of the US robotics company before deploying Atlas humanoid robots at a Georgia car plant from 2028 [Reuters]

SBI Holdings completed its majority acquisition of Singapore crypto platform Coinhako after winning approval from MAS, extending the Japanese group’s Southeast Asia digital asset push [The Block]

Markets

TSMC pledged another $100 billion for Arizona after second-quarter profit jumped 77% to a record T$706.6 billion ($22 billion) on continued AI demand [Reuters]

Japanese memory chip maker Kioxia saw its share price fall by as much as 16% in Tokyo, leaving it down 52% from last month’s peak and wiping at least JPY30 trillion ($185 billion) from its market value [Bloomberg]

Related: A Texas federal jury ordered Kioxia to pay Viasat $229 million for infringing a flash-memory patent developed for satellite error-correction systems [Reuters]

Indonesian coffee chain Kopi Kenangan is said to have held talks with banks about a potential listing that could value the company at up to $1 billion, with Singapore among the venues under consideration [WSJ]

Zepto’s planned IPO is drawing investor interest at lower valuations, with foreign investors around $4.5 billion pre-money and some domestic institutions at $3 billion-$3.5 billion [Economic Times]

CXMT’s Shanghai IPO drew applications from more than 9.4 million investor accounts, with retail demand reaching 212 times the shares initially available online [SCMP]

Singapore’s markets regulator has reportedly held talks with investment companies about possible tax cuts for fund managers in response to Hong Kong proposing sweeping tax changes to lure high-paid portfolio managers [FT]

AI and Chips

Z.AI is said to be on pace for $1 billion in annual recurring revenue after hitting its full-year sales target in July [Bloomberg]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s Japan trip is expected to include support for Noetra, the SoftBank-led sovereign AI consortium backed by 44 Japanese companies and up to JPY1 trillion ($6.2 billion) in government funding [Nikkei Asia]

Taiwan is building TAIDE, its own AI model, to preserve traditional-script Chinese and counter mainland political framing in global AI systems trained mostly on simplified-script data [Nikkei Asia]

Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling, its first general-purpose AI model, using a DeepSeek-V3-based architecture and post-training data from Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5 [FT]

Nvidia and four Japanese industrial automation companies will expand robot development work through its Cosmos physical AI platform [Bloomberg]

Chinese tech giants including ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent are turning AI tokens into an internal corporate currency as cheaper model pricing drives AI deeper into daily workflows [SCMP]

The US House China committee urged the Trump administration to bar US companies from buying memory chips from CXMT and YMTC over AI infrastructure and supply chain security risks [FT]

Tata Electronics is preparing to produce India’s first semiconductor wafers on 90nm process technology at its Dholera fab, stepping back from the 28nm process Tata Sons touted in March 2025 [Bloomberg]

Indonesia’s planned copyright rewrite would grant copyright privileges to people who use AI to generate content, setting up a potential fight with Google and other platforms over training data [Reuters]

DeepSeek is pushing China’s AI price war into enterprise adoption, with its V4 Flash model completing a standard intelligence task for about $0.02 versus more than $2 for Anthropic’s premium model [Bloomberg]

Japanese chipmaker Rapidus will work with US software company Cadence to offer customers agentic AI tools for chip design [Nikkei Asia]

The UK’s AI Security Institute said leading open-weight models GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4-Pro now perform on cyber tasks like frontier closed models released four to seven months earlier [UK AI Security Institute]

Shanghai Xingshu Tiansuan launched the first constellation for a planned 1,000-satellite space-computing network to process AI and remote-sensing data in orbit [Reuters]

Japan plans to buy 27,500 next-generation Nvidia Rubin chips for a JPY387.3 billion government-backed sovereign AI project led by newly formed Noetra [Bloomberg]

In other news

Hyundai Motor workers in South Korea staged a partial strike after the company showed its Atlas humanoid robot, with the union demanding a say before robots enter production lines [WSJ]

Sensitive files related to India’s Kudankulam nuclear power plant were exposed in a data breach and posted on the dark web [Reuters]

Cambodia’s Lim Heng Group leased casino-site buildings on the Thai-Cambodian border to a compound used for industrial-scale scams and human trafficking [Reuters]

South Korean authorities searched Chinese chipmaker Montage Technology’s local office over a potential competition law violation, with South Korea accounting for CNY2.93 billion ($432.63 million) of Montage’s fiscal 2025 sales [Reuters]

Balaji Srinivasan asked Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s office for a meeting after immigration officers raided his Network School in Johor’s Forest City [Bloomberg]

A South Korean fine on Coupang over a data leak has drawn criticism from Washington and forced Seoul’s US ambassador back to the capital for consultations [Reuters]

A Taiwan court sentenced BitShine ringleader Shih to 22 years in prison for unlicensed virtual asset services, fraud and money laundering that hit more than 1,500 victims for NT$1.27 billion ($39 million) [The Block]

SK Hynix has gone from a little known component maker in Korea to a meme stock that’s gaining popularity across the world, and introducing regular traders to concepts like HBM, Kospi and more. Following its huge US listing, we dive into the company in more detail today, it feels bubbly to me but the company has a compelling narrative to support a lot of future growth.

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Inside the SKy Hy US listing

AI IPOs are booming and SK Hynix just delivered America’s largest listing from a foreign company after it raised $26.5 billion through an ADR (American Depositary Receipt) offering on the Nasdaq.

The Korean firm’s share price closed the day 13% higher on its US debut, but shares in Seoul are down by 10% at the time of writing on Monday. Analysts told Reuters that investors are taking profits after the landmark US deal but there are also concerns.

CEO Kwak Noh-jung has said publicly that next year will see the worst supply shortage in memory chip industry history. We know SK Hynix, Samsung and other memory players have already sold their inventory for the coming years, but Kwak told Reuters that demand will outstrip production capacity “even beyond 2030.”

The proceeds of the listing, and its incredible stock market gains, will be funneled back into expanding manufacturing to alleviate this memory chip crunch.

Many had probably not heard of SK Hynix until a year or two ago, but the business has become a meme stock for investors seeking wild returns from the days of GameStop during the Covid-19 pandemic. Not unlike the US gaming retailer, SK Hynix was born from ruins. A creditor-led bailout from Hyundai in 2003 saw the business eventually acquired by Korea’s SK Telecom in 2012. (It’s a hell of a story with banks, credit, failure to sell and then a little luck/vision.)

The firm is booming as SK Hynix offers a direct proxy to the AI story since it specialises in memory chip solutions, particularly high bandwidth memory (HBM) that’s become essential for AI chip processing.

Fellow Korean firm Samsung has also been a major beneficiary of the demand. It forecast record quarterly profits of over $58 billion last week, but Samsung’s business is broadly diversified making it less interesting for some investors punting on the memory demand.

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won told Bloomberg that he believes the company will never be able to keep up with demand, such is the insatiable appetite and need for advanced memory.

“We spent almost 30 years finishing the completion of the internet infrastructure. When it comes to AI, I believe that the AI industry size is much, much larger than the internet,” he said in the money quote from the interview.

The company is busy securing new supply deals and ramping up its production capacity. It may even issue more US shares, in line with its plans to invest upwards of $35 billion in the American market.

We’ve not seen a stock like this hit the US market before. Instinctively, it feels like a bubble but the argument for future growth is compelling. Anthropic and OpenAI’s IPOs, and the look into their financials, may well be a very key moment in what happens next.

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Shein gets the nod to go public in Hong Kong

Speculation in recent years has linked Shein to an IPO in the US in 2023 and then the UK, but it now looks like Hong Kong could be the destination. The fast fashion retailer has received regulatory approval from China to proceed with a Hong Kong listing, a year after it started the process.

There’s no word on how much Shein might raise or when a listing might come. But the China Securities Regulatory Commission, which confirmed it had approved the listing, wrote on its website that Shein would offer 341.6 million shares through HKEX.

The Financial Times reported that Shein’s valuation has been cut to around $30 billion from a peak of $100 billion in 2022, and lower still than its 2023 valuation of $66 billion.

A listing would mark a notable change in approach for a company that has positioned itself as a global business while minimising links to China. Shein has focused on building a business in the US and Europe, sponsoring events and awards to help develop a local brand and connections. It moved its global HQ to Singapore, as other Chinese firms have done, but ultimately Hong Kong’s growing public markets are where it will reach retail investors.

Don’t expect a blockbuster IPO. Given how AI stocks have grown this year in Hong Kong, anything is possible, but Shein looks like it has come to market a little late.

Deals

Tencent is negotiating to become Manus’s largest shareholder as investors move to unwind Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of the Chinese AI agent startup following a Beijing order to reverse the deal [Financial Times]

Japan’s top convenience store chain, Seven & i Holdings, is reportedly in talks to accept an investment of up to 300 billion yen ($1.9 billion) from SoftBank and its PayPay payments affiliate [Nikkei Asia]

India approved Vivo’s manufacturing joint venture with Dixon Technologies, clearing the China-linked smartphone partnership announced in December 2024 under the country’s stricter investment review rules [TechCrunch]

Markets

We know Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT could have China’s biggest IPO of 2026 with plans to raise around $4.3 billion, but now Bloomberg reports it plans to double output and build a full supply chain from design to assembly [Bloomberg]

Nexchip Semiconductor began trading in Hong Kong after raising HK$6.98 billion ($890 million), with the Hefei-based wafer foundry pricing shares at the top of its range but still at a 57% discount to its Shanghai-listed stock [Bloomberg]

First Z.ai, now MiniMax (which also went public at the start of this year) plans to raise up to HK$14.54 billion ($1.9 billion) through a sale of new shares and convertible bonds [Bloomberg]

MiniMax CEO Junjie Yan has reportedly told staff he will forgo salary until the company reaches AGI, he also pledged to give up 5% of his personal equity for employee incentives, open-source work and AI ecosystem efforts [The Information]

AI and Chips

Taiwanese DRAM chipmaker Nanya Technology plans to spend more than T$200 billion ($6.2 billion) on capital expenditure in 2027, roughly quadrupling this year’s outlay as AI-driven memory demand rises [Reuters]

Chinese AI coding tools including ByteDance’s Trae and Alibaba’s Qoder are gaining attention after Beijing flagged security concerns around Anthropic’s Claude Code [SCMP]

Zhipu founder Tang Jie is said to have told staff that frontier AI should remain broadly accessible rather than controlled by a few companies, saying security comes from wide participation and oversight rather than technical barriers, and pointing to Zhipu’s open-source GLM-5.2 release as proof of that approach [Bloomberg]

In other news:

Nikkei found that roughly 20% of USB drives surfacing as top picks on Amazon carried multiple reviews flagging inflated storage capacity, with some fake-capacity devices linked to China-origin malware concerns in Japan [Nikkei Asia]

Grab plans to expand its Vietnam EV charging network fifteenfold by 2028 as the company builds infrastructure around its electric ride-hailing fleet [Nikkei Asia]

Malaysia Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim plans to debut an agentic AI avatar of himself to help the public use government services [Bloomberg]

China dropped its numerical target for urban job creation in its 2026-2030 labour plan, saying annual goals will be set flexibly while pledging to address the employment impact of AI and shifting global trade [Bloomberg]

SIG (Susquehanna International Group), one of ByteDance’s biggest shareholders, is reportedly winding down its China-based venture investment team, with managing director Tim Gong expected to leave and launch his own fund [The Information]

Tokyo bars and clubs are returning to cash payments after the sudden bankruptcy of credit processor Zentoshin caught them unawares and disrupted card settlements [Bloomberg]

Temasek came out swinging with some huge numbers for its financial year, with 16% US dollar returns and a portfolio that’s now worth over $400 billion. We planned to look at its startup deals this month, since it is doing them at a far quicker pace, so we put our analysis into today’s newsletter. There’s also a lesson about holding crypto tokens that belong to startups.

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From Anthropic and OpenAI to Vercel, Harvey and AMI Labs

Singaporean sovereign fund Temasek took a painful and embarrassing hit after it invested $275 million in FTX, the crypto exchange that went insolvent. Three years on, it is navigating the frothy world of technology pretty well, thanks to AI and other deals.

Temasek announced impressive 10.5% shareholder returns (16.4% in US dollar terms) with its newest financial results this week, as its total portfolio value hit S$518 billion ($401 billion). That’s despite global tensions and the Middle East-led fuel crisis.

Going forward, Temasek plans to do more deals in the US market, as Bloomberg reports:

Temasek’s assets in the Americas, which are second only to its home nation of Singapore, hit 26% of the portfolio in the most recent fiscal year – a huge jump from the roughly 11% it represented in 2016. The portion in China rose slightly to 17%, although the exposure remains well below the 24% it represented a decade ago.

On crypto, by the way, Temasek President Nagi Hamiyeh said it remains “off the table,” but he also seemed to say never say never.

I want to look specifically at how the two funds are capturing deals around the AI boom.

The Singaporean government is one of the few investors to back both Anthropic and OpenAI, through its Temasek and GIC funds, the latter of which manages Singapore’s foreign reserves. It is also an investor in Nvidia. Those stakes tell of its ambition to back the safer category leaders when it comes to AI, which is projected to move from 6% of its allocation to 15% by 2031.

In the first half of this year alone, GIC and Temasek completed 14 deals for AI or AI-related companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI, AMI Labs (the AI Lab from Yann LeCun), legal-focused Harvey, fintech Ramp, developer platform Supabase and data centre firm DayOne. Vercel, an AI website builder, and workflow platform Temporal are also among its past investments.

The last sixth month of deals is up sharply from just seven AI investments in 2025, most of which were made through GIC. (Note: Vertex Ventures deals are not included, that might be a separate piece itself.)

The AI deals look particularly strategic considering the past investment in data centres like Equinix in 2014 (GIC inked a joint venture), Vantage in 2015 and DayOne, as well as power firms. Moving up to cover developer tools, medical AI and top models gives a decent slice of the AI ecosystem.

Expect to see a lot more action in the second half of the year, although the concentration will continue to be overseas despite Southeast Asia making progress with AI and robotics companies. The biggest play remains public markets, but it’s always more interesting to see how colossal sovereign wealth funds make their play among startups and private markets. That’s where the real outsized winning deals can be found, but there’s also plenty of risk as Temasek is well aware thanks to FTX.

You can check out Temasek’s full report at this link. Fascinating to get a look into such a huge fund, which is now one of the world’s top 10.

Nium acquihires crypto card startup Cypher leaving token holders angry

Nium, the cross-border payments firm headquartered in Singapore, made its first crypto acquisition after it scooped up Cypher, a crypto debit card startup backed by Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures and others, in an undisclosed deal.

The deal is an acquihire that will result in the Cypher Visa debit card and blockchain protocol closing down by September, although some services including new card issuance and top-ups are already disabled.

Founded in 2022, Cypher was an early entrant in the now very busy and competitive crypto card space. In a press release issued last October, it claimed to have more than 100,000 users (disclosure: I was one) but its early momentum appeared to slow. Cypher doesn’t rank among the top 20 crypto cards based on spend, according to on-chain data from analytics company PaymentScan.

Nium will use Cypher’s team, including founder Kuberan Marimuthu who is ex-Amazon and Coinbase, to build new products and services for the crypto industry. Marimuthu will become VP of Digital Assets at Nium. The company specialises in helping banks and financial institutions move money globally at lower cost and with more speed. Nium CEO Prajit Nanu said the addition of this new division will be a pivotal moment for Nium to offer banks fiat to digital asset services thanks to a raft of new legislation worldwide and surging interest in stablecoins.

However, with all things crypto, the acquisition has angered Cypher users who feel blindsided by the company’s upcoming closure.

Cypher users earned their spending rewards in the company’s token, a setup that’s not uncommon in the crypto card space. While it didn’t require users to lock their tokens (make them untouchable for a significant period of time) to get a card, it did incentivise locking tokens for up to two years in order to gain preferential cashback options from their favourite merchants.

After announcing the deal and the company’s planned closure, Cypher’s token price unsurprisingly took a massive nosedive. CoinGecko data (below) shows it has lost over 87% of its value in the last week. That’s not isolated, however, as that price is down 99% since the token was introduced back in October with trading volume dropping to single-digit thousand US dollars per day as of last week.

Perhaps in preparation for a backlash, Cypher announced the deal on X in a series of posts that did not allow replies.

The language also drew criticism, with some users complaining that they have been left holding the bag while Cypher made money from a token sale and acquisition.

