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Aspire believes its Southeast Asia roots can help it crack the US fintech market

Moving to the US market isn’t a challenge many startups in Southeast Asia take on, but Singapore-based fintech Aspire is doing exactly that. It entered the market last month having hired David Harris, a six-year veteran of Revolut, last year to lead the business Stateside.

Taking on the likes of Ramp, Airwallex and Brex on American soil might seem like a futile exercise, but Aspire CEO and co-founder Andrea Baronchelli believes that building in Southeast Asia gives his business an edge.

“We started very early (2018) as one of the first to do business neobanking plus software on top,” he told Asia Tech Review. The demand for clients to do business in multiple countries, and some inefficiencies are among the factors that helped it chart its initial course.

Baronchelli believes those US peers are also trying to figure out their offerings at the same time Aspire is. Which is ironic since he moved to Southeast Asia to start e-commerce business Lazada, which heavily copied the Amazon playbook when starting up more than a decade ago.

“It’s very, very much at the beginning. It’s not often that someone in this part of the world (Southeast Asia) is so far ahead with core players in the US trying to figure out the same thing,” he added.

It’s not straightforward to explain what Aspire is building. The company calls itself “the finance OS for modern businesses” because it has all mission-critical services in one place. Baronchelli simplifies the explanation as an inevitable convergence that we’ve seen in other walks of life.

“Do you remember when you used to go around with a phone and a camera? Now you just carry a smartphone, it’s easier having one device that can take pictures, text and do more,” he said.

In simple terms, Aspire wants to merge core business banking with ERP and back office processes and services. For example, putting invoicing, payroll, expenses, supply and more on the same platform as corporate banking, which includes multi-currency and global accounts from day one.

“The finance back office used to be that thing you have in the corner. Now we make it the centre, making sure your data points are integrated into how you run your business,” he explains.

The Aspire stack makes sense for new business, it can be used right from incorporation to securing a bank account and even invoicing, but bigger fish are harder to catch. There, typically the entry point is around specific features like procurement approval, expenses management or company cards. From there, Aspire works to bring in more services or eventually the full stack.

That combination started out as a logical convenience for companies, but with the growth of AI (yes, we had to go there) Aspire could unlock even greater value by enabling companies to run analysis and intelligence across all parts of their finances, without running into silos. Already, it uses AI agents to help pull data for invoices and expenses, but the impact stands to be greater if a company’s data is all held on the platform.

Like many others in the fintech and banking worlds, Aspire is also investigating how it can integrate stablecoins. Baronchelli suggests that “programmable money,” which has become the finance industry’s term, will play a huge role in the future of banking infrastructure, particularly with the type of multi-geography, multi-currency businesses that make up large chunks of Aspire’s claimed base of 50,000 business users.

Aspire has grown to more than 600 staff with more than 10 licences across eight markets. It’s one of Southeast Asia’s most capitalised fintechs and highly visible across the regional ecosystem. That’s a long way from the original startup days, but the CEO is as energised as ever.

“If I started something new, I would be doing the same thing,” he said. “Banking integration is going to be the default and we want to be one of the top players.”

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In other interesting news you won’t want to miss:

Memory makers are recording record profits, but that’s bad news for the rest of us since all they’re doing is charging more, not making lots more [Culpium]

Samsung itself has come out with a warning on the impending memory shortage [Nikkei]

Bengaluru-based Oolka, which offers lending and credit, raised $14 million led by Accel [The Economic Times]

Two North Korean hacking groups have stolen more than $550 million in 2026 so far [TRM Labs]

Beijing has banned all drones within city limits from May 1 [AP News]

Every weekday, we will send you 2-3 of the most important items from Asia Tech from the previous day, and a list of other news you’ll want to know.

Hit reply and let us know what you think. What do you like, what do you love and what doesn’t work for you.

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eFishery CEO and other co-founders handed jail terms for fraud

We wrote about Indonesia’s startup ecosystem being on trial ten days ago, and now the first case has concluded with eFishery founder Gibran Huzaifah given a nine-year prison sentence in a fraud case following the collapse of the startup.

Most readers are well aware of the case, but to briefly restate: eFishery developed smart fishing tech to help Indonesia’s fish farmers run their business more efficiently, later adding financial services and more. It raised nearly $300 million from investors including SoftBank and Temasek, with a valuation that reached $1.4 billion in 2023.

But Huzaifah came out publicly last year to admit he had fabricated revenue, as Business Times explains:

From January to September 2024, the company told investors it generated US$752 million in revenue and posted a profit of US$16 million. In reality, the probe found that the firm recorded only US$157 million in revenue during the period and suffered a loss of US$35.4 million.

Alongside Huzaifah, the court also sentenced Angga Hadrian Raditya, eFishery’s former VP of corporate finance and investor relations, to nine years in prison and Andri Yadi, a former VP, to seven years.

Now we wait for the case of former Gojek CEO Nadiem Makarim, who is accused of corruption from his time as education minister, which is expected to reach a conclusion next month. The case is very different to eFishery, and all evidence suggests Makarim is not guilty of the charges set against him.

It’s a difficult time for startups in Indonesia following a number of cases of fraud, culminating in eFishery’s capitulation. As I wrote earlier this month, I believe the narrative will shift as there remain great startups and founders in the country, solving problems that the incumbent system isn’t able to fix.

Singapore’s Formas raised $4M to bring AI to architects and designers

One of the concerns looking at Southeast Asia’s tech scene is where the AI startups that can compete globally will come from. One contender popped up yesterday when Formas, a Singapore-based startup that provides a design platform for the architecture, engineering and construction industry, raised $3.98 million in a pre-seed round.

The round was led by Singaporean funds Vertex, UntroD Capital, Hustle Fund, Big Sky Capital VC and Orvel Ventures.

Formas was founded by husband-and-wife duo Yiping Goh, a tech executive and former VC, and architecture academic Carlos Bañón last year. Around half of the round came from angel investors that the couple know, Goh told Asia Tech Review, to the point that there was no immediate plan to raise funding from VCs until word reached some funds that got in touch.

“For decades, design tools have asked architects to adapt their creativity to fit the constraints of software - fragmented across 5-10 disconnected tools, steep learning curves, and a core experience that hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades,” Goh, whose past ventures include McKinsey Singapore, Quest Ventures and Indonesia’s MatahariMall.com, wrote on LinkedIn. Now, she believes that AI has reached the point where it can genuinely assist without glaring errors.

Formas launched its service in beta last November and it says users across 135 countries have created more than 500,000 designs. The target customer is architects, interior designers, spatial designers, virtual model designers and those in the real estate industry.

Indeed, Goh explained to ATR that early customers have cut their production time from weeks to as little as one day. One even won four projects within just two months of using the product. “There are many use cases and we cannot move fast enough to communicate them,” she added.

The global VC industry has pivoted significantly to focus on investing in AI. But, at this moment, Southeast Asia has far fewer AI startups emerging when compared to the US or even Europe. That makes a prospect like Formas, which unites a seasoned and well-known figure with a subject matter expert, a prospect that was always likely to get attention. Even if it wasn’t really looking to fundraise.

Now Formas is firmly on the radar. Can it break into the US and other Western markets meaningfully? Does that require taking capital from investors in those markets and pitting itself against AI startups in Silicon Valley and beyond?

In other interesting news you won’t want to miss:

Powered by its chip business, Samsung announced record results as revenue jumped 70% to 133.9 trillion KRW ($89.96 billion) with operating profit up 750% to 57.2 trillion KRW ($39.8 billion) [CNBC]

Amazon and Meta are among the firms that are set to lobby in India over the dominance of PhonePe and Google Pay on UPI [TechCrunch]

Indian test-prep company Allen Career Institute, which is backed by James Murdoch among others, is reportedly exploring a Mumbai IPO although there are no figures around a potential listing yet [Bloomberg]

Meta re-entered the stablecoin market after it quietly introduced digital currency payouts for select creators in the Philippines and Colombia, four years after it aborted its previous stablecoin venture [Fortune]

China halted new autonomous vehicle licences after dozens of Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxis abruptly stopped in Wuhan last month [Bloomberg]

Local demand for Huawei Ascend 950 chips has reportedly surged after DeepSeek’s new V4 model proved it can power advanced AI [Reuters]

Every weekday, we will send you 2-3 of the most important items from Asia Tech from the previous day, and a list of other news you’ll want to know.

Hit reply and let us know what you think. What do you like, what do you love and what doesn’t work for you.

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GoTo scores first profitable quarter thanks to fintech growth and TikTok

GoTo announced its first-ever profitable quarter. The Indonesian company made a net profit of $9.9 million (171 billion IDR) in Q1 2026 thanks to its growing financial services business and cost-cutting around its core ride-hailing unit. Net revenue rose by 26% year-on-year to reach $309 million (5.3 trillion IDR).

It’s tempting to make a direct comparison to Grab, which just had its first full year of profitability, but there are notable differences between the two.

Grab broadly tightened its core mobility business to get itself into the black on a regular basis. GoTo’s profit is mostly derived from its growing fintech business and the income of its partnership with TikTok, which includes the Tokopedia business it retains a minority stake in.

GoTo fintech revenue jumped 58% per year to reach $110 million (1.9 trillion IDR), with total transactions on GoPay up 84% to more than 2 billion and its loan book increasing 59% annually. In comparison, GoTo’s core on-demand, mobility and delivery business units grew modestly by just 12%, 8% and 13%, respectively, over the same period. The number of rides actually fell slightly, GTV -3%.

Still, that growth is promising as Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing companies always sold themselves on the potential of fintech. The pitch was a daily super app that merits tech company multiples by offering strong payments, lending and more. Grab’s business doesn’t yet reflect that, but it remains materially larger than GoTo. Grab’s total revenue was more than triple that of GoTo last year. Grab also has a lot more cash on hand.

But, beneath the numbers, GoTo will have concerns around the lending business which is driving those impressive fintech numbers. The company says its credit quality has remained consistent, but there’s an increased risk of defaults rising since the loan book grew 59% annually.

Finally, it also has an unlikely ally in TikTok.

GoTo sold 75% of Tokopedia to ByteDance in 2023 but the agreement includes a commercial arrangement that generates income for GoTo each quarter based on Tokopedia’s GMV. That brought in $16.7 million (288 billion IDR) in the last quarter, that’s the most it has contributed to date and a 2x increase from Q1 2024. GoTo has reshaped its business to make it sustainable, but that extra income helped push it over the line with its first net profit.

Going forward, how GoTo manages that loan book and restores growth to its core business after rides fell will be interesting to watch. The company’s shares remain down 23% this year. Notably, management hasn’t raised its forecasted numbers on account of the current global financial situation.

Grab’s financials drop next week. As always, there’s plenty of speculation about if and when the two will finally join together.

A different kind of US-China tech gap

One of the obvious impacts of the Meta-Manus deal furore, even before China’s decision this week, is to keep China and international business apart.

This isn’t a new concept per se. Western companies have been doing this for the last decade at least.

Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla and other major tech names have adopted specific approaches, narratives, policies and products for China. That’ll happen when one single market accounts for a double-digit percentage of your overall revenue. Investors would be mad if you didn’t even try to grab a slice of that money.

Now, though, the concept has morphed and Chinese startups are figuring out what compromises they must make to take a slice of a big market that exists beyond the comfort of where they call home.

There’s a big difference, of course.

The US firms named above are all enormous, multinational businesses with established products, financing and more. AI has changed the landscape and now it is early-stage, non-US companies being forced to make decisions that should be far away from where they are now.

There’s no way a founder of a year-old startup can know exactly where their product will take off. That’s the frustration and beauty of the tech industry, most things fail and it is unpredictable. The current geopolitical tension would have made the creation of TikTok impossible, for example.

When ByteDance acquired US-based Musical.ly for as much as $1 billion in 2017 there was little fanfare. It took two years for any kind of review of the deal and, well, the rest is history with TikTok now among the world’s most influential, and profitable, tech platforms of today.

Now, China has ring-fenced its startup playground and investors are following suit. Bloomberg reports that a number of funds, including some backers of Manus, have constructed parallel fund strategies that use US and offshore vehicles to cater to different startups they want to fund and LPs who want to back them.

If this feels familiar, it is. A great venture capital unbundling happened in 2023 when Sequoia, GGV and other international funds broke their businesses and teams into standalone regional entities, ending their past focus on serving different markets from one brand.

It’s hard to imagine ZhenFund or Luminous Ventures, two Chinese firms that are said to have adopted this track, being able to pull it off based on the technicality of having distinct Chinese and non-Chinese funds. After all, isn’t that what Manus did when it moved to Singapore? That didn’t exactly help.

Perhaps, ultimately, the rationale is simple and China doesn’t want US VCs calling the shots over its companies. The US doesn’t want that either.

In other interesting news you won’t want to miss:

Tencent staff reportedly used Claude to evaluate and fine-tune its new Hy3 model, despite US restrictions and the firm’s head of AI being formerly of OpenAI [The Information]

But Goldman Sachs bankers in Hong Kong are now banned from using Claude [Financial Times]

India-based stock app Sahi raised $33 million led by Accel Growth at a valuation estimated at $200 million [The Economic Times]

The US wants to ban key equipment makers that supply China’s second-largest chipmaker Hua Hong Semiconductor in another bid to kneecap Beijing’s technology self-sufficiency strategy [Reuters]

In further evidence of that apparent push, China’s National Supercomputing Center says it can build a world-class supercomputer using only domestic CPUs, with no Nvidia GPUs or foreign parts—but the response is sceptical [Tom’s Hardware]

Truecaller, with more than 500 million users globally, is slowing in India, its core market of over 350 million users or about 70% of its base. Downloads in the country fell 16% year over year in 2025. [TechCrunch]

Every weekday, we will send you 2-3 of the most important items from Asia Tech from the previous day, and a list of other news you’ll want to know.

Hit reply and let us know what you think. What do you like, what do you love and what doesn’t work for you.

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Meta is already integrating Manus but now China wants to unwind the deal

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, but China moved to block Meta’s $2 billion-plus acquisition of Manus yesterday.

The National Development and Reform Commission ruled it would “prohibit foreign investment in Manus in accordance with laws and regulations, and require the parties involved to withdraw the acquisition transaction.” The NDRC has spent much of this year investigating the transaction, which was announced in late December some six months after Manus had relocated from China to Singapore.

Meta continues to claim that the deal “complied fully with applicable law.” It told the BBC that it anticipates a resolution to the investigation.

China has come out strong on tech issues in the past. Yes, its tech companies are prized assets, but when there’s potential for negative impact, action has been taken.

It has fined its biggest companies repeatedly, including a $2.8 billion penalty for Alibaba in 2021, it crippled Alibaba affiliate Ant Group’s $37 billion IPO at the eleventh hour and, looking back more than a decade ago, it suspended key features from microblogging services following political rumours.

There may not be one homogeneous organisation controlling all of those decisions but China’s instinct is broadly to take unpopular decisions for the sake of longer-term interests.

When it comes to Manus, those interests and the threat is clear. This precedent could see China lose its most promising AI companies if they follow Manus’ lead and relocate to Singapore. Even still, a hardline approach wasn’t expected to be taken based on recent news reports, that’s despite the founders of Manus not being allowed to leave China.

It’s notable just how quickly Meta integrated Manus into its business. The US giant added the AI product to its advertising manager service in February, just over a month after it announced the acquisition. Beyond that, Manus employees have already moved into Meta’s offices in Singapore with executives joining Meta’s AI team.

Investors have been paid out, too, including Tencent, Hongshan and Benchmark. The US VC, whose involvement sparked initial controversy, has even already delivered returns to the LPs that back its fund, according to the Financial Times.

The fast integration may help make the deal seem harder to unwind, but Meta is in urgent need of a consumer-facing AI service as it lags its rivals by some distance.

The launch of OpenClaw and the continued development of Claude and Google Gemini clearly show the value of AI virtual assistants, which are sure to be a major new frontier for consumer tech companies. Yet Meta comes up short on this front for now.

US-China relations are hard to read at the best of times, let alone with the Trump administration in office. Trump signed off on the US TikTok deal, which saw his position shift from a hardline, outright ban to an outcome that looked like a major win for ByteDance and China.

That makes it tough to read what success looks like for the current White House when it comes to Meta-Manus. Likely some kind of deal, a compromise or a counter attack on China. That may mean no quick resolution.

Cube Asia raises $3.7M to map the fragmented e-commerce space in Southeast Asia and beyond

Singapore-based Cube Asia, which tracks Southeast Asia’s fragmented e-commerce market, raised $3.7 million in its Series A round to expand its geographical focus and add more products for brands, retailers and investors.

Online selling has evolved massively over the last decade in Southeast Asia, going from a market that was created by Lazada and other Rocket Internet-backed ventures, to the current day battle between a US listed company, an Alibaba affiliate and one of China’s new internet powers.

A recent Momentum Works report concluded that e-commerce GMV rose 22.8% year-on-year across the region to reach $157.6 billion last year, with Shopee TikTok Shop and Lazada the overwhelmingly dominant players. Grabbing this data is an imprecise science based on estimates, relationships and manual logging, and that’s where companies like Cube Asia focus.

Like Momentum Works, four-year-old Cube Asia regularly produces reports on the region’s e-commerce space which include data and numbers that are hard to find elsewhere. The insight comes from its primary focus on tracking the market for brands, retailers and investors to make sense of what is a nascent and growing industry that doesn’t lend itself to the type of measurement that’s common in emerging markets.

Data companies don’t tend to attract massive amounts of investor attention in Southeast Asia. Mapping commerce across the region is a tough job that’s creates the data and insights that influences the rest of the ecosystem, be it founders, operators or investors.

In other interesting news you won’t want to miss:

China has a new framework for the country’s estimated 200 million gig workers, which will provide protections like fair wage payments and better social security [SCMP]

Fresh from launching its newest model in preview, DeepSeek has slashed its cost of using all of its models by 90% [PanDaily]

Google is building an AI campus in Seoul, according to the office of the President [Reuters]

Indian Digital insurance company Acko, which is backed by General Atlantic and Amazon, is planning an IPO in India next year at a valuation of at least $2 billion [Economic Times]

Samsung will stop selling home appliances ​and TVs in China this year allegedly due to tough competition [Reuters]

It’s intensive, but the daily is in response to the current state of media as we see it. Consuming news has changed drastically. It’s harder than ever to keep up with what’s happening, what’s important and what’s not, especially in Asia where media coverage is not as dense as the US.

These days, I come across news via group chats or social media algorithms but articles rarely offer analysis or cut through the fluff. We need a place we can trust to get up to speed with news that’s going on in the region.

Your support will mean a lot to the small team behind ATR, so consider subscribing and sharing with people who will find it useful. And let us know what works and what doesn’t.

Have a great week, we’ll be back tomorrow.

Jon

Salmon catches $100M in fresh funding for Philippines digital banking push

Southeast Asia may be in the mindset of a funding and sentiment depression, but that isn’t stopping digital banks in the Philippines from raising capital. The latest deal saw Salmon pull in $100 million, $60 million of which is in equity with $40 million in debt to expand the bank’s digital lending and general services.

Salmon has a pretty unique story. It was started by three former executives at Russian digital bank Tinkoff, which expanded to the Philippines in 2016. Tinkoff looked at a digital license when the Philippines moved to issue them at the tail end of the pandemic.

The trio, however, opted to go solo. But, instead of snagging a digital banking license, they entered the field last September by acquiring Rural Bank of Sta. Rosa, a 60-plus year old bank focused on rural areas, following an 18 month wait for approvals. Now it is turning the bank into a digital player.

TechCrunch reports that Salmon is adding products like revolving credit lines, installment loans, cash loans, motorbike loans and deposits as it looks to build out a full suite of services. The debt component of the round, which is provided by the Nordic bond market, will be used to finance loans to customers.

Salmon has now raised $310 million, which comprises $160 million in equity and $150 million in bonds. Its investors include IFC, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Antler, Spice Expeditions and Washington University Investment Management Company.

The Philippines has six officially licensed digital banks, and a handful of others that took the Salmon route including Sea’s digital bank and Netbank, which raised undisclosed funding last week.

