Start with two numbers and a question.

In May, startups in this region raised $472 million. More than double what they raised in April. Read only that line and you would think the drought had broken.

Now the second number. That doubling was built almost entirely on two checks. Take those two out and May was thin, still down on the year before.

So here is the question I want to sit inside. When you are a founder in Kuala Lumpur, or Bangkok, or Manila, which numbers are actually telling you the truth?

Because two of the loudest numbers in this market, the funding headline when you raise and the IPO pipeline when you want out, are both unreliable. And they are unreliable in different ways. The money coming in is inflated. The money going out is uneven. In between sits a real company, your company, trying to make decisions on top of figures that flatter and figures that lie.

The mirage: headlines that flatter

The funding rebound is a perfect little lie. Not a dishonest one. A statistically true one, which is worse, because it is harder to argue with.

May 2026: $472 million across 31 deals, per DealStreetAsia. Up 104% on April. The kind of line that gets screenshotted into a pitch deck by Tuesday.

Look underneath it. The jump came from the return of mega deals, transactions worth $100 million or more. A data center. An AI hardware platform. April had none. May had two. Two checks did the heavy lifting for an entire region. And even with them, May still came in 18% below the same month a year earlier. Strip the two big ones out and what you have left is quiet.

This is not new, and that is the point. We saw the same shape in the first quarter: about $2.8 billion across 98 deals, the lowest deal count in at least eight years, with a single data center raise accounting for more than 70% of all that capital. Once you see the pattern you cannot unsee it. The total goes up. The number of companies actually getting funded does not. The aggregate is being inflated by hardware and data centers, while the count of real operating companies catching a check stays flat.

Here is why that matters to you, and it is not academic. If you are raising right now and you benchmark yourself against the headline, you will conclude that capital is flowing and you are simply being passed over. That is the wrong lesson, and it will make you do desperate things. The right lesson is that the deal count, not the dollar total, is the honest gauge. And the deal count says fewer companies, higher bar, slower checks.

The honest number is in the margin

So if the aggregate is a mirage, what is the real one? What is the number on a Southeast Asian cap table that does not lie?

It is the margin. Which brings me to one of the genuinely good stories in the region this month.

Respond.io, a Malaysia-based company, raised a $62.5 million Series B led by Camber Partners, with Endeavor Catalyst and existing backers coming back in, off the back of going through the Endeavor selection network. Big round. But the round is not the story. The story is what was true before the round.

$35 million in annual recurring revenue. Growing over 100% a year. At a decent profit margin. Read that again, because they were already profitable. They raised growth money from a position where they did not strictly need it. That is the exact opposite of the burn-first, find-the-model-later playbook the last cycle rewarded and then punished.

They run an AI-agent-powered customer messaging platform, the layer that lets a business actually hold a conversation and close a sale across the channels where commerce in this region happens. Billions of messages a quarter, more than 10,000 businesses, over 180 countries. The new money is going west, into North America and Europe, with the possibility of some acquisitions. A profitable company, quietly compounding, raising on its own terms and going on offense into the biggest markets in the world.

Take one thing from this. Stop reading the league tables. Read the profit and loss. In 2026, the only honest number on a Southeast Asian cap table is the margin, because it is the one figure nobody can dress up with a single big check.

The asterisk Malaysia should be honest about

Let me complicate my own happy story, because I am not here to wave the flag.

This one is close to home, and KL should be proud of it. The founder is not Malaysian. The company did not start here. It was brought here. That should be a feature, not a footnote. A founder who could base anywhere chose to base in KL, and that decision creates things you can touch: engineering jobs, payroll that gets taxed, corporate tax, office leases, local lawyers and accountants, the cafe downstairs, and a signal to the next founder weighing where to land that says people build serious companies here. Malaysia should bank that credit fully and without an asterisk.

But the timing is almost too on the nose, because there is an asterisk.

At the same moment, the rules on foreign talent are leaning the other way. The salary floor on the employment pass has jumped. Pass lifespans are changing. To me, though, the salary number is not the headline. The harder one is the requirement that you have a replacement plan in place for foreign talent, and some of those plans are short.

Detail has been scant, but one person closer to the interpretation told me the employment is treated as tied to the company, not to the title or the role. So if you bring in a foreign hire to fill, say, a junior developer seat, and that person does well and gets promoted, it does not matter that their title has grown. What matters is that they are still there, and the requirement is that you replace them so that they no longer are.

Sit with that from the talent’s side. What highly capable person takes a role knowing there is a clock on it? If they have a family, will they uproot to a market that is effectively saying we want you temporarily but not forever?