This deal isn’t likely to be a major financial windfall for Cypher, which previously raised $4.3 million in 2023, but it does demonstrate how fast the crypto landscape can move and the risk of owning tokens.

Deals

Blackstone, CVC Capital Partners and MUFG are bidding for a stake in Vietnamese fintech MoMo in a partial sale that could value the company at more than $2 billion [Reuters]

Ant Group took a 28% stake in China’s Boohee Health as the company’s AI health app AQ surpassed 100 million users [TNGlobal]

Indian billionaire Nandan Nilekani will step down as a general partner at Fundamentum Partnership as the Indian venture capital firm launches its third fund, which is targeting about $200 million [TechCrunch]

Indian wholesale e-commerce platform WizCommerce raised Rs 79.5 crore ($8.3 million) from existing investors including Blume Ventures, Alpha Wave, Z47, 100X VC and Peak XV Partners [Entrackr]

Markets

Chinese AI model maker Zhipu priced a $4 billion Hong Kong share sale at HK$1,588 per share, a 13% discount to its previous close, after its stock rose roughly 1,700% since listing [Bloomberg]

Apple supplier Luxshare Precision closed 1.6% lower in its Hong Kong debut after raising HK$24.3 billion ($3.1 billion) in the city’s biggest listing this year [Bloomberg]

SK Hynix is set to raise around $28 billion from a Nasdaq ADR sale this week, but Culpium notes its AI-memory exposure is highly concentrated: HBM was about 8% of DRAM bit shipments last year but around 40% of DRAM revenue [Culpium]

Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT will open investor subscriptions next week for a Shanghai IPO targeting at least 29.5 billion yuan ($4.3 billion), with the deal potentially raising more than $5 billion [Bloomberg]

Autonomous driving company Momenta had a muted Hong Kong debut after raising $751 million in its IPO at a valuation of around $9 billion; shares were up 2.8% from the offer price in early trading [Wall Street Journal]

Shanghai chipmaker Iluvatar CoreX is raising about $850 million in a Hong Kong share placement after a rally in its stock since its January IPO [Bloomberg]

China’s Nexchip Semiconductor is seeking to raise up to HK$6.98 billion ($890.3 million) in a Hong Kong share sale, adding to the city’s pipeline of mainland chip listings [Reuters]

Chinese AI model maker Zhipu is seeking to raise about $4 billion from a share sale after its stock rose almost 1,500% since a January listing in Hong Kong [Bloomberg]

Bain Capital exited its full stake in Japanese flash-memory chipmaker Kioxia after an AI-driven rally pushed the company’s shares up more than 4,000% since its debut [Bloomberg]

South Korean AI chip startup Rebellions plans to list in Korea in the first half of next year, with a potential US listing to follow [Reuters]

Shanghai Iluvatar CoreX Semiconductor raised about $902 million in a Hong Kong share sale, selling 14.9 million shares at HK$476 each after a rally since its January IPO [Bloomberg]

Zostel asked India’s securities regulator to review OYO’s IPO filing over litigation disclosures [Entrackr]

Following OYO’s filing for IPO in India, Southeast Asia-based RedDoorz says it plans to go public in Singapore next year. Early days but it plans to raise $50-$100 million for acquisitions [Business Times]

The parent of India’s CarDekho reportedly plans to file draft IPO papers this quarter for an offering of up to Rs 3,000 crore ($360 million) [Economic Times]

AI and Chips

Google Cloud will roll out its latest AI models locally in India as part of a data-sovereignty push and it is exploring local AI server manufacturing [Economic Times]

MiniMax is said to be developing a 2.7 trillion-parameter large language model, which would be the largest open-weight model released by a Chinese company [Reuters]

China’s National Vulnerability Database said it found security backdoor vulnerabilities in Anthropic’s Claude Code, escalating tensions in the US-China AI rivalry [Wall Street Journal]

US lawmakers are weighing curbs on American companies’ use of Chinese AI models as a House committee investigates risks tied to China’s AI capabilities [CNBC]

Hesai Technology is expanding in the US through sensors used in Nvidia-backed autonomous vehicles despite being blacklisted by the US Department of Defense as a Chinese military entity [CNBC]

Tencent’s Xiaowei AI agent is being tested inside WeChat as the company tries to turn its super-app into an AI-powered assistant platform [Bloomberg]

China will reportedly allow a handful of top AI firms to buy limited quantities of Nvidia’s H200 chips after previously holding back local purchase approvals to protect domestic chipmakers [The Information]

LG will invest $1 billion in a chip-packaging plant in Hai Phong, Vietnam, with operations due to start in 2027 and mass production targeted for 2028 [Nikkei Asia]

India’s JioStar, the Reliance Industries streaming unit with 500 million monthly users, is using OpenAI technology to build a conversational AI platform for content discovery and shopping [Bloomberg]

Thailand approved nine investment projects worth a combined $1.99 billion across AI, advanced electronics, aviation, clean energy and food as manufacturers reposition supply chains in Southeast Asia [TechNode Global]

In other news:

India scrapped 7.5% and 5% import duties on selected mobile-phone and electronics components, a move expected to benefit manufacturers including Apple and Xiaomi [Reuters]

Malaysia’s Zetrix AI Berhad group will provide the underlying protocol for the Philippines’ public blockchain infrastructure [TNGlobal]

Despite other nations opening up to digital assets, India’s central bank and tax authorities are pressing for stricter cryptocurrency curbs [Reuters]

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has stepped down from Grab’s board likely due to the incoming conflict of interest from Grab’s acquisition of FoodPanda Taiwan, which will put it into competition with Uber once again [Grab]

Taiwan charged two businessmen with helping Chinese state-linked hackers run an espionage campaign that used leased LINE accounts to impersonate international journalists and plant malware [The Record]

Google appealed an Indian ruling over its advertising platform, arguing that the decision could harm consumers [Economic Times]

Truecaller CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala accused India’s telecom regulator of blocking the app from displaying spam data for calls from the country’s 1400 and 1600 number series [TechCrunch]

US hospitals are increasingly hiring Filipino nurses for remote monitoring roles to cut costs and fill staffing gaps, a shift that may worsen the Philippines’ nursing shortage [Rest of World]

Editor’s note: After today’s newsletter was published, we updated the deal count and graphic for Temasek/GIC deals. And the loose headline for the Nium-Cypher acquisition. Our apologies for any confusion.

Today we’re looking at how Chinese AI models might evolve. With major investment windfalls, DeepSeek is leading the charge towards developing its own inference chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia, Huawei and others and potentially unlock major performance gains. There’s also talk that Chinese firms might limit overseas usage of their top models. Lots to ponder.

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Outside of Asia Tech Review, I run Fully Drafted, a communications and consulting company focused on traditional comms, thought leadership and investor relations. Get in touch if you think we can help you.

Chinese AI companies are about to look a lot like their US peers

Open source and budget-friendly are what comes to mind when you think of Chinese AI models, but things are showing signs of change.

Developments this week suggest that China’s top AI firms are levelling up their strategies to be more in line with those in the US.

Huge investments mean Chinese AI chips are coming

When DeepSeek raised $7 billion, you’d be forgiven for wondering what that huge pile of cash is for.

The company has managed to build a popular and highly rated AI model, and related services, on a modest budget. It did so under the radar. How does raising a truckload of cash fit with that strategy, and if it doesn’t, what is the new approach?

We have more clarity now after Reuters reported that DeepSeek is developing its own chip for inference in order to reduce its reliance on Nvidia and even Chinese suppliers Huawei for the processors that power its tech. Its own chips and hardware could help DeepSeek produce even better quality models and services.

OpenAI and Anthropic are both reportedly working on their own chips, with Broadcom and TSMC, and Samsung, respectively, their potential partners. For these two, this is about helping unlock greater capabilities, while Chinese companies are also looking to overcome their issues acquiring US technology.

We know China’s self-sufficiency push is giving AI providers options from local companies, chiefly Huawei, but DeepSeek isn’t alone in looking at its own chips. Zhipu AI, the Chinese firm that’s seen its Hong Kong share price soar since its IPO at the end of last year, is also considering it too, according to The Information.

It makes sense that increased capital into the Chinese AI leaders is enabling them to step up and take on strategies that have, until now, been limited to US giants. DeepSeek’s huge funding round is more than we’ve seen for any of its peers to date, and Zhipu may be about to rake in more cash with a planned listing on mainland China after its shares have risen by more than 1,250% since January.

Profitability and international restrictions

Chinese AI firms are levelling up their strategies as the existing approaches hit their buffers.

Alibaba, for example, has been in transition after it reorganised its Qwen AI division and entire AI department with a view to making money and not simply creating popular open source models. The New York Times reported that the company is struggling to turn the popularity of its models into revenue.

This remains an ongoing issue for Chinese companies.

New data from OpenRouter, which aggregates all major models in one place, suggests Chinese AI models are winning more and more US enterprise usage with DeepSeek and Z.ai’s GLM model leading the charge. Chinese models have topped 30% of US companies’ weekly token spend since February 8 and peaked at 46%.

Underwriting all of these changes is the role of China’s government, which could be changing its own position. Reuters reports that Alibaba, ByteDance, Z.ai and others have had conversations with Chinese authorities about potentially restricting overseas access to their most advanced models and future releases.

That would bring it in line with Anthropic and OpenAI and their restrictions not only in China, but non-US markets. The initial release of Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models of Claude were pulled for all foreign nations, raising concerns across the world and prompting governments to increase their focus on developing their own sovereign solutions.

Are we about to see a huge change to how Chinese AI companies operate?

It’s unlikely to be wholesale, but increased capabilities might allow Chinese companies to offer more premium experiences to either grab market share or sell more expensive services. The AI landscape looks like it is becoming multi-tier, with many users and companies happy to buy more affordable packages without necessarily needing the latest, greatest and most expensive models. Chinese companies will fare better in that market with more advanced options to complement their existing focus on affordability and open source.

In related news: Chinese companies expect to shift 46% of their AI accelerator budgets to domestic chips over the next year, up from 30% today, as US-China tensions push buyers away from Nvidia’s advanced processors [Bloomberg]

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Report highlights Singapore’s role as Asian startup scaling hub

Southeast Asia’s funding winter may appear to have rebounded somewhat after Traxn, a data provider covering Asia, found that tech companies in the region raised $7.4 billion in the first half of 2026, more than double the $3.2 billion raised a year earlier.

Don’t take this report with too much authority, however, because the data is supersized by DayOne’s massive $2.5 billion Series C round. That deal in June alone counts for 33% of the total amount raised.

Traxn found that the number of rounds was down, but the number of larger rounds ($100 million-plus) was up from four in the second half of last year to 12 in the first half of 2026.

It wasn’t just DayOne, Supabase raised $500 million, Airwallex raised $320 million and PixVerse closed $300 million. Interestingly, all of these are Singapore-based companies but each one has a founding story that’s away from the country.

Supabase was started by founders who aren’t Asian, Airwallex is originally from Australia and PixVerse is the international business of China-based AIsphere. We’ve written about DayOne a number of times, so readers will recall it is the global business of China’s top data centre provider, GDS.

Traxn’s data alone may not indicate Southeast Asia has arrested its funding slump, but it certainly highlights Singapore’s position as a fundraising and incorporation hub for startups across Asia that want to scale and raise big rounds.

Deals

Shenzhen-based smart glasses startup Even Realities raised a $150 million pre-Series B round led by Meituan and Tencent at a $1 billion valuation [TechCrunch]

Thailand secured $4.1 billion in EV supply-chain investment from Chinese, Korean and Japanese companies [TechNode Global]

B Capital closed its third early-stage fund at $500 million to back young companies working on AI and other frontier tech, India is a major focus after backing winners like Meesho [Economic Times]

Markets

SK Hynix has begun marketing a US listing to sell American depositary receipts worth roughly $28 billion [Bloomberg]

Consumer electronics manufacturer Luxshare, which works with Apple among others, raised HK$24.3 billion ($3.1 billion) in its Hong Kong IPO after selling at the top of its range. Shares begin trading on Thursday [Bloomberg]

Indian electric two-wheeler maker Ather Energy plans to launch a qualified institutional placement as early as next week to raise up to $200 million [Economic Times]

Indian fintech Navi, cofounded by Flipkart cofounder Sachin Bansal, is reportedly preparing to file for an IPO by the March quarter of 2026-27 to raise INR30 billion ($350 million) [Economic Times]

Shanghai Biren Technology is raising HK$7 billion ($892.5 million) through a share placement to ramp up GPU production as it competes with Nvidia in China’s AI chip market [SCMP]

Samsung Electronics posted a monster quarter as operating profit surged nearly 19-fold from a year earlier to an estimated 89.4 trillion won ($58.44 billion), beating forecasts, while revenue is expected to rise 129% to 171 trillion won ($111.8 billion) [Reuters]

LG Electronics expects second-quarter operating profit to jump nearly 150% year-on-year to 1.579 trillion won ($1.03 billion), helped by a US tariff refund and steady profitability in home appliances, TVs and auto parts [Wall Street Journal]

Tencent sold $1.5 billion of Kuaishou shares, offloading about 273 million shares at HK$43.25 ($5.50) each in Hong Kong’s biggest block trade this year. Kuaishou’s share price fell as much as 9.3% [Bloomberg]

Naver Financial and Dunamu, the operator of South Korean crypto exchange Upbit, delayed their planned stock-swap deal for a second time as debate over the country’s proposed Digital Asset Basic Act adds regulatory uncertainty [The Block]

AI and Chips

South Korea’s government plans to launch an investment fund fuelled by tax revenue from the country’s semiconductor boom [Bloomberg]

Tencent launched its Hy3 model, claiming performance comparable to flagship models two to five times its size and greater stability and cost efficiency than its preview version [Tencent]

Chinese web-novel platforms including Tencent, ByteDance and Baidu are tightening limits on AI writing tools after low-quality automated fiction flooded their sites [Rest of World]

In other news

Singapore prosecutors added money-laundering charges against Alan Wei Zhaolun, a suspect in an alleged scheme to divert Nvidia AI chips to countries including China [Bloomberg]

Morgan Stanley expects the global robotaxi market to reach $1 trillion by 2040, with Chinese players Baidu, Xpeng and WeRide set to lead the region alongside Tesla and Waymo [SCMP]

A US federal judge ordered the Pentagon to give Alibaba a reprieve from a lobbying ban while she considers the constitutionality of a measure targeting Chinese companies’ US activities [Bloomberg]

A Samsung union leader’s $26 billion bonus win has splintered the union he leads, as unequal payouts widened tensions between semiconductor workers and staff in loss-making units [Bloomberg]

South Korea’s Supreme Court proposed amendments that would introduce detailed procedures for the seizure and liquidation of digital assets [The Block]

Telegram has reportedly become a paid hub for non-consensual intimate images in India, with users paying as little as Rs 99 ($1.15) through UPI to join private groups that share and trade photos taken without consent [Economic Times]

Apple is starting to resume card payments for Apple Account purchases in India more than four years after suspending them in May 2022, with eligible Visa and Mastercard credit and debit cards returning for iCloud+, Apple Music and App Store purchases [TechCrunch]

Tokyo police arrested a 15-year-old student suspected of using ChatGPT to help automate an attack on Bandai Channel that fraudulently cancelled more than 46,000 user subscriptions and forced the anime streaming service offline for more than a month [The Record]

In a sign of a narrative that might be the start of planning for an IPO: Carousell claims to have reached positive EBITDA in FY25 as revenue grew 18% to $141 million and e-commerce revenue rose 40%, accounting for 45% of total revenue [TNGlobal]

Chinese smartphone sales fell 13% year-on-year during the 618 shopping festival, according to Counterpoint Research, with all major domestic brands except Huawei posting double-digit declines and Honor down 33% while Xiaomi fell 24% [Reuters]

Southeast Asia has typically been a laggard when it comes to robotics. It’s tough to compete with the US, the land of innovation, and China, the world’s manufacturer, but now the region is finding a niche through companies that take the lab and design work and turn them into practical outputs. That’s our main topic for today’s newsletter, but that’s only because we don’t write about football or the World Cup. (You can ask me about those directly, I have just as much to say…)

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Outside of Asia Tech Review, I run Fully Drafted, a communications and consulting company focused on traditional comms, thought leadership and investor relations. Get in touch if you think we can help you.