The Philippines is also becoming an attractive destination for startups focused on Indonesia that seek expansion opportunities, particularly around payment and physical commerce. The rest of Southeast Asia caught a startup chill, but the Philippines looks to be continuing its growth.

DeepSeek’s new model is finally here and it divides opinion already

Following months of speculation, DeepSeek released its newest model (the not-so-creatively-named V4) and already it has received a mixed reaction.

First of all, let’s look at what DeepSeek V4 isn’t.

This is not going to be a replacement for Anthropic’s Claude Opus model (or its upcoming Mythos) or ChatGPT 5.5, which was just launched by OpenAI. But early tests do suggest that V4 gets close to these frontier models at just a fraction of their price, as Simon Willison points out in his well-read newsletter.

DeepSeek-V4-Flash is the cheapest of the small models, beating even OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 Nano. DeepSeek-V4-Pro is the cheapest of the larger frontier models.

Here’s his price comparison chart to hammer the point home.

Early criticism, however, has focused on performance and the fact that DeepSeek hasn’t closed the gap on its two big US competitors. In fact, it didn’t even benchmark against their newest models. Indications suggest it is pretty far behind them.

Those comparisons may miss the point, however.

The new DeepSeek release has tighter integration with China’s domestic chip ecosystem than ever before. Indeed, Huawei’s new Ascend 950 AI chip, which competes with Nvidia products, will support V4 on release. That indicates that DeepSeek has been working closely with its peer to ensure collaboration that can potentially help wean China-based companies off of a reliance on Nvidia and other US firms. Or just give more capability to Huawei’s AI offerings.

The arrival of the new model comes at an interesting time.

DeepSeek is reportedly in talks to raise its first external capital, having been self-funded entirely to this point. Alibaba and Tencent are said to be among those in conversations over taking a 2-3% stake of the business at a $20 billion valuation.

On the other side, a host of other Chinese companies announced major AI releases last week.

• Moonshot AI released Kimi K2.6

• Tencent put out an entirely re-engineered version of its Hunyuan LLM, the first release under the management of its new head of AI who is ex-OpenAI

• Alibaba rolled out a new version of Qwen, and announced plans to embed its model in cars and its first commercial deals

• Tencent also released an English version of its OpenClaw product, QClaw, for international markets

There’s never a dull moment in the world of AI in China.

China

Honor’s humanoid robot won a Beijing half-marathon in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, beating human runners and showing rapid progress in Chinese robotics link

Huawei launched its first AI glasses, starting at 2,499 yuan ($367), with features including voice interaction and payments link

ByteDance’s net profit fell more than 70% in 2025 as AI spending weighed on earnings despite strong overseas growth led by TikTok Shop link

Chinese authorities have tightened controls on domestic AI startups, warning firms including MiroMind not to move talent or research abroad link

Nvidia’s H200 AI chips have not yet reached Chinese buyers despite conditional US approval, with Beijing clearances still a hurdle link

Dutch military intelligence said China had drawn level with the US in offensive cyber capabilities link

Micron lobbied US lawmakers to tighten export curbs on chipmaking equipment used by Chinese rivals link

The White House accused China of industrial-scale efforts to siphon intellectual property from US AI labs link

China’s top market regulator launched a six-month crackdown on internet advertising, including misuse of AI link

ByteDance’s planned R$50B ($9.5B) Brazil data centre became a flashpoint between AI infrastructure demand and local opposition link

Chinese regulators moved to bar tech firms, including AI startups, from taking US capital without prior approval link

iQiyi plans to use AI to produce a significant share of its films and series as part of a wider overhaul of its content platform link

The US told diplomats to warn governments about alleged intellectual property theft by Chinese AI firms including DeepSeek link

DJI and Insta360 are accelerating their global push as US scrutiny intensified and Western rivals came under pressure link

Huawei will invest up to 80B yuan ($11.7B) over five years to strengthen computing power for its smart driving systems link

State Grid Corporation of China plans to deploy thousands of AI-powered robots to inspect substations and maintain ultra-high-voltage lines link

Tencent jumped into the Kazakhstan market after it bought a 3.2% stake in fintech and e-commerce business Kaspi.kz for just over $500M link

India

Razorpay is preparing to confidentially file for an IPO, targeting a $600-700M raise at a $5-6B valuation link

India’s central bank cancelled Paytm Payments Bank’s licence over compliance failures link

Sarvam AI is reportedly in talks to add Glade Brook Capital to its $320-350M funding round at a valuation of about $1.5B link

Sarvam is among the Indian AI labs in advanced talks with the defence ministry over a $36M Centre of Excellence for military AI link

House help on-demand startup Snabbit is raising at least $50M at a valuation of around $400M in a round led by Susquehanna Venture Capital, according to TechCrunch link

Meanwhile rival Pronto is said to be close to sealing a $20M investment at a valuation of around $200M—TechCrunch (again) reports that high profile angel investor and former Stripe executive Lachy Groom will lead the round link

Krafton, Naver and Mirae Asset launched a $718M India-focused fund targeting consumer internet, AI, and deeptech startups link

Apple has been accused of failing to provide information requested by India’s antitrust regulator, prompting the Competition Commission of India to speed up penalty proceedings link

Dunzo cofounder Kabeer Biswas’s concierge startup M raised $12.2M from Peak XV Partners, Blume Ventures and Cred at a $35.9M valuation link

OpenAI partnered with Infosys to bring AI tools including Codex into the Indian IT company’s Topaz platform link

India’s in-app purchases crossed $300M in the first quarter, up 33% year on year, but much of the spending flows to foreign companies not local ones link

WhatsApp rolled out prepaid mobile recharges in India through a partnership with PayU link

Zomato agreed to drop a contract clause that penalised restaurants for offering cheaper meals to walk-in diners link

India’s IT sector faces record Gen Z churn as companies overhaul recruitment, training and retention link

India is now among a set of “limited countries” where Facebook and Instagram “automatically restrict content, at scale and based on local law requirements,” according to a source link

Southeast Asia

Singapore’s financial regulator pressed banks to close cybersecurity gaps as concerns over Anthropic’s Mythos AI model spread across Asia link

Bain Capital is reportedly looking to sell at least a 40% stake in Singapore-based Bridge Data Centres in a deal that could value the company at about $5B link

The Wall Street Journal looks at how Cambodia’s cyber-scam industry has grown into a vast transnational network of call centres tied to powerful local interests, exploiting trafficked workers and victims worldwide link link

The US sanctioned Cambodian senator Kok An over alleged links to scam compounds that stole millions from American victims link

Apple launched Tap to Pay on iPhone in Malaysia, letting businesses accept contactless payments on their devices link

Singapore is rapidly emerging as a neutral ground for AI companies that need to navigate complicated US-China tensions link

Singapore’s Cobo launched Cobo Agentic Wallet, a crypto wallet product designed for management by AI agents link

Vietnam and South Korea launched a cross-border QR payment service link

Singapore police arrested a 26-year-old man accused of leaking the unreleased animated film The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender link

Singapore’s Tazapay partnered with ClearBank for Asia-Europe payments link

Nium and Coinbase teamed up for global stablecoin payments and settlement link

Taiwan

Taiwan’s financial sector launched a project with 16 lenders to build a sector-specific large language model link

TSMC plans to open an advanced chip packaging plant in Arizona by 2029 link

TSMC delayed adoption of ASML’s high-NA EUV machines costing more than €350M each until at least 2029 link

TSMC unveiled a process technology roadmap through 2029, including A12, A13 and N2U, while A16 slipped to 2027 link

AI chip demand is pushing Taiwan and South Korea past Europe’s biggest stock markets as investors pile into semiconductor companies link

Japan

A Japanese court ruled that detailed plot summaries could constitute copyright infringement in a case involving Godzilla Minus One and Overlord link

Japan’s finance minister is set to meet with major banks to discuss the potential threat of Anthropic’s new Mythos AI model link

Sony’s autonomous ping-pong robot Ace competed against and at times beat top human players in Tokyo link

Japan is considering a social media ban for minors link

SoftBank is seeking a $10B loan backed by its stake in OpenAI to fund its AI push link

SoftBank plans to convert part of its Osaka factory into a battery production line for AI data centres link

South Korea

SK Hynix announced another set of impressive record financials for Q1, with operating profit surging five fold to Won37.6T ($25.4B) and revenue nearly tripling link (we went into more detail in the Daily last week)

SK Hynix plans to invest about $13B in a new South Korea plant to meet AI memory demand link

SK Hynix bonuses tied to the AI boom were set to rise towards $900,000, highlighting inequality concerns in South Korea’s chip sector link

SK Hynix reported a record quarter, with operating profit surging fivefold to Won37.6T ($25.4B) and revenue nearly tripling to Won52.6T link

Samsung workers rallied at its Pyeongtaek chip complex to demand higher bonuses and threatened to strike link

A South Korean court jailed a former Samsung researcher for seven years for passing semiconductor technology to China link

South Korea told US lawmakers it would not single out American tech firms or impose unnecessary regulatory barriers link

Coupang stands accused of squeezing growth from small merchants in South Korea as regulators and politicians debated how to rein in the platform link

North Korea

North Korea-linked hackers are thought to be the culprit behind a near-$300M cryptocurrency heist from Kelp DAO in a breach tied to cross-chain infrastructure provider LayerZero link

North Korean hackers are also thought to have stolen up to $12M in cryptocurrency by targeting web developers’ personal devices link

Hong Kong

Victory Giant, a supplier of printed circuit boards for companies like Nvidia, raised $2.6B in Hong Kong’s largest IPO of the year—its share price rose nearly 60% on the first day of trading link

AI video startup PixVerse, backed by Alibaba and others, is reportedly weighing a Hong Kong IPO as early as this year link

Rest of Asia

Sri Lanka is investigating a Finance Ministry cyber breach that allowed hackers to steal about $2.5M link

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SK Hynix breaks more financial records as AI boom pushes valuation close to $600B

South Korea’s memory chip companies are seeing crazy growth thanks to the AI boom and that continued yesterday when SK Hynix announced yet another record financial report.

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%.

What makes this all the more remarkable is that the first quarter of the year is typically lower in demand. That was in a world before AI.

Suddenly, SK Hynix and close rival Samsung are integral to the tech industry, as we wrote back in February when it announced record annual financial results which included a $29.6 billion profit in 2025:

A large part of that was down to its high bandwidth memory (HBM) business that’s used in AI chips from Nvidia and others. SK Hynix has a dominant 61% share of that market, and its sales more than doubled in 2025.

These are quarter-on-quarter numbers!

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.

Right now, the company has a net cash position of $25.9 billion which will not just go towards developing new memory products, but massively increasing its capacity to ensure AI services can simply continue to run. SK Hynix will spend $13 billion on a new plant in Korea specialising in advanced packaging, an essential part of the process for making products like HBM chips.

SK Hynix shares are up 80% this year to date, with the company’s market cap currently sitting around $586 billion. Samsung is up over 70% during the same period. The electronics giant also announced record Q1 financials when it published its guidance earlier this month, more details will come with its full earnings.

The two companies currently make up more than 40% of the value on KOSPI, South Korea’s closest equivalent to the S&P 500.

Tencent revamps its flagship AI model with ex-OpenAI researcher leading full rebuild

Tencent last December hired former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu as chief AI scientist to lead development of its Hunyuan LLM. That change is showing its first results after the Chinese tech giant released its newest flagship model, Hy3, in preview.

The new model takes a very different approach, as you’d expect with Shunyu’s arrival. The model was rebuilt entirely in February with new pre-training and reinforcement learning infrastructure to develop a strong focus on reasoning, coding, agentic performance and following instructions, the team wrote in a release paper.

At the same time, Hunyuan has adopted the familiar Chinese AI style with a move to a smaller and supposedly more powerful model. MiniMax, Zhipu and likely even DeepSeek are pushing to add more power to their models to compete with US peers having already built a reputation for doing more with less. But Tencent was arguably behind in that race so there’s some logic to rebuilding the foundations.

The early benchmark seems promising, comparing Hy3 favourably against Chinese rivals but just behind ChatGPT and Gemini. But the real test is always actual usage, and Chinese models typically fall short of their promises, from my experience at least. (Notably there’s no benchmarking of Claude, which is interesting given Anthropic accused Chinese AI firms of plagiarism.)

It seems likely Tencent has retooled Hunyuan so it can roll it out inside its services. It has done a fair amount with OpenClaw, including launching an English version of its QClaw, which may indicate a gap in its own tech.

Alibaba, meanwhile, just started offering its flagship AI to third parties, starting with China Eastern Airlines. Tencent will feel it is behind.

In other interesting news you won’t want to miss:

Not Asia specific, but a new iPhone launched with technology designed to verify that images were taken on the device, a response to the growth of AI-generated content [Succinct]

Chinese AI companies all now compare themselves to Anthropic and Claude, not OpenAI and ChatGPT [Recode China AI]

AI and data sovereignty is poised to become a big deal in Asia, and along those lines Taiwan is developing its own LLM models for its financial sector [Bloomberg]

Southeast Asia’s data centres are major investment focuses right now with Bain Capital reportedly looking to offload at least 40% in Singapore-based Bridge Data Centres (BDC) at a valuation of $5B [Reuters]

Sri Lanka is investigating how hackers broke into its finance ministry’s computer systems and stole $2.5M [BBC]

India’s mobile app market revenue grew 33% in Q1 2026 but most of the money is for foreign companies [TechCrunch]

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Tencent wants to give everyone access to OpenClaw

Would you trust a Chinese company with your data? Tencent is betting international users will after it launched its AI agent, which is based on OpenClaw, for users outside of China.

The Chinese version of QClaw, as it is called, has already racked up more than one million users within two weeks of launching.

The English version runs on Mac or Windows devices, but to get access you need to complete a form on the website and then hope you are one of the selected 20,000 ‘founding’ members.

Tencent said the international version was built in five days with OpenClaw doing 99% of the code. That’s completely believable if you’ve used OpenClaw. The bot’s ability to develop and refine itself is one of the most interesting features, but the code and processes need supervision over time.

Tencent says QClaw includes a built-in “AI Security Gateway” and that permissions or the program itself can be shut down via settings. On data, it says that “some input and output data may be temporarily stored on our servers for up to 24 hours” but it claims local files are not permanently uploaded or retained.

That makes sense, too, but it’s not advisable. OpenClaw and other agent platforms are best installed on a spare computer or a VPS rather than your main device just in case things go wrong since this is very new technology that’s evolving.

OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger gave the product an endorsement for working directly with his team, suggesting it is a good option for those who aren’t comfortable with using the terminal application that’s typically favoured by coders.

The project is interesting, but even the most ardent OpenClaw fans I know have moved to Claude after Anthropic prevented use of its subscription within OpenClaw. Claude has built most of the core pieces that make OpenClaw attractive and that without any need for technical knowledge or bugs. That makes it easy for tech people and those less experienced.

Personally, I still use OpenClaw and I would recommend anyone curious to dabble. Using the terminal isn’t that hard. I made this short guide that’s helped dozens of people hop on the OpenClaw wagon.

Still, this is an interesting move from Tencent. Over the years, it has tried to make products that can extend its reach outside of China but it’s not come close to replicating WeChat, with its billion-plus user base and ecosystem of mini apps. We might see the company put significant focus on QClaw since messaging on its website suggests it plans to charge for the service in the future.

Alibaba and Tencent in place to invest in DeepSeek’s first external funding round

Elsewhere in China AI news, there’s more colour of DeepSeek’s rumoured new round. The Information reports that Tencent and Alibaba are in talks to do a deal at a valuation of around $20 billion. The startup, however, is reportedly not planning to sell more than 3% of its shares.

These details make sense given DeepSeek’s background and the nature of China’s AI investment landscape.

DeepSeek was spun out of Hangzhou-based hedge fund High-Flyer so this would be its first external fundraise. The startup has self-funded to date, specialising in doing more with limited resources as we’ve written before, so any investors it welcomes would need to provide more than just capital, which it already has access to. Connections, distribution, talent and other areas may be far more valuable to its development.

As for said investors, Tencent and Alibaba have backed China’s top emerging AI companies for years including Kimi, MiniMax and Zhipu. Both stack up as value-add investors and no doubt they’ll be keen to own a slice of DeepSeek, even if it isn’t a huge one. Given what has happened with Manus, endorsement from China’s top two tech companies may also help DeepSeek as it navigates being a Chinese company offering a global product.

In other interesting news you won’t want to miss:

No journalist knows supply chains quite like Tim Culpan, so his reflections of Tim Cook’s time as Apple CEO is uniquely insightful and worth your time [Culpium]

A former Samsung research got a seven year jail sentence for leaking semiconductor technology ‌to a Chinese company [Reuters]

Apple launched Tap to Pay in Malaysia, which is only the second market for product in Southeast Asia behind Singapore, of course [Apple]

Memory maker SK Hynix is surging on the AI boom, surpassing Samsung as Korea’s most valuable company, and now it will invest $13B to develop a new plant in order to meet growing demand [Reuters]

Yesterday we had robots smashing human half marathon records, today a robot from Sony has beaten elite level table tennis players, but it wasn’t a clear sweep… yet [Reuters]

That’s right. This email is coming today (Wednesday) as we look to make ATR more useful and insightful to our readers. We will send you 2-3 of the most important items from Asia Tech from the previous day, and a list of other news you’ll want to know.

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Old money and new money are coming together in Southeast Asia

I’m here at Money2020 Asia in Bangkok where agents, payments and “web 2.5” are the agenda. This event felt vibrant when it was in Singapore in pre-Covid times, but the Bangkok version feels a little quieter with some founders in Singapore skipping it altogether.

The core themes look to be around financial connectivity. There’s lots of chatter about cross border payments, which has become a major area for innovation across Southeast Asia. That’s thanks to national QR payment systems gaining strong adoption and national systems themselves connecting. Payment infrastructure sounds boring, but making things easy takes an orchestra and a lot of plumbing behind the scenes.

Digital assets are also bleeding into traditional investment and finance. That’s not new per se, I wrote about this last year, but it’s striking how many crypto companies want to offer investment products that mirror those of a bank and banks are dabbling in digital assets themselves. Stablecoins are a great example of this.

Payment provider Nium, one of the few companies to expand globally from Southeast Asia, linked up with Coinbase to enable stablecoin money transfers worldwide. More locally in the Philippines, crypto exchange Coins.ph now lets its users spend stablecoins through the national QR payment system. Added to that, somehow I missed Thailand’s Kasikorn Bank and Grab coming together two weeks ago to announce a blockchain-based system to let Thai customers pay with Grab in Singapore.

No tech event would be complete without AI, and in payments that focuses around its use in areas like money laundering and fraud detection and, of course, agents. The concept of automating payments on your behalf feels like a huge area for development, albeit that crypto companies are running with this ball for now.

A number of fintechs at the event are talking up their potential to build guides and guardrails for agentic payments, though. Singapore-based MetaComp, for example, launched a framework that will govern how AI agents operate in the regulated financial services space. We can usually turn to crypto for a sign of the future and Singapore’s Cobo took things further with the launch of a crypto wallet specifically for agents.

We have a number of interviews from the event, so stay tuned for more.

Razorpay reportedly set for IPO filing at apparent $5-6B valuation

India’s IPO pipeline is about to get a major boost with reports that Razorpay, the fintech valued at $7.5 billion four years ago that’s akin to a ‘Stripe For India’, will file to go public in the coming few weeks.

The business may take a valuation haircut, with Economic Times speculating a possible $5-6 billion tag, but a raise of $600-$700 million would be a massive boost to the country’s IPO pipeline.

Last year, India was flushed with IPOs as listings from Groww, Meesho and Pine Labs earned investors like Sequoia billions of dollars in returns. In 2026, however, the mood has fallen. PhonePe paused its plan to go public last month citing volatile markets and geopolitical concerns, but it was widely reported that the company struggled to land the $15 billion valuation it had targeted following an investor roadshow.

A big blockbuster listing is exactly what can restore positive sentiment and kick start listings from other companies. To state the obvious, that’s important as investors see returns and those exits give others the confidence to do more deals, all of which is good for startups that want to grow. No exits or returns makes that a lot harder, as anyone in Southeast Asia can readily testify.

