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Despite its fragmented markets and myriad of cultures and spoken languages, Asia is becoming an increasingly popular home for budding tech and AI entrepreneurs, according to Magnus Grimeland, the founder and CEO of venture capital firm Antler.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoing to the U.S. to build companies is still very popular and we see that happening at scale,\u201d Grimeland said at the Fortune Southeast Asia 500 Summit in Vietnam on Nov. 3. \u201c[But] for the first time ever in one of these platform shifts, there are real advantages in Asia that will lead to a lot of the leading companies being built out of here.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Crunchbase data, investors poured $42.8 billion into startup funding rounds across all of Asia in the second quarter of 2026\u2014the highest quarterly total in over three years. In Grimeland\u2019s telling, several factors make Asia an appealing home for startups: a rapidly growing electricity grid, and an abundance of advanced chips and AI engineering talent.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look at global power production, there\u2019s four times more power being generated and built in Asia per year than in Europe and the U.S. combined,\u201d he explained. \u201cMost of that is in China, but [it\u2019s happening] in the rest of Asia as well\u2026 the cost of power has gone down drastically compared to what you can access in the U.S..\u201d<\/p>\n
Asia, too, is leading in the physical AI realm. \u201cAll the leading companies in that space are here,\u201d Grimeland said. \u201cThere\u2019s very, very few autonomous vehicles on the streets in the U.S\u2026. [but there\u2019s] one company in China that has more autonomous vehicles on the streets than the rest of the world combined.\u201d<\/p>\n
Uneven growth<\/p>\n
Yet, the allocation of venture funding remains hugely uneven within Asia. Thus far in 2026, 68.1%\u2014or $96.1 billion of $141 billion\u2014of VC funds entering Asia flowed into China, mainly to AI startups such as DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and StepFun, according to Dealroom data. By contrast, only $10.7 billion of venture funding went to Southeast Asia during the first nine months of the year.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get this question all the time: \u201cWhat kinds of AI deals are you seeing in the Philippines?\u201d\u201d said Franco Varona, managing partner at Foxmont Capital Partners, a Philippines-based early growth fund. \u201c[But] we don\u2019t have the infrastructure for an LLM developer. We don\u2019t even have the infrastructure for AI apps to be developed in the Philippines.\u201d<\/p>\n
Varona, a Canada-born Filipino, argued that this environment creates different investment opportunities. \u201cIn developed markets, you can already benefit from the infrastructure which has been developed, and you can invest in innovators, because those innovators have everything around them that can help them out,\u201d Varona said. \u201c[But] when we think about investing in an emerging market like the Philippines, we think about it as investing in the infrastructure itself.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
To date, Foxmont has launched several themed funds, including one on digitization in the Philippines, and another focused on accessibility and affordability for Filipino consumers.<\/p>\n
The unique corporate dynamic in Asia has also pushed the region\u2019s long-running venture firms to launch new funding models. Singapore-headquartered VC firm Granite Asia\u2019s private credit fund Libra Hybrid, for example, combines the characteristics of both debt and equity into a single financial instrument.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of businesses [in Asia] are family owned or part of conglomerates,\u201d said Ming Eng, Granite Asia\u2019s managing partner. \u201cThey may not be interested in dilution or going for an IPO at any point in time\u2026 but they still need strategic capital to help them grow, and that\u2019s where we see a lot of opportunities to help founders and companies, [by] having a different form of capital other than [pure] equity.\u201d<\/p>\n
All three panelists remained bullish on Asia\u2019s VC scene, despite recent geopolitical headwinds. \u201cWe are going into a world now where the balance of innovation is clearly shifting,\u201d concluded Grimeland of Antler. \u201cThere\u2019s a real chance that more than the majority of the most exciting and innovative companies in [the AI] space will have been built out of Asia, and that has never happened before.\u201d<\/p>\n
#Experts #boom #shift #real #advantages #building #Asia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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