Southeast Asia’s robotics startups are finally leaving the demo floor

We’re used to seeing China dominate the robotics narrative globally, not to mention in Asia. Southeast Asia doesn’t have dancing robots on national TV or IPOs from robotics companies, but it is gaining momentum with Singapore firmly in the centre.

Last week, dConstruct raised $125 million in what is one of the largest investments for a robotics startup in Southeast Asia to date. It’s also a huge Series A for a company in the region. The five-year-old company develops 3D worlds to build better navigation for robots, drones and vehicles.

More interestingly, the company came from the first cohort of the RoboNexus accelerator, a venture building programme from Singapore’s National Robotics Programme. dConstruct isn’t the programme’s only early validation.

Spinoff Robotics, a five-year-old company providing drone-based solutions for cleaning and inspecting industrial infrastructure, was acquired by Nanoveu, an Australia-listed company focused on AI and automation. The deal price was not disclosed but it’s a major landmark for the programme and Singapore itself as a hub.

We know Singapore is positioning itself as a destination for deployment, both in terms of AI and robotics. Back in May, the government announced a slew of partnerships and initiatives including the development of a national AI strategy, an AI lab from OpenAI, a robotics lab from Nvidia and a testbed for businesses to develop robotics solutions in areas like delivery and cleaning. Grab, DHL and Unitree (the Chinese firm behind those dancing robots) were all among the launch partners.

The RoboNexus accelerator builds on this focus on deployment, i.e. not developing core technology but instead adoption and practical application of technologies. Elsewhere, we’ve seen Neptune Robotics raise $52 million for its ship-cleaning robots (it is investing heavily into Singapore), BeeX raise $7.7 million for underwater inspection drones, Augmentus raise $11 million to make coding robots easier and, most recently, Thailand’s Amity close $7 million for concierge robots.

Rather than chasing sci-fi visions, Southeast Asia is catching the attention of investors by graduating robotics from the lab into practical deployment, with Singapore doing a lot of heavy lifting with its initiatives and programmes. The big question looming will, again, be exits and global capabilities.

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Alibaba stops using Claude after being called out for copying

Weeks after Anthropic accused Alibaba of carrying out “the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities,” the Chinese e-commerce giant is moving to bar its employees from using the AI service.

Reuters reports that employees will no longer have access to Claude from 10 July. Instead, they’ll use Qoder, Alibaba’s homespun coding assistant, and, you’d presume, its own Qwen-based services. Alibaba declined to comment when we asked. However, a source close to the matter did confirm to Asia Tech Review that the details and dates are correct.

Last month’s accusation prompted Alibaba’s share price to slide by as much as 5%, leaving the price at a 16-month low. While the company never responded publicly to the accusations, it has taken prompt action. A further reason for the switch might be the fact that Chinese AI labs have frequently been called out for copying by US AI firms. Most recently in March, Anthropic called out a host of Chinese AI firms for ‘distilling’ (training their models) on Claude. The claim is pretty damaging given how Chinese models have emerged, as we noted at the time:

Chinese AI firms have generally built their reputation around doing more with less. Unlike Anthropic, OpenAI and others with multi-trillion dollar budgets, they’re financed more modestly and have limited access to technology from Nvidia and others which is key to training large-scale models.

The idea that they are reliant on their US peers undermines that narrative which China has crafted.

In the months since that accusation, AI has become a national government issue.

The US restricted the introduction of Mythos and Fable, Anthropic’s newest Claude models, and it is taking the same approach with OpenAI’s newest version of ChatGPT for fear of what it could enable adversaries, including governments like China, to do.

Indeed, Anthropic was caught including secret software in the recently released version of Claude Code which tracked if a user was located in China or had links to Chinese URLs or labs. It has since removed the setting, but it shows clearly where things are moving to. As a highly visible Chinese company, Alibaba likely had little choice but to make this move away from Claude.

Deals

Indian data centre operator Yotta Data Services is in talks with global and domestic funds to raise about $1 billion, with its promoters seeking to sell a 25-30% stake at a $3 billion valuation [Economic Times]

Temasek-backed Azalea Investment Management launched Azalea All Access, its first private equity evergreen fund, with $350 million in initial commitments from anchor investors [TechNode Global]

Markets

Chinese robot maker Unitree Robotics won regulatory approval for a Shanghai listing through which it plans to raise CNY4.2 billion ($619.4 million) [Reuters]

China’s quant funds have more than doubled assets under management to about $384 billion in less than a year as they adopt AI trading tools [Bloomberg]

AI and Chips

Kioxia began shipping samples of its 332-layer 3D flash memory chips to AI data centre operators, with the parts set to power data-centre SSDs made at its Kitakami plant in Japan’s Iwate prefecture [Bloomberg]

Hong Kong handled more than half of mainland China’s $239 billion in chip imports through May, up from about one-third a decade ago, as AI-related trade through the city accelerated [Bloomberg]

Micron broke ground on a JPY1.5 trillion ($9.3 billion) Hiroshima plant expansion that will produce high-bandwidth memory chips for AI processors, with shipments expected around summer 2028 [Bloomberg]

ByteDance’s Seedance video generator is gaining Hollywood users with low pricing, realistic output and timeline-based prompting features [Los Angeles Times]

India’s CG Power & Industrial Solutions began chip production at its new Sanand, Gujarat facility, with capacity expected to rise from 200 million to 5 billion units a year [Bloomberg]

In other news:

GoDaddy warned that India’s crackdown on websites impersonating major brands could make the internet less safe for legitimate businesses after a New Delhi court ordered new disclosure and domain-ban requirements [Reuters]

India’s IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw directed MeitY to summon Meta after a BBC investigation found Instagram had run ads promoting child abuse material [Economic Times/BBC]

India told Meta to remove child abuse content from Instagram and explain the steps it is taking to prevent such material from appearing on the platform [Bloomberg]

India is investigating a Tata Electronics data breach that exposed documents linked to Apple’s unreleased iPhone 18 Pro after a ransomware group posted component and supplier lists and photos on the dark web [Reuters]

China proposed amendments to its e-commerce law that would expand its scope beyond platforms and merchants, adding broader digital economy oversight and tighter coordination across government levels [Bloomberg]

India’s information and broadcasting ministry gave Telegram 15 days to strengthen piracy detection and takedown systems for films and OTT content [Economic Times]

We’re looking primarily at Shopee, which now has some of the internet’s biggest names in its corner including Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and ChatGPT. That’s because Southeast Asia’s e-commerce leader is desperately trying to stave off the growing threat of TikTok Shop, which has rapidly risen to become the region’s second most popular destination for online shopping.

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Shopee is partnering with the internet’s biggest platforms to defend against TikTok Shop

Shopee is out to meet you wherever you are on the internet. The company just agreed a partnership with Meta to bring affiliate revenue to creators on Instagram and Facebook as part of its effort to rival TikTok’s growing e-commerce market share in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Endless scrolling of short videos may come to mind when you think of TikTok, but there’s a lot more. We’ve noted in recent years that the Chinese firm (technically headquartered in Singapore) has quietly risen up the ranks to become Southeast Asia’s second-top e-commerce business, behind only Shopee.

TikTok Shop is estimated to have reached $54.6 billion in GMV across Southeast Asia last year, up more than 50% year-on-year, according to figures from Momentum Works. That puts it behind Shopee’s $83.2 billion GMV, but TikTok Shop’s crazy growth rate suggests the gap will narrow further this year.

Social commerce felt a little gimmicky at the start, but it has become hugely lucrative and Southeast Asia is at the forefront. I’ve seen with my own eyes how consumers go on TikTok to find deals and products, as well as following their favourite creators. Shopee creates purchasing intent. By contrast, Shopee and Lazada are destinations when you know you want to buy.

That explains why Shopee is going out to build a moat to shore itself up as best it can.

The Meta deal will allow creators in Southeast Asia, Taiwan and Brazil to make money by linking to Shopee products. With a minimum follower count of just 1,000 on Instagram, a lot of people may begin shilling Shopee items, or large accounts might consider it a new revenue stream to explore.

Instagram is the best tonic for battling TikTok, but it is not Shopee’s sole gambit.

It linked up with OpenAI last month to add Shopee e-commerce capabilities to ChatGPT in those same target regions. Back in 2024, when the TikTok Shop threat was already visible, it partnered with YouTube to let video creators on the platform earn affiliate revenue the very same way as they can now do on Instagram.

Some years ago, Lazada and Shopee went all out to create engagement and bring users to their apps without purchasing intent. They rolled out games, gave livestreaming capabilities to sellers and more. Some of that has stuck, livestreaming may help deciding on a product, but it doesn’t funnel shoppers in as TikTok does.

ByteDance’s acquisition of Tokopedia helped drive its shopping business in Indonesia, which is second only to the US, not to mention making Tokopedia’s holding company GoTo profitable. But times are changing. TikTok Shop laid off a number of Tokopedia staff in Indonesia. Local reports suggested as many as 90% were impacted. TikTok confirmed that there were layoffs but not the numbers impacted.

Is TikTok and TikTok Shop about to get more ruthless in the region?

Regardless, executives at Sea, the parent of Shopee, will feel they have as good a defence as they can with Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and even ChatGPT in their corner. But does that patchwork of connections between creators and shopping stand up to TikTok’s integrated approach which puts it all on the same platform? Only time will tell.

But expect to see more stories of TikTok Shop’s surge when the annual e-commerce reports land at the end of the year.

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Thailand’s Amity lands $7M more to build out its robotics business

Thailand’s Amity is quietly hoovering up investment money even during Southeast Asia’s funding winter. Fresh from raising $100 million in March for its core AI play, it announced that its robotics and physical AI business (Amity Robotics) closed a $7 million seed round that includes equity and debt.

The capital is coming from East Ventures, which famously backed early stage winners in Indonesia over the last decade or so, and 500 Startups with Singapore’s AlteriQ Global, which offers private credit, bringing the debt component.

Amity Robotics develops and sells a static concierge robot that’s designed to give information and answer questions in shopping malls, hotels and other locations with customers. Already, it is deployed in over 30 properties across Asia and the Middle East with Europe apparently to follow soon. The company looks to have tapped the network of founder Korawad Chearavanont, a member of the family behind Thailand’s mega conglomerate CP Group, to deploy the robot in resorts like IHG, Accor and Shangri La and some prestigious malls.

There are also plans to introduce a mobile version of the robot, which uses a combination of voice and a large touchscreen.

“We believe a world-class physical AI company can be built from Thailand and Southeast Asia,” Chearavanont said in a statement.

We don’t see a lot of robotics companies emerging from outside of Singapore in Southeast Asia, Southeast Asia itself isn’t really a hub. If Chearavanont can continue to apply his fundraising magic to the business, Amity has as good a chance as any startup at taking on this tough task, although it is tough to take on China, which is already producing dancing robots let alone static machines for malls.

Deals

China’s Kling AI raised an initial $2 billion in venture funding as the Kuaishou spinout expands its video AI operations, with further investors potentially lifting the round to about $3 billion [Bloomberg]

It feels like the 2010s again after Singapore’s Acti raised a $5.3 million seed round to build an AI-powered keyboard for personal context across apps [TechNode Global]

US-Korean AI video search startup Twelve Labs closed $100 million from Amazon, NEA and Naver Ventures to expand its AI video search technology [Bloomberg]

Indian VC firm Sparrow Capital closed its third fund at INR4.75 billion ($50 million), with plans to invest $1 million-$2 million each in 25-30 startups over the next three years [Economic Times]

SoftBank reportedly restarted talks with lenders for a $10 billion loan backed by its OpenAI stake, adding a repayment guarantee after earlier discussions stalled [Reuters]

Markets

India’s IPO wagon gains another passenger after the parent behind social platform ShareChat said it plans to raise up to $400 million in a domestic IPO next year. It claims to now be ‘operationally’ profitable this year with annual revenue of $105 million. It says it has over 150 million users across social networking and streaming services. Side note: nice of Bloomberg to label it a “rival” to Meta… [Bloomberg]

Indian VC firms had their weakest six months of fundraising for more than a decade after closing just $820 million across 32 funds as of mid-June [Economic Times]

By contrast, startup funding in India in the same period reached the second highest levels since 2022 with $7.4 billion in capital closed, although Meta’s unique $900 million investment in Cred lifted the numbers [Entrackr]

Xiaohongshu, the social app known as RedNote, is reportedly preparing for a Hong Kong listing that could become the biggest Chinese internet IPO in five years. It was previously valued at $17 billion but apparently private market valuations have “soared.” [Financial Times]

Creditors filed insolvency proceedings in Singapore against Udaan, the B2B e-commerce startup that was valued at over $3 billion, after it defaulted on $170 million of convertible notes due June 30 [Economic Times]

South Korea’s Kospi fell as much as 8.2% as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix sold off on concerns over excess AI infrastructure capacity [Bloomberg]

AI and Chips

Japan is getting serious about sovereign AI after the government pledged to invest up to JPY1 trillion ($6.16 billion) in a nine-company consortium led by SoftBank, Honda, NEC and Sony to build a domestic AI foundation model [Nikkei Asia]

China’s semiconductor material makers are said to be ramping up advanced production as Beijing pushes for self-sufficiency and challenges incumbent rivals in a $73 billion market [Nikkei Asia]

Taiwanese prosecutors detained two Super Micro Computer employees and an Albatron Technology manager as part of a probe into alleged Nvidia chip shipments to China [Bloomberg]

Singapore police seized a S$55 million ($42 million) mansion and around S$1 million ($775,000) in bank funds tied to a probe into suspected cross-border smuggling of Nvidia chip-laden hardware [Nikkei Asia]

Anthropic rolled back a covert Claude Code feature that tracked whether users were based in China or linked to Chinese AI labs after a social media backlash [The Information]

ByteDance picked Brazil as the location for its largest data centre outside China, a $39 billion project that could scale to 1GW of computing capacity. This follows a commitment in May to invest $25 billion in Southeast Asia-based data centres. [Bloomberg]

Vietnam’s G-Group Technology Corporation will invest VND7.6 trillion ($300 million) in an AI and high-performance computing data centre campus in Hanoi [TechNode Global]

UBTech Robotics launched a consumer humanoid companion robot in China, with models priced from 119,800 CNY ($17,650) to 990,000 CNY ($146,000) [SCMP]

South Korean exports hit a monthly record of $102.25 billion in June, boosted by record semiconductor shipments from SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics [Nikkei Asia]

Beijing set a target of 50,000 industrial 5G private networks by 2030 as it pushes AI deeper into Chinese manufacturing [SCMP]

Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is putting $30 million of his own money into Neo, an enterprise AI software startup built around redesigned workplace tools rather than chatbot add-ons [TechCrunch]

SK Hynix will invest KRW100 trillion ($64.4 billion) to build new chip plants in Cheongju, including a NAND flash facility due by 2029 [Reuters]

Microsoft and Singapore-based Lightstorm will lead a consortium building the 3,600km I-2SEA undersea cable linking India with Malaysia and Singapore [Reuters]

Apple is in talks to buy memory chips from China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies and Yangtze Memory Technologies for devices sold in China as global memory prices rise [Bloomberg]

SoftBank Group and its telecom unit will start renting AI computing power to US companies next fiscal year through a new neocloud venture, SB Neo [Bloomberg]

Z.ai, formerly Zhipu AI, launched ZCode, a free desktop coding app built for its GLM-5.2 model [VentureBeat]

Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 model is drawing attention from Silicon Valley executives and investors for coding and agent performance at lower cost than leading US rivals [Reuters]

In other news:

India has told Meta to pause the rollout of custom WhatsApp usernames because apparently it has concerns over fraud, phishing and impersonation implications of the move [Bloomberg]

Toyota wants to get into the flying car game after it announced a joint venture with US-based Joby Aviation to produce air taxis [Reuters]

Speaking of taxis, France’s BlaBlaCar will expand into 20 new countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Its business in India just became its largest carpooling market with 19 million passengers [BlaBlaCar]

India’s Dream Sports shut down fintech platform Dream Money within a year of launch [Economic Times]

South Korea’s Financial Services Commission referred two suspects to prosecutors over alleged crypto price manipulation [The Block]

Ant International opened a Kuala Lumpur global development centre with 1,500 fintech roles, more than half of them in technology [TechNode Global]

Alibaba and its US payment processor will pay $600 million to settle US Justice Department allegations that merchants sold illegal drugs, chemicals and pill presses through its e-commerce platforms [Reuters]

A Shanghai court sentenced five people to up to six years in prison for moving more than $29.4 million across borders illegally using crypto [The Block]

Taiwan’s legislature passed a law establishing a regulatory framework for crypto trading platforms and stablecoin issuers [The Block]

New legislation to boost the role of startups and SMEs in Thailand is expected to clear parliament and take effect by the end of this year [Nikkei Asia]

Gaming firm Krafton agreed to pay bonuses to Unknown Worlds Entertainment staff after settling a legal dispute with the Subnautica 2 studio’s CEO and co-founders [Bloomberg]

Skyroot Aerospace is preparing to launch Vikram-1, India’s first privately designed orbital rocket, between July 12 and August 4 [Bloomberg]

Anthropic is in talks with Samsung to be a manufacturing partner for a custom AI chip [The Information]

There’s only one story to discuss today and that’s the sentencing of Nadiem Makarim to 10 years of prison in Indonesia. The founder of Gojek, he entered politics in 2019 as Indonesia’s education minister but his time in office was dogged by accusations over a school laptop programme. The ruling doesn’t look convincing, but this is another tough blow for Indonesia’s startup and business ecosystem.

