The Startup Scene in Southeast Asia

Jul 28, 2026 by SED

Golden Gate Ventures is one of Southeast Asia’s most established early-stage venture firms, having backed companies across the region since 2011. They have invested in companies that are now household names in the region. Examples include Gojek, which started as a motorcycle taxi service in Indonesia and grew into a super app spanning payments, food delivery, and logistics, and Grab, which began as a ride-hailing service in Singapore and similarly expanded across Southeast Asia into food delivery and financial services.

Jeffrey Paine is a co-founder and partner at Golden Gate Ventures. In this episode, Jeffrey joins Gregor Vand to discuss how the Southeast Asian startup ecosystem has evolved, why the regional copycat model is giving way to globally ambitious technical founders, what companies like Manus and Supabase reveal about Singapore’s emerging role in the global tech landscape, and what advice Jeffrey gives founders today who want to build something that matters beyond their home market.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

Thanks to our sponsors

This episode is brought to you by:

Endor Labs
You’re shipping faster than ever with AI coding agents. But those agents don’t vet the packages they pull in, and they don’t have security context built in.
AURI by Endor Labs fixes that. It plugs directly into your editor via MCP, catching vulnerabilities, blocking malicious packages, and flagging exposed secrets in real time. No separate tool to switch to. No dashboard to babysit. Security that fits how you actually build.
Teams using AURI see ten times fewer security tickets and six times faster fixes.
Free for developers. Get started at www.endorlabs.com/auri
tigerdata.com
If you’re running Postgres in production, you’ve probably felt the moment analytical queries start fighting your transactional workload. Most teams end up adding a second database and all the pipeline complexity that comes with it.
Tiger Data, creators of TimescaleDB, takes a different approach. We extend Postgres with hybrid row and columnar storage so one table handles both writes and analytical scans. Native Compression cuts storage costs up to 95%. Continuous aggregates keep dashboards live without batch jobs. And it scales to petabytes without you re-architecting.
Companies like Cloudflare, Octave Energy, Schneider, Axpo, and Flowco run production workloads on Tiger Data today.
No stale data. No second system to operate. Just Postgres, managed for you, ready for the workload you’re building toward.Try it free at tigerdata.com
Vaisala Xweather
You’re building agents that can write code, summarize documents, and automate workflows.
But they’re missing one thing: awareness of the world around them.
Xweather combines enterprise-grade weather intelligence with agent-ready APIs, natural language capabilities, and an MCP server built for tools like Claude, Codex, Copilot, and modern IDEs – so your agents can adapt workflows, automate responses, and make better decisions based on real-world conditions.
Backed by Vaisala, whose instruments fly on NASA missions to Mars, Xweather delivers trusted data and unique insights that go beyond conditions to actual impact – from real-time lightning strikes to road surface forecasts.
Start with 15,000 free API calls every month and pay only for what you use as you grow.
Your full weather stack, for developers by developers.
Start building for free today at xweather.com.

Endor Labs

tigerdata.com

Vaisala Xweather

Subscribe to the newsletter

Related episodes

Subscribe
to the newsletter