Startup Bangladesh, the government’s catalytic venture fund, has notched its first multi-fold exit — from PulseTech, a Dhaka pharmaceutical distribution startup that has scaled from US$2M to US$150M in annualised revenue in just two years.
The fund backed PulseTech in 2024; neither the original cheque size nor the return multiple has been disclosed, but the outcome matters for a market where venture exits remain scarce and the ecosystem narrative has long centred on access to capital rather than the ability to recycle it.
PulseTech’s model — MedBox for authentic-medicine distribution, layered with embedded financing, pharmacy software, and the ONE Pharmacy franchise network — targets a genuinely unglamorous but high-frequency problem: fragmented, counterfeit-prone drug supply chains reaching Bangladesh’s 14,000-plus independent pharmacies. The company claims profitability alongside 20% average month-on-month growth, yet still serves under 5% of the country’s US$6B pharma market.
It is now raising a Series A targeting US$1B in revenue and eyeing Saudi Arabia as its first market outside Bangladesh, an ambitious jump from a frontier ecosystem to one with entrenched incumbents and a far tougher regulatory bar. For Bangladesh, though, the signal value is immediate: one credible return tends to unlock the next wave of risk capital.
REGIONAL
Grab’s ‘record’ profit hides a core business still burning cash: Grab’s US$235M quarterly profit is mostly a one-off Superbank accounting gain; strip it out and operating margin sits under 2%, while incentive spend and free cash flow both worsened.
Acrab’s US$130M raise signals SEA’s deeper push into AI hardware: Singapore’s Acrab has raised a Series B to scale its Agent Box edge-AI platform, betting that running large models locally, not just in the cloud, will define the next computing wave.
GenZero backs PCG Global’s push to export a China-tested clean energy model: Temasek’s GenZero has led a pre-Series A for PCG Global, which wants to bring a distributed-energy playbook refined in China to Southeast Asia, Oceania and the Middle East.
MDV backs Funding Societies to reach more Malaysian tech SMEs: Malaysia Debt Ventures has renewed a multi-year facility channelling development capital through Funding Societies’ digital lending platform to underserved, tech-driven SMEs.
Razer and NUS launch Singapore AI lab to rethink how games respond to players: The Razer-NUS Joint AI Research Lab will explore “Gaming Artificial Narrow Intelligence”, real-time AI that adapts tactics, dialogue and difficulty during live gameplay.
Indonesia’s McEasy raises US$9M to move fleet management from tracking to prediction: The profitable fleet-tech startup wants to turn nine years of vehicle data into predictive maintenance and routing tools as it expands beyond Indonesia.
Singapore firms embrace agentic AI, but audit trails remain thin: A Sumsub-Singapore Fintech Association study finds 94% of local firms use agentic AI, yet only 29% can produce an audit trail for its decisions.
Vietnam’s science ministry, NUS Enterprise to collaborate on AI, semiconductors, startups: The two sides plan an accelerator for AI and robotics startups, a technology-transfer programme and a co-funded venture-creation scholarship, aiming for results by year-end.
Indonesia delays e-commerce seller tax to protect purchasing power: Jakarta has postponed the 0.5% marketplace withholding tax on Tokopedia, Shopee, Lazada and Blibli sellers, citing weak consumer spending rather than industry pressure alone.
Choco Up and Koomi launch F&B financing in Singapore: The growth-financing platform is pairing its revenue-based lending model with Koomi’s restaurant POS network to give local F&B operators faster access to working capital.
Nadiem Makarim cleared to call witnesses in Chromebook appeal: The Gojek co-founder, jailed for 10 years over alleged laptop-procurement graft as education minister, has escalated a double appeal at the Jakarta High Court alongside a judicial-conduct complaint against the trial panel.
SeaX Ventures names ex-Microsoft VP as venture partner: Desney Tan, who spent 21 years at Microsoft and founded its Health Futures “moonshot factory,” joins the Southeast Asia-focused deep-tech fund as venture partner.
INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
25 SEA insurtechs racing to digitise health, wealth and legacy planning: From bolttech’s embedded checkout cover to “death tech” platforms like Kamboja, the region’s insurtech map spans at least six countries. The pitch is always the same: insurance is broken, and technology fixes it.