There’s not a tonne of information on the Razorpay prospectus right now, which makes sense as it hasn’t been filed, but we know it is coming. The company completed its ‘reverse flip’ aka redomiciling its business to India nearly one year ago, therein fulfilling a key requirement for a domestic IPO.

In other interesting news you won’t want to miss:

A robot from Honor, the smartphone brand spun out of Huawei, ‘won’ a Beijing half-marathon and smashed the (human) world record in the process. [SCMP]

ByteDance’s net profit dropped by 70% in 2025 due to massive spending on AI, and in spite of serious revenue growth from TikTok Shop. [Yicai Global]

Moonshot, one of China’s prominent AI companies, released a highly-rated new AI model that might compete with its US peers when it comes to coding. It is also open source. [Kimi]

Google expanded access to its Gemini in Chrome feature, which brings its AI into your browser, in Asia with launches in Australia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Vietnam. [TechCrunch]

Tencent jumped into the Kazakhstan market after it bought a 3.2% stake in fintech and e-commerce business Kaspi.kz for just over $500 million. [Tech In Asia]

Welcome back—it’s a tough time to be a startup in Indonesia. The country was central to Southeast Asia’s startup boom, attracting a huge share of the $73 billion invested in the region between 2019 and 2023. Now, sentiment is being hit by two very different trials involving prominent figures.

Gibran Huzaifah, CEO and co-founder of eFishery, is facing a potential 10-year sentence for fraudulently inflating his company’s revenues to mislead investors.

Nadiem Makarim, Indonesia’s best-known startup founder after building Gojek, is now on trial over alleged corruption linked to his time as a government minister. A decision is expected next month.

Huzaifah last year admitted to fabricating revenue numbers for eFishery, which reached a valuation of over $1 billion and counted SoftBank and Temasek as investors. Prosecutors at a court in Bandung last week said eFishery’s co-founders were responsible for more than $4 million in apparent losses in the criminal case. Overall, investors are estimated to have lost about $300 million.

In contrast, Makarim has denied corruption charges linked to the procurement of Chromebook-based laptops during his time as education minister between 2020 and 2022. His legal team took his defence to LinkedIn, publishing details of the procurement process and arguing that the programme was subject to oversight and audit. Makarim also apologised for the way he dealt with officials at the time, suggesting his direct manner may have created enemies.

One case looks like clear startup fraud, the other may be political. Nevertheless, the damage to Indonesia’s startup narrative is real.

Huzaifah claimed he fudged the numbers because other founders were doing it. TaniHub, another once prominent startup, was found to have doctored its numbers. When I was a reporter, there were often rumours of startups across the region ‘gaming’ numbers through tactics like liberally calculating ARR (annual recurring revenue).

If Makarim has been targeted, what does that say about startups or individuals that challenge the status quo without bending the rules?

The flashier years are not coming back soon. Any recovery is more likely to come from resilient startups building quietly and showing real traction. Baskit, a startup that’s digitising offline networks in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, for example, just announced a $4.4 million Series A after being profitable for the last 18 months.

It is a long road back, but Indonesia is still Indonesia and many of the problems startups set out to solve have not gone away. Digitisation, connectivity and banking, especially outside major cities, remain weak spots that incumbents are not well placed, or motivated, to fix. Startups can still play a key role.

Asia Tech Review (well, Jon) will be at Money2020 in Bangkok this week, drop us a line if you’re also there.

Have a great rest of the week,

Jon

China could unravel Meta-Manus as deal becomes national security issue

Meta’s $2.5 billion acquisition of Manus looked smart in December. It bought an ambitious startup whose founders had already moved from China to Singapore to build with more freedom. Now, it looks like an evolving nightmare.

First, Manus’ two co-founders were barred from leaving China, though it isn’t clear why they were back there. Now the deal has become the subject of a top-level national security probe that could force it to unwind, the Financial Times reports:

Chinese regulators have since mobilised across multiple agencies to review the transaction, drawing in bodies including the National Development and Reform Commission, the commerce ministry and China’s antitrust watchdog, according to people familiar with the matter.

Officials are examining the deal using a range of tools, from export control rules to foreign investment and competition laws, the people said.

The Manus co-founders considered leaving Meta to ease pressure, the FT reported. If tough retaliation forced the deal to be undone, Manus’ future would hang in the balance.

It is easy to see how that could become a warning to other founders and dealmakers. At the same time, a heavy-handed approach could scare local founders away from China, a situation that’s obviously not in Beijing’s best interests. The FT reports that officials are divided on how to respond, which should worry all involved.

DeepSeek reportedly plans first fundraise at $10B valuation

There’s been speculation for some time that DeepSeek is opening to raising external funding for the first time. Now, The Information reports that it is in talks to bring in $300 million at a valuation of over $10 billion.

Reuters reported that DeepSeek rejected advances from Chinese investors when it first emerged from under the radar. It is unclear if US funds would be open to an investment given the chaos around Manus.

Yet DeepSeek needs access to top technology (read: US technology) to ensure its services are competitive against the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and others. It will need to develop (or disclose) an overseas strategy to use Nvidia and other tech that’s blacklisted in China.

The Information has a strong track record on China and funding scoops, but time will tell whether a deal is actually completed.

China

The market regulator fined seven major ecommerce and food delivery platforms more than $525M (3.6B CNY) for failing to verify food vendor licences and allowing ghost kitchens to operate link

Chinese chipmaker YMTC planned two new fabrication plants that would lift capacity to 500,000 wafers a month once all three sites are online link

RedNote, the TikTok-like app that briefly went viral in the West last year, is now trying to grow its social media and ecommerce business in the US through hiring, university events and a shopping portal for American consumers link

Amazon opened its first smart warehouse in Shenzhen, reportedly cutting costs for Chinese sellers by up to 45% and streamlining exports to the US link

ByteDance rolled out its Seedance 2.0 video model to enterprise users in more than 100 countries, but crucially that excludes the US where Hollywood threatened legal action link

Alibaba launched Happy Oyster, an AI world model that can generate 3D environments and real-world simulations for games, film and video link

A Crunchbase report found that startup funding in Asia rose to $27.4B in Q1 2026, up 20% from the previous quarter and nearly double from a year earlier thanks mostly to a rebound in China link

A Chinese deep-sea mission tested a device capable of cutting submarine cables at depths of 3,500 metres link

China has sharply increased chipmaking equipment imports from Malaysia and Singapore in 2025 as shipments from the US fell to an eight-year low link

China ordered safety checks on smart vehicle road tests after a robotaxi incident link

Hesai unveiled a colour-detecting lidar system aimed at improving perception for autonomous vehicles ahead of mass production later this year link

Airwallex is entering the in-person payments space as it expands its challenge to Stripe, Square and Adyen link

A US bill to tighten chipmaking equipment curbs on China was scaled back but still proposed a nationwide restriction on ASML’s DUV immersion machines link

Alibaba open-sourced Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, a mixture-of-experts model aimed at stronger coding performance with far fewer active parameters link

Competition for AI talent in China is intensifying as major tech companies poach from rivals and recruit researchers from overseas hubs such as Silicon Valley link

India

Ola has been a prominent India startup developing local AI products but its ambitions appear to have stalled after Kruti, the assistant developed by its Krutrim sibling company, disappeared from app stores and the development of Krutrim 3 was reportedly paused according to sources link

India has now officially confirmed that it dropped a proposal to require smartphone makers including Apple and Samsung to pre-install the Aadhaar app link

More than 2,000 attendees turned up to Y Combinator’s first ‘startup school’ event on Indian soil link

Google is bringing Gemini’s Personal Intelligence feature to India, letting users connect services such as Gmail and Google Photos to get personalised answers link

JioHotstar expanded its Warner Bros Discovery partnership to bring HBO Max to India as an add-on starting at $0.53 a month link

Tata Group injected $160M into Tata Electronics as it expanded its push into iPhone manufacturing, including the recently acquired Pegatron India business link

Vibe-coding startup Emergent launched Wingman, a messaging-first autonomous AI agent that looks a lot like a wrapper on top of OpenClaw link

IndiGo invested $1M in Bengaluru electric flying taxi startup Sarla Aviation via its IndiGo Ventures fund link

Computer science graduates from India are not ready for the AI era, according to a Bloomberg report which says companies such as Infosys have been pushed instead to retrain new hires on modern tools link

India is said to be keen to access the US State Department’s new $250M Pax Silica seed fund designed to secure global supply chains for artificial intelligence, semiconductors and critical minerals link

Top fintechs in India are pushing Anthropic for early access to its Mythos AI model amid concerns it could trigger a new wave of cyberattacks link

Flipkart is preparing to sell movie and concert tickets and is also piloting a food delivery service link

Brand analytics platform GobbleCube raised $15M in funding led by Susquehanna Venture Capital link

Southeast Asia

The FBI and Indonesian authorities disrupted W3LL, a phishing kit that let hackers build fake login sites for as little as $500 link

A Tracxn report found that Southeast Asian startups raised $2.8B in Q1 2026, up 146% from the previous quarter, as late-stage deals drove a rebound link

Profile of Hyperliquid, the Singapore-based crypto trading platform that has distributed billions of dollars in tokens and became one of the world’s most profitable startups per employee link

Malaysia plans to tighten environmental laws to curb illegal e-waste imports and avoid becoming a dumping ground for global electronic waste link

The Trump administration struck a deal with the Philippines to build a US-run AI-powered industrial hub on the island of Luzon that will be focused on critical minerals link

Southeast Asia’s platform ecommerce market reached $157.6B in 2025 in a new report from Momentum Works link

Taiwan

TSMC posted a record first-quarter profit that beat forecasts as AI chip demand drove a 58% jump in earnings link

Furthermore, TSMC said revenue should grow by more than 30% in 2026 as it expands capacity for AI and high-performance computing demand link

Japan

SoftBank, NEC, Honda and Sony came together to build large-scale AI models for Japan, the joint venture is expected to receive government backing link

SoftBank is widening lender participation in its $40B loan for its OpenAI investment as the deal enters a soft-launch phase link

Japan will grant Sony up to $390M in subsidies to expand semiconductor output for smartphone and vehicle chips link

South Korea

Korean AI chip startup DeepX is reportedly preparing a domestic IPO with plans to list in the US later link

South Korea became ASML’s biggest market in the first quarter as memory chipmakers ramped up tool purchases to tackle AI-driven shortages link

A global shortage of memory chips is expected to last until at least 2027 as manufacturers expand DRAM output too slowly to meet demand link

North Korea

Two New Jersey men were sentenced to more than 7 years in prison for helping North Koreans secure IT jobs at more than 100 US companies link

Hong Kong

Manycore Tech, which develops 3D design, simulation and modeling tools, raised $160M in a Hong Kong IPO as it looks to focus on mapping ‘physical AI’ link

Chinese AI agent startup StepFun is dismantling its offshore red-chip structure ahead of a planned Hong Kong IPO as Beijing tightens oversight of overseas listing mechanisms used by domestic tech firms link

Good morning from Seoul, where I am for this week, but let us first focus on Southeast Asia where Grab continued its push to be seen as a tech company with the launch of more than a dozen new services and features.

The big theme was Grab turning its app into an “everyday guide” using AI to reduce manual tasks for consumers, drivers, and merchants.

The new features, 13 in total, are all ‘AI-powered’ and they range from group rides and consumer maps to personalised travel recommendations, a virtual store manager and AI assistant for drivers.

The features themselves may not all be hugely compelling but Grab pushed hard on its tech credentials. Not only do they cater to its range of users, consumers, drivers and business owners, but visually they were announced at GrabX, the company’s own tech event held in Jakarta, the heart of the key Indonesian market.

Grab has always made Indonesia a key focus, given the market used to be owned almost entirely by key rival Gojek. I happened to be in Jakarta last week, not for the show I might add, and I saw a fairly equal distribution of drivers wearing both uniforms on the city’s busy roads.

While Grab has driven its business to a decent financial destination, with annual profitability banked for the first time and plenty of cash for investments, it hasn’t convinced the market of its tech edge. When it went public in 2021, that edge was going to be fintech in the form of lending of payments.

Now it is pushing hard on AI, which has been investor catnip, and its Indonesia claim. But last week’s announcements are more of a nudge than an iPhone launch-level news event. I’m more interested in what deals Grab does as it continues its M&A spree.

Chinese defence information stolen in massive data centre hack

An alarming report suggests a hacker breached a major state-linked data centre in China and made off with a trove of sensitive defence data in what may be one of the country’s largest cyber attacks ever.

The alleged attack on the National Supercomputing Centre in Tianjin, which handles data for over 6,000 clients, is said to have exposed more than 10 petabytes, that’s the equivalent to roughly 2 billion photographs or over one million hours of HD video. The attacker is said to be actively selling the information online, and it reportedly includes missile schematics, weapons testing, aerospace simulations and other technical files.

The attacker reportedly claimed they got in through a compromised VPN domain. Once inside, they allegedly used a botnet to pull data out.

Data has become a national commodity in today’s world, and that’s only going to increase given the dramatic rise in new data centres as usage of AI jumps. To state the obvious: Storing data securely will be essential for governments if they are to tap into the benefits of AI across their economies. Few are diving into AI more than China.

Quick commerce drives India’s e-commerce growth: Google and Deloitte

A report from Google and Deloitte claims India’s digital commerce market is projected to grow to $250 billion by 2030 from $90 billion right now.

The key forecasts also include:

• The growth is being driven by quick commerce, Gen Z and AI-led shopping

• The report says 220 million Gen Z consumers will account for 45% of online spend

• It also expects 150 million new shoppers to enter the digital economy

Quick commerce is a major focus as you’d expect::

• Quick commerce is expected to grow 6x to $50 billion by 2030, from $7-8 billion in 2025

• The number of quick commerce shoppers is forecast to rise from 32-34 million in 2025 to 65-70 million by 2030

• Growth is coming from tier-2 cities and non-food categories, with non-food already makes up about 45% of total spend

In related news, Amazon is putting more focus on its 10-minute Now service which will expand to as many as 15 cities by the middle of this year, according to a report. In response, it is winding down its Fresh service in 10-15 cities. Meanwhile, Flipkart and Amazon are said to be ramping up dark stores and discounting in an effort to squeeze the rising (and much younger) quick commerce players.

Reports are all well and good, but these are forecasts and there’s often little accountability on the numbers which are often cited widely as if they’re factual. But they aren’t and my former colleague Manish Singh has a great analysis of how such reports often fall short in accuracy—Bain being a notable example, including being wrong on overall e-commerce predictions by a factor of nearly 50%.

A good reminder that future-gazing is mostly errors.

China

China has tightened drone rules with the introduction of real-name registration, urban flight permits and real-time data sharing with authorities link

Bitchat, decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app developed by Jack Dorsey, was removed from Apple’s China App Store for allegedly breaching internet service rules link

Chinese micro-drama producers are adapting the hit domestic format for mobile-first audiences in the US link

OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have started coordinating to stop Chinese rivals distilling outputs from their most advanced AI models—Anthropic spoke out in March about competitors in China plagiarising its tech link

TikTok plans to invest €1B ($1.16B) in a second Finnish data centre as it moves European user data storage to the continent—its first centre is the country is due to come online later this year link

Zhipu raised prices for its top AI model by at least 8% as it pushes to monetise its heavy investment in AI like others link

Alibaba had a busy week:

• It created a top-level technology committee led by CEO Eddie Wu to sharpen its AI push and monetisation plans link

• Meanwhile: Alibaba Cloud CTO Jingren Zhou will step down to focus on AI models as chief AI architect link

• Alibaba Cloud accounted for more than half of global open-source AI model downloads by March, with nearly 1B cumulative downloads link

• On the infrastructure side: Alibaba and Huawei are deploying massive computing clusters as China steps up its push for home-grown AI infrastructure link

• And the e-commerce firm and China Telecom are launching a southern China data centre using 10,000 Zhenwu chips to train and run large AI models link

• Finally, Alibaba quietly released its HappyHorse-1.0 AI video model, which topped benchmark leaderboards and stirred buzz online taking some attention from ByteDance’s Seedance product link

• It is also involved in AI video startup ShengShu Technology, which raised $293M in a round led by Alibaba Cloud link

Unitree will reportedly begin to sell its cheapest humanoid robot internationally via AliExpress this week—the R1 is tipped to retail for 29,900 CNY or around $4,400 link

DeepSeek disclosed it operates a data centre at a location in Inner Mongolia which suggests it may be running clusters of restricted Nvidia Blackwell chips link

China is drawing AI talent back from Silicon Valley with higher pay, stronger career prospects and a tougher climate in the US link

Super Micro launched an independent probe weeks after three people linked to the company were indicted on US export-control charges link

Sharetronic Data Technology fell 20% after the US charges against Super Micro’s co-founder heightened scrutiny of its links to banned Nvidia chip servers link

India

Digital lender KreditBee is India’s newest unicorn after it raised $280M at a $1.5B valuation link

India is replacing China-made highway toll cameras with US, German and Taiwanese systems on security grounds link

Y Combinator hired Harshita Arora, a recipient of India’s Bal Shakti Puraskar academic award and formerly a YC batch startup founder, as its youngest general partner ever—however she will be based in California link

Wipro agreed to buy Olam Group’s IT services arm for $375M to expand its enterprise tech and cybersecurity business link

Manav Robotics, which focuses on industrial customer needs and is founded by former Ola employees, is said to be in talks to raise $15M to $20M from Blume and Qualcomm Ventures link

SatLeo Labs raised $2.2M from Unicorn India Ventures to build a multi-spectral Earth observation satellite constellation link

Nava raised $22M to build a full-stack AI cloud infrastructure platform across Asia-Pacific link

Slice, the small finance bank, is in talks to raise $50M to $100M at a valuation below $1B, which would represent a drop from its previous $1.3B valuation link

Atlas raised $6M from Accel and Stellaris to expand its AI-native accounting platform in North America link

Southeast Asia

OKX Ventures and HashKey Capital invested into local crypto entity CAEX to enable it to participate in Vietnam’s pilot program for regulated crypto asset trading—the country is allowing only domestic players to offer trading services, CAEX has now raised the minimum investment sum of $380M from its backers, which also include VPBank and tech company LynkiD link

Bain Capital’s Bridge Data Centres removed cloud provider Megaspeed’s tech from its Malaysian facility after US authorities investigated the company over alleged ties to Nvidia chip smuggling to China link

ESR, which focuses on real estate, secured $850M in additional capital to expand its logistics and data centre business link

Digital Realty, a real estate firm focused on data centres, is planning to invest around $5.5B in Singapore, including more than $3.35B for new data centres link

Samsung plans to invest $4B in a chip packaging plant in northern Vietnam, starting with a $2B outlay link

Hot on the heels of Grab’s first autonomous rides, Pony AI partnered with ComfortDelGro to launch by-invite autonomous rides in Singapore ahead of a planned public rollout link

Vietnamese fintech MoMo, which claims 30M users, is reportedly weighing options including new investors at a valuation above $2B—it last raised funds 5 years ago and u-turned on previous IPO plans link

The Philippines has asked Meta to curb false and panic-inducing content and warned of legal action if it fails to act link

Taiwan

Taiwan’s security agency said China is targeting the island’s chip technology and talent to break through international curbs link

TSMC reported first-quarter revenue of $35.6B, up 35%, suggesting AI chip demand held up despite the Middle East war link

Japan

Arm CEO Rene Haas is set to take a wider role across SoftBank’s international operations, overseeing semiconductors and AI link

Japan approved a bill to reclassify cryptocurrencies as financial products, moving towards tighter oversight link

Japan approved an extra $4B in subsidies for Rapidus to speed up its advanced AI chip push link

South Korea

Fintech startup Toss is reportedly considering launching its own blockchain network and token, including a possible Layer 1 mainnet and Layer 2 network link

Samsung forecast first-quarter operating profit of $37.9B, beating estimates as AI chip demand drove an eightfold jump from a year earlier link

South Korea posted a record $23.2B current account surplus in February as chip exports surged link

Kia plans to deploy humanoid robots in US factories from 2029 and roll out a hybrid truck and its first software-defined vehicle link

North Korea

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT said a North Korea-linked IT worker network was generating about $1M a month through crypto payments and fraudulent employment schemes link

Drift, which runs a decentralised exchange focused on perpetual futures trading, claimed North Korea-linked hackers were responsible for an exploit that stole $280M following a months-long campaign that include social engineering and others activities link

North Korea-linked hackers briefly hijacked the open-source project Axios after cultivating trust with top developers for weeks link

Hong Kong

Hong Kong granted its first stablecoin issuer licences to HSBC and a Standard Chartered-led joint venture link

AI smart glasses maker Rokid is reportedly preparing for a Hong Kong IPO as early as late April link

Manycore Tech launched its Hong Kong IPO aiming to raise about $130M link

Rest of Asia

Bhutan became known for Bitcoin mining but now it has sold off most of its holdings and reportedly stopped the mining operations altogether link

Kazakhstan’s financial watchdog is pushing insurers and select companies to move client communications to local messaging app Aitu link

Australia’s Firmus Technologies raised $505M at a $5.5B valuation to expand Nvidia-powered AI infrastructure across Asia-Pacific link

Welcome back, Microsoft had a busy week after it announced three investment commitments across Asia.