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Indonesia’s startup reckoning takes Nadiem from $10 billion founder to 10 years in jail

Indonesia has done what everyone hoped it wouldn’t do and sentenced Nadiem Makarim, the Gojek founder and former education minister, to at least 10 years of prison for corruption relating to a school laptop procurement programme during the pandemic.

He was ordered to pay a IDR 1 billion ($56,000) fine and a further IDR 809.6 billion ($45 million) in restitution. Failure to pay the amount would add 5 more years of jail time.

The case is well known (unfortunately) given how badly things went. This was a young founder who fought Uber and regional champion Grab to build Indonesia’s first billion-dollar company, which would go on to reach a $10.5 billion valuation. He made a surprise move into government in 2019 because he said he wanted to give back to his country and make a difference.

At the time, Makarim looked like a future leader. A young man who championed the new economy and built a business that gave millions of Indonesians a new way to make a living. But somehow we’ve reached this situation where he’s going to jail.

One year into his role, his key policy was to increase digital access and literacy with an initiative to buy 1.1 million Chromebooks for schools across Indonesia. That is the case prosecutors seized on, although their verdict looks unconvincing.

Things look particularly bleak given the recent sentencing of four executives from state-linked funds for simply doing their job.

Focus on Google and Gojek

Let’s start at the beginning and review the verdict:

• The court ruling was 4-1, with one judge dissenting

• Nadiem Makarim has not been sentenced for kickbacks, bribery or illicit payments, despite accusations.

• The judges said there was no evidence that he controlled Gojek during his time in government.

• Claims that a WhatsApp group chat showed intent of criminal conspiracy before he came into office were rejected by the court.

• His meetings with Google executives were deemed to have been part of the job as education minister.

• But Makarim has been sentenced based on alleged state losses of $122 million, despite his defense team claiming that 97% of the devices were distributed, reaching more than 77,000 schools.

• He was also found to have committed “an abuse of authority” to help Google grow its business. That’s anchored on Google being an investor in GoTo (the business that Gojek became when it merged with Tokopedia) and Makarim continuing to be a shareholder in the company.

The Chromebook deal is said to have cost the state IDR 2.18 trillion ($122 million) in losses, they argue. Makarim himself is said to have personally made IDR 809 billion ($45 million) through the transactions, but it isn’t clear how that figure is calculated. (Clarity here seems very necessary since he faces 5 more years in jail if he doesn’t pay this amount back.)

Google itself was not tried, and multiple Google executives testified in Makarim’s defence during the trial.

“We have not offered, promised, or provided benefits to education ministry officials in exchange for their decision to adopt Google products,” Google said in a statement back in January. The US company should now come forward with more information.

A new low

This verdict sends out a chilling signal to anyone looking to do business in Indonesia, let alone in the tech sector, which used to be a buoyant and surging industry in the country. Indonesia attracted $6.9 billion in VC investor funding in 2021, with a number of funds going ‘Indonesia only.’ But that figure fell to $355.7 million last year. Once Southeast Asia’s main event, Indonesian funding fell behind Singapore and Vietnam.

That was before this year when things have gotten worse still. Yes, there have been cases of actual startup fraud, but trials like this make Indonesia’s judiciary appear unfamiliar with the workings of business (at best) or, at worst, they’re outright efforts to neutralise political opponents or find opportunistic scapegoats.

We can duly expect a lot less startup activity in Indonesia in the public domain.

Privately, a number of VCs have told me that they are not actively looking in Indonesia due to these events and the perceived risk. Those who focus solely on the market are waiting for things to clear up. I believe that will happen as I do think startups can tackle outstanding problems that traditional businesses can’t, such as education, financial services and logistics. But it will need time for the good actors to take the limelight.

For now, it’s almost like the Indonesian government is at war with startups. That’s a big shift from earlier in the decade and the 2010s when the likes of Gojek, Tokopedia and others were widely celebrated and the government closely aligned with their success stories.

Now, as we wrote at the sentencing of the four state-linked VCs, it’s hard to see why Indonesians who have been successful or studied overseas would want to give back to their country.

“Youth across all of Indonesia, and the diaspora in every corner of the world, await your answer to the question echoing in their hearts: ‘Is this country still safe for us to serve?’,” Makarim, who graduated from Harvard, asked after the trial.

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Deals

Webull, a Robinhood rival founded by a former Alibaba executive, is buying Thailand-based investment company Pi Securities for around $100 million. That’s a decent exit for a Thai startup, but we understand not a crazy exit given its previous valuations. Pi is a fairly offline business that leans on agents; Webull is likely buying it to get a footprint in Thailand’s lucrative investment market, acquire licenses and grow its digital business. [Bangkok Post]

Singapore merchant operating system startup Qashier raised $6.1 million round to expand across Southeast Asia [TechNode Global]

Akro, a Singapore-based AI startup, raised a $700,000 pre-seed round led by Amigos Venture Capital [TechNode Global]

Southeast Asian insurtech Igloo acquired Thailand-focused rival Eazy Digital in an undisclosed deal [Igloo]

South Korean game maker Wemade is reportedly selling 40% of its business to a consortium led by Chinese investment platform in a deal that values it around $600 million [Bloomberg]

Markets

India’s OYO is finally going public. Parent company Oravel Stays has filed updated IPO papers to raise up to INR 6,650 crore ($703 million) through new shares, with no existing investors selling stock. It may also raise up to INR 1,330 crore ($141 million) before the IPO. [Economic Times]

There’s yet more Hong Kong IPOs after five Chinese tech and manufacturing companies launched listings seeking up to HK$44.1 billion ($5.6 billion), that’s led by Apple supplier Luxshare’s planned raise of up to HK$24.27 billion ($3.15 billion) [Reuters]

Tencent has increased share buybacks after a Hong Kong stock selloff erased about $309 billion in market value since October [Bloomberg]

AI and Chips

In a major landmark for China’s self sufficiency push, Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0, its AI model that features 1.6 trillion-parameters and a 1 million-token context window. Crucially, it claims it was trained and run on a 50,000-card domestic Chinese computing cluster with no foreign hardware. [SCMP]

Taiwanese authorities raided Super Micro Computer’s local offices and the homes of six people linked to the company as they widened an investigation into alleged Nvidia chip smuggling to China through servers [Bloomberg]

Chinese smartphone makers Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo have cut 2026 shipment targets again, with some reductions reaching 30%, as rising costs and severe component shortages pressure the market [Nikkei Asia]

In other news:

Japan’s attempt to fully legalise ride-hailing has stalled after a government reform council offered only vague commitments, leaving taxi-industry opposition and transport ministry resistance largely intact [Nikkei Asia]

Japan plans to provide 150 billion yen ($926 million) in subsidies to a Rakuten-led consortium building a low-Earth orbit direct-to-mobile satellite network with AST SpaceMobile [Nikkei Asia]

Major Washington lobbying firms are dropping Chinese tech clients including Alibaba and Tencent as a new US law forces firms to choose between Chinese companies and US defence contractors [Bloomberg]

Applications for Japan’s business management visas have fallen after tougher rules raised the capital requirement, complicating the government’s push to attract more startup founders [Nikkei Asia]

Exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, also known as Miles Guo, was sentenced to 30 years in a US prison for crypto-related fraud after prosecutors said he used his following to promote fraudulent investment schemes [The Block]

And finally, WhatsApp is adding usernames, at long last [BBC]

You can’t escape South Korea’s AI creds these days. Whether it is record earnings from Samsung, SK Hynix becoming a trillion-dollar business or the rise (and volatile crashes) of the KOSPI, the benchmark for the South Korea Exchange which is now world famous. Yesterday, the country’s Prime Minister announced a massive investment plan live on TV. Let’s dive in.

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In addition to writing Asia Tech Review, I help great startups and tech companies tell their story through narrative, content and comms. Check out Fully Drafted to learn more.

AI isn’t just for techies in Korea, it’s a televised national event

South Korea is making AI the centrepiece of its next economic growth strategy after a splashy televised event saw President Lee Jae-myung announce an $880 billion plan to massively grow its already lucrative semiconductor and AI capabilities.

Korean companies are already reaping the benefits of demand for components, with memory makers Samsung and SK Hynix posting record financial results and huge stock price gains. These are two of the main backers of “Three Mega Projects,” the Korean initiative to develop new chip production hubs, data centres and robotics technology by 2035.

The two memory giants are leading the charge, with GS Group, an energy firm spun out of LG in 2005, and Naver among the others joining, per Bloomberg:

Samsung Group and SK Group said they each plan to build two chipmaking plants in the southwest, with total investment of 800 trillion won [$516 billion], to rapidly expand production capacity and meet rising demand. South Korea also announced 550 trillion won [$355 billion] of investment from companies including internet leader Naver Corp. to build 8.4 gigawatts of AI data-centre capacity by 2029.

There’s a lack of memory chips, which Samsung and SK Hynix supply, due to a surge in demand from companies building AI products and infrastructure. That’s led to a global shortage that’s pushed up the price of consumer electronics (Apple just hiked its prices) and, in response, Korea aims to double its output over the next five years.

The deals were announced in a live event on national TV with President Lee alongside the heads of Samsung and SK Hynix, who were called national heroes. That’s the level of mainstream focus on AI in Korea, where the AI craze has sent stock prices ripping with SK Hynix becoming a trillion-dollar business and Korea’s KOSPI market hitting record highs despite volatility.

“We’re entering an era where the page turns in the blink of an eye,” The president said. “Speed is the only way to survive.”

President Lee’s plan also focuses on greater distribution of wealth from this boom. One core goal is also to create jobs outside of Seoul to ensure that the benefits are felt across the country and not only in the capital.

This is not the first time Korea’s government has pledged to power up its chip sector, as Bloomberg noted:

In 2021, Moon Jae-in’s administration unveiled a similar private sector-led investment blueprint anchored by Samsung and Hynix to spend $450 billion over a decade on semiconductor research and production. More broadly, Seoul in 2023 engineered a $400 billion plan for spending on a far broader range of sectors including EVs and biotechnology.

When recapping Asia’s efforts to develop sovereign AI, we noted that Korea has engaged major companies to develop local AI products with the backing of solid local infrastructure. Now that could go to another level if these pledges yield real results, new data centres, more chips, etc.

Certainly, the event caught the attention of more than the Korean nation, with interest and headlines generated across the world. Many want their government to take similar action, but Korea is in an enviable and unique position with the corporations and tech expertise it has developed.

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CXMT lands multi-billion Tencent deal ahead of blockbuster IPO

CXMT (ChangXin Memory Technologies), China’s largest memory chip maker, is said to have landed a major deal with Tencent worth more than 20 billion yuan ($2.94 billion) as it prepares for a blockbuster IPO.

We wrote at the beginning of June that CXMT was readying for a China listing to raise more than $4 billion, and landing Tencent’s business is a massive validation that will add fuel to its IPO fire.

Reuters broke the news and it said that the agreement covers “several years” of DRAM chip supply for Tencent servers, although it isn’t clear whether that will be three or five years, based on the sources the news outlet spoke to.

Memory is one of the most constrained but essential pieces of the computing, data centre and AI play, as Korea’s massive new strategy clearly shows. CXMT sits behind SK Hynix, Samsung and US-based Micron in the global pecking order of memory providers, but its growth is likely to come from supporting China’s ecosystem growth and working with the likes of Tencent to develop self-sufficient AI and computing.

But there’s potential to go global. Networking companies Huawei and ZTE expanded their business reach into international markets by offering competitive products at lower cost than Western equivalents. Things got tricky with politics, but there will likely be scope for CXMT and others to do the same in the future.

Deals

China’s robotics sector continues to grow after AI2 Robotics and Alibaba-backed X Square Robot each reached valuations of about $2.9 billion in recent funding rounds [Bloomberg]

Indian AI startup Rocket is reportedly in talks to raise $40-50 million led by wealth management firm 360 One Asset at a roughly $500 million valuation, that’s less than a year after closing a $15 million round at a $60 million valuation [Economic Times]

Markets

We wrote recently about AirTrunk, the data centre provider that includes Blackstone among its backers, and its plans for a Singapore REIT listing and now it is reportedly close to filing with plans to raise about $1.5 billion, which would make it the city-state’s largest listing since 2017 [Bloomberg]

One listing that is going ahead is Chinese autonomous-driving firm Momenta Global, which is aiming to raise up to HK$5.89 billion ($751.1 million) after filing for a Hong Kong IPO [Reuters]

AI and Chips

DeepSeek announced a major V3 model upgrade that it claims boosts per-user response speeds by up to 85% using a speculative decoding framework called DSpark [South China Morning Post]

ByteDance will reportedly deploy its first in-house CPUs for its AI infrastructure in the second half of next year, with the design set to be finalised in partnership with Qualcomm in early 2027 [South China Morning Post]

In other news:

Vietnam sharply increased fines for spreading fabricated information online, part of a wider effort to curb cyber fraud and misinformation [SGGP]

Apple accused Indian antitrust investigators of copying rivals’ complaints verbatim rather than conducting an independent probe, and asked for the findings to be quashed [Reuters]

China’s DJI and Insta360 now account for nearly 90% of global smart-camera shipments as demand for portable imaging devices grows, according to IDC [South China Morning Post]

Japanese startups are building prediction-market apps that pay out in points redeemable for gift cards rather than cash, in order to sidestep strict anti-gambling laws [Bloomberg]

The US FCC will expand import restrictions on Chinese technology next month to cover legacy equipment from manufacturers including Huawei, ZTE, Hytera, Hikvision and Dahua [South China Morning Post]

We’re looking at record IPO filings again after Mynt, a fintech in the Philippines backed by China’s Ant Group and top US private equity funds, went official with plans to raise as much as $1.5 billion. If it hits that target, it would surpass Monde Nissin, the food and beverage giant that raised $1 billion in 2021.

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In addition to writing Asia Tech Review, I help great startups and tech companies tell their story through narrative, content and comms. Check out Fully Drafted to learn more.

Mynt is showing how emerging market fintech can work

Fresh after Jio filed what could be a record IPO in India, there’s now a contender for a highest-ever listing in the Philippines. Fintech business Mynt filed for an IPO that could raise as much as $1.5 billion and value it at $11 billion.

Mynt operates GCash, a popular payment and lending wallet that claims more than 40 million monthly active users. The company has a serious pedigree. It was founded by leading operator Globe, conglomerate Ayala and China’s Ant Group in 2015 when fintech first got started in Southeast Asia. It raised more than $1.2 billion from backers that include Japan’s MUFG bank, private equity firms Warburg Pincus and Bow Wave. Notably, just under 65% of ownership is from foreign entities.

Despite the huge numbers, Mynt itself is only raising P16.1 billion ($264 million) in funds for itself, most of the fresh capital will be exits for its investors, who stand to do pretty well as Mynt previously raised at a valuation of around $2 billion.

Mynt is in the position of most mature fintech companies in Southeast Asia in that it has hit decent scale on its payment business, and now it needs to grow its lending and financial services income to really hit scale.

Last year, the company did net income of $284 million (P17.2 billion) on revenue of $1.31 billion (P79.7 billion), passing the billion-dollar milestone for the first time. Revenue from the first quarter of this year ($342 million or P20.7 billion) gives it about the same annual run rate.

That lack of growth is down to a slump in payment revenue after the domestic regulator stopped allowing in-app access to online gambling games.