Invisible banking: How embedded finance is quietly rewiring SEA’s economy: AND Solutions’ Abdul Mikael argues embedded finance is becoming SEA’s defining fintech undercurrent, but warns founders against “premature financialisation” before their core product works.
Growth at gunpoint: Why VCs share the blame for startup fraud: A new Imperial College London study maps how founder “façading” escalates into fraud, and Southeast Asia’s TaniHub shows the region has the same growth-at-all-costs ingredients.
INTERNATIONAL
DeepSeek resumes US$8B funding round as Monolith weighs in: The Chinese AI lab has restarted talks at a roughly US$74 billion valuation, days after warning of a significant price rise for its AI services.
Nvidia and Dell back AI cloud startup Volta at US$2.4B valuation: Volta Infra has raised US$300M and lined up US$5B more in financing, plus a US$10B, six-year compute contract reportedly with Anthropic, to help smaller labs afford costly AI chips.
Mobile tech to add US$1.4T to Asia Pacific economy by 2030: GSMA: Growth will hinge on AI adoption, digital trust and sovereignty, even as scam rates reported by ASEAN consumers jumped from 31% to 45% in a year.
TikTok lays off 250 employees and shutters Nashville office: The cuts signal continued restructuring at ByteDance’s short-video platform as TikTok consolidates operations amid ongoing legal and regulatory pressure in the United States.
Ex-Spotify employees raise US$10M to bring recommendation AI to e-commerce: The founding team is applying the personalisation engine that drove Spotify’s engagement to online retail, targeting a sector where discovery and conversion remain persistent challenges.
Travis Kalanick’s robotics startup Atoms taps former Uber finance chief as CFO: The hire signals that Atoms is maturing beyond early-stage operations and preparing for a more structured financial footing, possibly ahead of a fundraise or commercialisation push.
Saudi Aramco backs India’s Mitti Labs to make Asia’s rice farming more water-resilient: The strategic investment from an oil major into agritech signals diversification into food security technology, with Mitti Labs targeting water-intensive rice farming across South andSoutheast Asia.
South Korea targets tech investment amid global realignment: Seoul is positioning itself to attract technology capital and strengthen its innovation ecosystem as global supply chains and investment flows continue to shift amid US-China tensions.
South Korean firms ramp up domestic AI investments: Korean conglomerates and techfirms are accelerating domestic AI investment, reflecting a broader national strategy to build competitive AI capabilities and reduce reliance on foreign models and infrastructure.
CYBERSECURITY
Google: Hackers are calling financial firm employees to hack and extort them: Groups tracked as UNC6671 are using old-fashioned vishing calls to breach major private equity and finance firms, then threatening to leak stolen data.
Hackers steal over US$130M by exploiting bug in offline hardware wallets: A predictable seed-phrase flaw in Coinkite’s Coldcard devices let attackers brute-force supposedly offline keys, despite users following every recommended security practice.
Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI The disclosure broadens a prior allegation, with Apple now indicating that multiple former staff members may have transferred proprietary information to OpenAI, raising questions about IP protection in competitive AI talent markets.
Suno to start watermarking AI-generated songs amid legal battles: Under legal pressure from major labels, Suno will embed watermarks in AI-generated music, a move that could set a precedent for content provenance standards across generative audio platforms.
SEMICONDUCTOR
Nanya plans US$10.7B fab investment to expand memory chip capacity: Taiwan’s Nanya Technology is committing US$10.7B to new fabrication capacity, a significant bet on long-term memory chip demand driven by AI workloads and data centre expansion across the region.
Indosat seeks US$2B in loans to fund advanced chip ambitions: The Indonesian telco is pursuing US$2 billion in financing to support its push into advanced chips, signalling Southeast Asia’s growing appetite to build sovereign semiconductor capabilities beyond data centre infrastructure.
AI
AI agents could help SEA firms untangle cross-border payment costs: A Sunrate-Mastercard report argues agentic AI can close the region’s “liquidity blind spot” by handling FX timing and reconciliation in real time, not just automating fixed rules.
The end of manual finance? AI agents are coming for startup payments: The same Sunrate-Mastercard report frames the next phase as a “one brain” model for treasury — where AI decides how money should move rather than just recording that it did.
What AI safety researchers actually worry about: A survey of lab publications finds models sometimes behave differently when they believe they’re being tested — evidence, researchers say, that chain-of-thought reasoning is a fragile safety signal, not a reliable one.
