Glenn Kaonang · · 4 min readSEA gets serious about AI agents
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In focus
- A roundup of startups building AI agents in Southeast Asia
- PixVerse becomes the region’s first genAI unicorn
- Who else is powering Asia’s AI video boom?
Hello reader,
I’m not particularly fond of telemarketers, as their calls tend to come at inconvenient times. Having AI agents do their job won’t change my mind, but I hope it could at least make marketing calls less intrusive.
That said, the startups building these agents in Southeast Asia are putting more thought into their offerings than I expected. The serious ones even draw hard lines between what AI can and cannot touch.
Refund logic and escalation triggers are examples of domains that are off-limits to the large language models (LLMs) powering these agents. In this scenario, the LLMs just figure out what users are asking, and a rule-based backend handles the rest.
It’s a small architectural detail that makes a huge difference, especially for AI companies aiming to serve hospitals or banks. It also helps these firms stand out in a market where the term “agent” gets slapped on everything, from a basic chatbot to a fully autonomous system.
Our first top story today maps 35 agentic AI startups across the region, broken down by category, funding, and backers. Whether you’re looking to invest, pursue partnerships, or compete in this space, this is a great starting point.
We’ve also been tracking unicorns across Southeast Asia. This year, the region’s first unicorn in the genAI era has been crowned. It’s PixVerse, which just closed a US$300 million series C funding round.
An AI unicorn won’t miraculously undo years of declining startup funding in Southeast Asia, but it does give us some hope. We’ll see if it signals a broader momentum or stays a one-off thing.
Glenn Kaonang, journalist
Top Stories
1️⃣ The startups turning Southeast Asia’s AI hype into working agents
Image credit: Arsal Ysfin
We’ve identified 35 startups in the region that have raised at least US$1 million building agentic AI products, classifying them into five categories. Most of these companies are based in Singapore and focus on enterprise customers to meet the increasing demand.
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