Granite Asia’s senior managing partner Jixun Foo, speaking on our stage last week, credited the “DeepSeek moment” for democratizing access to AI across the region.
She urged investors to be cautious. “This is not a very mature ecosystem, unlike China, where you have entrepreneurs that have gone through intense competition…here is still a bit more raw,” she said.
“What’s the exit landscape here [in Southeast Asia]?” Phylicia Koh, a general partner at Play Ventures, asked during a separate panel on video gaming. “That has been a challenge, and one I don’t envy for Southeast Asia-focused VCs.”
“[Are] the capital markets here mature enough to support an exit? It hasn’t probably performed as well as investors wanted it to,” Koh added.
Still, speakers noted that there are plenty of opportunities in Southeast Asia for those willing to look for them. Wong noted that while fintech and e-commerce firms may have suffered, climate and sustainability startups are still raising funds.
There’s “a tremendous opportunity for a lot of much more specific, highly differentiated visions that could potentially be billion-dollar companies,” said Matthew Graham of Ryze Labs. (He, however, wasn’t interested in a company “trying to be the 19th LLM.”)
And funders based in Southeast Asia are prepared to start investing again—even if not right now. “We want to be patient. We want to see the confluence of talent and market adoption, and then we’ll start investing,” Foo said.