In Japan, it will invest $10 billion across the next four years to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure in the country. That’s an initiative carried out alongside Sakura Internet and SoftBank, and it also includes a plan to train one million AI engineers.

The US firm said it will keep all data processing within Japan’s borders, thereby providing an answer to concerns around data sovereignty. Although that’s by no means definitive since Microsoft is a US company and not a Japanese one.

In Southeast Asia, Microsoft announced that it will invest $5.5 billion in cloud and AI infrastructure in Singapore until 2029 and in Thailand it pledged $1 billion over the next two years for a similar programme.

Cloud companies have spent the last few years making commitments to build out their computing capabilities across Southeast Asia and other parts of Asia to make their economies ‘AI ready.’ Last October, Google made a similar $1 billion commitment to Thailand, and it previously committed to spend $5 billion in Singapore where it opened a Google DeepMind Research Lab.

These commitments are often ushered in with much fanfare and events with high-level politicians, Thailand’s PM hosted Microsoft’s announcement event. But they leave longer term questions around true data sovereignty and whether these markets can really compete on the development of AI services.

In related news: DayOne, the Singapore-based data centre firm we recently wrote about, announced plans to invest $7 billion to expand in Malaysia and Singapore’s BDx Data Centers secured a $320M loan to expand its data centre campus in Jakarta.

That’s all for this week’s issue—have a great week,

Jon

China’s markets are turning more sceptical about AI

China’s markets are unsure of the value AI can bring. Chinese tech stocks just had their weakest quarterly growth for three years.

The Hang Seng Tech Index, which counts 30 companies including Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi, is down 12% year-on-year and 30% since October. Combined earnings for its members fell by 30% year-on-year in the final quarter of last year.

Investors are divided on whether the huge investments in AI can pay off, and whether Chinese government policy will hinder and help.

Alibaba just reorganised its AI play with a new business unit driven by CEO Eddie Wu that’s focused on monetisation. The departure of key leads within its Qwen division hinted that its previous open source approach might not continue. Tencent, meanwhile, has rolled out OpenClaw-based agents to its WeChat messaging platform, which has over a billion users and services like shopping, food, taxis and payments.

Now we wait to see the impact. One area investors are bullish on is AI companies, two of China’s pioneers are profiting handsomely from going public in Hong Kong in January.

Zhipu, which develops Z.ai, has seen its stock price increase 500% since listing while MiniMax’s shares are up 180% over the same period. No wonder Moonshot, the maker of Kimi, is looking to list in Hong Kong. It opted to stay private, raising $500 million in December. Now it is said to be raising another $1 billion with an IPO before the end of the year.

Still, there are doubts about profitability for all three. That could be where their backers, which include giants like Alibaba and Tencent, may come into play.

CoinDCX founders go after fraudulent websites following impersonation arrest

The founders of India-based crypto exchange CoinDCX spoke publicly for the first time after they were arrested and then released on bail following an alleged case of scamming an individual.

It emerged that the complainant had lost nearly $90,000 to a scam that used a similar name to CoinDCX to defraud unsuspecting victims.

“The fraud at the centre of this complaint was carried out through a fake website by impersonators who have absolutely no connection to our platform, our systems, or CoinDCX. No money moved through CoinDCX. No transaction occurred on our exchange,” wrote CoinDCX co-founder Sumit Gupta on X.

In response, the company said it is now launching a network to fight fraudulent websites, backed by an initial $12 million commitment. “This could happen to any founder,” Gupta said.

China

DeepSeek’s upcoming new model, V4, will reportedly run on Huawei’s latest chips—that’s led to a surge in orders from the likes of Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance which increased Huawei Ascend 950PR prices by 20% link

But DeepSeek’s chatbot suffered a seven-hour outage in China, its biggest since its 2025 debut link

Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.5-Omni, a multimodal AI model that processes audio, video and text in a single system as it continues to push efforts to monetise its AI tech link

Meanwhile, Chinese companies including Alibaba Cloud and Zhipu AI have opted not to open-source their latest AI models to push revenue link

OpenClaw deepened its China push through partnerships with Tencent and ByteDance, which added native QQ integration and more for its agent skills registry link

ByteDance bolstered its controversial video-generation model Seedance 2.0 with “advanced” watermarking and IP protection guardrails following criticism from Hollywood for alleged IP theft when it went viral in February link

Robotics company Unitree, which supplied the dancing robots at the CCTV Spring Festival, filed to raise $610M in a Shanghai IPO—China Talk profiled its unique business which is profitable but may suffer the effects of US-China tensions link

Huawei’s revenues grew at its slowest pace in three years in 2025, as declining cloud sales and weak smartphone growth dented its comeback from US sanctions link

GPU makers Biren Technology and Iluvatar CoreX reported sharp revenue growth in their first post-listing results, they’re both in the red but seeing demand for domestic Nvidia alternatives link

Zhipu AI’s first post-IPO earnings missed expectations, revenue jumped 131.9% but net losses rose by 60% as spending surged link

Shenzhen launched China’s first 10,000-card AI computing cluster powered by Huawei chips, delivering 11,000 petaflops link

Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxi fleet suffered a system failure in Wuhan, with multiple driverless cars stopping mid-journey, stranding passengers and blocking roads link

China detained Li Xiong, a fugitive Cambodian finance tycoon accused of running a global money-laundering network, escalating its crackdown on cross-border scam syndicates link

Chinese GPU and AI chipmakers seized ~41% of China’s AI accelerator server market last year, chipping away at Nvidia’s dominance link

UBTech shares surged after the robotics firm reported 2025 revenue up 53%, sales of its humanoid robot rose 23-fold link

The FBI deemed a recent China-linked cyber intrusion into a sensitive surveillance system a major incident posing significant risks to US national security link

Chinese technology is becoming central to America’s humanoid robots, with companies including Tesla relying on suppliers like Unitree, highlighting Beijing’s growing hold over hardware link

China is rapidly embedding AI into its classrooms, with pilot schools already using it to grade artwork, track students’ facial expressions and flag mental health risks link

Ping An Insurance claims it automated nearly 60% of accident and health claims using AI, with some settled in under a minute, but investors remain sceptical the technology can lift its valuation link

India

India calmed foreign investors by clarifying it won’t apply stringent tax-evasion rules to pre-April 2017 investments, after a Supreme Court ruling ordered Tiger Global to pay taxes on a $1.6B stake sale link

Caller ID app Truecaller announced it hit 500M monthly active users, doubling its base in five years—that includes more than 350M users in India and some 4M paid subscribers link

India barred Chinese surveillance firms Hikvision, Dahua and TP-Link from selling internet-connected CCTV equipment, aligning with US legislation link

The government proposed changes to its IT rules to make government advisories legally binding on Meta, Google and X—non-compliance could strip platforms of safe harbour protections link

Bharti Airtel’s data centre arm Nxtra is raising $1B from Alpha Wave Global and Carlyle at a $3.1B valuation as Indian conglomerates race to build AI infrastructure link

Fidelity sharply marked down the value of its investment in conversational AI startup Gupshup to $3.35M from its original investment of $16.2M in 2021 which came at a $1.4B valuation—the new implied valuation is $280-300M link

Gaming firm Nazara Technologies plans to raise $59M via a preferential warrant issue link

India approved 29 proposals worth $751M under its electronics component manufacturing scheme as it targets expanding the sector to $500B by 2031 link

B2B manufacturing marketplace Zetwerk is reportedly in talks to raise $59M in pre-IPO funding at a $3B valuation link

India’s smartphone exports surged 55% to ~$11B in the first half of the fiscal year, but Middle East tensions are snarling trade routes link

Bengaluru-based trading platform Sahi is reportedly in talks to raise $60-80M from Accel, Bessemer and SIG at a $250M valuation link

Oracle will cut ~10,000 jobs in India as part of a global restructuring that’s affecting ~30,000 employees, with reductions focused on technical roles link

Southeast Asia

GIC is said to be in talks to lead a $500M investment in database startup Supabase at a $10B valuation, doubling its previous round link

PolicyStreet, the Malaysian insurtech startup, raised $21M in the first close of its Series C round led by Cool Japan Fund with Altara Ventures and Gobi Partners link

Cambodian lawmakers unanimously adopted a new law targeting online scam operations with up to life in prison, following a government pledge to shut them down by the end of April link

Malaysia’s digital banks collectively served 2.4M customers with $1.04B in total deposits by end of 2025, according to the central bank’s annual report link

Grab and WeRide launched robotaxi services in Singapore, the first public service of its kind in Southeast Asia link

Circulate Capital, a Singaporean fund, raised $220M in the first close of its second fund to back recycling and circular supply chain ventures across South and Southeast Asia link

Indonesia’s J&T Global Express reported double-digit revenue growth and a profit surge in 2025 as parcel volumes topped 30B for the first time link

China’s pivot to Vietnam is blunting Trump’s tariff strategy, with Vietnam now the top US supplier of laptops and game consoles as firms move final assembly out of China while keeping core production there link

Japan

TCL will buy a 51% stake in Sony’s global home entertainment unit for $472M, taking control of a joint venture including Bravia TVs while Sony retains 49% link

Rapidus chief Atsuyoshi Koike is leading Japan’s effort to re-enter advanced semiconductor manufacturing, with the government-backed company aiming to begin mass production of cutting-edge chips next year link

Japanese firms including Mitsubishi, SMBC and Toyota Ventures backed a $147M Africa-focused fund by Novastar Ventures link

South Korea

AI chip startup Rebellions raised $400M at a $2.34B valuation, led by Mirae Asset and the Korea National Growth Fund, as it targets US expansion ahead of an IPO link

South Korean exports hit an all-time monthly high in March as companies front-loaded semiconductor orders amid Middle East supply chain fears, with chip shipments up 151.4% to $32.83B link

Wrtn is preparing a US launch, it has generated over $8M in monthly revenue from AI storytelling apps with fewer than 500K users link

Hong Kong

Zhongji Innolight, a Chinese optical components supplier to Nvidia, confidentially filed for what could be one of Hong Kong’s largest IPOs this year link

Manycore Tech, a spatial intelligence startup that’s often referred to as one of Hangzhou’s ‘six little dragons,’ is close to a Hong Kong IPO link

Yuanjie Semiconductor shares surged nearly 9X over the past year as the optical chipmaker eyes a Hong Kong listing link

iQiyi, the Baidu-backed streaming company, filed confidentially for a Hong Kong listing link

Rest of Asia

Taiwan is probing 11 Chinese firms for illegally poaching tech talent link

A profile of Pakistan’s crypto regulator Bilal Bin Saqib, who used crypto diplomacy to help Pakistan win over President Trump link

A North Korean-linked hacking group was tied to a supply chain attack on axios, one of the internet’s most widely used software libraries link

Crypto platform Drift confirmed $280M stolen in a hack, with early assumptions pointing to North Korea but that’s not been proven for sure yet link

Grab made its most ambitious M&A deal yet after it announced plans to buy Foodpanda Taiwan from Delivery Hero for $600 million.

This is Grab’s most significant outlay to date and it marks its first move outside of Southeast Asia, where it currently serves eight countries. When Grab got itself profitable last August, we suggested it could use its $6 billion warchest for acquisitions, but we didn’t foresee this level of spending.

The Foodpanda agreement, coupled with a February announcement to buy US fintech Stash for $425 million, means Grab has committed $1 billion in deals in the last two months alone. That’s on top of a major investment spree on autonomous driving tech in Q4 2025.

Now the finances are in order, with a first full year of profit recorded, Grab is clearly looking to expand its core business but with one key criteria: value.

In both cases, it has got deals at a sizable discount.

The Stash sale price was well below the startup’s $1.4 billion valuation one year ago, and likewise Grab is paying less than the $950 million that Uber had agreed when it landed a deal to buy Foodpanda Taiwan. That deal was struck down by regulators exactly a year ago over concerns that Uber, which is still active in Taiwan, would become a monopoly. Grab isn’t likely to have that concern to deal with. (There’s no word on whether it will expand from food to transportation, but it will resume its battle with Uber on food, at least.)

Delivery Hero’s CEO said the Grab deal was the culmination of nine months of negotiations. We’ve long known that Delivery Hero wants out of Asia to focus on other markets, and its Foodpanda Taiwan business is the jewel in its regional crown. We can expect Foodpanda to continue to narrow its Asia presence but closures or, ideally, asset sales.

Grab has got a decent deal in the end. If there was ever any secret that iat is in acquisitive mode, that’s certainly out.

It’s pretty clear it will continue to scour for value-focused deals while it can, and maybe we see it dip its toes into pure AI or more automotive tech. Then there’s that GoTo/Gojek deal…

Have a great week.

And be sure to check us out on LinkedIn, Telegram or WhatsApp for news as it breaks,

Jon

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India’s Sarvam goes after enterprise AI with new $200M funding incoming

It’s been a busy week for Sarvam, India’s home-grown AI company, after it announced plans to develop services for enterprises and potentially government sectors. All the while, it is reportedly raising a huge round that would give it unicorn status.

Chanakya is Sarvam’s upcoming service that’s built with on-premise deployments and air-gapped environments in mind to provide security for customers that need additional safeguards when it comes to using AI.

That could include large companies with safety demands, governments and the military. In this case, using cloud-based AI services poses a risk that IP, processes and other internal data could leak out. Using dedicated ‘enterprise’ AI services doesn’t mitigate that risk so the process is handled on-premise.

With Chanakya, Sarvam plans to offer that high-level service whilst keeping customer data on Indian soil. AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure offer similar services worldwide, but they must comply with US laws including the Cloud Act, which can force them to hand over customer data from any location in the world.

Developing government, military or simply enterprise-grade AI is no easy task, but it is one that could unlock significant opportunities for Sarvam. We’ve said before that “nationalism alone” wouldn’t work for India-made products like WhatsApp rival Arattai, but Sarvam could be a different case.

An injection of funds to fuel this move looks to be incoming. Sarvam is reportedly in talks to raise $200-$250 million from the likes of Nvidia, Accel and HCL Tech in a deal that would value the business at $1.5 billion.

Sarvam launched its inaugural consumer chat AI product in February, and now it partnered with Razorpay to introduce voice-led commerce. That hasn’t taken off in the US, but India has the potential to be a very different market.

China bars Manus co-founders from leaving as Meta deal review continues

China didn’t look like it could do much when Manus, a startup that relocated to Singapore, was acquired by Meta for $2.5 billion in January. But Beijing is not to be underestimated: it emerged last week that Manus co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao have been barred from leaving China whilst the deal is reviewed.

It isn’t clear why the duo were on Chinese soil, it appears ill-advised given the furore around the transaction. But Beijing now has unlikely leverage.

Meta has already started integrating its products with Manus’ tech and agents, so any unwind would be quite unprecedented. Even if it does nothing, a message appears to have been received.

“The path taken by Manus: people will not go down that route anymore,” Wayne Shiong, head of US-based AI fund Argo Venture Partners told CNBC.

That makes sense. Companies in China will need to be more deliberate about their future pathway. Or take steps like carving out their intentional business, such as data centre operator DayOne. But that approach is trickier for companies like Manus which operate and sell globally from inception. That’s bad news for US funds like Benchmark that had worked this angle.

Meanwhile: A top AI conference quickly reversed a policy banning submissions from researchers at US-sanctioned entities after a boycott threat from China’s largest tech body. NeurIPS had introduced the rule citing US law, but said it was issued in error and apologised following uproar after Huawei and others were barred.

China

We wrote that Alibaba is getting serious about monetising AI and last week it launched an AI platform to automate tasks for small e-commerce businesses, including market analysis, design, sourcing and inventory monitoring link

Alibaba also unveiled its XuanTie C950, a 5nm CPU designed to run AI agents that can handle multi-step tasks autonomously link

Huawei’s new 950PR AI chip is gaining traction in China, with ByteDance and Alibaba preparing orders after strong early tests showed better performance and improved compatibility with Nvidia’s CUDA link

DJI sued rival Insta360 for alleged patent infringement ahead of its new drone launch link

The US FCC has banned imports of new foreign-made consumer routers, tightening its crackdown on Chinese electronics over security concerns, though existing devices remain unaffected link

Kuaishou said its AI video-generation model Kling generated $150M in revenue in last year link

Chinese open-source AI models like Qwen and DeepSeek dominated Hugging Face downloads, though Nvidia still controls the underlying infrastructure, according to a new report link

Pony AI and Uber are expanding their robotaxis partnership into European roads with Zagreb, Croatia, the first stop link

Memory chip maker CXM, which is planning a major domestic IPO, more than doubled revenue to $8B in 2025, boosted by a global shortage link

AI chip firm MetaX more than doubled 2025 revenue to $231.5M as the country’s AI boom drives demand for domestic chips, with narrowing losses and a new flagship C600 chip in the pipeline link

Robotera raised about $143M USD in a new funding round at a valuation of over $1.5B USD as it scales humanoid and logistics robot deployment link

SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker, sent chipmaking tools to Iran’s military, US officials claim link

ByteDance is rolling out Dreamina Seedance 2.0, its new audio-video model, on CapCut that lets creators generate and sync content from prompts, images and reference videos link

AI glasses are reportedly catching on in China, powering everything from hands-free shopping to high-tech cheating: early users can rent a pair for about $6 a day to navigate streets, translate conversations and even sit exams link

China is closing the gap in advanced chips, unveiling a high-performance processor based on the open-source RISC-V architecture that it says matches global standards link

Notable earnings:

• Xiaomi sales grew at its slowest in years in sign of poor phone demand link

• PDD, the owner of Temu, has quickened its growth after its US business steadied with Q4 revenue up 12% YoY to around $18B but net profit down 11% YoY to ~$3.56B link

• Meituan said it expects losses to narrow after China curbed the competitive delivery fight link

• AI firm SenseTime said it turned EBITDA positive during the second half of last year, the first time since its listing in 2021 link

• Pony AI delivered its first ever profitable quarter—net income reached $75.5M helping the full-year loss narrow by 72% to $76.8M link

The UK sanctioned Xinbi, a Chinese language crypto marketplace accused of enabling large scale scams and human exploitation link

Austrian authorities have yet to approve JD.com’s bid for Ceconomy, putting the €2.2B deal for Europe’s largest electronics retailer at risk link

India

Reliance Jio Platforms reportedly held talks ‌with 13 marquee foreign investors to sell down 8% of individual stakes in an upcoming Mumbai listing link

Rentomojo, the online furniture rental platform backed by Accel, filed for IPO link

Food delivery startup Swish raised a $38M Series B round valuing the 18-month-old company at $139M and taking total funding to $54M as its 10-minute delivery model gains traction link

AWS is expanding its data centre footprint in India, lining up capacity across Mumbai and Hyderabad link

Apple Pay is facing pricing hurdles ahead of its India launch, as near-zero UPI fees and low card charges undercut its global 15–20 basis point model link