That move came into effect in August, and it reduced Mynt’s payment take rate from 0.31% in Q1 2025 to 0.25% in Q1 2026. In turn, payments accounted for just 57% of all income in Q1 2026, a reduction of more than 10% since 2023 but that’s also down to the company diversifying into credit, investing, insurance and more.

Credit is the main area where Mynt’s revenue is growing, having increased 48% year-on-year during Q1, but that also brings its own warning.

Mynt says that 87.7% of its total loan portfolio sits on its own books, meaning it is directly exposed rather than simply passing borrowers to dedicated lending partners. That on-book exposure was worth about $925 million as of Q1 2026. Its lending products (GLoan, GGives, Borrow Load and GLoan Sakto) are unsecured and not collateralised, guaranteed or insured. As of Q1 2026, 5.1% of loans were non-performing.

That means the business comes with a fair bit of risk. It also underlines how important Mynt has become as a financial gateway since 78% of its users are located outside Metro Manila, while 92% come from “lower-income groups.” For many of these users, GCash has almost become their bank, although it isn’t in the domestic digital bank space.

A core question for investors is whether Mynt can manage that credit risk and grow the lending book meaningfully.

In that respect, there are strong parallels with PayPay in Japan, which we wrote about in March prior to its US IPO. It became the country’s main payment app but is struggling to grow its financial services book.

As an emerging market business, Mynt is less about taking business from banks and lenders and more about creating new financial consumption habits. With a strong user base and plenty of capital, it’s in the best position to make that impact.

We might get to see more on Philippines fintech if Maya, Mynt’s rival, comes good on its plans to list in the US. The company, which includes telco PLDT and Tencent among its backers, is reportedly planning to raise as much as $1 billion for its Stateside listing.

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Deals

South Korea’s Samsung Group and SK Group will reportedly announce as much as 2,000 trillion won ($1.3 trillion) of investments over the next decade as part of President Lee Jae Myung’s flagship industrial strategy [Bloomberg]

DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng was apparently motivated to raise external capital ($7.4 billion) for the first time after being ‘spooked’ by the capabilities of Anthropic’s Mythos model preview in April [The Information]

Australian AI infrastructure firm Firmus Technologies is partnering with Nvidia and Singapore-based DayOne to build its first data centre in Indonesia, a 360-megawatt AI Factory campus in Batam [Bloomberg]

India’s seed-and early-stage startups are raising almost twice as much per round as they did a year ago, according to data collected by Tracxn [Economic Times]

Markets

Kunlunxin Technology, the AI chip firm majority owned by Baidu, is targeting a $50 billion valuation for its planned Hong Kong IPO [The Information]

China’s onshore technology IPOs are on track for their strongest year since 2023 after raising $3.1 billion from stock ‌market listings in China this year to June 18, a more than 5X year-on-year increase [Reuters]

AI and Chips

China’s office workers are worrying whether their jobs can be done by artificial intelligence, and whether their companies will make the switch [South China Morning Post]

Anthropic is tightening restrictions on access to Claude in China, but users keep finding new workarounds, from proxy services to fake identities sourced on Telegram [Wired]

If you’ve ever visited China, you’ll know how hard it is to navigate without core payment apps and local services. Well, Tencent is testing an app designed to help overseas visitors navigate daily life in China with travel, dining and shopping, and, of course, digital payment options [Bloomberg]

Researchers claim that Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 matches the latest US models at finding security bugs [Wall Street Journal]

A look at South Korea’s four vocational “meister” schools that train students to work in semiconductor manufacturing [New York Times]

In other news:

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is on tour in India and, in fairly softball media interviews, he said Amazon will look at acquisitions in India and continue to work with the government on expanding AI capabilities—as background, much has been written about Amazon falling off the pace in India [Economic Times]

Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for permission to source memory chips from CXMT, the Chinese supplier blacklisted by the Pentagon over alleged ties to the People’s Liberation Army [Financial Times]

OpenAI appointed Prabhjeet Singh, the former president of Uber India and South Asia, as its first India managing director [TechCrunch]

Byju’s global lenders are reportedly in talks to take a roughly 30% stake in one of the edtech firm’s partly-owned units in exchange for dropping all legal action against founder Byju Raveendran [Reuters]

There’s no immediate IPO plan for Australian fintech Airwallex. It announced a new round at an $11 billion valuation and jumped deep into AI with the launch of two new and unique services, including a full finance suite for startup founders. Over in Japan, another corporation is diving into crypto and digital assets via an acquisition.

To keep up with our issues, follow us on LinkedIn or WhatsApp. Please do share Asia Tech Review with people you know who want to get smart about Asia tech.

Before we go this week: RIP Om Malik, the prolific blogger passed away on Wednesday. I remember reading his posts when I first got started working in tech more than 20 years ago.

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Airwallex doubles down on AI after raising $320 million

We’re used to seeing Airwallex raise money and the Australia-headquartered fintech is at it again after it announced a $320 million Series H round at a valuation of $11 billion.

The round is led by Addition, the fund from former Tiger Global executive Lee Fixel. Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia, Haun Ventures, Washington University in St. Louis and Amex Ventures all joined.

More interesting than the money, however, is what Airwallex is doing next.

The company announced a new AI-powered product called T0 that’s designed to offer a full financial department to startups and new businesses. That ranges from bookkeeping and forecasting to taxes, compliance and reporting and it is “designed to give founders CFO-grade books with compliance built in and no migration required,” Airwallex explains.

CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang recently said that he believes that “AI is the greatest entrepreneurship unlock we’ve ever seen.” The company teased these products this week, with Zhang stating that solo founders can now run companies. Clearly, he believes T0 is a product that can make this happen.

Airwallex also launched its first agentic wallet, Airi, which allows companies to sell products and services to customers using AI agents. The company plans to add more features including permission controls, spend limits and multi-currency options.

These launches may not appear huge on the outside, but they represent a new push from Airwallex that will see the company delay its plans to go public. That was loosely targeted for 2026, according to comments from Zhang made a couple of years ago. Now he told Australian Financial Review that Airwallex’s commitment to spending on AI will make the company’s financials ill-suited for going public.

Airwallex claims to have been profitable since 2023. It released new stats today, including $1.3 billion in ARR, up 74% year-over-year, and $287 billion in annualized transaction volume, up more than 120%.

These new launches are notable as Airwallex is known to industry figures as a cross-border payments company, but it has been working to build more fintech and banking capabilities. When we spoke to Singapore fintech Aspire’s CEO in April, he forecast that it was only a matter of time before fintech embraced AI to offer much more sophisticated services to small companies. That’s exactly what Airwallex is shooting for here.

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Japan’s SBI buys crypto exchange for $288 million

We’ve seen a number of crypto exchanges being sold to traditional finance institutions across Asia, including a $10 billion deal for the parent of Korea’s Upbit, and now Japan-based Bitbank is being bought by SBI, a financial services group formerly owned by SoftBank, for 46.7 billion yen, $288.6 million.

The goal of the deal is similar to other exchange acquisitions and that’s to expand SBI’s trading services to cover cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and other digital assets. Bitbank ranks among Japan’s top 10 exchanges based on trading volume, according to CoinGecko, with over $42 million in daily trading volume at the time of writing.

The increased adoption of stablecoins across Asia following regulation is enabling new use cases for exchanges, and that’s attracting the interest of traditional financial companies that see an opportunity to introduce a range of new trading services that tie into what they already offer.

New assets such as tokenised stocks, which are being pioneered by the likes of Coinbase and Binance, are also becoming attractive. These assets allow investors to assess stocks in harder-to-reach markets like Korea and Taiwan, where the likes of SK Hynix, Samsung and TSMC are surging thanks to the AI boom.

Deals

Kuaishou’s chip spin-off TranStreams raised an undisclosed Series A+ round led by QF Capital, with participation from a Beijing state-backed fund, Baidu Ventures, and Shenzhen-based payment tech firm XGD [South China Morning Post]

Hang Ten Systems, a new enterprise AI startup from former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, raised $32 million in seed funding led by Mayfield with participation from Aramco Ventures [Economic Times]

India’s central government could end up with a 1-2% stake in AI startup Sarvam, valued at $1.5 billion, as part of its $300 million funding round [Economic Times]

South Korea’s Samsung SDI will invest $20 million in US battery startup Forge Nano and provide engineering support under a deal to secure domestically produced battery cells for the defense and aerospace sectors [Bloomberg]

There’s consolidation in the co-working industry after India’s Smartworks Coworking Spaces acquired Workstudio Spaces to expand its presence in Singapore [Entrackr]

Markets

We wrote about SK Hynix’s US listing plans and now NAND flash maker Kioxia, Japan’s most valuable company since June 12, plans to offer US depositary shares in spring 2027 [Bloomberg]

India’s Pocket FM is reportedly headed for IPO, but before getting there it has shut down its microdrama vertical in favour of focusing on audio [Economic Times]

AI and chips

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said the company is targeting China’s data centre market with chips designed specifically for Chinese customers and compliant with US export controls [Nikkei Asia]

DeepSeek is looking to at least double headcount across all departments, targeting technical and engineering roles [Bloomberg]

South Korea is set to unveil plans for a new chipmaking cluster, as a senior presidential adviser warned the country must rapidly expand production capacity to stay competitive in the AI boom [Nikkei Asia]

In other news:

We previously said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is on an India tour this week and he announced a commitment to spend $13 billion on AI and cloud infrastructure by 2030, as part of a bigger package that Amazon claims to be worth $48 billion [Amazon]

Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force used China-linked virus-infected USB drives on classified systems for nearly a year and chose not to disclose the breach, internal documents show [Nikkei Asia]

Today we look at how the companies behind two red hot AI stocks are capitalising on their surge with new offerings. SK Hynix is Korea’s highest valued company alongside the venerable institution that is Samsung, and China’s Zhipu has become a breakout AI star that’s valued at more than $100 billion despite being best known for open source models.

To keep up with our issues, follow us on LinkedIn or WhatsApp. Please do share Asia Tech Review with people you know who want to get smart about Asia tech.

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Zhipu plans to raise billions more to capitalise on hot streak

Zhipu, the company behind the Z.ai chatbot and GLM AI models, is a headscratcher.

On the one hand, GLM is incredibly highly rated. Its newest 5.2 model was proclaimed as “the step change for open agents” by Nathan Lambert, an AI scientist with the Allen Institute and well-read newsletter author. Beyond agents, it has won acclaim for its coding ability, with praise from Elon Musk, and it consistently outranks most of the industry in benchmark tests.

GLM 5.2 appeared at just the right time. Right when Anthropic withdrew its newest Fable/Mythos models in an unprecedented move that brought the issue of sovereign AI, and dangers of relying on US products, into the broader agenda.

“At a time when some frontier models can suddenly become unavailable, we choose to believe in a different path. Frontier intelligence should not belong to only a few people, nor be subject to withdrawal by a handful of rules at any moment,” Zhipu said via social media.

Since that Anthropic moment, there’s been a noticeable shift in the narrative towards free weight models that can be hosted and trained locally, rather than through the cloud. But, and this is the confusing counter, open source models don’t equal revenue. Zhipu may have great models that are capable of rivaling the best in the world, but if I don’t have to pay for it, how does this whole thing work?!

Then finally, because all good things come in threes, you have its stock price.

The company went public in Hong Kong at the end of last year alongside rival MiniMax in what were the world’s first AI IPOs, and its share price is up more than 2,200% so far this year. That gives it a valuation of just over 1 trillion HKD ($128 billion) but yet its annual revenue in 2025 was just $105 million. The company lost 4.72 billion RMB ($695 million) last year.

Now, Zhipu is reportedly cashing in on its surge with Bloomberg reporting it is planning a multi-billion dollar share sale. That comes as rivals fuel up on capital as investor appetite for Chinese tech grows. Moonshot AI, which produces the Kimi models, is said to be raising at least $1 billion before going public, while DeepSeek reportedly closed more than $7 billion in new funding.

There are concerns that Chinese AI companies are far behind Anthropic and OpenAI when it comes to revenue generation and profitability. Zhipu is trying to strike a balance and narrow the gap by releasing open source models that gain attention for their quality, whilst simultaneously increasing the price of its subscriptions and API-based products.

It raised API-based pricing by 10% in April in what was its second price increase of the year, and its models are embedded in a range of popular services that include Notion and Cloudflare. We expect to see more partners and customers in the US and beyond as companies increasingly look for alternates or hedges to Anthropic, and Zhipu has more money to play with.

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SK Hynix confirms US IPO that could raise $29 billion

It’s official, SK Hynix will go public on the Nasdaq after the Korean memory tech specialist confirmed plans for a US IPO.

SK Hynix has had a whirlwind year. We wrote about its record Q1 earnings back in April and that’s driven its stock price to all-time highs, which include overtaking Samsung as Korea’s most valuable company:

These numbers are wild. The company posted $35.55 billion in revenue for Q1 2026. That’s the highest for any single quarter in its history and a staggering increase of nearly 3X year-on-year. SK Hynix also saw operating profit increase five-fold to reach $27.9 billion. Operating margin hit a new record of 72%.

ATR Daily: SK Hynix posts record profits as AI boom drives valuation toward $600B

Bloomberg reports that the IPO will raise around 45.45 trillion won ($29.4 billion) and that it could begin trading on 10 July, in just over two weeks time. A float of that size would make the IPO one of the top five in history, equaling Saudi Arabian oil giant Aramco’s huge 2019 listing which raised $29.4 billion at the time.

SK Hynix shares have risen by more than 300% this year, giving it a market capitalisation of 2,017 trillion KRW, that’s around $1.3 trillion. Confirmation of these US plans gave it another 10% boost. Alongside the growth of Samsung’s own share price, the duo have pushed the value of Korea’s stock market to seventh in the world.

But there are concerns around the sustainability of the stocks as retail investors have increasingly used borrowed money to buy up the shares and grab a piece of the rocketship that everyone in the country is talking about. Nikkei Asia reports that credit from brokers to retail traders (margin balances) jumped by more than 60% this year so far. That’s huge but it doesn’t include borrowing from banks, credit companies and others.

The potential impact of market ‘corrections’ (aka share price slumps) from automatic selling on leveraged trades could spell trouble. SK Hynix shares can be volatile, and its movement has triggered circuit breakers on the KOSPI. Just this week, the exchange’s value fell 10% following those concerns on SK Hynix ETFs trading.

Adding liquidity from the US may help balance the concentration on Korean trading, and of course give SK Hynix access to more capital. It also makes sense given its huge US plans:

SK Hynix is already planning to launch a US business to capitalise on AI demand by “delivering optimized AI systems for its customers in the AI datacenter sector.” That venture will be backed by $10 billion in capital, and we are likely to learn more as the year plays out.

