Global Startup Cultures – Southeast Asia

Lack of Series A funding and risk aversion in Southeast Asia creates a revenue-seeking culture that burns through cash slowly. Unlike in North America, profit-and-loss spreadsheets are critical and the terms cannot be redefined at will. Series C funding is plentiful for startups that are willing to bootstrap their way to success.

Why Founders Here Watch the Spreadsheet

The “Series A gap” the original article described is a familiar problem in younger ecosystems. Seed money from angels, accelerators and government programs can be relatively easy to find, and late-stage investors are happy to back companies that have already proven themselves. The hard part is the middle: the round that turns a promising product into a real business.

When that middle round is scarce, founders adapt. They charge customers earlier, hire more slowly and keep a close eye on cash. That’s the revenue-seeking, slow-burning culture the article pointed to. It’s less glamorous than blitz-scaling, but a company that lives on its own revenue has more control over its future.

One Region, Many Markets

Southeast Asia is often described as a single market of hundreds of millions of people, but it’s really a collection of very different countries. Singapore is small, wealthy and highly connected to global finance. Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand have large, young populations and fast-growing digital economies, each with its own language, regulations and payment habits.

Many startups handle this by setting up their headquarters and finance functions in Singapore while building most of their operations and customer base in the larger neighboring markets. Expanding across the region means adapting the product, the marketing and often the business model for each country.

Grab Shows the Superapp Model

The region’s best-known startup story began with a taxi app. Grab was founded as MyTeksi in Malaysia in 2012 by Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling, then expanded across Southeast Asia. In March 2018 it took over Uber’s operations in the region, with Uber taking a 27.5% stake in Grab as part of the deal, and it grew into a “superapp” offering rides, food delivery and payments. It had started small: MyTeksi got going with a $25,000 grant from Harvard Business School, where Anthony Tan had been studying, plus his own money.

In 2021 Grab agreed to go public through a merger with Altimeter Growth that valued the company at nearly $40 billion, the largest SPAC deal on record at the time, and it debuted on the Nasdaq in December that year. Business Insider reported that Grab’s gross merchandise volume reached $12.5 billion in 2020, more than double its 2018 figure, as people leaned on food and grocery delivery during the pandemic. Grab’s path showed both sides of the region’s culture: it grew by solving everyday problems, then pushed into payments and financial services, where the money is.

A Tougher Funding Market

Since the boom of 2021, investors in the region have become more cautious, which in some ways brings the market back toward the discipline the original article described. Data firm MAGNiTT reported that funding in Southeast Asia fell 29% to $4.08 billion in 2025, with the number of deals also down 29% to 446.

Singapore remained the most active country across the emerging markets MAGNiTT tracks, with 274 deals, though that was a 20% drop from the year before. The firm also said the Middle East outpaced Southeast Asia in deal activity for the first time.

What It Means for Founders

The good news for founders is that Southeast Asia’s cautious culture fits a world where investors want profits sooner. Companies that already watch their burn rate and charge for what they offer are better placed than those built on the assumption of easy follow-on money.

The challenge is that big rounds are harder to land, and the region’s fragmentation still makes scaling expensive. Founders who pick one large market to win first, prove the economics there, and only then expand to neighboring countries are following the approach that has worked best in the region so far.

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