The co-founders of crypto exchange CoinDCX were bailed after being arrested in an impersonation fraud case link

Ultrahuman, the Bengaluru-based smart ring maker, is moving to revive its US business and up its rivalry with Oura after it won approval for its Ring Pro—a previous trade ruling had curbed its imports and cost up to $50M in lost sales link

Accel and Prosus picked six startups from more than 2,000 applicants for their first joint India cohort, backing “off-the-map” ideas in areas like healthcare, climate, space and longevity link

Amazon MX Player launched a microdrama service as vertical video content continues to gain momentum in India link

OpenAI hired JioStar CEO Kiran Mani as its managing director for the Asia Pacific region link

Indian billionaire Gautam Adani is in talks with US giants including Meta, Google and Walmart to partner his fast-expanding data centre business link

Deccan AI, which develops high-accuracy AI systems for enterprises and frontier model labs, raised $25M link

Scimplify, which provides specialty chemical and advanced material manufacturing infrastructure for large companies, is in discussions to raise $30-40M from a consortium of Japanese investors led by Hitachi Ventures link

Fitness startup Cultfit raised $47M from Temasek, its first major funding in two years link

Health insurance platform Plum raised $20M led by Peak XV Partners link

Fusion energy startup Pranos Fusion raised $6.8M in a round co-led by pi Ventures and Ankur Capital link

The Indian government has held multiple consultations as it plans to curb children’s social media use link

Revolut plans to base about 40% of its global workforce in India by end-2026, scaling its global capability centre to 5,500 staff link

Google’s top India counsel reportedly resigned after 16 months in the role link

Southeast Asia

A senior US official accused China’s government on Wednesday of implicitly backing Chinese criminal syndicates running cyber scam compounds across Southeast Asia and of exploiting a crisis that has resulted in billions being stolen from Americans each year link

Thai startup Amity, which claims to buy, build and develop AI services, raised a $100M Series D led by Singapore’s EDBI—founded by Korawad Chearavanont, a 31-year-old from the family behind Thai corporate Charoen Pokphand (CP) Group, Amity said it is planning to go public in 2027 and it claims most of its revenue comes from Europe link

Indonesia’s finance minister hinted that the government may take action in response to the prevalence of low-cost imported goods from China on local e-commerce platforms link

Singapore-based payment infrastructure firm Tazapay raised a $36M Series B extension led by Circle Ventures with new investors including Coinbase Ventures and CMT Digital link

Thailand introduced new guidelines for e-commerce platforms that set out standards on pricing and business conduct to curb unfair trade practices and preventing market dominance link

Indonesia began enforcing a sweeping new rule banning children under 16 from accessing major digital platforms link

Japan

Sony is close to selling a majority stake in its home entertainment business to China’s TCL in a deal valued at $1B link

News app operator SmartNews is reportedly considering an IPO in Tokyo as soon as October at a valuation below the $2B of its last major funding round in 2021 link

Sakana AI launched its first consumer chatbot, Sakana Chat, which is tailored to Japanese language and culture—previously its focus was on enterprise services link

SoftBank secured a $40B bridge loan to fund investments in OpenAI and broader corporate needs, deepening its push into generative AI link

Singapore’s Startale Group raised a $63M Series A round from SBI Group and Sony Innovation Fund to expand its blockchain services to Japan link

Sierra, a San Francisco–based startup building AI-powered customer experience agents, acquired Tokyo-based enterprise AI startup Opera Tech link

South Korea

AI startup Upstage is in talks with AMD to purchase 10,000 of its latest AI accelerators and scale domestic compute capacity link

South Korea’s SK Hynix will spend $7.9B on ASML’s EUV chipmaking tools through 2027 link

At the same time, SK Hynix plans to raise $10B through a US listing that will fund AI infrastructure including a semiconductor cluster in Yongin and expanded memory capacity link

South Korea will invest $166M in AI chip startup Rebellions as it pushes local semiconductor opportunities link

Hong Kong

MiniMax has become one of Hong Kong’s top stocks thanks to its positioning as your workplace ‘bestie’ link

No doubt inspired by MiniMax and Zhipu, Chinese AI tiger Moonshot is in the early stages of considering a Hong Kong IPO to boost its services which include popular LLM Kimi link

Meanwhile DeepRoute.ai is said to be the next autonomous driving company from China to eye a Hong Kong IPO, following listings from WeRide and Pony AI last year link

Rest of Asia

Taiwan will keep its electricity rates unchanged for now to mitigate inflationary pressures from the war in the Middle East link

Three men including a US soldier were jailed for letting North Korean IT workers use their identities to get jobs at US companies link

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, is under fire after investigators found accounts moving $1.7B to entities linked to Iran link

Timing is everything, last week we wrote about three mega IPOs heading to the markets in India and within a day, PhonePe confirmed it has postponed its domestic listing, which had been tipped to raise $1.3 billion.

The payment business said it made the decision based on volatile markets and geopolitical concerns, denying claims that it had seen weak investor interest. But it was widely reported in the media that the company struggled to land the $15 billion valuation it had targeted following an investor roadshow. The target valuation was said to have relaxed to $11 billion, but even that was tough. The Economic Times claimed investor interest was as low as $7 billion.

Certainly, those issues can all be linked. The current issues make public market investments challenging, and that’s multiplied in the case of a new stock headed to the markets to list.

PhonePe “remains committed to a public listing in India,” CEO Sameer Nigam said, but this decision could have a chilling effect on a number of high-profile tech companies that were aspiring to go public this year. Zepto, Oyo, Flipkart, Razorpay, Infra Market and Acko may all be forced to shelve or delay IPO plans such is the negative signal of PhonePe’s postponement.

The company’s success is not guaranteed. My former colleague Manish Singh wrote a detailed analysis of PhonePe’s issue for India Dispatch. In short: it needs to get its large user base to use its platform for more than just transactions if it is to finally stop being a loss-making business. That’s not unlike PayPay, Japan’s dominant payments app, which went public in the US this month at a valuation of over $10 billion.

The question now isn’t whether PhonePe will eventually list, it’s whether India’s public markets are ready to back unprofitable growth stories at Silicon Valley-style valuations. Private investors valued PhonePe at $12 billion during its last raise in 2023 and its original fundraise target was in line with that. But if investors still seek a discount now, then the gap is about what they believe a growth business is worth, not any impact from so-called market conditions.

That’s the long-term concern for Zepto, Razorpay and others that have built strong businesses but remain in growth mode.

Have a great week and thanks for subscribing,

Jon

Chinese tech companies push to monetise their AI smarts

We’ve already written about OpenClaw mania in China, and how it has shifted attention from India’s AI boom, and there are even more updates this week.

Alibaba is making a big push to monetise its AI smarts with the creation of a new AI unit called Alibaba Token Hub. Led by CEO Eddie Wu, the division will consolidate the Qwen model research team, consumer apps, DingTalk and Quark devices with a view to monetisation.

One of those plays looks like an agentic service for enterprises. That’s called Wukong and it coordinates multiple agents to automate tasks including document editing, spreadsheet updates, meeting transcription and research.

The goal is to make $100 billion in additional revenue from cloud and AI within the next five years, a timely goal as China’s tech stocks got whacked hard for failing to turn their AI investments into solid revenue.

With that in mind, Tencent just launched an OpenClaw-based AI bot for WeChat users. It previously integrated the tech for file transfers and other tasks. Baidu, once one of China’s tech elite, is turning its smart speakers into voice-controlled remotes for OpenClaw as it too tries to get in on the act. In another lever pull, Alibaba and Baidu have raised cloud prices by up to 34%.

We touched on the impact of OpenClaw outside of tech companies in last week’s Original story, but Rest Of World has a good explainer on how Chinese cities are offering major perks including free apartments, cheap compute and repurposed data centres to lure AI-powered “one-person companies” building startups without staff or venture backing.

Elsewhere in China AI this week:

• Xiaomi released MiMo-V2-Pro, a 1-trillion parameter foundation model with benchmarks approaching OpenAI and Anthropic at around a sixth of the cost

• Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.5-Max-Preview, its most powerful AI model to date

• Huawei launched the Atlas 350 accelerator card for inference, boasting higher computing power and better performance than Nvidia’s H20

• China’s AI optics boom has driven a ~780% surge in Yuanjie Semiconductor Technology’s shares over the past year, turning founder-CEO Zhang Xingang into a billionaire

Super Micro in crisis after co-founder charged for smuggling AI chips to China

The co-founder of Super Micro, Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, was arrested for allegedly smuggling billions of dollars of AI technology into China by routing them via Southeast Asia.

Liaw, a Super Micro board member who remains a close confidant of CEO Charles Liang, and Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, a Super Micro contractor, are charged with working together to violate the Export Control Reform Act. A third man, Ruei-Tsan “Steven” Chang, is a Taiwan-based sales manager who is currently a fugitive.

Super Micro isn’t named as a defendant in the charge, but its shares fell by 33% on the news. The company retains a $12.3 billion market cap. The company’s VP of Global Trade & Sanctions Compliance, former Intel executive DeAnna Luna, stepped into the role of acting Chief Compliance Officer on Friday.

China

Beijing is reportedly restricting Chinese companies incorporated overseas from seeking initial public offerings in Hong Kong, a move that could slow the city’s IPO boom link

Well, here’s the attempt at dishing out comeuppance: China is moving to penalise people linked to Meta’s $2B acquisition of Manus, with officials summoning executives and seeking to restrict Manus staff from leaving for Singapore link

It was a busy week for Nvidia in China:

• It restarted H200 chip manufacturing for China shipments link

• Chinese authorities approved multiple domestic companies to purchase Nvidia’s H200 AI chips link

• It is also preparing a version of its Groq AI chips for the Chinese market link

• And finally, it added Chinese automakers BYD and Geely to its robotaxi programme link

Unitree Robotics, a Hangzhou-based maker of quadruped and humanoid robots, filed for a Shanghai Star Market IPO to raise $610M link

AI coding company Cursor admits its new coding model was built on top of Moonshot AI’s Kimi link

ByteDance is selling gaming unit Moonton to Saudi-backed Savvy Games Group for $6B to double down on generative AI link

Hua Hong has developed advanced chipmaking technology capable of producing AI chips, with its Huali Microelectronics unit preparing a 7nm process, potentially becoming China’s second chipmaker with such capabilities link

Google is reportedly in talks with China’s Envicool to buy data centre cooling systems link

Tencent posted a 13% revenue rise to $28.3B for Q4 2025, with net income up 14% as it ramps up its agentic AI bet link

Ant Group’s quarterly profit fell 91% as the payments firm boosted spending on AI and healthcare link

Tim Cook praised Chinese developers and he received praise from Premier Li Qiang during a rare visit to China to take part in a company event, just days after Apple lowered the fees it collects from local app developers link

Meanwhile, Apple posted a 23% surge in China smartphone sales in the first nine weeks of 2026, bucking a 4% market decline as Android makers raised prices due to higher memory chip costs link

AI pioneer Zhipu is planning a major reorganisation to consolidate all AI product teams, spanning apps and hardware including AI glasses, into a single unit link

TP-Link CEO Jeffrey Chao applied for an expedited US visa through the Trump Gold Card programme, which requires a $1M payment, while the company faces national security probes link

China is playing a growing role in shaping Africa’s surveillance infrastructure, with 11 countries spending over $2B on AI-powered systems relying heavily on Chinese technology link

Apple supplier Murata Manufacturing will start separating its rare earths supply chain in China over the next three years, in a bid to insulate itself from geopolitical turmoil link

China will reportedly allow 12 more banks to handle digital yuan, adding to the 10 that currently access it now link

How Eric Trump became a key ally to Bitmain, a Chinese crypto company that’s been dogged for years by questions about the security of its mining rigs link

India

Google and Accel selected just five startups from more than 4,000 India-linked applications for their latest AI accelerator, rejecting roughly 70% of pitches as superficial “wrapper” ideas link

Former Peak XV managing directors Shailesh Lakhani and Harshjit Sethi launched early-stage venture fund Ambition Capital with a $250M target, backing seed and Series A startups across consumer, AI, deep tech and fintech link

MakeMyTrip, the Nasdaq-listed online travel booking platform, is considering a domestic listing after restructuring its India business link

Travel startup Scapia is in early talks to raise $50-60M in a round led by General Catalyst link

Visa processing startup Atlys raised $36M led by Susquehanna link

Sumit Gupta and Neeraj Khandelwal, the founders of the Coinbase-backed crypto exchange CoinDCX, were arrested over an apparent allegation of fraud, but the company has claimed it is an impersonation conspiracy link

Over 100 VC firms, including Mela Ventures, Blume and Ideaspring, applied for the government’s Rs 1 lakh crore ($12B) RDI fund to boost deeptech startups link

India’s government reportedly privately urged Apple, Samsung and Google to consider pre-installing its Aadhaar biometric ID app on smartphones, though the proposal faced pushback link

Yotta Data Services, which runs India’s largest Nvidia AI processor cluster, is seeking to raise $500-600M at a $4B valuation ahead of an IPO link

Zetwerk, a contract electronics manufacturer, is said to be gearing up to confidentially file for an IPO within weeks, seeking to raise up to $550M at a $4B valuation link

Southeast Asia

Used-car marketplace Carsome raised more than $30M from investors including Hong Kong Investment Corporation and Gobi Partners. No word on the valuation, but Carsome has raised over $300M to date and was previously valued at $1.7B link

Singapore-based digital payments startup dtcpay raised $10M in a Series A round led by Vertex Ventures link

DayOne Data Centres, which we wrote about in ATR earlier this month, is reportedly seeking to double an existing loan to as much as $7B to expand in Malaysia—that would be Asia’s largest data centre borrowing link

Grab’s 2025 revenue grew 20% year-on-year to a record $3.37B with a $200M profit link

Vietnamese companies are racing to launch the country’s first licensed cryptocurrency exchanges as the government moves to curb trading on overseas platforms link

Bloomberg reports that Indonesia’s sovereign fund Danantara has veered off course in a turbulent first year, transforming into a catch-all vehicle for the president’s socialist agenda link

Recruiters tied to Southeast Asia scam compounds are increasingly hiring “AI face models” to carry out deepfake video calls used in romance and cryptocurrency fraud schemes link

South Korea

Samsung to invest record $73B in R&D ​and facilities in a bid ​to lead the semiconductor industry ⁠in AI link

Samsung is also considering extending memory chip contracts to 3-5 years to stabilise supply and ease shortage concerns as AI-driven demand surges link

A global shortage of memory chips is likely to persist another four to five years, SK Group chairman said link

Reflection AI, a US startup backed by Nvidia, is partnering with Korea’s Shinsegae Group to invest several billion dollars in building a 250-megawatt AI data centre running on tens of thousands of Nvidia chips link

Crypto.com partnered with KG Inicis, South Korea’s largest payment gateway provider, to enable digital assets payments including for tourists who visit the country link

North Korean hackers targeted crypto e-commerce platform Bitrefill, accessing about 18,500 records including emails, crypto addresses and IP metadata link

Hong Kong

Hong Kong is set to launch ClawNet, what it calls the world’s first open-source human-AI agent collaboration network designed to ensure AI agents operate only within permitted actions link

Stablecoin payments startup RedotPay is reportedly seeking up to $150M in fresh funding at a valuation above $4B ahead of a planned US IPO link

Ant Group is close to completing its purchase of Hong Kong-listed brokerage Bright Smart Securities, nearly a year after agreeing the deal and on the verge of clearing mainland China approvals link

Taiwan

Micron Technology plans to build a second manufacturing facility in Taiwan to expand production of advanced DRAM for AI demand link

Foxconn’s Q4 2025 net profit fell 2% to $1.41B despite continued robust demand for AI servers, it missed analyst expectations but revenue did rise by 22% link

The Middle East war is threatening the global semiconductor supply chain by risking shortages of key materials and higher power costs in Taiwan link

Japan

SoftBank plans to build a giant Ohio AI data centre that will be powered by gas plants link

Big tech adoption and a unique internet culture has moved the AI spotlight on China

Nearly 1,000 people lined up outside Tencent’s Shenzhen headquarters, waiting to have OpenClaw installed on their devices. Similar scenes took place in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and beyond. The stock markets shifted by trades made through it. The government was forced to issue two warnings.

OpenClaw mania is alive in China. Over in India, though, the world’s second largest market, there’s barely a peep.

Pictures like this have helped represent the growth of OpenClaw in China, which has beenw written about by media like The New York Times, Wired and more.

Image via Bloomberg

The media is right to cover this, but just a month ago their pens and cameras were trained on New Delhi, as the who is who of the tech world came to town for India’s inaugural AI week, which featured Prime Minister Modi.

OpenAI, Claude, Perplexity and Google are among the AI giants that have spoken publicly of user growth in India, which has become the world’s biggest growth market for the industry. But, one month after that blockbuster AI event, the focus has shifted to the Chinese consumer market.

Why isn’t India going wild about OpenClaw? This week, we look at why that might be.

Big tech adoption

This is the crucial part, major companies have jumped aboard the OpenClaw wagon almost from the moment it launched.

MiniMax, Zhipu and Moonshot AI all added one-click installations for OpenClaw. Alibaba Cloud did the same using its Qwen AI sibling, and even a mobile friendly version, and ByteDance’s cloud computing unit launched its ArkClaw assistant which lives in the browser making it easy to install.

OpenClaw has also come to major products.

Alibaba is using its AI division to develop agents that can handle shopping for users on its e-commerce platforms, which have over 1 billion users. Tencent launched QClaw, a WeChat-integrated version it dubbed ‘lobster special forces’ which handle groceries, taxis, payments and more for the 950 million-plus users of its mini programs.

India simply doesn’t have its own consumer facing tech companies with this kind of influence. Its big firms like Infosys will fear the impact AI and agents will have on their core business.

Chinese LLMs dominate usage of OpenRouter, an aggregator that’s often paired with OpenClaw

Different internet cultures

China, and the Chinese population, is an early adopter of technology trends by nature. Whether cryptocurrencies, live commerce, messaging apps, the Chinese population is often among the first to run with the newest trends.

One long-time China-based journalist friend speculated that this is down to a desire to make money, or explore opportunities to make money. That’s backed up by an anecdote in a Wired article that tells how one user “thought OpenClaw could make him rich, even though he didn’t really understand how the viral AI agent software worked.”

But even then, a key component is missing in India. China’s internet spans PC and smartphone, whereas India is an overwhelmingly mobile landscape.

Mobiles have accounted for as much as 80% of India’s internet traffic, according to Statcounter, with estimates suggesting as many as 41% of users access the web exclusively through a smartphone. OpenClaw is computer-based, which means it’s not just unfamiliar to Indian users, it’s literally inaccessible to nearly half of them.

Culturally, Chinese internet users aren’t phased by convoluted processes and that may also play a part given the complexity of OpenClaw installation. Millions jump through hoops to get a VPN service, or deal with multiple Android app stores, jailbreaking devices or Android fragmentation.

Different kinds of investment

China is placing a major focus on all things AI as it pushes its self sustainability agenda. That spans from the chip companies whose creators power the process, to data centres, LLMs and more.

That’s put AI in the mainstream consciousness, and that helps explain why influencers, traders and others are always seeking an edge or exploring new developments.

China’s AI companies have moved more aggressively on OpenClaw as it can give differentiation and it fits with their innovation model of making technology accessible.

A typical setup that uses Claude or ChatGPT could cost from $20 to $200 or more per month. Chinese AI models are renowned for being cheaper and more efficient which is an appealing combination for OpenClaw users both at home and outside of China.

India has become a mecca for US AI companies, with the Modi administration focused on attracting investment into the country rather than self sufficiency. OpenClaw appears to be seen more as an enthusiast or developer tool rather than a mainstream product by those US firms.

Can India close the gap?

India is seen as a key gateway market for consumer facing AI in a similar way that it has been for social network businesses. The strategies OpenAI and Anthropic have adopted there will likely be tweaked and localised for expansion in other parts of Asia, Latin America and beyond.

Apps have been the key focus given smartphones are so dominant in the market. The first phase was downloads and usage, and now the big test in India is whether this impressive growth can translate to revenue.