ATR Daily: SK Hynix posts record profits as AI boom drives valuation toward $600B

Walmart and Amazon double down on Indian quick-commerce

Walmart-backed Flipkart says its Minutes quick-commerce service has reached 1,000 micro-fulfillment centers across India less than two years after launch—it plans to scale to 1,500 by the end of 2026 [TechCrunch]

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is visiting India, weeks after a big report about how the US firm is struggling in the country, as Amazon expands its quick-commerce service (Amazon Now) to 200 new cities to reach a total of 300. Jassy will reportedly also meet PM Modi during his time in India. [Bloomberg]

Reuters has a deeper look at how Walmart/Flipkart and Amazon are chasing younger rivals for a slice of an $11 billion sector that home delivers everything from iPhones to milk within 10 to 30 minutes from neighbourhood warehouses [Reuters]

Deals

Bengaluru-based customer engagement platform MoEngage is betting on AI agents by acquiring San Francisco AI startup Aampe in an all-cash deal said to be worth tens of millions of dollars [TechCrunch]

ByteDance is reportedly in early talks with banks for a $20 billion offshore loan, its largest yet, which will go towards AI spending [Bloomberg]

Blackstone plans to invest $30 billion in AI data centers in Japan over the next three to five years [Nikkei Asia]

Philippine billionaire Lance Gokongwei is buying a 15% stake in online gaming technology firm PhilWeb for 2.03 billion pesos, or $33 million. PhilWeb shares rose 8% on the deal, which will see the company invest in AI-related opportunities. [Bloomberg]

Markets

Lingyi iTech raised HK$8.3 billion ($1.1 billion) in a Hong Kong listing priced at the top of its range [Bloomberg]

Chinese electronics manufacturer Luxshare Precision, which works with Apple and others, is said to be sounding out investors for a Hong Kong IPO that could raise around $3 billion [Bloomberg]

AI and Chips

Anthropic has accused Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab of orchestrating its largest-ever documented attempt by a Chinese company to exploit a US AI developer’s models, using nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to conduct 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April and June [Bloomberg]

ByteDance is preparing to launch Seedance 2.5, an AI video model that will generate clips of up to 30 seconds using as many as 50 reference materials [The Information]

China’s 360 Security Technology claims it has developed a domestic equivalent to Anthropic’s Mythos, framing the US AI vulnerability-hunting system as a strategic capability Beijing cannot afford to leave in foreign hands alone. [Reuters]

Qualcomm is in talks to design custom chips for ByteDance as it expands beyond its dominant smartphone business model [Reuters]

Tencent is rolling out an AI agent called Dayuan on WeCom, its enterprise messaging platform, using DeepSeek’s latest V4 model [Bloomberg]

Black market prices for Nvidia’s flagship AI chips in China have more than doubled over the past six months as US export controls tighten and domestic demand surges [Financial Times]

In other news:

We wrote about VinFast’s Green SM’s India entry last month, and the company continues to expand its footprint after it launched in Kazakhstan [Nikkei Asia]

The US Justice Department seized a cloud computing account used by subsidiaries of Cambodia’s Huione Group, a conglomerate cut off from the American financial system last year over alleged ties to investment scams, money laundering, and human trafficking [The Record]

Alibaba sued the Pentagon to remove it from a blacklist linking the Chinese e-commerce giant to the People’s Liberation Army [Bloomberg]

Rakuten will launch a satellite joint venture with AST SpaceMobile in Japan this year to provide direct-to-mobile communications, rivaling Japan’s three larger carriers that use SpaceX technology [Nikkei Asia]

Masayoshi Son plans to stay at the helm of SoftBank for at least another decade, by which time he’ll be 78 years old [Bloomberg]

Malaysia plans to release a national roadmap for its commercial drone and air taxi sector by year-end [Nikkei Asia]

WhatsApp just appointed Kunal Shah as its CEO, and new reports show India contributes more than half of its global revenue, with more than $1 billion coming from the country per year [Moneycontrol]

Today, we’re all about Reliance Jio, the disruptive mobile operator that modernised India’s mobile landscape a decade ago and raised billions of dollars from Facebook, Google and the world’s investors. Its initial IPO prospectus dropped last Friday so let’s peek into the black box. We know you value brevity and have tried to keep this issue short, sweet and insightful.

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Unpacking the business behind Reliance Jio’s IPO pitch

As an outsider looking into India, Reliance Jio fascinates me. The mobile operator was launched in 2016 by Reliance Industries (RIL), its $190 billion-valued parent, and it quickly revamped India’s mobile scene by offering free calls and cheap data on the country’s first 4G-only network.

The rollout, the fastest of any network anywhere in the world, sent rivals scrambling, prices falling and India consumers moving to all-you-can-eat data packages. That created the conditions for a domestic ecosystem of consumer apps, services and startups to bloom.

Jio wasn’t done there, and its ambition moved up the stack. Beyond providing data, it built video and music content, and personal storage. There’s also fixed broadband to complement mobile, enterprise plans and plans for satellite broadband, data centres, AI glasses (because why not?!) and more.

The disruptive nature of Jio attracted a glut of overseas investors keen to take a slice. Jio announced nearly $20 billion in investments, at a valuation of $65 billion, during a hectic period between April and July 2020. The deals included:

• April 2020: Facebook invested $5.7 billion

• May 2020: Silver Lake invested $750 million; KKR invested $1.5 billion

• June 2020: General Atlantic invested $870 million: PIF invested $1.5 billion; TPG invested $600 million; Mubadala invested $1.2 billion

• July 2020: Google invested $4.5 billion

That unprecedented fundraising spree was bookended by US tech giants with a number of the highest-profile growth funds in the world taking part. It certainly put India on the map.

The combination of innovation, capital and major names, explains why I’m excited to dip into Jio Platforms, as the company is officially called, after it dropped its IPO papers ahead of a much-anticipated listing that could be the largest IPO in Indian history.

Telecom operator or internet platform?

Let’s get straight to the fundamentals.

Jio is headed to the public markets with annual operating revenue of ₹1.47 trillion ($15.5 billion) with net profit of ₹300.5 billion, or $3.2 billion. It plans to raise about ₹37,700 crore, or $4 billion, through a fresh issue of 270 million shares, which is roughly 2.9% of post-issue shares. That would value the business at around ₹13 lakh crore, or $138 billion.

Those are huge numbers that reflect Jio pitching itself as a technology platform based on its sheer scale. It has more than 524 million customers, carries around 60% of India’s wireless data traffic and has pushed itself into adjacent services and devices. It aspires to play a role in India’s digital economy that is far larger than simply selling mobile plans.

Can it upsell that half a billion-plus user base on video streaming, music plans, personal cloud, quick commerce, groceries or more? The charitable case is that it can, or there’s no reason that it can’t, but it hasn’t yet. It hasn’t all been successful, a number of ventures have failed and more ambitious but risky rollouts are on their way.

Despite that, the default view for this filing is that we are looking at a mobile telecom provider. The document shows comparisons to rivals Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, not the global internet platform story that overseas investors likely bought.

Jio is taking a different approach to the norm with a fresh issue, offering new shares for sale rather than unloading its own. Over 70% of the proceeds (₹27,500 crore or $2.9 billion) will be used to pay off loans, with the remainder put towards very blandly labeled “general corporate purposes.”

We know Jio is publicly talking about making a big investment into AI, like most companies, so that will likely be a big part of the general plan, but paying off debts makes sense. Jio had to build a national network, and that is expensive. Reducing that debt before being public makes the company cleaner for public investors, even if that’s not the most glamorous plan.

Incredible scale

Jio’s operating scale is something to behold given it is less than a decade old. Its total customers reached 524.4 million, with monthly data consumption of 42.3GB per customer. In 2015, one year before it launched, the average Indian mobile customer used just 2GB of data per month, and the total number of mobile internet users was estimated at just over 300 million.

While Jio played a major part in changing those numbers, its monetisation isn’t much to shout about. Average revenue per user is just ₹214 per month, or about US$2.26. Airtel’s 482 million customers spend 20% more on average (₹257 per month) but consume nearly 25% less data, 31.4GB. That’s partly because it went after a higher-paying user base, but it also indicates scope to grow for Jio.

On that note, growth hasn’t been plain sailing. Jio added just 6.4 million net customers in its FY 2015, but last year was a healthier 36.2 million. Its fixed-line service fared better, more than doubling to 27.1 million customers between 2024 and 2026. That actually gives a strong base to upsell value-add services, but it’s once again less of a story to sell to investors.

Daddy rules the roost

For all of Jio’s breakthroughs, big-name backing and a potentially record IPO, the company remains dependent on its parent, RIL.

Daddy provides the capital, distribution, talent, strategy and, perhaps most importantly, patience for an expensive project. RIL is the sole distributor for prepaid Jio services, and FY26 revenue received in advance from it for recharge vouchers was 77% of operating revenue. In addition, other related-party purchases, fees and distribution expenses bring in a further 7.4%. Jio remains deeply embedded inside the broader Reliance machine

There, of course, huge benefits to a close relationship with such a dominant company, but that has to be factored in for investors. The other side of the deal is that RIL retains significant control. It holds more than 66% of shares before the issue, and that will drop by less than two percent post-IPO.

Furthermore, Meta and Google will forfeit their board nomination rights once the company goes public, neither firm has a nominee director. But if you want to see confidence, they’re not selling their shares.

Effectively, Reliance is giving retail investors direct exposure to the new and shiny technology jewel that sits within its business.

That might appeal as a proxy for AI adoption in India, the continued growth of the digital economy or a ride on the train as one of India’s largest companies continues to modernise in today’s online world. Buy it or not, this mammoth listing could have a bigger impact if it can breathe new life and freshness into India’s IPO pipeline after other major listings stalled.

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Deals

Asia-focused prediction markets and perpetual futures platform TurboFlow raised $6 million led by Pantera Capital [The Block]

Tencent is reportedly in talks to exit minority stakes in several Japanese game studios, potentially at a loss, as it reassesses its global portfolio [Bloomberg]

Singapore’s H3 Zoom, which uses AI for building and asset inspection, closed a $3.6 million Series A funding round [H3 Zoom]

ChemT Biotechnology, a Singapore-based AI biotech startup, announced a $4 million seed round led by Wavemaker [FinSMEs]

Markets

Used-car platform Carro is once again being linked with an IPO filing in the US that could raise $500 million, the company may also consider a secondary listing in Singapore. This is no doubt a listing that would boost Southeast Asia, but we’ve heard many reports of its plans and to date none have come to fruition. [Bloomberg]

In other news:

Japan is building AI dialogue frameworks with nations like France and India to reduce its dependence on US and Chinese technologies [Nikkei Asia]

Lazada has reportedly cut 5% of Southeast Asia staff, including many in Singapore, following similar job cuts made by close rival Shopee [The Straits Times]

Amazon is expanding its conversational AI assistant Alexa+ to India, where it is inviting users to test a Hindi-language version [TechCrunch]

Tools for Humanity, Sam Altman’s iris-scanning identity startup behind Worldcoin, hired law firms last year to look into apparent links between its business and a company linked to a South African businessman accused of involvement in transnational cyber-fraud schemes [Business Insider]

ComfortDelGro is launching public rides on its Zig Driverless shuttles in Punggol, its second autonomous public service globally after a robotaxi pilot in China [Technode Global]

Forty-eight Chinese iOS developers filed a complaint with China’s State Administration for Market Regulation, accusing Apple of breaking a promise to offer the country its lowest App Store commission rates [South China Morning Post]

Shenzhen-based supercomputer LineShine reclaimed the title of world’s fastest for China, posting results more than 20% quicker than El Capitan, the US system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that had topped the rankings since November 2024 [New York Times]

Who knew Monday would be a blockbuster news day for Asia tech? Today we’re looking at a billion-dollar acquihire and a Japanese AI startup that claims its newest model is as good as Anthropic’s Fable/Mythos.

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Meta’s $900M Cred deal isn’t really about Cred at all

Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are forking out nearly $1 billion to essentially acquihire a new CEO to run WhatsApp.

That’s the one-line takeaway from a rather unique deal which will see Meta invest $900 million into India-based fintech startup Cred for a 20% stake. As part of the transaction, Kunal Shah, Cred’s founder and CEO, will move over to become the global head of WhatsApp.

Shah will remain the chairman of Cred, but his deputy, Miten Sampat, will step up into his role and lead the company to give Shah the capacity to run WhatsApp.

Some details of the news sneaked out a little early with Moneycontrol reporting that there had been talks between Meta and Cred over a possible investment or acquisition, as we noted in yesterday’s newsletter. I speculated that this would be a talent acquisition, in a similar fashion to how Meta hired Alexander Wang by investing $14 billion in his startup Scale AI in 2024, and it appears to be so, but with one twist.

Shah is not a Silicon Valley insider like most of Meta’s management, including former WhatsApp head Will Cathcart. But he may be India’s most prominent entrepreneur and angel investor, which is significant as we’ll explain.

Zuckerberg said Shah brings a “builder mentality and global mindset.” Meta COO Chris Cox added that he was “the clear choice” to replace Cathcart, who is moving to a role to build new products after seven years leading WhatsApp. There’s a lot about Shah’s past for Meta’s management to like.

At Cred, Shah has helped raise nearly $1 billion from investors at a valuation that peaked at $6.4 billion. But this isn’t his first rodeo. He sold his previous business, digital payment startup Freecharge, to early e-commerce leader Snapdeal in 2015 for around $400 million.

That was one of India’s earliest major startup exits. Rather than retiring, Shah doubled down. He became a prolific angel investor, I estimate he has a portfolio of over 50 deals which includes Gojek, Razorpay and Unacademy. He went back into fintech with Cred and built a business which targets the more affluent users in India, but offers a payment experience that’s far higher quality than other wallets and card companies.

Cred’s market share is not significant, but it does hold a full stack of licences and it has been profitable as a business, according to Shah himself.

WhatsApp is insanely popular in India. India is WhatsApp’s largest market for users. But, Meta has missed the payments race in India despite its efforts to make WhatsApp Pay a mainstream contender. Some of that has been regulatory challenges, which aren’t helped by being an overseas company that’s led by a non-Indian executive.

Installing Shah as WhatsApp CEO could clear some of those difficulties with his knowledge of regulators, licenses and building in fintech. WhatsApp has already seen early revenue promise with its business chat feature in India, and that’ll be a key focus, too.

They could have hired a local consultant, someone senior with experience of US corporates and startup culture. Flipkart hired Kalyan Krishnamurthy, a former Procter & Gamble and eBay executive with experience at investment funds, after it was acquired by Walmart in 2018. But Zuckerberg has a preference for entrepreneurial leaders and not simply executives as the hiring of Wang showed, and efforts keeping the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp at the company for as long as possible after their acquisitions.

Shah fits the bill not only because he has extensive experience, knowledge and presence in India’s startup ecosystem (Shah has over one million followers on both LinkedIn and X), but he’s also familiar with US startup culture and he has great links in Silicon Valley, too. No doubt, these are characteristics the Meta CEO will admire.

Ultimately, though, Shah’s job will be tough. Google Pay and PhonePe accounted for 79% of all transactions made on India’s UPI (universal payments interface) national payment system in May 2026, with Cred at just 0.68% and WhatsApp Pay lower still at 0.65%.

WhatsApp Pay is insanely late to the payments party in India. Even if it does find the right relationships, it has a lot of work to carve out market share. Of course, it also remains unclear how the change of culture will work. Will Shah be based in India and hire a team in the country? Will he need to bounce between the country and the US? Does Meta ultimately acquire Cred?

I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out, and particularly what impact Shah will have on how WhatsApp develops. Meta’s investments in India haven’t really paid off, so it’s not a huge surprise to see it try something newer, more local and more personal. Even at nearly $1 billion for one person.

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Japan’s Sakana enters the chat with an AI model it says matches Anthropic’s Fable

We’ve periodically written about Sakana, a Japan-based AI startup founded by former Google Research fellows, mostly when it raised money, but now it has burst on to the global stage with the launch of its newest model, Fugu.

“Our ‘Fugu Ultra’ model matches the performance of Fable and Mythos, delivering frontier capability without the risk of export controls,” the company said in an announcement on X. That said, it is not currently available in Europe while the company “works towards compliance” in the region.

Unlike other models, Sakana operates multiple LLMs using an ‘agent pool’ which essentially means it will use different models to handle requests based on the task. It claims to use both open and closed models, as well as its own, to remove “any single-vendor dependency,” which we saw when Anthropic unlaunched its Fable and Mythos models just over a week ago following US government intervention.

Fugu is also built for agentic AI and optimised for multi-agent systems. That’s the newest trend in AI usage right now. Rather than prompting a model, developers and corporations are increasingly building and deploying agents that can handle more complicated tasks without constant human interaction.

Sakana claims Fugu Ultra beats the newest models from ChatGPT (5.5) and Google Gemini (3.1 Pro) as well as Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 on benchmarks. It even posted results that surpass Fable and Mythos on a handful of comparison tests, but real world usage may be another story.

The two Fugu models come with an OpenAI-compatible API, which means it can be easily plugged into OpenAI’s Codex app. The company is offering a free month for customers who buy its monthly subscription, which starts at $20 per month so it could be interesting for AI curious folks. Enterprise sales are hot in Japan, where a sovereign AI stack is emerging, so this will be a key avenue if Sakana is to grow revenue in this highly competitive landscape.