The localisation gap: Why multilingual AI isn’t enough for APAC markets: Agora’s Effie Fang argues that supporting more languages isn’t the same as localisation — customers judge voice AI on whether code-switching feels natural, not on a language-menu count.
Southeast Asia’s AI talent and infrastructure: building the foundation: The region has solved training but not capability verification — credentials don’t predict performance, and SMEs, 98% of SEA businesses, have no affordable way to assess who can actually do AI work.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Washington banned Mythos and Fable: it created a hydra: Forcing Anthropic to disable two models exposed a paradox — banning a capability that’s cheap to replicate mostly advertises its value to open-weight rivals and sovereign labs.
From periphery to permission: What CEE and SEA reveal about a fracturing order: Compute, models and even corporate ownership are becoming permissioned goods, and Singapore and Malaysia already sit inside that scrutiny.
The new border: why server farms are the battleground of AI sovereignty: A Bangkok firm tied to Thailand’s national AI push was accused of routing Nvidia chips to Chinese buyers — proof that buying compute is now a declaration, not a procurement decision.
Why Southeast Asia cannot build sovereign AI on borrowed choices: Every AI vendor choice is also a jurisdiction choice, and most SMEs drift into dependence without noticing — the fix is classifying data properly before it ever touches a third-party model.
The infrastructure choice that now decides how you scale: Choosing a cloud region has become a political decision — founders who assume fragmentation as permanent, one adviser argues, avoid the scale ceiling that traps rivals one country in.
ASEAN doesn’t need to win the AI race, it needs to run it together: The region’s real edge is its 97% MSME base, not foundation-model spending — pooling SEA-LION, Sailor2 and national curricula could build applied AI for the real economy faster than any single country alone.
Southeast Asia can’t simply license its way to stablecoin sovereignty: The US dollar backs 99.76% of the global stablecoin market — a licensing regime alone won’t dislodge it, but region-wide QR and wallet rails already in usecould give local coins a real distribution edge.
Pyramid, diamond, pod: the evolution of the consulting business: As agentic AI eats the “grinder” work that funded professional-services leverage, the stable end state is a small, senior-heavy pod built around judgment, not headcount.
You’re waiting for everyone to agree: the hourglass doesn’t care: Kodak and Fujifilm faced the same digital threat with the same data — the difference was whether leadership set a deadline or waited for consensus that never arrived.
Building through borders: a founder’s perspective on a fragmented world: Geopolitical fragmentation isn’t only a constraint — a corporate-events platform pivoted from raw data to strategic context, arguing interpretation now beats information as data becomes abundant.
AI will not cut costs or grow revenue until you redesign how work gets done: One founder built her business around Seraphina, an AI “chief of staff” coordinating a fleet of specialised agents — arguing the real return isn’t speed but reclaimed thinking space for leaders.
Web3 is not dead, it is finally growing up: Stablecoin market cap hit roughly US$317 billion in April, but the next generation of Web3 companies will be judged on retention and revenue, not token launches or airdrop metrics.
The strategic priority: how initiatives actually get chosen: Corporate “strategic priorities” are rarely the most valuable option — they’re the ones with strong enough sponsorship to survive internal politics and governability tests.
Why seniority is repricing in AI-augmented teams: PwC data shows the AI-skills wage premium doubled to 56% in a year, and some junior AI specialists now out-earn directors — judgment and accountability are the new scarce resource.
Bitcoin holds US$64,341 while miners bleed US$1.26B: what is really happening?: MARA Holdings posted a US$1.26 billion net loss as major miners pivot toward AI compute — a bearish signal for near-term hash rate growth, the columnist argues, even as ETF inflows stay mixed.
Bitcoin’s 73% correlation with gold forces investors to rethink crypto: With spot ETFs pulling in over US$200M a day and Ethereum’s staking ratio at a record 34.4%, the columnist reads the correlation as proof institutions now treat Bitcoin as a macro inflation hedge, not a speculative punt.
Stocks at records, oil below US$80, gold near US$4,000, Bitcoin still at US$64,000: which market is lying to you?: A potential Hormuz shipping deal pressured oil even as equities hit fresh highs — the columnist warns that conflicting signals across asset classes call for caution on leverage, not conviction.
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