OpenClaw could be part of US companies’ growth strategies in India if it can be successfully ported to mobile devices, but even that hasn’t happened in China yet. The more inevitable progression is that Claude, OpenAI and others become more agentic, picking up the functionality that makes OpenClaw popular.

Recent updates to the Claude desktop app, for instance, allow it access to folders, documents and extended memory, all of which takes it from being stuck in an app to more of a virtual assistant.

When this type of functionality lands on mobile, India will be a very key market. It simply wasn’t meant to be for OpenClaw in India.

China is obsessed with OpenClaw, the platform for creating AI agents that can carry out tasks.

Last week’s newsletter had a mention of consumers rushing to use it, but a week is a long time in technology and now we can update this to a craze.

Major companies have released OpenClaw-related products, including:

• Alibaba introduced a mobile app that installs and runs OpenClaw agents

• Baidu launched an instant-install product

• Kimi has a one-click bridge to install OpenClaw in a browser

• Kimi and MiniMax were among the first to offer easy integration

• Apple’s Mac mini, a popular option for installing OpenClaw, is sold out across China

• Tencent Cloud became an official sponsor of the OpenClaw community

But OpenClaw remains a work in progress. This is a platform that’s evolving on a daily basis with patches, security updates and more. There are horror stories of agents deleting files or taking actions that a user didn’t expect or ask for, as one of Meta’s senior safety executives showed in a recent tweet.

So naturally, great adoption comes with great concerns.

Authorities twice warned government agencies and state-owned-enterprises of the security issues behind OpenClaw. Even major banks were warned, such is the frenzy.

Then there were stories of the users who paid to have OpenClaw installed, and then shortly after they paid someone else to remove it such was the damage caused or difficulty to use it.

That’s the issue with OpenClaw. If you’re not able to install it and use it, you shouldn’t touch it.

There’s no doubt that the elements that make OpenClaw appealing (as someone who has used it for a month, I’d say it can be a magical experience) will make their way to mainstream users.

Every consumer internet company wants to offer a PA-style chatbot waiting on you 24-7 and sitting in your messaging app alongside your friends and family. The version OpenClaw gives is not ready for mass consumption, and China is showing us why.

But it won’t be long.

Tencent is already reportedly building an AI agent for WeChat users which could essentially do what OpenClaw does but with more control and less freewheeling. It could help you book taxis, order groceries and other tasks from WeChat’s ecosystem of mini programs, which are used by some 1.4 billion people.

Meta has added AI to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger but OpenClaw has raised the bar and given it a clear target to reach.

China is already AI crazy. Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and its other huge tech companies have all dived into AI, with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange welcoming the first consumer AI IPOs in the world. Its enthusiasm for OpenClaw was obvious, in hindsight.

That’s all for this week.

Drop me a line if you’re also actively experimenting with OpenClaw, always interested to hear how others are finding it.

Best,

Jon

India braces for two major IPOs: Reliance Jio and Flipkart

Three major public listings are on the horizon in India in the form of Jio Platforms, the digital arm of Reliance industries, digital payments giant PhonePe and its former parent company Flipkart, the e-commerce giant owned by Walmart.

Jio is likely the furthest from IPO, but a recent change to lower the proportion of shares that companies must sell when they list appears to have opened the door to the Reliance-owned project and the National Stock Exchange.

Now, companies valued above 5 trillion INR ($57 billion) must sell just 2.5% of their paid-up capital, that’s half the previous requirement. They then have 10 years to ensure public shareholding levels reach 25%, with other targets along the way.

Reliance Jio is estimated to be worth $180 billion, it owns the Jio telco, payment and delivery services and numerous consumer apps and is backed by the likes of Google, Facebook and Silver Lake. That valuation is a tough ask for public markets to take on, so slashing the minimum in half here makes the initial fundraising requirement more feasible. Reports suggest that a listing is planned, but there’s likely some way to go before we see that.

Elsewhere, another mammoth IPO is moving down the pipeline as Flipkart reportedly completed its reverse flip, which means it redomiciled its registered HQ from Singapore to India. Regular readers will know that’s a baseline requirement to go public in India, and a move that takes time and comes at great cost with a raft of new taxes due.

But Flipkart is now asking banks to pitch for its IPO as soon as next month (April), according to Bloomberg. That means we could see it go public within the next 12 months, so says Reuters.

First in line, digital payment leader PhonePe will head to markets. The company was once fully-owned by Flipkart, which remains a shareholder alongside Walmart, so there will likely be lessons learned which can be applied to Flipkart’s own process.

That process will get some assistance from a Flipkart old hand after Nishant Verman, an executive who played a major role in the company’s sale to Walmart in 2018, returned to help with the IPO.

In other IPO news: the head of Cars24’s used-cars vertical in India has quit as the company prepares to go public.

PayPay IPO

Japanese payment firm PayPay successfully listed on the Nasdaq raising $880 million at an initial valuation of $10.7 billion.

PayPay’s share price is up 32% from the IPO, giving it a solid start to life as a public company in the US. It may soon expand and go public in Japan, too. Its listing is the largest from a Japanese company in the US for a decade. Line raised $1.1 billion back in 2016, it feels like just yesterday when I wrote about it for TechCrunch.

Line’s challenge was to squeeze more revenue out of a popular messaging app that wasn’t going to beat WhatsApp in any new market expansion pushes. (It also had a dual US-Japan listing.) Paypay’s situation is a little different. It needs to find a way to get its users to do more than just payments, as we wrote when we previewed the IPO last month.

These days Line is part of a SoftBank-backed private group. That gives it some ownership of PayPay, so we come full circle.

China

The Trump administration is set to collect about $10B from TikTok’s US investors, with backers including Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX paying $2.5B upfront and additional payments until reaching the total link

That deal gives Oracle’s stake in the TikTok US venture a valuation of around $2B link

Meanwhile: Canada will allow TikTok to continue operating, reversing its earlier order requiring the company to close its Canadian division for security reasons link

ByteDance is deploying about 36,000 Nvidia B200 chips in Malaysia through Southeast Asia-based Aolani Cloud, a setup that could cost more than $2.5B as the company powers its global AI push outside China link

ByteDance paused the global rollout of its video generation model Seedance 2.0 amid a series of copyright disputes with major Hollywood studios and streaming platforms. Link

Moonshot AI, the company behind the Kimi AI service, is looking to raise up to $1B in an expanded funding round that could value its business at $18B, more than quadrupling its worth in three months link

Apple will cut App Store commissions in China from 30% to 25% following talks with regulators, small-business rates will drop from 15% to 12% link

Tencent plans to invest several hundred million dollars as a passive financial backer in Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery link

Electric air taxi maker Archer Aviation sued rival Joby Aviation, accusing it of misleading US regulators by concealing ties to Chinese suppliers, including a Shenzhen manufacturing subsidiary that allegedly disguised aerospace imports as items like socks and napkins link

Aridge, a flying car developer backed by Xpeng, has raised nearly $200M ahead of a potential Hong Kong IPO link

Nexperia’s Chinese subsidiary began producing its own chips using 12-inch wafers, a size the Dutch parent cannot produce in Europe, as an ongoing dispute disrupts automakers’ supply chains link

Chatbots are emerging as a powerful force driving China’s stock makets as Gen Z day traders flock to use them for investment advice link

China’s chip exports surged 73% to $43.3B in January-February, far outpacing overall export growth of 22% link

Ultrasound BCI startup Gestala, founded by serial entrepreneur Phoenix Peng, raised $21.6M at a $100-200M valuation just two months after launching, marking the largest early-stage funding in China’s brain-computer interface sector link

Chip firm Cambricon posted its first-ever annual profit of $306M with revenue surging to $911M from $168M thanks to Beijing encouraging Chinese AI developers to adopt locally made chips link

Didi posted a Q4 net loss of $43.5M, narrowing from $188M a year earlier, as international revenue jumped 47% while its core China mobility business grew 9% link

JD.com is expanding into Europe with its Joybuy brand, it aims to differentiate with fast delivery of products ranging from Chinese food and appliances to toys and cosmetics link

Food delivery players in Brazil, a $20B market, claim they have been hit by a “coordinated effort” to seal trade secrets after Chinese players entered the market link

India

Apple increased iPhone production in India by 53% to roughly 55 million units last year, meaning a quarter of its flagship devices are now made there as the company reduces exposure to China tariffs link

India is preparing new smartphone manufacturing incentives that would tie subsidies to export performance and local component use, expected to benefit Apple, Samsung and their suppliers link

Delhi plans to launch a fund exceeding $10.8B to strengthen domestic chipmaking, with the scheme expected within two to three months to subsidise chip design, equipment and supply chain development link

The government eased investment rules for Chinese firms in a signal of a shift in New Delhi’s approach toward its geopolitical rival link

In other government moves, it will subsidise half the cost of a $359M semiconductor back-end plant being built by Kaynes Semicon with Japan’s Mitsui and Aoi Electronics, with operations expected by year-end link

Accel is likely to join Rapido’s ongoing $550-600M funding round led by Prosus, which is expected to value the ride-hailing startup at about $3B link

Former Peak XV managing directors Shailesh Lakhani and Harshjit Sethi launched early-stage venture fund Ambition Capital with a $250M target link

Online learning platform upGrad is set to acquire rival Unacademy in an all stock deal—Unacademy’s valuation has fallen from a $3.5B high to under $500 million since the pandemic link

Rapido has now overtaken rivals Uber and Ola to become larger than the two ride-hailing giants combined, that’s based on active user numbers from app analytics company Sensor Tower link

Y Combinator, which has seen its presence in India dwindle despite blockbuster IPOs at the end of last year, will run a ‘summer school’ event in India to drum up interest in its US programme link

Razorpay is targeting large global brands to expand its cross-border payments business, with its clients already including Replit, Airbnb, Decathlon and McDonald’s link

Snabbit, the on-demand home help start founded by the former chief of staff of Zepto, is reportedly raising $50-$60M at a valuation of $350-$400M led by Mirae Asset and existing backer Bertelsmann—it previously raised $30M at $180M in October link

Ride-hailing Namma Yatri, which is already backed by Google, raised $4.4M in a pre-Series A extension led by Juspay founder Vimal Kumar, with participation from existing investors Blume Ventures, Antler and others link

Climate-tech startup Newtrace raised $6.3M from HDFC Bank, Mitsui Sumitomo, Peak XV and others link

India’s neobank Fi, which raised around $169M but is going through cash issues, is discontinuing its four-year-old banking services, which served over 3.5M users, as it pivots to B2B AI technology link

The CBI arrested Darwin Labs co-founder Ayush Varshney for alleged involvement in the GainBitcoin Ponzi scheme link

Southeast Asia

AI video startup PixVerse raised a $300M Series C investment led by Beijing-based CDH Investments at a valuation above $1B, the company was previously backed by Alibaba and Antler and it has now opened a Singapore office to lead global sales—this strategy may sound familiar to readers link

Kast, a stablecoin payment startup headquartered in Singapore, raised $80M at a $600M valuation—its annual revenue run rate expected to reach $100M this year link

Cortical Labs is building two data centres powered by lab-grown human brain cells in Melbourne and Singapore, an experimental approach that could challenge chips from companies like Nvidia link

GoTo forecast full-year adjusted EBITDA of $190-200M, above analyst estimates link

Bridge Data Centres plans to invest up to $3.9B in AI technology development in Singapore, funding research on advanced power systems, next-generation cooling and energy optimisation link

Hong Kong-based Accelerated Infrastructure Capital plans to build a $2.1B AI data center in Vietnam’s HCMC link

Foxconn will invest an additional $39M in Vietnam, although the strategy behind the cash injection isn’t clear link

Remember Singtel’s Innov8 investment arm? Well it is back with a $250M fund to back growth-stage AI startups across the world link

Empyrean Sky Partner, a Singapore-based investment company, completed a $90M first close for its new global tech fund which is targeting $200M link

A Cambodian scam complex used fake police stations and prisonlike cells designed to convince victims over video chat that they were talking to law enforcement link

Mozark, a Singapore-based digital testing startup that measures performance across devices, networks and locations, raised $40M in a Series B round led by IFC and RMB Capitalworks, with backing from Kalaari Capital link

Singapore-based sports intelligence startup Aiko raised $1.5M in a pre-seed round to expand its real-time data platform for broadcasters link

MetaComp, a Singapore-based digital finance infrastructure provider, said it raised $35M across two Pre-A rounds backed by Alibaba and Spark Venture link

South Korea

Coupang is highlighting its American identity as it faces investigations by at least 10 South Korean agencies over a major data leak link

The Financial Intelligence Unit issued a six-month partial suspension notice to crypto exchange Bithumb for alleged AML violations link

Japan

Japan plans to target $253.5B in domestic semiconductor sales by 2040 to capture rising AI and data centre demand, up from about $32B in 2020 and above the earlier $95B target for 2030 link

US startup Nuro’s self-driving vehicles are now operating on public roads in Tokyo with safety operators, marking the company’s first international deployment link

Uber, Nissan and UK self-driving startup Wayve plan to launch a robotaxi pilot in Tokyo in late 2026, integrating Wayve’s AI driving system into Nissan vehicles on Uber’s platform link

SoftBank’s stock is down ~48% since early November on account of scrutiny into the scale of its OpenAI involvement grows link

Rohm and Toshiba are in talks to integrate their power semiconductor businesses, with options including a joint venture as industry consolidation accelerates amid rising competition from Chinese rivals link

Hong Kong

Victory Giant, a Chinese PCB maker already listed in Shenzhen, is preparing a Hong Kong listing for April that could raise over $2B link

AI-driven drug discovery startup Earendil Labs is considering a Hong Kong listing that could raise up to $500M link

HSBC and Standard Chartered are set to become among the first licensed stablecoin issuers in Hong Kong link

Rest of Asia

TSMC is not the only Taiwanese company that’s surging thanks to the growth of AI, as former Bloomberg reporter and ATR friend Tim Culpan explains in his newsletter link

Uzbekistan fintech Uzum raised $131.5M led by Omani sovereign wealth funds, pushing its valuation to $2.3B, up 53% from seven months ago link

Ride-hailing firm inDrive acquired Pakistan-based quick-commerce startup Krave Mart link

Binance accounts allegedly helped transfer more than $1B to Iran-linked entities, involving a 79-year-old VIP Chinese trader and a suspected Iranian gold smuggler link

North Korea IT workers have generated at least $6.8M for Pyongyang by impersonating workers and securing jobs at more than 300 US firms between 2020 and 2024—and now Europe is the new target link

A seasoned venture capital executive in Thailand has been outed for taking millions of dollars in what turned out to be a cryptocurrency investment scam.

Kampanat Vimolnoht, known as Jom, is a well-known VC in Thailand who helmed Kasikorn Bank’s $100 million Web3 fund. But a report from Scamurai shed light on his dark side. He collected millions of dollars from industry colleagues, friends and others who wanted to invest in promising crypto deals, only to disappear last November with no returns.

Scamurai said more than two dozen individuals were convinced into giving Jom money, some sending multiple six-figure US dollar amounts. All of which has disappeared without trace. Worse still, the individuals who invested through Jom found that, in many cases, he hadn’t done the deals he’d claimed, according to founders of the projects he’d claimed he’d invested in.

The situation seems unlikely given that Jom was one of Thailand’s highest-profile Web3 VCs. He had worked for multiple funds before but was the front man for Web3 at Kasikorn Bank, Thailand’s second-largest bank with $122.3 billion in assets under management.

I interacted with Jom in recent years, first as a journalist and then briefly when I worked at Crypto.com Capital. We didn’t do any deals together, but when he said that had raised his own fund, he was quite keen to take even a small cheque. It seemed like a conflict of interest to raise a personal investment fund whilst being employed to run a $100 million fund for Kasikorn, but not entirely unbelievable given how the Web3 industry has been in the past.

Web3 doesn’t have a great reputation within the broader technology industry and instances like this are usually why. Most investment funds are paperwork heavy, but, in crypto, ‘syndicated’ investments are often made with limited, or even no, agreements in place. You just need a wallet. That allows scammers like Jom to thrive, even though it feels inevitable that they’ll be found out at some point.

It isn’t clear why he took these actions or where he is right now, which will make it tough for those he took money from to come to terms with what happened and get their money back. That’s rough, and I hope he is found and brought to justice.

Thanks for subscribing and have a good week, we will return with another original article on Thursday.

Finally, a quick note on what I do outside the newsletter: I work with ambitious startups to sharpen their story, build clear messaging, and create the channels that drive growth. If that sounds useful, you can learn more at fullydrafted.com

Best,

Jon

Leadership change hint at new focus for Alibaba’s Qwen

Alibaba has turned its business around thanks to a focus on AI that’s hinged on the development of its Qwen LLM and consumer services. Now that business appears in flux following a number of key personnel changes.

Qwen’s head, Lin Junyang, left his role last week. He was joined by post-training head Yu Bowen, with research scientist Hui Binyuan stepping down back in January. Google DeepMind scientist Zhou Hao has been recruited as head of post-training research, and Alibaba has made broader changes.

CEO Eddie Wu will lead a newly-formed task force to accelerate AI model development.

It isn’t clear why these changes are being made, but the excellent Recode China has some theories, which include.

• The reshuffle makes Qwen’s operations less like a startup and more like an AI division inside a corporation

• Zhou Hao arrival, as a research from Silicon Valley, is said to have caused unease among the Qwen leadership

• There was overlap between Qwen and Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab

• Qwen lost its lead over Chinese rivals, with Minimax, Moonshot AI and Zhipu all challenging it on benchmarks

It’s too soon to know how this all shakes out. But, as Recode China points out, it may mean Alibaba prioritises its close source AI efforts over the open source ones because, ultimately, they drive revenue and that is business.

Indonesia and India follow Australia with kids social media ban

Australia banned social media usage for children under 16 last year. Malaysia was among the countries to follow with plans of its own, and now other governments across Asia are following suit.

Indonesia, never a country to be slow in dishing out internet bans, plans to prevent under-16s from opening accounts on ‘high risk’ digital platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram from the end of this month. That’s according to the country’s communication and digital affairs minister.

It isn’t clear how that will work and, ultimately, Indonesia wants tech platforms themselves to introduce the limitations. None of the tech companies contacted by Reuters responded.

Now India is also stepping up, not nationally but instead with the state of Karnataka, which encompasses tech hub Bengaluru, moving first.

“With the objective of preventing ​adverse effects of increasing mobile usage on children, usage of social media will be banned for children under the age of 16,” said Karnataka’s chief minister.

Like Indonesia, the exact details here are not clear and we’ll have to wait for more details.