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Deals

Samsung created the term ‘shadow AI’ when sensitive company information was famously exposed when its engineers entered information into personal ChatGPT accounts in 2023, so it’s notable that Samsung is giving ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex access to its Korea-based staff and numerous overseas divisions. OpenAI said this is one of its largest enterprise deployments to date, and it reinforces why the company and rival Anthropic have put a huge sales emphasis on East Asia to date. [OpenAI]

In more OpenAI Asia news: Sea, the company behind Shopee, announced a partnership to bring its e-commerce services into ChatGPT in its core markets of Southeast Asia and Brazil. It might not move the revenue needle but it shows Sea is mixing it with the bigger names in tech. [Sea]

Japanese bathroom fixtures maker Toto plans to invest 80 billion yen ($495 million) over the next five years to expand its semiconductor materials business [Nikkei Asia]

The founders of Taiwan’s Himax have become billionaires as surging demand for automotive display chips drove the company’s shares to more than double this year [Bloomberg]

Chinese investor NewTrails Capital will inject $55 million into African electric motorbike startup Spiro, pushing its valuation to nearly $1 billion and bringing the latest funding round to $270 million. Spiro has a network of around 100,000 electric bikes and 2,500 battery swapping stations across seven countries in Africa. [Bloomberg]

Markets

Chinese robotics company Coowa, which recently raised over $600 million in a round valuing it at over $3 billion, is said to be preparing to file for a Hong Kong IPO within the next few months [WSJ]

ByteDance is reportedly trading at above $600 billion in the secondary trade market, which could see it reach a $1 trillion valuation whilst remaining private, according to an anonymous senior banker at Bank of America. That could explain why ByteDance has decided against making a renewed push to go public [Nikkei Asia]

Zhipu AI’s Hong Kong-listed shares surged 42% on Monday to push its market cap past HK$1 trillion (US$128 billion), after it open-sourced its newly released GLM-5.2 model last week [South China Morning Post]

Lingyi iTech, an Apple supplier and Shenzhen-listed electronic components maker, is targeting up to HK$8.3 billion ($1.1 billion) in a Hong Kong IPO happening this week to fund expansion into AI hardware and humanoid robotics [South China Morning Post]

Japan’s five biggest chipmaking equipment makers recorded their first-ever combined sales decline in China as homegrown alternatives rose on account of Beijing’s self-sufficiency push. Tokyo Electron, Advantest, Screen Holdings, Disco and Kokusai Electric reported a combined annual revenue decrease of 12% from 2024. [Nikkei Asia]

AI and Chips

SK Hynix briefly overtook Samsung Electronics as South Korea’s most valuable company on Monday, the first such reversal in 26 years [Nikkei Asia]

Tencent is testing an AI assistant called Xiaowei on WeChat, which runs on its own WeLM language model with some help from DeepSeek [Bloomberg]

Indonesia plans to embed AI across key government programmes, including its controversial $15 billion free meals initiative, as part of a strategy the government believes could lift GDP by 12% by 2030. This seems like an initiative that could go seriously wrong, given the trial against Nadiem Makarim for Chromebooks for schools and the recent sentencing of state-linked fund VCs for losing money on one deal. [Reuters]

JD.com founder Richard Liu said the Chinese e-commerce giant’s 700,000 delivery workers will eventually be replaced by robots [FT]

In other news:

India’s Tata Research was hit by a cybe attack which the perpetrators claim gave access to more than 200,000 documents including proprietary information from Apple and Tesla, both of which are Tata customers [Reuters]

A Chinese chemical company whose executives were convicted in the US last year over fentanyl precursor exports appears to have been linked to a large-scale cryptocurrency fraud operation run from Japan [Nikkei Asia]

South Korea’s Toss Bank is exploring a blockchain-based financial infrastructure product for global users in partnership with the Solana Foundation [The Block]

China added 10 American companies including rare-earth producer MP Materials and drone maker Teal Drones to its export control list [Nikkei Asia]

Today we’re looking at a nonsensical decision to jail four executives from state-owned venture capital funds in Indonesia, and the hugely negative signal it sends out to the local ecosystem and Indonesians studying overseas who had previously returned in droves to build in the country.

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Politics and startups collide in Indonesia once again

Dark clouds continue to circle over Indonesia’s startup ecosystem after four former employees of venture capital firms backed by the government were given jail sentences. While the former executives were sentenced for corruption, the allegations centre around investments in TaniHub, an agritech startup that cut out the middlemen to connect farmers directly to buyers.

TaniHub appeared well intended with a focus on social impact, which included a lending fund for farmers. It raised more than $90 million from investors, which included $20 million from MDI Ventures, a fund owned by state-owned telco Telkom Indonesia, and $5 million from BRI Ventures, the ventures arm of state-owned bank Bank Rakyat Indonesia.

Things began to go awry during the pandemic in 2022 when TaniHub downsized its operations and staff, and changed its CEO. It closed its operational business later that year, and the company went into liquidation after its lending business lost its license as farmers defaulted on loans they’d received. All in all, it was a spectacular collapse for a startup that put Indonesia on the investment map and had even been mentioned by former Prime Minister Joko Widodo during a speech.

TaniHub executive Ivan Arie Sustiawan and Edison Tobing (former CEO and finance director, respectively) were jailed for 9 years and 7 years over corruption, but the case generated concern as the VC executives were also punished:

• Donald Wihardja, former CEO of MDI Ventures, was sentenced to five years in prison and fined 750 million rupiah (around $42,000)

• Aldi Adrian Hartanto, former VP of investment at MDI Ventures, was sentenced to two years in prison and fined 250 million rupiah (around $14,000)

• Nicko Widjaja, former CEO of BRI Ventures, was sentenced to three years in prison and fined 350 million rupiah (around $20,000)

• William Gozali, former CFO of BRI Ventures, was sentenced to two years in prison and fined 250 million rupiah (around $14,000)

Prosecutors alleged that the state-backed VCs unlawfully approved and disbursed investment into TaniHub without sufficient verification and proper legal basis. That, it is claimed, contributed to state losses after funds were allegedly misused and diverted.

In their defence, the four executives claim the outcome and loss was simply startup risk and not corruption or any enrichment for personal gain.

“We contracted three external due diligence parties, two global top 10 financial audit firm[s], and a local law firm for legal dd [due diligence]. And all have been reviewed through our internal team as well as our investment committee that represents our shareholders,” Wihardja wrote in a LinkedIn comment days before being sentenced.

He added that approval to make the investment required all board members, and not simply two partners on the fund.

The TaniHub investment ultimately ended in a loss for MDI Ventures, but the fund produced more than $100 million in returns, as Wihardja’s sister, Cynthia, pointed out in one of a series of posts in support of her brother.

“Think about what that means for a second. It’s like firing — and jailing — a fund manager whose portfolio returned 500%, because one position went to zero. It’s not just unjust. It’s bad maths,” she wrote.

Much like the ongoing case around alleged corruption from Nadiem Makarim, the founder of Gojek and Indonesia’s former education minister, the VC sentencing clearly shows the challenge of bringing modern thinking and startup economics into politics, a domain with more traditional and conservative foundations.

There are certainly bad apples in the startup space. eFishery founder Gibran Huzaifah was jailed for nine years after he admitted to manipulating and falsifying his business numbers to mislead investors, but that doesn’t mean all losses can be attributed to fraud.

That’s a very obvious observation to make, but that’s exactly why these four gentlemen look set for prison. The issue certainly gets more complicated when the money used to invest comes from the state.

Singapore’s Temasek, GIC and Vertex are all generally seen as successes of sovereign wealth funds, but they’re not immune to getting things wrong and being criticised by an angry public. Temasek, for example, embarrassingly wrote off $275 million that it invested in crypto company FTX, which imploded in 2022 resulting in founder Sam Bankman-Fried going to US jail.

We’ve also seen similar outrage in Malaysia. Asia Tech Review broke news of the fire sale of FashionValet, previously backed by the country’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah, in 2024. The issue made its way all the way to the top as prime minister Anwar ordered an investigation into the due diligence behind the investment.

Back to Indonesia and these trials won’t just stifle potential investment in the country and deter potential founders from taking the risk that is starting a business, but they threaten to reduce the talent returning to the country from overseas.

“Sea turtles,” aka Indonesians who studied overseas and returned to start companies, was a hallmark of the previous decade as Indonesia’s startup scene boomed. Makarim, Wihardja and Widjaja are all examples of US-educated Indonesians who returned to help grow the startup scene. Would they make the same decision if they had that choice today?

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DayOne attracting multi-billion dollar acquisition interest as pathway to IPO continues

DayOne is at a crossroads as the Singapore-based data centre company contemplates its next move.

We previously reported that the company is well-placed to go public with the tailwinds around AI picks and shovels companies, with a US-Singapore listing widely expected at a valuation that could reach $20 billion. Now Bloomberg is reporting that Hillhouse is in talks for a $600 million loan to refinance its investment in DayOne, which stands at around 19% of the business, in a sign of that potential IPO.

At the same time, Reuters reported that DayOne could be about to be approached by MGX, the AI investment firm backed by Abu Dhabi, for a potential “multi-billion dollar” acquisition.

MGX’s ownership stakes include TikTok USA, US-based Aligned Data Centers, chip firm Altera and OpenAI and Anthropic. Reuters’s brief report claimed it is talking with investment banks to construct a bid for DayOne. The company certainly fits its investment profile, which includes the doomed-looking Stargate AI proposal, and it would also bring MGX into Asia Pacific in a major way.

The deal may not happen, but DayOne is certainly a company to watch as 2026 develops.

Markets

Jio Platforms is moving close to a record $3.8 billion Indian IPO after it formally approved the listing, we will have a deeper dive this week [Reuters]

Perhaps taking a page from SpaceX/Starlink, Jio Platforms is said to be planning to build its own low-earth-orbit satellite constellation [CNBC]

Momenta, a Chinese autonomous-driving startup backed by General Motors and Grab among others, is set to raise about $1 billion in a Hong Kong IPO at a roughly $9 billion valuation [WSJ]

Deals

DeepSeek is widely reported to have raised $7.4 billion in its first funding round (it’s worth noting that this hasn’t been officially confirmed), but the most interesting detail may be the terms it has dictated. Aside from setting up a vehicle that won’t allow investors to sell their shares for five years, another condition is that investors cannot poach DeepSeek staff or encourage them to start their own businesses [CNBC]

Meta is reportedly in talks to invest in or acquire fintech startup Cred at a $4 billion valuation, higher than its marked-down $3.5 billion valuation in 2025 but short of the $6.4 billion it fetched in 2022. Is this another talent acquisition to get the highly-rated operator and angel Kunal Shah into Meta or an effort to finally crack India’s fintech and payments market? [Moneycontrol]

ByteDance is said to be on track to spend over $1 billion annually on Microsoft AI and cloud services, making it the company’s largest AI customer in China [Bloomberg]

There’s yet another report that the early Chinese backers of AI firm Manus, including HSG and Tencent, plan to repurchase the company from Meta at the $2 billion acquisition price. But, maybe more interestingly, Manus has seen ARR jump from $100 million at the acquisition six months ago to $400-$500 million now [The Information]

Hyundai will buy SoftBank’s remaining stake in Boston Dynamics for $325 mln, according to reports [Reuters]

Long-time Southeast Asia VC firm Golden Gate Ventures opened an office in Uzbekistan, the Singapore-based fund launched its first MENA fund two years ago with a target of raising $100 million [Golden Gate Ventures]

Politics

Senator Tom Cotton is pressing US treasury secretary Scott Bessent to launch a CFIUS probe into Airwallex over alleged Chinese ties [Axios]

The US blocked Chile’s bid to connect South America to Asia via a Chinese-backed undersea cable [Rest Of World]

US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick accused ASML of potentially violating US export restrictions by allowing one of its advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography machines to reach China. The company denies the claim, but even if it is true it is unclear how responsible ASML would be. [Bloomberg]

AI and Data Centres

The Bank of Korea warned that outsized bonuses at major chip firms in the country could stoke broader wage demands and consumer spending [Bloomberg]

SK Hynix has begun to ship samples of its next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips to major customers [Reuters]

Alibaba is investing deeply into AI and its chairman Joe Tsai argued AI could develop into a US$50 trillion market, and he clarified that the tech giant will invest across the whole value chain covering chips, cloud infrastructure, foundation models and consumer applications [South China Morning Post]

Alibaba Cloud is opening a fifth data centre in Japan with a focus on supporting AI-based services, its most recent launch in the country was only in March [Nikkei Asia]

India’s real estate and investment firm RMZ plans to invest $35 billion over the next five years to scale its data centre capacity to 2-3 gigawatts, it currently has 250 megawatts of capacity [Reuters]

Chinese authorities will promote the further integration of AI and consumption, according to a plan released by the Ministry of Commerce and seven other ministries [South China Morning Post]

In other news

South Korea’s antitrust regulator rejected settlement bids from food delivery giants Baedal Minjok and Coupang Eats over allegations they pressured restaurant partners into price parity arrangements with rival platforms [Bloomberg]

We know Brazil is a major market for Shopee’s growth, and now the company has begun offering quick commerce-like services in the country in partnership with Uber [Momentum Works]

We’re a little late today as your author was up in the early hours watching the World Cup (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿), but there’s plenty more on the menu today including a big new fund for a newly rebranded climate change fund in Southeast Asia, a long pipeline of upcoming IPOs and a sea change in how Chinese AI models may be used.

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Asia gets a new climate-focused startup fund with $100M to spend

Asia has a shiny new venture capital name after the launch of 100x100, a new fund and venture builder focused on startups related to the impact of climate change and emissions. 100x100 has spun out of Singaporean VC Wavemaker, where it was previously called Wavemaker Impact, and announced a new $100 million fund. That’s its first as a rebranded entity but technically its second to date following Wavemaker Impact’s $60 million raise in 2023.

We’re used to VC going after startups, and more recently AI, but 100x100 says it is scouring South Asia and Southeast Asia for “high-impact, high-growth companies designed to address the planet’s most pressing emissions challenges.”

Rather than simply finding promising companies and writing cheques, 100x100 gets involved from day one like a venture builder. It says it looks for serial founders and experienced operators that want to build companies in the climate space, and works with them to find a problem and build a solution that can grow into a business.

When a business is launched, which is typically within six months after the initial ideation, the firm invests $500,000 on “standard” terms and runs the business with the founder for around 18 months. There’s another investment of $500,000 to $1 million when product market fit is reached, with 100x100 working to find other investors to co-lead that deal as a Series A.

The goal after that is to follow on at Series B when institutional investors arrive and the business takes off with less involvement from 100x100.

It’s an ambitious roadmap, and to date the firm has co-created 27 startups across India, Southeast Asia and Australia covering energy, transport, agriculture, food, industry and land use. That portfolio raised over $28 million from 16 external investors, and the firm claims most were revenue-generating within six months of launch.

The new fund is targeted at creating 50 more businesses. More precisely, the fund wants to reduce 100 million tonnes of CO₂e, a measurement of greenhouse gas emissions, and generate US$100 million in revenue per year. Hence the name: 100x100.

It’s also notable that 100x100 emphasises the financial side of its ventures, not simply climate-related businesses for the sake of impact.

“We believe that solving the world’s most pressing emissions challenges also represents a significant economic opportunity. Our name reflects our conviction that profit and carbon reduction are not a trade-off, but a multiplier,” said Marie Cheong, Founding Partner, 100x100, in a statement.

“We don’t invest in green premium, we look for green discount. For climate tech to scale, it must be cheaper and better than the existing fossil alternative. We build companies that win on unit economics first, carbon second,” the firm writes on its website.

Climate-focused funds are less visible in Southeast Asia, but others include The Radical Fund, which is wholly focused on Southeast Asia with a $40 million fund. Larger and more corporate players include ADB Ventures, the VC arm of the Asian Development Bank which has $60 million, Circulate Capital, which raised $220 million in April, and Clime Capital, a more energy-focused fund with $175 million. India, meanwhile, has more than half a dozen.

Still, 100x100’s differentiator is its hands-on and co-building approach. Much of that comes from the profile of the team. That includes Cheong, who worked with KPMG and others before entering VC, as well as PropertyGuru Group co-founder Steve Melhuish, former HappyFresh CEO Guillem Segarra, and serial entrepreneur Quentin Vaquette.

The jury is still out for venture building VCs in Southeast Asia tech, so it’ll be interesting to see if 100x100’s early promise can continue as it doubles down and its existing portfolio matures and seeks those elusive Series B+ investors.