I understand the intent. We do need to build local capability, and you should not let companies park expats in seats indefinitely. Fair enough. But here is the tension I cannot get past as an investor. You cannot run a “come build your global company here” pitch and a “here is your countdown timer, please train your replacement” policy at the same time. The open-door version of this works. There are countries we can point to that prove it.

This is a competitive sport. The founder who chooses KL had other options, because Singapore wanted him, Hong Kong wanted him, Tokyo, Bangkok and Manila all wanted him. The risk is that Malaysia celebrates this win in the very quarter it makes the next one harder to land. If attracting mobile founders is how a small market punches above its weight, and it is, then the policy and the pitch have to point in the same direction. For this month at least, they did not.

The fork in the road

Now the way out. Every founder eventually asks the quiet question. If this works, how do I get out, and where? Every investor asks it less quietly. In Southeast Asia the answer used to be a shrug. This month, three companies gave three different answers, and together they tell you more about this region than any funding total.

Thailand sends its champion abroad. LINE MAN Wongnai, the app more than 10 million Thais use for food, rides and payments, is weighing an IPO, and the venues it is looking at are Hong Kong and New York, not Bangkok. The reporting cites weak domestic conditions and political volatility, with a decision expected as soon as the end of this month. Sit with that. The most-used app in the country looked at its home exchange and decided it could not get a fair hearing there, so it is shopping for a listing 8,000 kilometers away. A market that cannot list its own champions does not have a sentiment problem. It has a plumbing problem. The pipes that turn a great company into a liquid, locally owned public outcome simply have not been built.

The Philippines builds a house worth staying in. In the same window, the opposite answer. Mint, the parent of GCash, the finance super app tens of millions of Filipinos live inside, has authorized the filing to go public: a registration with the regulator, a listing application with the Philippine Stock Exchange, an offer of around 12% of the company, targeting the second half of this year and possibly the fourth quarter. It is shaping up to be the largest IPO in the history of that exchange. And it is listing at home. Not Hong Kong. Not New York. The biggest fintech outcome the country has produced is choosing to be a Philippine public company. It is not alone. Maya, the digital bank, is weighing its own listing on a dual track, the local exchange plus NASDAQ, after its first profitable year. One foot at home, one foot abroad, a hedge.

Look at the fork honestly. Thailand’s champion is leaving the list. The Philippines has one champion committing to the home exchange outright and another hedging across both. That is not the region as a single sound story. That is the region splitting in real time over the same question: is it worth building a venue people want to stay for? Right now, this quarter, the Philippines is making the bigger bet that the answer is yes.

The caveat, because I promised it. Do not let anyone sell you Mint and Maya as a scrappy-startup miracle. Mint sits behind Globe and the Ayala group, with AMP alongside. Maya sits behind PLDT. These are conglomerate and telco children going public, which rhymes with what I said recently about Vietnam, where the giants raise and the startups starve. Hold both thoughts. The optimism is earned: a deep local public market is the single thing this region has always lacked, and the Philippines is genuinely building toward it. But the homegrown-founder fairy tale is not the right frame. Incumbents are listing. That is still good. It is just not the legend.

And here is the constructive next move, the one I would want a Filipino policymaker or operator to actually hear. One record listing does not make a market. The test is the second one, and the third, and the fourth. Can the exchange turn Mint’s debut into a habit, so that the next great Filipino company does not even think about Hong Kong or the US? If it can, the Philippines stops being the market everyone underrates and becomes the market with the exit nobody else in the region has.

The through line

Two acts, the same lesson from opposite ends of a company’s life.

When you raise, the headline lies. It is inflated by a handful of checks you will never be part of, and the only number that tells you the truth is your own margin. So build like respond.io. Get to profit, and let profit, not a press release, be the thing that earns you a round.

When you leave, the region forks. One country will send you abroad to be valued. Another is trying, right now, to build a house worth staying in. Do not assume your exit. Choose it on purpose, the way you would choose a co-founder.

In between sits the thing I keep coming back to. The capital around a Southeast Asian founder, the private money coming in and the public money you eventually exit through, is unreliable and uneven. That is not a reason to be cynical. It is a reason to be precise. Read the honest number, pick the real venue, and do not build your company on top of someone else’s headline.

The markets that win the next decade out here will be the ones that do both: attract the people who create the margin, and build the place those people can cash out at home. This month, one company showed us the margin. One country showed us the door, opening it and starting to close it at the same time. And one country started building a room worth staying in.

Be the reason the money stops sitting still.

Real. Raw. Relatable.

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