China

US investors are asking Asian fund managers to create China-free investment vehicles as Washington’s curbs on funding Chinese technology threatens heavy penalties link

US officials are considering capping Chinese companies to 75,000 Nvidia H200 chips each, less than half of what Alibaba and ByteDance wanted link

Nvidia halted production of chips designed for the Chinese market, shifting TSMC manufacturing capacity from H200 chips to next-generation Vera Rubin hardware link

Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent entered talks to buy more memory chips from domestic suppliers as a global shortage tightened supply link

The US Commerce Department proposed rules requiring countries whose companies sought large volumes of Nvidia and AMD chips to commit to investing in the United States link

MiniMax reported 159% revenue growth to $79M in its first results since listing in Hong Kong, though losses widened to $1.87B amid heavier R&D spending link

Huawei debuted its Atlas 950 SuperPoD and TaiShan 950 computing clusters to challenge Nvidia in international markets link

The White House is weighing whether to let Tencent retain stakes in Epic Games, Riot Games and Supercell ahead of Trump’s planned April meeting with Chinese premier Xi Jinping link

Meanwhile, Tencent-owned Supercell said it was cooperating with a US security probe and that its shareholder agreement guaranteed operational independence from its Chinese parent—not a big surprise as Supercell has usually done as it pleases without interference link

China has far less public alarm over AI than the West, with policymakers and the public largely expressing optimism about the technology link

However, China’s tech stocks faced a $600B rout as AI development costs threatened to deepen losses link

China’s new five-year policy blueprint calls for aggressive AI adoption across the economy as the country aims to secure leadership in quantum computing and humanoid robots link

As AI threatens jobs and deflation strained growth, Xi Jinping faces pressure to expand China’s social safety net link

Chinese consumers and developers are rushing to install Openclaw, the platform that lets anyone build an AI agent, for everything from stock picking and report writing to slide decks, emails and coding link

Centurium Capital, Luckin Coffee’s controlling shareholder, agreed to buy Blue Bottle Coffee from Nestlé for under $400M, a steep discount to the $700M deal that was reportedly first sought link

Six US senators asked Intel for details on its ties with ACM Research, whose subsidiaries remained on a Commerce Department blacklist link

China’s venture capital industry is gaining momentum after years of decline, driven largely by increased government funding link

JD.com reported its first quarterly loss in nearly four years following a costly foray into food delivery link

US investigators believe China-linked hackers breached an internal FBI computer network containing information on some domestic surveillance orders. Link

Zero-day exploitation targeting enterprise tech products reached an all-time high last year, with China-linked cyber-espionage groups remaining the most prolific state-backed users, according to Google link

China’s smartphone market is seeing one of its biggest and widest price hikes ever, affecting almost all brands and product categories, as a deepening memory chip shortage pushes up costs by as much as 20% link

NetEase will stop funding the studio led by Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi as part of a broader pullback in game development link

India

PhonePe is reportedly targeting a $9B-$10.5B valuation in its upcoming IPO, a potential drop from the $12B valuation it secured in 2023 link

Meanwhile, delays in formalising new listing rules risked pushing back the planned IPO of Jio Platforms, Mukesh Ambani’s digital arm link

Quick commerce solutions platform Inamo raised $8M led by Prime Venture link

Google has partnered with Bharti Airtel to embed carrier-level filtering into RCS, the messaging standard, to improve efforts to curb fraud and spam in India link

Home services startup Pronto raised $25M in a round led by Epiq Capital at a post-money valuation of $100M link

An espionage campaign targeted government agencies and critical infrastructure operators in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, has been attributed to an India-nexus threat actor called SloppyLemming link

Ownly, a zero commission food delivery app from Rapido, fully launched its service across Bengaluru following a 7 month trial, Flipkart is reportedly planning to follow suit and launch a trial in the city soon link

Rural commerce startup Rozana raised $30M led by existing investors Bertelsmann India Investments and Fireside Ventures, reaching a valuation near $200M link

India’s security agencies have asked private startups to develop ‘bodyguard satellites’ to protect space assets link

Southeast Asia

Singapore launched a national programme to strengthen AI capabilities of 100,000 workers and 10,000 businesses over three years, including lawyers, accountants and prisoners link

MyFirst, Singapore’s kid-focused tech brand, raised over $8M in a Series A link

Sea shares plunged the most since 2023 after profit fell short of estimates link

Singapore and Taiwan identified more than $700M in assets and illicit funds linked to alleged scam syndicate Prince Holding Group and its founder Chen Zhi link

Vietnam will impose mandatory AI labelling under a new law link

Vietnam’s police-owned telecom Mobifone entered talks with Chinese tech firms over contracts to build parts of its 5G network despite US security warnings link

South Korea

Mass production at Samsung’s Taylor plant in Texas has been pushed back to next year link

South Korea plans to cap major shareholder stakes in cryptocurrency exchanges at 20%, forcing platforms like Upbit and Bithumb to restructure their ownership link

Japan

SoftBank’s PayPay is seeking a valuation of up to $13.4B in a US IPO, which is moving ahead despite market volatility link

SoftBank is looking for a loan of as much as $40B to help finance its investment in OpenAI link

Rest of Asia

Visa and Stripe’s Bridge expanded their stablecoin partnership to launch stablecoin-backed cards in 100 countries across Europe, Asia and Africa link

Pakistan’s parliament passed the Virtual Assets Act, 2026, converting the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA) into a permanent federal body with the power to license and supervise crypto service providers. link

Kazakhstan’s central bank has formed a portfolio of up to $350M from gold and foreign exchange reserves ‌for investment in cryptocurrency assets link

When Meta agreed to buy AI startup Manus for $2.5 billion in January of this year, a phrase began to make the rounds online: the Singapore Flip.

Manus was a Chinese company, headquartered in China, backed by Chinese VCs and staffed predominantly by Chinese employees. Its origins set limitations on the business, which included the potential to be acquired by a US buyer.

But once it relocated its headquarters to Singapore and closed its Chinese offices, it became acquirable.

The Manus acquisition was Meta’s largest outlay on a technology company based in Asia, and a rare example of US Big Tech fishing outside of the US or Europe for a major strategic deal. It popularised the Singapore Flip, but it is not the first and it won’t be the last.

One company that might prove to be a repeatable blueprint for Chinese businesses is DayOne, a data centre business operating across Asia Pacific and Europe that looks headed to IPO. This Singapore-based company might be the most tactical and significant Singapore flip the tech world has seen so far.

DayOne is reportedly lining up banks to prepare for a US IPO to raise $5 billion at a potential valuation of $20 billion, according to reports from Reuters, Bloomberg and other media.

Yet, two years ago, it didn’t exist. It was GDS International, a subsidiary of China’s largest data centre operator. That transformation is a real-time case study in derisking for global geopolitics.

Strong demand

DayOne appeared on the radar of many early this year when it announced it had closed a $2 billion Series C investment round on January 5, 2026.

That round was led by New York-based private equity firm Coatue, which counts Uber, Canva, OpenAI and Snap among its portfolio companies. Indonesia Investment Authority, one of Indonesia’s two sovereign wealth funds, was among the other participating investors named.

The deal was one of the largest for a data centre operator anywhere in the world, but it was not DayOne’s first major investment haul.

The company raised $1.9 billion across its prior Series A and Series B deals in 2024. In 2025, it landed a debt facility of up to €1 billion courtesy of Brookfield Asset Management and an unnamed sovereign investor.

That’s nearly $5 billion in capital, and it has been used for expansion

DayOne has grown its footprint in Southeast Asia, through initiatives that include Thailand’s first 1GW platform and a regional operations and training center in Malaysia. It also expanded to Europe having just opened its first location in Finland, which houses a hyperscale data centre campus.

So what is everyone in private equity getting so excited about?

The surge in AI usage, which is visible in increased spending from tech giants and concentrated investing in AI companies, only delivers results if the infrastructure and ‘picks and shovels’ are there to enable it. We’ve seen AI chip companies fetch a very rich premium in public markets, for example Korea’s SK Hynix, and data centres are another critical piece.

Goldman Sachs, for instance, forecasts that demand for data centres will grow 50% by 2027. The firm sees a compound annual growth rate of 17% between 2025 and 2028. In short: the market is bullish.

More than that, however, regular data centres aren’t capable of performing to the requirements of today’s internet.

“Data centers from the pre-AI era are increasingly ill-suited for the demands of today’s AI workloads, and the era of simple retrofitting is coming to an end,” Goldman wrote in the August 2025 report.

DayOne’s narrative has a major focus on sustainability, and technology such as advanced liquid cooling, higher-power density and faster builds using modular racks that speed up the process of developing data centres.

DayOne’s assets include 480 megawatts of data centre capacity in service or under construction and a further 590 megawatts reserved for future development across Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore, according to a Reuters report

As a new entrant, DayOne gives investors exposure to a different facet of the AI boom, and it brings a more modern and AI-focused approach to the data centre industry. Plus, as is key to the overall business, it has pedigree after spinning out of one of China’s top players.

The Americanisation

GDS Holdings is China’s largest data centre operator. Listed on the Nasdaq and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, it operates over 100 data centres which service major Chinese cloud service providers and internet companies.

DayOne started life as GDS International, which was formed in 2022 to house its non-China assets in Southeast Asia, Japan and Hong Kong. The plan to separate the China and international business became clear in 2024 after GDS International raised its $587 million Series A financing from funds that included Hillhouse and Boyu Capital.

GDS had diluted its share of the business to a minority holding (35.6%) when the Series B was completed at the end of 2024, and GDS International was renamed to DayOne in January 2025.

That Series B deal shaped the trajectory of DayOne. Not only did it total $1 billion and give the business the ownership structure to go independent, it welcomed US investors to the fold: Coatue and The Baupost Group, a Boston-based hedge fund. SoftBank Vision Fund and Citadel CEO Ken Griffin also took part.

That deal gave DayOne the independence to be its own business, and thus head to the public markets, but with the credibility of links to its parent. GDS founder William Huang still chairs both boards, DayOne has its own executive team and board and GDS has a stake that’s sizable but not controlling.

With a host of US-friendly backers, the company is poised for its next expansion to the US public markets. That could happen as soon as this year, according to a range of media reports.

A perfect storm

GDS is not a startup. This is a 24-year-old business that leads an industry that’s high on capex with revenue coming from partnerships with major companies. There’s a long sales cycle and expansion is expensive.

But still the DayOne template is remarkably simple and replicable.

Spin out the international assets, dilute the parental stake, bring in familiar faces to the cap table and board and maybe even find a company name that resonates better.

Other Chinese companies facing geopolitical headwinds are watching closely. ByteDance explored similar structures for TikTok, before it was forced to sell its US business. Companies in emerging industries like EVs or drones face the same challenge of accessing Western capital and markets without being an outsider.

Singapore is a commonly chosen location thanks to competitive taxes, government grant options, a stable political and economic environment and, particularly for DayOne, close proximity to its key markets for operations and investment in Asia.

The real question now is how long this setup will work for DayOne.

No doubt, there’s continued demand for what it offers but it only works if the separation with GDS is real. Huang, for example, may need to cease all involvement to satisfy regulators, lawmakers or investors concerned with any possible suggestion that a Chinese firm can have access to crucial data. GDS may need to cut its share of the business, if it doesn’t do so at the IPO.

But, to even be in the situation where those concerns are valid, shows how successful DayOne’s creation has been. Much is owed to being in the right place at the right time.

It’s rare to see companies going after their rivals publicly, but that’s exactly what happened when Anthropic called out a trio of Chinese rivals for allegedly using its Claude service to train their own AI models.

DeepSeek, Moonshot and Minimax were found to have created 24,000 fraudulent accounts that were used to develop agentic reasoning, tool usage and coding for their respective services through more than 16 million Claude interactions, Anthropic argued.

These labs used a technique called “distillation,” which involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one. Distillation is a widely used and legitimate training method. For example, frontier AI labs routinely distill their own models to create smaller, cheaper versions for their customers. But distillation can also be used for illicit purposes: competitors can use it to acquire powerful capabilities from other labs in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, that it would take to develop them independently.

The Anthropic blog goes into some level of detail around each Chinese company’s alleged usage of Claude. As I said, this is notable for being such a direct attack on these companies. OpenAI previously warned US lawmakers that DeepSeek was distilling its product, but it communicated those sentiments in a memo rather than a more public channel.

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.

But the response to Anthropic’s post was mixed at best, with many pointing out that US AI services have trained on the internet, including news media, without revenue compensation for creators.

This kerfuffle comes at a notable time.

The US government has just selected OpenAI as its AI platform of choice, with Anthropic seemingly overlooked after refusing to back down over a request to restrict use of its service for autonomous weapon development and US citizen surveillance.

DeepSeek, meanwhile, is poised to launch its newest model (V4) after it missed out/opted against joining the many other AI companies that launched new or upgraded services during Chinese New Year.

Already, DeepSeek V4 is controversial. It was reportedly not shared with US chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD as is customary to ensure hardware compatibility. Chinese companies like Huawei were, apparently, given access. The Trump administration, meanwhile, believes it has been trained on Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, which would be in violation of US export control.

Leaks suggest V4 will be a multi-modal model meaning it will be capable of generating images, videos and text. There are also heavy suggestions that it will be more ‘agentic’, meaning it can be used to handle tasks rather than just operating as a pure chat interface. That would be in keeping with updates from Claude and ChatGPT.

Have a great week and all the best,

Jon

Finally, a quick note on what I do outside the newsletter: I work with ambitious startups to sharpen their story, build clear messaging, and create the channels that drive growth. If that sounds useful, you can learn more at fullydrafted.com

Peak XV partners reported left after $200M demand following major IPO win

February was a rollercoaster month for Peak XV, formerly Sequoia India and Southeast Asia. It closed its first independent fund at an impressive $1.3 billion in size, but lost three partners over an internal disagreement.

Now we have more colour on exactly what went down, thanks to a Newcomer report:

Their break was precipitated by what Singh considered an outrageous demand from Agrawal: a profit share that would translate to as much as $200 million from the breakout success of fintech company Groww (similar to Robinhood), which netted the firm and its limited partners $2 billion. Agrawal had led the Groww deal, one of the firm’s biggest-ever wins.

Figuring out compensation for out-sized wins like Groww isn’t as simple as it may seem.

Deliveroo exits Singapore and Japan to cut Asia presence

We know Southeast Asia is a tough market for food delivery and transportation given Grab’s market dominance, and another competitor has bitten the dust after Deliveroo exited Singapore and Japan. It quit the Hong Kong market in April 2025.

Deliveroo, originally British but now owned by US giant DoorDash since October, is also leaving Qatar and Uzbekistan, where its Wolt brand operates. Finally, it will close an engineering hub in Bengaluru, India, eliminating just over 100 jobs. It will retain a similar office in Hyderabad, though.

These exits are the first cost-cutting moves after DoorDash completed the acquisition of Deliveroo. It isn’t a huge surprise given the Hong Kong exit last year and Deliveroo’s market position, which has fallen behind the competition, as data from Momentum Works shows.

Foodpanda, owned by Germany-based DeliveryHero, left Thailand last year, and there’s constant speculation around its future in Asia Pacific. The region seems to be an afterthought for Western countries due to the tough competition, lower spending and more.

China

Alibaba Cloud launched a low-cost AI coding product built on Qwen 3.5 and models from Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI and MiniMax, three companies it backed with investment. The lite tier starts at just 7.9 yuan ($1.15) per month with the pro costing 39.9 yuan ($5.80) link

Honor unveiled its first in-house humanoid robot and a so-called “robot phone” at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona this week, as part of a $10B repositioning push around AI-driven hardware link

Tencent shut down its TiMi Montreal studio after five years without it releasing a single game link

The Pentagon is exploring AI-powered cyber tools to map China’s critical infrastructure link

OpenAI said ChatGPT refused to help a user linked to Chinese law enforcement plan an online smear campaign against Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi, and flagged romance scams targeting Indonesians and China-based accounts seeking information from US officials link

Nvidia received a US licence for a small amount of H200 exports to China link

However, Nvidia has yet to sell a single H200 AI chip to China, a US export enforcement official told lawmakers, underscoring how tightly Washington is policing advanced semiconductor shipments link

DJI is taking its fight against the FCC’s drone ban to an appeals court link

Shein founder Xu Yangtian made his first major public appearance in Guangdong praising Communist Party support, a shift from positioning as a Singapore-headquartered company as it navigates regulatory scrutiny before a potential listing link

Huawei recorded revenue of more than $127B in 2025, signalling resilience despite US sanctions link

Crypto mining firm Canaan acquired Cipher Mining’s stake in West Texas bitcoin mining projects for $40M link

General Atlantic is selling a ByteDance stake at a $550B valuation, that’s up 66% from last year’s $330B buyback and is the first such secondary deal since Washington cleared TikTok’s US sale in January link

China’s leading chipmakers are ramping up to 7nm and potentially 5nm production, with SMIC, Hua Hong and Huawei-linked manufacturers expanding capacity to meet demand from domestic AI chip developers link

The door handles of a bestselling Xiaomi EV failed and trapped its driver during a fatal 2025 crash, a report that will likely intensify pressure for China to phase out such designs link

Chinese women are turning to AI chatbots for companionship link

Baidu posted a third straight quarterly revenue decline with sales falling 4% as weakness in its core advertising business and mounting AI losses weigh on its transition link

Chinese hackers breached Pulse Secure’s VPN software in 2021, planting a backdoor that gave them access to 119 organisations worldwide including US and European military contractors link

Google disrupted a Chinese-linked hacking group known as Gallium that breached at least 53 organisations across 42 countries, targeting governments and telecom companies over nearly a decade link

India

This year will tell whether India can be a major revenue market for consumer AI, or simply one for growth. India was the world’s top market for GenAI app downloads with 207% growth in 2025, or 20% of global downloads, but just 1% of in-app revenue—that needs to change this year as promotion deals announced last year from top names run out and packages are sold on their merit alone link

The country is emerging as one of the world’s largest AI user bases, but unless it treats its vast data reserves as a strategic asset and demands meaningful returns from US tech firms harvesting it, the country risks becoming little more than a free training ground for Silicon Valley. link

Apple Pay appears headed to India with ICICI, HDFC, Axis Bank, Mastercard and Visa in talks with Apple over a mid-2026 launch with UPI support link

Meanwhile: the iPhone became India’s single most valuable export in 2025 with shipments worth about $23B, or 76% of the country’s $30B smartphone exports link

Fintech lender Kreditbee is reportedly in talks to raise $120M at a post-money valuation of $1.2B link

Creator commerce platform Wishlink raised $17.5M in a round led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India link

Cross-border B2B payments startup Xflow raised $16.6M in a Series A at a $85M post-money valuation link

Billdesk will acquire Worldline’s India payments business for $70M in equity value link

Gushwork, which helps brands acquire customers through AI platforms, raised $9M valuing it at $33M post-money link

Sify Infinit Spaces, the data centre arm of Nasdaq-listed Sify Technologies, is targeting a valuation of up to $4.2B in an IPO that could raise $407M as early as next month link

India became the world’s back office by supplying millions of white-collar workers to global companies, but now advances in AI are beginning to automate the very services that fueled its rise link

However, AI’s deflationary impact on India’s IT industry, which has never seen a decline in software exports in 24 years, will likely take years to fully materialise link

Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal raised $54M for wearable startup Temple at a roughly $190M post-money valuation link

India blocked Supabase, a popular developer database platform, from 24 February but isn’t clear why or how long it will last link

Southeast Asia

Granite Asia, formerly the Asia arm of global VC GGV Capital, launched a $150M fund alongside Singapore’s largest bank, DBS, to invest in AI-focused IPOs link

We recently wrote that Grab remains stuck as a transportation company in the eye of investors, that explains why it is betting on AI and higher-margin services like fintech to triple EBITDA to $1.5B by 2028 link

Based, a crypto ‘super app’ based on the Hyperlink chain, raised $11.5M led by Pantera with Coinbase and Wintermute among those joining link

Malaysia blocked access to LGBTQ+ networking and dating sites Grindr and Blued link

Malaysia-based digital infrastructure provider Zetrix AI raised $40M from the World Bank’s IFC ahead of plans to list its AI unit in the US this year link

South Korea

South Korea finally approved Google’s long-standing request to export high-precision map data to overseas servers, reversing a two-decade ban and clearing the way for competition in a market dominated by local mapping apps link

Startups Motif Technologies and Upstage are squaring off against conglomerates SK and LG in the race to build a national foundation model for South Korea link

South Korea’s three major broadcasters sued OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT was trained on their news content without permission link

Coupang, rocked by a major hack, posted a surprise quarterly loss as revenue rose 11% to $8.8B link

Japan

Japan will invest ¥250B ($1.6B) in Rapidus over the next two years to back 2nm chip production, taking about 10% of voting shares with the option to assume majority control in distress link

Team Mirai, a political party founded by software engineers, secured 11 seats in Japan’s legislature on a tech-first agenda including government chatbots and self-driving buses in aging communities link

Japan’s Fair Trade Commission is investigating Microsoft’s local unit over potential anti-competitive conduct tied to Azure, including whether it restricted customers from running its software on rival cloud services link

Hong Kong

Binance internal investigators found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iranian entities despite the exchange’s pledges to crack down on crime link

Stablecoin payments firm RedotPay, which offers a crypto card and other services, is weighing a US IPO that could raise over $1B at a valuation above $4B link

Dongchedi, the auto content and trading platform spun out of ByteDance, is weighing a Hong Kong IPO to raise $1 billion to $1.5 billion as soon as this year link

StepFun, a Tencent-backed Shanghai AI startup, is weighing a Hong Kong IPO that could raise about $500M link

Taiwan

US tech giants including Apple, AMD and Qualcomm remain heavily reliant on Taiwan’s chip supply despite years of warnings that a Chinese invasion could paralyse Silicon Valley link

TSMC customers will have to wait until at least Q2 2027 for allocation for its newest N2 production technology, as long-term partners like Apple and Nvidia have gobbled up allotments for close to the next two years link

Rest of Asia

North Korea’s Lazarus hacking group was observed deploying Medusa, a ransomware-as-a-service product for which the developers take a percentage of the ransom payment, for the first time in attacks against a Middle East company and a US healthcare organisation link

Welcome back—it was artificial intelligence week in India as the country’s five day AI Summit took place, inaugurated by PM Narendra Modi.

