Asia is gaining a growing advantage as a base for AI startups, according to Antler founder and chief executive Magnus Grimeland, who said the region could produce more of the sector’s leading companies than ever before.
Speaking at the Fortune Southeast Asia 500 Summit in Vietnam, Grimeland said the current technology shift was the first in which Asia offered “real advantages” over the US and Europe for entrepreneurs building new businesses.
“Going to the U.S. to build companies is still very popular and we see that happening at scale,” he said. “But for the first time ever in one of these platform shifts, there are real advantages in Asia that will lead to a lot of the leading companies being built out of here.”
He pointed to the region’s expanding electricity grid, access to advanced chips and pool of AI engineering talent as factors making it increasingly attractive to founders.
Global power production is expanding particularly quickly in Asia, Grimeland said. “There’s four times more power being generated and built in Asia per year than in Europe and the U.S. combined,” he said, adding that the cost of power had fallen sharply compared with what was available in the US.
Asia is also becoming a centre for physical AI, including autonomous vehicles. Grimeland said there were “very, very few autonomous vehicles” on US streets, while one Chinese company had more such vehicles in operation than the rest of the world combined.
China dominates Asia’s venture funding
Investment in Asian startups has risen, although funding remains heavily concentrated in China. Crunchbase data showed that investors committed 42.8 billion dollars to funding rounds across Asia in the second quarter of 2026, the highest quarterly total in more than three years.
Dealroom data indicated that China received 68.1 per cent of the 141 billion dollars invested in Asia during the first nine months of the year, equivalent to 96.1 billion dollars. Much of that funding went to AI companies including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and StepFun.
Southeast Asia attracted 10.7 billion dollars over the same period. Franco Varona, managing partner at Philippines-based Foxmont Capital Partners, said the country did not yet have the infrastructure required to support large language model developers or even AI applications.
“When we think about investing in an emerging market like the Philippines, we think about it as investing in the infrastructure itself,” said Varona, who was born in Canada and is Filipino.
Foxmont has launched funds focused on areas including digitisation in the Philippines, as well as accessibility and affordability for Filipino consumers.
The structure of Asian businesses is also prompting venture firms to develop alternatives to conventional equity investment. Singapore-based Granite Asia has launched a private credit fund, Libra Hybrid, which combines elements of debt and equity.
Managing partner Ming Eng said many businesses in the region were family-owned or part of conglomerates and might not want to give up ownership or pursue a stock market listing. Such companies could instead require “strategic capital” to support their growth, she said.
Despite geopolitical pressures, the speakers remained positive about the region’s prospects. Grimeland said the balance of innovation was shifting and that more than half of the most exciting and innovative AI companies could eventually be built in Asia.