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Deals

SoftBank is said to be struggling to find Latin American startups capable of absorbing its preferred ticket size of $50 million or more, managing just two new regional investments over the past two years [Bloomberg]

Singapore-based Acrab, which builds agentic AI compute infrastructure, has reportedly emerged from stealth with $350 million in financing to date from investors including Vertex. There’s much more to learn about this business given its sudden arrival on the scene. [TechNode]

Kuaishou is in talks with General Atlantic to anchor a first funding round for Kling AI, its video generation unit, targeting more than $2 billion at an $18 billion post-money valuation ahead of a planned IPO. [Bloomberg]

CPP Investments, the Canadian pension fund manager that owns a large chunk of soon-to-list-in-Singapore data centre business AirTrunk, is now doubling down on India after it committed up to ₹70 billion ($741 million) to data centre operator CtrlS, acquiring an 8.2% stake for ₹40 billion ($423 million) and investing up to ₹30 billion ($317 million) more through a joint venture [TechCrunch]

Pramaana Labs, a US-based AI startup founded by IIT Madras alumni, raised $27 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures for its technology that makes AI answers mathematically verifiable by converting complex knowledge into machine-readable language [TechCrunch]

Carro has entered Australia after it acquired fellow used-car marketplace CarPlace to push into its eighth market [Reuters]

Genting, the Malaysian conglomerate best known for real estate and gambling, has launched a $20 billion smart city project in Johor that includes an AI research lab [Nikkei Asia]

Markets

Mynt, which operates Philippines-based digital wallet GCash and is backed by Ant Group, received shareholder approval to go after a local listing that’s been rumoured for many years. The company is said to be seeking to raise $1-1.5 billion at a valuation of $8 billion [Wall Street Journal]

Audio startup Pocket FM is said to be in early talks to shift its holding structure from the US back to India ahead of a potential domestic IPO [Economic Times]

Social commerce platform Xiaohongshu is targeting a Hong Kong IPO as early as the end of this year, with investors seeking a valuation of over $70 billion [Wall Street Journal]

Reliance Jio Infocomm is set to file a draft prospectus for its long-awaited $4 billion IPO with India’s capital markets regulator within days [The Financial Times]

Chinese components maker Lingyi iTech is pricing its Hong Kong IPO at a 44% discount to its Shenzhen-listed shares, as it seeks to raise up to HK$8.3 billion ($1.06 billion) [Bloomberg]

China’s securities regulator is loosening the gates for AI companies to list at home following Hong Kong’s emergence as an AI IPO hub [Bloomberg]

In other news:

Microsoft is reportedly exploring whether it can host its own version of DeepSeek for its copilot AI service [Axios]

Sea quietly launched a generative AI companion chatbot called Migoo in the US and other markets. The service, which looks like an OpenClaw-style bot, connected to Google accounts but requires an invite code to get started [Bloomberg]

Alibaba Cloud opened its first data centres in France, extending its European footprint as businesses on the continent push for greater data sovereignty [South China Morning Post]

India’s Kaynes Technology has stationed sales staff in Japan and plans to ship sample products in fiscal 2026 as its semiconductor unit seeks assembly orders from local chipmakers [Nikkei Asia]

BYD, Google, AMD and Tesla are in talks with Samsung about using its contract chipmaking capacity, as soaring AI infrastructure demand strains TSMC’s advanced manufacturing lines [Nikkei Asia]

And finally, in an update to one of yesterday’s main stories: India’s high court has asked the government to present proof that its ban on Telegram is justified [The Economic Times]

You don’t often see a Southeast Asian startup raise more than $60 million, let alone for a global software business, but we have the details of Respond.io’s newest round which does exactly that. India is also shooting the messenger on exam leaks, after Telegram was banned for a week.

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Respond.io puts Malaysia on the global software map with huge round

It’s not common to see a Southeast Asia-based startup raising a large round led by US investors, but Malaysia-based Respond.io did just that after it announced a $62.5 million Series B round.

The deal is led by Camber Partners, a New York-based fund with $350 million AUM that’s focused on software startups. Endeavor Catalyst, which is chaired by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, took part as well as existing investors.

Respond helps businesses reach their customers using AI agents, chatbots and other automated messaging systems that tap into ad and social platforms, messaging apps, websites, offline channels and more. Its products span lead generation, lead conversion and customer retention across retail, automotive, healthcare and more. That’s not so different from how the business started in Hong Kong in 2017, but today it uses AI to handle those customer inquiries, leads and more without necessarily requiring human involvement.

Gerardo Salandra, Respond’s CEO and co-founder, said the company has reached $35 million ARR with 169% year-over-year growth. It serves 10,000 businesses in more than 180 countries, but now this funding is designed to double down on growth opportunities in North America and Europe. That could include M&A activity. Salandra told TechCrunch that there are already conversations ongoing on that front, as Respond seeks out acquisitions to add tech to its platform or bring in large customer bases.

This isn’t a Malaysian success story per se since Respond relocated to Kuala Lumpur from Hong Kong two years ago, having already raised around $10 million in venture capital funding. But it does show the potential to grow international companies from Southeast Asia whilst tapping into local talent, potential cost savings and avoiding potential geopolitical conflict.

Southeast Asia doesn’t have a massively strong track record of hatching software businesses, let alone global ones, so for that reason Respond is putting it on the map after attracting tens of millions from US investors. Interestingly, there aren’t a huge number of Asian funds backing the business with the exception of Headline Asia.

India scapegoats Telegram for exam paper leaks

In a classic case of shooting the messenger, India has banned Telegram for a week after the chat app was supposedly used to circulate leaked examinations.

The NEET undergraduate entrance exam for medical colleges, which is sat by more than two million students, was cancelled last month after it emerged that questions were circulating online ahead of exam day. In response, the government used India’s IT law to block access to Telegram in the “interest of sovereignty and integrity of India.”

Telegram’s desktop and mobile apps will be banned until 22 June, which means they will be delisted from app stores and blocked on mobile and fixed-line networks. Reuters reported that already Google and Apple will comply with the app store delistings, and ATR can confirm directly that Telegram is currently blocked on wireline broadband and mobile networks as of last night.

“This punishes 150 million ordinary Telegram users in India — not the insiders who leaked the exam materials,” Telegram CEO Pavel Durov wrote on X. “And the ban hasn’t stopped anything. The leaks just moved to other apps.”

The Internet Freedom Foundation called the move “a band aid solution” that’s a “disproportionate” response to exam fraud.

“This blocking comes in the final days of NEET preparation, when thousands of students depend on Telegram for study groups, doubt-clearing, and shared resources,” the foundation added.

Durov said Telegram removed hundreds of channels that had shared leaked materials and other scams in India, and made changes to its label that indicates messages have been edited to prevent backdating scam messages.

There’s not much more to say here other than a government minister seemed intent on finding a scapegoat for the incident. Examination leaks are hugely frustrating, my son was forced to resit nearly half of his exams over the last two months because exams leaked out in another country. Clearly tackling the root cause is the solution, not wildly striking out at platforms that impact tens of millions of people with no connection to the leaks.

It’s worrying to see India’s IT laws abused in this manner. Particularly given that local operators, Apple and Google have all fallen in line to allow this one-week ban to actually take place.

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Deals

DeepSeek reportedly hit the first close of its inaugural funding round at 50 billion yuan ($7.4 billion) and a valuation of over $50 billion. But it adopted an unusual structure that keeps CEO Liang Wenfeng in control as backers put their capital in a limited partnership he manages, and are not allowed to sell their stakes for five years. [The Information]

Indian VC firms are increasingly backing AI startups founded by non-Indians. Peak XV invested in over 10 US-based AI companies in 2025, including Supabase and PostHog, while Activate backed ElevenLabs and DeVC wrote checks into six US firms. [Economic Times]

ESR, an Asia-Pacific real asset manager, made a strategic investment into Racks Central, a Singapore-headquartered data center platform, to fund a regional expansion that starts with Johor, Malaysia. [Racks Central]

Australian healthtech startup Everlab raised $65 million in a Series A led by Airtree Ventures, less than a year after closing a $15 million seed round [Everlab]

Markets

Japan’s largest taxi app Go, which claims a fleet of 85,000 cars, closed its first day as a public company up 10% after it raised ¥88.6 billion ($553 million) at a market value of ¥186 billion ($1.16 billion) from a listing on the TSE Growth market [Nikkei Asia]

Four of India’s biggest retail brokers, Groww, Zerodha, Angel One, and Upstox, secured licences to offer international equity investing [Economic Times]

AI and models

Alipay is getting its biggest makeover for years after the payment app rolled out an update featuring an AI agent, which helps give users access to over 10,000 services including ride-hailing. Ant is moving first as Tencent prepares to introduce AI bots in WeChat, its blockbuster messaging app. [South China Morning Post]

Alibaba has launched the Qwen Robot Suite, its first AI model lineup designed for robotics [South China Morning Post]

SoftBank Group will launch a cybersecurity service powered by OpenAI, targeting Japan’s top 3,000 companies across critical infrastructure including airports, power grids and transport networks [SoftBank]

The Trump administration is said to have considered export controls on Anthropic weeks, after a China-based company apparently accessed the model, before forcing its newest AI models offline [Washington Post]

The Economic Times interviewed the founders of Sarvam after their funding announcement and in light of the Anthropic situation [Economic Times]

Z.ai launched its newest flagship model, GLM-5.2, which adds stronger coding capabilities and adjusted reading effort levels. It also introduced IndexShare, an architecture it says reuses the indexer to reduce token usage and make new tokens cheaper to process [Z.ai]

In other news:

The CFO of the SoftBank Vision Fund is reportedly leaving the company [Reuters]

India’s Enforcement Directorate has charged eight people over a Coinbase spoofing scheme that netted more than $20 million from victims worldwide [The Block]

Startup exits continue to be a major deal in Southeast Asia, but a nearly 20-year-old company might help bridge the gap to Hong Kong with an IPO before the end of the year. We look at PatSnap’s listing ambitions and a tactical fundraising announcement from Sarvam, India’s leading sovereign AI contender.

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PatSnap, the low-profile contender to put Southeast Asia on Hong Kong’s IPO map

Can Southeast Asian companies find their much-needed IPO exits in Hong Kong? We are about to find out after Singapore’s PatSnap confidentially filed to go public in a dual listing across Singapore and Hong Kong, according to Bloomberg.

It’s well known that Southeast Asian startups have struggled to find the meaningful exits that venture capital ecosystems require. IPOs for Grab and GoTo, two regional flag-carriers, have massively underwhelmed and younger companies have struggled to find a path to public markets. Hong Kong, by contrast, has become a destination for tech IPOs, with AI a particular hit since MiniMax and Zhipu went at the start of this year with stellar returns for investors.

PatSnap is looking to raise between $300-$400 million at a valuation of over $2 billion, Bloomberg says, and it has some of the elements that might appeal to HKEX investors.

The 19-year-old company specialises in intellectual property, specifically it operates a database of over 120 million patents which helps companies manage their own patents and innovation, keep an eye on competitors, develop new opportunities and more. I will confess I didn’t fully comprehend its value when I wrote about it during my time at TechCrunch, but it appears increasingly important during these AI-fuelled times. AI technology allows PatSnap customers to run deeper analysis and research on the patent world, be it their own, their industries or their rivals, to help develop their own IP and innovation.

“Patent data let us kick down the door and earn respect, but now we’re looking at completely different products,” Ray Chohan, one of PatSnap’s co-founders, told me back in 2018. Even then, they were developing new products to position themselves as “the software stack for R&D teams.” No doubt AI has put that into overdrive.

The company claims over 15,000 customers. It includes HongShan, SoftBank and Tencent among its backers who gave it around $400 million in capital to date and valued the business at over $1 billion.

PatSnap can play up its position as an AI business. Its website has visible cues including a chatbot interface and agents that can scour its patent database and extract data and intelligence.

The listing is being tipped to come “as early as this year,” which suggests it could slip into 2027.

Given its previous valuation, Bloomberg’s $2 billion-plus target for the IPO isn’t particularly outrageous. Without knowing the full details, it looks like this is an opportunistic punt at Hong Kong given the company’s AI credentials and Hong Kong’s track record this year. Zhipu’s stock price has surged to give it a valuation of over $80 billion, up from around $6.6 billion when the bell rang. A relatively modest valuation isn’t necessarily a hurdle, and an exit is better than no exit, as the rhetoric goes.

We’ve seen a couple of Thai companies linked with Hong Kong IPOs, Bitkub and Line Man, but PatSnap would be the first to walk the path. I’m also curious to see what happens on the Singapore IPO side, particularly with data centre firm DayOne tipped to take a US-Singapore IPO route.

Singapore has much work to do to catch Hong Kong. A recent Financial Times article noted that IPOs on SGX increased from six in 2024 to 16 in 2025. HKEX, meanwhile, had 119 IPOs in 2025. This year already, it has hosted two blockbuster LLM listings and a host of AI companies across chip design, production and more.

Sarvam pops out a timely funding announcement but many questions remain

Timing is everything. A day after we wrote about the need for sovereign AI solutions in Asia, India’s Sarvam raised $234 million at a $1.5 billion valuation.

This round has been rumoured for a few months (I even mentioned yesterday it still hasn’t been confirmed) and it looks like this announcement is fairly opportunistic since the target total raise is $300 million. Clearly now is a good time to be a bit more public about fundraising for a homegrown AI model for India, and of course trumpet that it is now a unicorn business. (Does that still have meaning these days…?)

That pitch convinced IT services giant HCLTech, which led the round with a $150 million cheque and is joined by Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Rather interestingly, Bloomberg noted in previous reporting that Sarvam wasn’t able to convince major investors SoftBank, Prosus, a16z, General Atlantic and Accel to join the party.

Sarvam disclosed some numbers including that it handles 2 million conversations and 10 million API calls per day, with 500,000 hours of audio transcribed per month. It says a leading fintech uses its model for its 350,000-person sales force and claims it was adopted by a leading insurance provider.

Everyone wants to fund a local alternative to Claude or ChatGPT, but the dynamics at play here are insanely tough. The company hasn’t defined its user focus yet. That’s important as we’ve seen from Anthropic doubling down on enterprise in its battle with ChatGPT.

Sarvam has a consumer AI chatbot, covering the basics, but will it focus on covering all Indian businesses? Is this a play for enterprise because it is more lucrative? Can it get the government to mandate adoption? Probably not.

Then there’s the issue of quality. Sarvam covers more than 22 Indian languages, but Claude and OpenAI are better products than anything else on the market. That includes Chinese models that have taken billions of dollars to develop. It feels unlikely Sarvam can compete on merit in the near future.

Then that returns us to the sovereign and patriotic argument, which has only really played out in China. And still we read weekly of how Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance and other big tech Chinese firms continue to buy Nvidia and use US models overseas.

Asia needs more sovereign AI solutions, at the risk of repeating yesterday’s newsletter. But it’s not clear why investors should be a part of that, too.

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Deals

Tencent has reportedly invested $20 million in the new AI lab founded by Junyang Lin, the former lead researcher behind Alibaba’s Qwen models [The Information]

Singapore’s Pints AI, which helps banks and insurers automate processes whilst remaining audited and compliant, raised $5.6 million in a pre-Series A round led by Tin Men Capital. [TechNode]

Kazakhstan wants to turn cheap and available power into AI infrastructure exports, and plans to spend up to $10 billion on computing projects, including $1 billion from a state-run telco, to develop data centres with Nvidia tech support [Bloomberg]

Markets

Zhipu shares soared further after it revealed plans to make GLM-5.2, its latest and most powerful large language model, open source [South China Morning Post]

Xiaohongshu, the parent of RedNote, reportedly plans to file for a Hong Kong IPO this month. Its last valuation was $17 billion in a 2024 funding round, but shares are said to have exchanged hands in secondary markets for as much as $31 billion. [Bloomberg]

Enflame Technology, an AI chipmaker that Tencent owns 20% of, will go public on Shanghai’s STAR board with plans to raise 6 billion yuan ($888 million) at a valuation of around $9 billion-plus. [Bloomberg]

In other news:

ByteDance is said to be in talks to expand its Chinese AI inference chip partnerships with deals from Iluvatar CoreX and potentially Baidu’s Kunlunxin on the table. It works with Huawei and Cambricon. [Reuters]

Tiezhen Wang, a former Hugging Face executive, believes China’s open-source AI push is mounting a serious challenge to OpenAI’s dominance, with freely available models increasingly matching proprietary ones on performance. [Rest of World]

Google and Black Lotus Labs worked with the FBI to dismantle a massive Chinese phishing-as-a-service that used thousands of phishing websites to steal credit card data and passwords [Bleeping Computer]

Google also revealed that a Chinese-linked hacking group spent over two years quietly stealing data from US and Canadian academic, medical, and military research institutions between September 2023 and November 2025. [Reuters]

Investors and analysts say China’s humanoid robotics industry risks repeating the electric vehicle sector’s brutal price wars [Caixing Global]