Every business deal relies on knowing exactly who you are dealing with, but mapping corporate relationships across Asia is an incredibly challenging task. Daryl Neo spent years as a regulator at the Singapore Exchange, manually tracing ownership chains and trying to uncover who was truly behind complex business structures. As corporate networks expanded and data volumes exploded, this painstaking process became entirely unsustainable.

In 2011, Daryl and his co-founder Charles Poon left the SGX to build Handshakes, the tool they always wished they had. Today, it is the largest aggregator of ASEAN and China private market data, visually mapping corporate relationships and hidden connections to reduce due diligence workflows from months to hours. Backed by investors like Nikkei Inc, SPH Media, and S&P Global, the platform has successfully exposed the networks behind cross-border investment scams, penny stock crashes, and major conflict-of-interest cases.

Daryl talks to us about the significance of having global financial giants on their cap table, the introduction of their new AI Map Summariser, and why Malaysian business leaders need to shift their mindset from viewing due diligence as a boring compliance cost to treating it as a valuable intelligence asset.

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