Artificial Intelligence in ASEAN (South East Asia)

AI Outlook: Artificial Intelligence in Asia (ASEAN)

With a sustained rise of economic growth and an increasingly growing middle class, there are about 3.8 million people becoming first-time internet users each month thanks to smartphones. ASEAN’s digital economy is bound to triple to a figure of $240 million by 2025. This creates enormous value for tech business, and in extension, cognitive technologies.

Adoption of AI is growing around the world, in sectors such as finance, healthcare and telecom. ASEAN lags behind in rapid adoption, but there is AI activity in each member state. Singapore has made the greatest strides, but there are also promising early signs in places like Malaysia and Vietnam.

CloudMile, a leading Taiwanese AI and cloud service provider has raised $6 million in pre-series B funding recently in a round led by VC’s like CDIB Capital (the private equity arm of China), Development Financial, APAC’s Black Marble Capital Management and Taiwan Cooperative Venture Capital.

While the total VC investment in the region reached $2.6 billion — Singapore, in particular has been taking several initiatives to power AI capabilities in an effort to boost the digital economy. With the venture capital funding growing from $136 million to $1.36 billion, the country has witnessed a significant growth curve for AI start-ups in verticals such as healthcare, transport, financial and business services, retail, manufacturing and more.

Here’s a list of 5 VC’s investing heavily in the AI start-ups in the industry:

BEENEXT — The fund, launched by a Japanese entrepreneur Teruhide Sato, is based in Singapore and provides a highly unique perspective along with the funds to help start-ups scale.

Enspire Capital — This fund, launched by Singapore entrepreneur KS Chay, funds start-ups in Asia and Silicon Valley. Their focus areas are SaaS, AI, Cloud and IoT. A current investment includes ViSenze, which is an AI start-up developing visual search and image recognition solutions leveraging ML.

Quest Ventures — Based out of Singapore and China, Quest Ventures is a promising venture fund for start-ups that promise high scalability. Their focus areas include e-commerce, entertainment, logistics, etc. using AI. A sample investment includes Nurrture.AI, which is described as a platform involved in making AI research more efficient, reproducible and accessible.

Vickers Venture Partners — The fund was founded back in 2005 by Dr. Finian and Damian Tan, Dr. Khalil Binebine and others. With a focus on Asia and beyond, the fund has an interest in cutting-edge tech such as AI, augmented and virtual reality, robotics etc.

Wavemaker Partners — With headquarters in both LA and Singapore, they have over 300 portfolio companies and $265 million in assets under management. An example of current investments is Musiio, a music start-up that uses AI to analyse and listen to huge volumes of music released daily to rank, categorize and curate songs of interest for customers.

Here’s a list of AI based start-ups in ASEAN:

Bindez, based out of Myanmar, leverages text analysis and NLP to track and detect online hate speech.

Kata.ai is pioneering the NLP algorithms for Bahasa, a primary language in Indonesia and Malaysia spoken by more than 250 million people.

Cloudsek is a cyber-security start-up that intends to provide ML solutions to identify and tackle online threats in real-time.

Sero is a Vietnam-based agriculture start-up which provides farmers with crop intelligence by leveraging on AI analytics of images and in-field data.

AI can boost productivity enormously, and create new opportunities. But AI adoption is not always a simple proposition, and coupled with the fact that ASEAN does not have a vast pool of talent to choose from, the entire region will need to strengthen its digital infrastructure with a big enough talent pool with advanced digital skills. Then, ASEAN can transform into a hub for accelerated AI adoption for the greater good.

We are actively working with startups around the world and would love to work with founders in ASEAN to take their products and businesses to the next level with AI and Marketing/Sales. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIN :) If you ask, you get…