Essay
The Bill Hiding Behind the AI Bargain
Enterprise AI’s $20 seats are not a bargain but a temporary subsidy that will snap back into usage-based bills big enough to shock any company that built core workflows on fake prices.
John Soriano
Head of Marketing @ PayMongo (YC S19) Growth hobbyist and cat dad
Embedded Finance
Embedded finance Southeast Asia: How software companies launch a second revenue line
Embedded finance is not a future adjacency for software companies; it is a second revenue line unlocked the moment you have weekly engagement, money flowing through your product, and user trust to hold a balance.
Design
Generated Form Is Not a Solved Problem
The new AI design tools are very good at producing form, and very bad at the part that actually matters in fintech.
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia Scam Economy: A Digital Infrastructure Problem
Southeast Asia's scam economy is a digital infrastructure problem — and it matters for every founder building on the region's financial rails.
Essay
The Philippines Built a $40 Billion Industry It Doesn't Own
The Philippines built a $40 billion IT services industry — and almost none of the ownership. AI is about to expose that gap.
Essay
FinTech Marketing That Moves the Needle: Lessons from Tonik Digital Bank’s Head of Marketing
Vanity metrics die fast when your CFO demands grounded unit economics. Tonik's Wanda Pascua on building a revenue-first marketing org in a low-trust market.
Essay
The Structural Case for the Philippine Female-Led Economy
This article is based on a conversation with Niña Terol Aquino, CEO and Co-Founder of FoundHer, and the gap that's costing the Philippines one of its biggest economic opportunities.
Ecosystem
The Trust Tax: How Indonesia's Startup Scandals Repriced an Entire Ecosystem
Indonesia’s startup boom didn’t just stall — it got repriced, as the eFishery and TaniHub scandals turned “growth at all costs” into a permanent trust tax on every Indonesian founder raising capital.
Ecosystem
How Capital Markets Shape Startup Ecosystems
The Philippines’ startup problem is not talent, funding, or ambition—it is exit arithmetic. When capital markets cannot absorb high-growth companies, venture outcomes collapse regardless of founder quality or capital deployed.
Digest
Southeast Asia Tech Digest - January 2026
January clarified the rules of participation in Southeast Asia’s tech ecosystem. Capital, exits, and AI deployment now reward preparedness, positioning, and institutional alignment.
Funding
How LP Mandates Rewired Southeast Asia's Venture Market
For anyone building in SEA over the next 24 months: incorporate in Singapore and engineer unit economics for 12-month payback, or accept that institutional venture capital is structurally unavailable.
Essay
The Capital Deployment Problem in Southeast Asia
Founders in Southeast Asia know the math of dilution, but the ecosystem’s incentives push them to behave as if the math doesn’t matter.