India put on a show that got global attention and validation from tech’s biggest names, from old guard names like Microsoft and Google to new powers OpenAI, Anthropic and more. Politically, the country is navigating the tricky corridor of relationships with China and the US.

The most viral moment of the week was OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei seemingly refusing to join hands as part of a group photo, though Altman played it down as confusion. Getting to business, both companies increased their already sizable commitments to the Indian market and generally India put itself on the global AI map.

Altman had already revealed that India is OpenAI’s second largest market with 100 million users, with nearly half of ChatGPT’s usage coming from users aged 18-24. On that note, OpenAI is making a big push into education after it partnered with six educational institutions as part of its goal to reach more than 100,000 students in the next year.

The company was busy penning strategic deals that include teaming up with Pine Labs to enable agentic commerce by uniting its APIs with the fintech company’s payment stack. It also partnered with Reliance to bring conversational search to JioHotstar, it is working with Tata Group on AI-ready data centre capacity and it will become the first customer of India’s Tata Consultancy Services’ data centre business.

OpenAI already has an India office, and it said it will expand its presence to cover Mumbai and Bengaluru by the end of the year. Not to be outdone, Anthropic opened its first office in India in Bengaluru, its second in Asia after Tokyo.

Amodei said Anthropic’s ARR from India has doubled since October. We know the company’s focus isn’t on consumers, like OpenAI, and Anthropic struck enterprise deals with Air India and Cognizant. It also announced a partnership with Infosys to develop AI solutions for telecom and financial services.

A lot of announcements were focused around infrastructure. India’s technology minister said the country expects to draw in more than $200 billion in AI investments over the next two years. Microsoft said it remains on track to invest $50 billion across the ‘Global South,’ which prominently features India, and Google announced new fibre optic routes.

On the venture capital side, US fund General Catalyst pledged to invest $5 billion in India. That’s its largest commitment to the country ever, and it will cross sectors including AI, defence, healthcare, industrials and fintech.

That was echoed by Peak XV, the fund formerly known as Sequoia India and Southeast Asia, closed a new $1.3 billion fund. This is its first as an independent firm, and the achievement is impressive and certainly helped by huge IPO exits last year, as I noted in the ATR WhatsApp channel.

Meanwhile, Lightspeed closed a $9 billion fund in December and it is doubling down on AI in India, revealing that 60% of its deals in the past year have been for AI startups.

But the week wasn’t just about international companies or cash, it was an opportunity to showcase India’s progress.

Sarvam, a 2-year-old startup that collaborates with the government to develop AI systems focused on India, had a big week after it unveiled a chat app for consumers in India. Under the hood, it also launched a new family of LLMs that are compute-efficient and open source. The goal is to offer a viable alternative to US and Chinese rivals which dominate the market.

Initial deployments will cover low-cost feature phones, in-car systems and Sarvam’s own smart glasses. Its Indus chat app will be the main touch point to reach new users and offer a local alternative.

Sarvam’s strategy reflects India’s broader focus on developing efficient and cost-effective local AI models, challenging the global pioneers without breaking the bank.

Finally, if you only read one thing on the summit, let it be this: India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn.

Have a great rest of the week—we’ll see you on Thursday for our next ATR original story,

Jon

China

Nearly $1B in US government funding went to research projects involving Chinese defence-linked labs, according to a new report that puts the total at $943.5M and says existing security controls have failed to curb sensitive collaborations link

Moonshot AI is aiming for a $10B valuation in an expanded funding round, fresh from raising $500M at a $4.3B valuation and securing over $700M in commitments for the first tranche of this new round link

ByteDance said it will rein in its AI video generator, Seedance, after multiple Hollywood studios threatened legal action link

ByteDance is recruiting for nearly 100 US-based roles within its AI unit, Seed, showing it plans to compete with US rivals despite national security scrutiny link

Alibaba launched Qwen 3.5, a new artificial intelligence model built to handle complex tasks autonomously, it claims performance and cost gains that outperform US rivals on several benchmarks link

China’s most-watched TV show, the annual CCTV Spring Festival gala, showcased the country’s cutting-edge tech, including a choreographed dance routine featuring humanoid robots link

Unitree Robotics, whose robots were used in the New Year show, plans to ship as many as 20,000 humanoid robots this year, up from about 5,500 in 2025, according to its CEO link

Polymarket is targeting China-based users after hiring Mandarin speakers and rolling out Lunar New Year wagers, even while the site remains blocked in China and despite Beijing’s strict online gambling ban link

China’s effort to build medical technology champions to rival US players such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink is gaining traction, with Shanghai-based NeuroXess advancing to human trials just years after its founding link

The problems piling up at fast-fashion giant Shein — Regulatory probes and the ending of customs loopholes pose big challenges, but its business model is highly resilient link

Texas sued TP-Link, alleging it allows China to hack into routers link

The US is planning Peace Corps-style “Tech Corps” to counter China’s AI exports by sending volunteers abroad to promote American AI models link

China’s supply chain is stepping up investments in liquid cooling technology as the global AI build-out pushes data centre power densities to levels that air cooling can no longer efficiently handle link

India

Data analytics company Fractal, which became India’s first AI unicorn in 2022, raised $313M in its Mumbai IPO; its shares fell 5% amid a weak Indian IPO market link

AI infrastructure startup Neysa raised up to $600M in primary equity from Blackstone and other investors link

The India Deep Tech Alliance will unveil expanded backing for AI and deeptech, with members committing over $2.5B across five years link

Nvidia is ramping up its India push, supplying Blackwell Ultra GPUs to Yotta Data Services and E2E Networks as it backs the country’s bid to scale infrastructure link

Nvidia also partnered with VC firms including Peak XV, Z47, Elevation Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and Accel India to identify and back local AI startups link

Abu Dhabi-based G42 and US chipmaker Cerebras are building an 8-exaflop supercomputer in India link

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s conglomerate will plow as much as $110B over 7 years into AI infrastructure link

C2i Semiconductors, which is building plug and play power systems for AI data centres, raised $15M link

Razorpay and AI startup Replit formed a strategic partnership to help developers monetise their applications link

LLM operations startup Portkey raised $15M from Elevation Capital and Lightspeed to expand its platform and sales efforts link

Vibe-coding startup Emergent said it surpassed $100M in ARR, doubling in the past month as more than 6M users across 190 countries link

India plans to move from 28-nanometer chips to advanced 2-nanometer production within years, IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said link

India is in talks with social media companies on possible age-based curbs, as global momentum builds to restrict children’s access to addictive digital platforms, Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said link

Fixed income investment startup Stable Money raised $25M led by Peak XV Partners link

Skyroot Aerospace is seeking to raise $150M to $200M to fund its next phase of growth, a deal that could value the rocket maker at $1B link

Supply-chain financing startup Progcap is in advanced talks to close a $100M equity funding round, according to sources link

Southeast Asia

We have seen agentic commerce begin to take off in China, now Sea wants to explore possibilities in Southeast Asia after it inked a new strategic partnership with Google to develop AI tools for e-commerce and gaming, its core businesses link

Philippine fintech firm Maya, backed by the country’s top telco, Tencent and KKR, is reportedly planning an IPO in the US that could raise $500M-$1B link

Vietnam is experiencing a slump in investments in startups, which is being attributed to a catalogue of cross-border challenges link

Indonesian creators are fueling the rise of Facebook’s new content monetization program, which has grown from 3M to 12M users in a year in response to the growth of TikTok and YouTube Shorts link

Vietnam said US President Donald Trump told Communist Party chief To Lam he will remove the nation from the US’s list of restrictions on advanced technologies link

Japan

Sony claims to have developed technology to trace when copyrighted songs are used to train AI music models, enabling songwriters to seek compensation link

Sony is shutting down Bluepoint Games, the PlayStation subsidiary responsible for developing remakes of video games such as Demon’s Souls link

Japan‘s premium video-on-demand sector achieved $7.2B in total revenue during 2025, marking a 15% year-over-year increase, according to a new report from Media Partners Asia link

A planned $33B natural gas facility in Ohio, backed by Japan and led by SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy, would be the largest of its kind in the US, with capacity of about 9.2 gigawatts, enough to power millions of homes, according to US officials link

Rest of Asia

A US federal court has sentenced a Ukrainian man to 5 years in prison for enabling North Korean workers to use stolen American identities to land jobs at dozens of US companies link

Welcome back,

A small plug for the ATR WhatsApp channel, follow along if you like to get your news there. We never spam, just 1-2 essential posts a day. Now to Grab.

The Singapore-based ride-hailing company announced its first annual profit of $65 million in 2025, showing that its core business can indeed be sustainable. Grab actually made a full-year profit of $200 million, thanks to $203 million in income from its $7 billion-plus cash reserves, which we will return to later.

Despite a first full year in the black, Grab’s stock is down 16% this year to date. Investors aren’t impressed for a few reasons:

• It is expensive: trading at over 200X P/E, Uber is 70-80X for comparison

• Weak operating margin: Grab made $65 million from $3.37 billion sales, that’s sub-2%

• Cash intensive: operating cash flow fell from $852 million to $79 million in a year due to lending business demands

• Slow growth: a 20-22% overall revenue growth estimate, not a huge jump on the 18% in 2025

But on the strategy side, Grab is pulling exciting moves thanks to that cash reserve.

Alongside its financials, it announced a deal to buy a majority share of Stash, a US fintech with more than one million users and $5 billion in assets, at a valuation of $425 million.

That represents a big discount on the $1.4 billion valuation when it raised a $146 million Series H less than a year ago.

We wrote last year that Grab is spending its war chest to develop its automotive tech stack through investments into companies like public companies WeRide and Hesai, and acquisitions like US-based Vay. Now that’s extended to its financial services business and with a company with zero consumer presence in Southeast Asia.

Grab said it plans to bring Stash’s products to Southeast Asia, specifically its ‘AI Money Coach,’ and grow Stash’s US business. I like the idea of it fishing for technology outside Southeast Asia, particularly with bargain deals that can generate revenue standalone. Maybe that focus on value is why a deal for GoTo, which has been much rumoured in recent months, hasn’t crossed the line yet.

The fintech business was always the revenue weapon Grab needed to master to be more than just a transport business. This annual report makes that need even clearer.

Have a great week, and happy Lunar New Year to those who celebrate it,

Jon

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China tech goes full AI ahead of New Year

There’s no rivalry quite like China tech. With New Year looming, the country’s top firms are rushing to launch and promote their new AI products. Alibaba is perhaps the standout as it presented agentic commerce to shoppers en masse for the first time.

The e-commerce giant was forced to temporarily halt the coupon promotion on its Qwen AI chatbot, after it received 10 million orders within the first nine hours. The deal allowed users to get discounts to shop in Alibaba-owned retail platforms via the AI app. Despite the initial hitches, the company said over 120 million orders were processed in the first week.

Alibaba sits in a unique position to marry AI and commerce, but others made similar efforts. ByteDance gave away more than 100,000 products and held red packet lucky draws to bring users to its Doubao app. But the company got a lot more attention for Seedance 2.0, a new version of its AI video generator which has already been denounced by The Motion Picture Association for enabling “massive” content infringement. Disney sent a cease and desist letter, too.

ByteDance also shipped a new version of its Seedream image generator, but Seedance understandably hogged the limelight.

On the more regular front, if such a thing is possible, it is launch season:

• DeepSeek boosted its flagship service ahead of its new release

• Zhipu will launch GLM-5, an upgraded AI model built for complex coding

• MiniMax launched M2.5, a productivity-focused model

• Alibaba unveiled RynnBrain, an open-source AI model for robotics

DeepSeek’s newest product hasn’t shipped yet, but already there’s clamour for it. That’s been stoked by OpenAI telling US lawmakers that the Chinese firm is using sophisticated “distillation” techniques to extract outputs from American AI models.

There’s no response. It looks like DeepSeek is happy to be gossiped about. You’d imagine its product will do all the talking for it.

Related: Zhipu is preparing a secondary listing in Shanghai after raising $558 million in a Hong Kong IPO

PayPay, Japan’s top payment app, files for US IPO

Japan’s largest payment business claims 72 million users and now it is headed to Nasdaq in what will be a fascinating listing as the first of its kind from Japan.

Cash was always king in Japan, but 8-year-old PayPay has helped shift things digital by leaning on owners SoftBank and Yahoo for distribution, and riding the government goal to digitise 65% by 2030. India’s Paytm was a founding partner, but it sold its share for nearly $300 million in 2024.

Tapping into the massive userbases of Line Japan and Yahoo Japan has given PayPay the platform to lead digital payments in Japan. That’s reflected in the ownership as PayPay is essentially a SoftBank entity with some ownership from Naver, the parent behind popular messaging app Line.

This listing will give those two a chance to cash in on the success of monetising digital payments from their consumer-facing businesses. But, as is the case with strong payments companies like PhonePe in India, going beyond just transactions is tough.

PayPay is coming off the back of its first annual profit of $261 million profit for the year ended March 31, up from a $5.5 million loss the previous year. It needs users to commit to using its card, banking and investment services, and reduce its dependency on its parents.

China

The US withdrew an updated list of Chinese firms allegedly aiding Beijing’s military shortly after it was posted with the addition of Alibaba, Baidu, BYD and other top Chinese tech firms link

Ant Group is aiming to make its digital healthcare arm as successful as Alipay’s digital payments by reaching most of China’s population through a 3 year strategy focused on AI Doctor Agents and an AI-based health app link

Huawei will launch its Mate 80 Pro smartphone with a self-designed AI chip link

China appears to be using a covert cyber training platform to rehearse attacks on neighbouring countries’ critical infrastructure link

A Chinese scammer responsible for laundering $73M was sentenced to 20 years in absentia after fleeing the US link

Pony.ai began mass production of a Toyota-developed robotaxi, targeting 1,000 units this year link

Investment firm Eight Roads reportedly shelved plans to sell stakes in dozens of Chinese tech companies as geopolitics ease link

A Dutch court ordered a mismanagement probe at Nexperia, a setback for Chinese parent Wingtech by allowing the European management team that took charge after a Dutch state intervention last year to remain in place—Wingtech plans to use “all legal means” to regain control link

A global memory supply shock is squeezing China’s smartphone and broadband manufacturers link

Palo Alto Networks softened a report linking a cyberespionage campaign to China after Beijing banned its software, according to a report link

ByteDance is in advanced talks to sell mobile game studio Moonton to Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games Group for $6–7B link

Meituan warned it will post its biggest annual loss since 2021, forecasting a $3.4B deficit on account of fierce competition in the food delivery space link

SMIC reported a 60.7% jump in Q4 profit to $172.85M, that beat estimates but it warned that heavy spending on AI chips could leave some data centres idle link

NetEase missed estimates as it reported a 29% drop in Q4 profit to $902.9M link

WeRide plans to at least double its fleet this year as it aims to turn profitable by 2030 link

Beijing tightened its crackdown on real-world asset tokenization, extending restrictions to offshore yuan-pegged stablecoins link

India

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says ChatGPT has 100M active users in India, he comments came as India’s AI Week prepares to start, we’ll have more details in next week’s issue link

India overhauled its startup rules to back deep tech companies, extending benefits to 20 years and raising revenue thresholds for startup-specific tax, grant, and regulatory benefits to around $33M from $11M link

The country also approved a $1.1B state-backed fund of funds to channel capital into startups via private investors, sharpening its focus on AI, advanced manufacturing and other deep-tech sectors link

Delivery startup Swish is reportedly in talks to raise $30–35M from Bain Capital Ventures and Accel link

Flipkart is said to be weighing entry into online food delivery with a Bengaluru pilot planned for May–June link

Sarvam AI reported strong performance on benchmarks for document understanding and Indian languages link

India ordered social media platforms to step up action against deepfakes, slashing takedown timelines link

A look inside India’s only “dark factory” in Tamil Nadu, which runs autonomously through the day and night with robots assembling semiconductor chips without any human supervision link

A UC Berkeley study of 596 Indian tech startups found homegrown founders now outperform diaspora returnees link

Insurance aggregator InsuranceDekho is reportedly weighing a Mumbai IPO that could raise up to $250M link

Used-car platform Spinny raised $160–170M led by Fidelity and Accel link

Malaysia and India signed an agreement to enable cross-border QR payments link

Space startup AgniKul Cosmos and NeevCloud plan to launch an AI data centre in low-earth orbit, with a proof-of-concept mission due this year and commercial rollout in 2027 link

Southeast Asia

Abu Dhabi-based AI firm G42 is leading a $1B project to build data centres in Vietnam link

Singapore said a China-linked cyber espionage group breached all four of the country’s major telecom operators—officials said attackers gained unauthorized access to parts of telecom networks and, in one case, reached limited portions of critical systems, but there were no service disruptions and no evidence customer data was accessed link

Chinese companies outspent US firms on investment in Singapore last year in a surge often described as “Singapore-washing” link

Singapore’s GIC led a $30B Series G funding round in Anthropic link

Google announced new investments to deepen R&D capabilities and build a workforce for the AI economy in Singapore link

Singapore/Thailand-based electric motorcycle maker Sleek EV raised $8.5M led by the venture fund of Taiwan-based motorcycle maker Kymco link

Singapore-based Topview, which develops a collaborative AI content workspace, closed a $14M Series A round link

Singapore’s Polybee raised $4.3M in seed funding to scale its drone-based pollination technology link

GoTo partnered with MRT Jakarta to launch a transit-digital platform integration link

Criminal networks in Southeast Asia are reportedly using cheap AI tools to scale up scams despite government crackdowns link

Zenyum, a Singapore-based dental startup, merged with Indian rival MakeO Toothsi to create a joint business with 1,100 partner doctors link

South Korea

Travel startup Myrealtrip is targeting a valuation above $1B for a Seoul IPO as early as late 2027 link

Coupang failed to preserve evidence during a South Korean data breach probe, fuelling trade tensions with Washington link

The financial watchdog launched an investigation into Bithumb after it mistakenly sent $43B in bitcoin to users link

Meanwhile, Seoul Gangnam Police lost track of 22 BTC ($1.5M) seized in an investigation link

South Korea will tighten crypto oversight targeting market manipulation link

ByteDance is in talks with Samsung to manufacture an in-house AI chip targeting 100,000 units this year link

OpenAI, Samsung SDS and SK Telecom will begin construction of two South Korean data centres in March link

A profile of SK Hynix, which has become a cornerstone of the AI boom, supplying high-bandwidth memory chips that power Nvidia’s accelerators link

Samsung began the first commercial shipments of HBM4, taking an early lead in advanced AI memory link

Taiwan

The Trump administration plans to exempt US hyperscalers from upcoming chip tariffs, tying carve-outs to TSMC investments link

A series of agreements between Taiwan and the Trump administration point to a sweeping expansion of TSMC’s US footprint, placing the chipmaker at the center of a potential $250 billion reshaping of the semiconductor supply chain. link

Taiwan pushed back against US calls to shift 40% of chip capacity to the US, calling it impossible link

Japan

SoftBank’s Vision Fund reported a $2.4B ‘gain’ in the December quarter, driven by its OpenAI stake link

A looming shortage of T-glass, essential to AI chips and made largely by a single Japanese supplier, is emerging as a bottleneck for Apple and Nvidia link

Andreessen Horowitz invested in Shizuku AI, a San Francisco startup operating in Japan developing AI-driven virtual characters link