A look at the women driving Southeast Asia’s startups

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Hello reader,

Happy International Women’s Day!

Every year, Tech in Asia’s International Women’s Day campaign is led by none other than my colleague Stefanie Yeo. She’s always been a fantastic project leader, and I’m continually impressed by how much she can get done. (I mean she’s disciplined enough to go for 8 am runs basically every day – I could never.)

For this year’s campaign, we came up with a whole slate of exciting and interesting content, including a deeply personal piece by our COO Maria Li and a mini mockumentary series, which you can find on our social media pages.

Today’s premium story – a fantastic and in-depth diagram of all the female founders and leaders in Southeast Asia’s biggest startups – is part of this year’s campaign too. It’s a really good showcase of just how critical everyone is in our regional tech scene.

At the risk of coming off like I’m virtue signaling, here’s a quick shout out to all the women out there who keep the world going round.

Today we look at:

• The women calling the shots in Southeast Asia’s tech scene
• A carbon project startup’s seed round
• Other newsy highlights such as JD.com’s fourth quarter results and Bukalapak halting its buy now, pay later offering

Premium summary

It’s raining women

Image credit: Timmy Loen

Hallelujah, because without these women, who knows where some of the startups on this list would be? Here’s a look at some of the women that work tirelessly behind (and in front of) the scenes at major companies like GoTo to Lazada.

• Fantastic Four: Lazada, which tops this list for most funding in the last two years, has four major female leaders: chief people officer Lillian Jang, group counsel and ESG leader Gladys Chun, chief customer officer Brigitte Daubry, and group COO Kaya Qin, who is also CEO of Lazada Vietnam.
• At the apex: We’ve got several CEOs on the list, including: Insider co-founder Hande Cilingir, Su Mei Toh of Anext Bank, and more.
• The more the merrier: Several companies have three or more women in top leadership positions, namely Lazada, Insider, Tyme, TNG Digital, Astro, and Anext Bank.

Read more: The female founders and leaders behind SEA’s top-funded startups

A thriving company

Hear it straight from the man who catapulted companies like Dropbox to phenomenal success

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