While foundation models continue to be led by the US and China, Southeast Asian AI startups can carve out opportunities to emerge on the global stage as long as they find the right moat, startup founders shared at DealStreetAsia’s Asia PE-VC Summit 2025 on September 11.
Entrepreneurs in SE Asia emphasised that the key lies in being truly AI-first and relentlessly customer-focused.
“Most of the AI solutions are still trying to rebuild what the last two revolutions were seeing, and that’s where you see the major wins concentrated in just a few companies,” said Bernard Leong, CEO & Co-Founder of Dorje AI, an AI-led ERP platform.
He added that most AI startups today tend to become point solutions instead of being end-to-end. “If you don’t think end-to-end, you cannot serve enterprise customers,” he said in the panel discussion titled ‘Can SE Asia founders build global-grade AI startups?‘.
Speakers argued that technology alone won’t be the moat for Southeast Asian players. Instead, integration and partnerships will define long-term success.
Technology alone won’t be the moat for SE Asian players; integration and partnerships will define long-term success
“There are things you only figure out by having people on the ground—understanding how different departments interact and then weaving AI into those workflows. That in itself becomes a moat,” said Hiep Nguyen, COO and Founding Team Member of AI Hay, which recently raised a $10 million Series A round led by Argor Capital.
Leong echoed that view, stressing the importance of go-to-market strategies and leveraging hyper-scalers such as Microsoft Azure, AWS or Google Cloud Platform. “The go-to-market strategy is important in this region but people underestimate it,” he said.
The Dorje AI CEO added that having a SE Asia-founded, global AI company requires forward thinking of what technologies can be built on top of whatever innovation comes forward in the next 12 to 24 months.
Building a world-class AI company from this region will also require systemic support, Nguyen added. It has to be a collective effort of government backing, buy-in from the country’s largest enterprises, and everyday adoption by local users, according to him.
For one, as AI Hay is focused on the Vietnam market, local talent is a crucial part of its global strategy. Vietnam has historically built out a high-quality engineer pool, for which Nguyen believes the country will emerge as an AI talent hub in the global stage.
Meanwhile, Daphne Tay, Founder of Bluente, highlighted that the diverse culture in Southeast Asia could turn into an edge for regional startups. By understanding these nuances, she said, SE Asia businesses can embed AI into the various workflows and enhance them.
“Translation is not something new. It is the precision that you need to get so that clients are truly satisfied by what you claim your solution can do,” Tay emphasised on being customer-obsessive.
Bluente is a professional communication platform that helps translate documents across more than 120 languages. It recently secured $1.5 million in a seed+ round anchored by US venture capital firm Informed Ventures.
Southeast Asia is still in an early stage of the AI revolution, the panellists opined, and there are gaps to be addressed, be it helping companies transit from small- and medium-sized to the upper market segment, or providing more benefits to the consumer end. These are also opportunities ahead for local startups to tackle.
Southeast Asian AI startups have continued to attract venture capital funding. Recent headlines include Singapore enterprise software startup Whale’s $60-million Series C round, TopView.ai’s $8.5 million Series A round, and Indonesia-based Bythen raising a $5-million seed financing.
