Startups get serious—AI goes platform-native 🧠
- Shivirta C.
- Jun 28
- 3 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
28 June 2025
👋 Welcome to the A2D Weekly Wrap!
This week’s headlines show Southeast Asia leaning into long-term bets—building in climate, education, and generational wealth.
Meanwhile, global tech giants are rewriting the rules.
From monetizing massive user bases to doubling down on AI, the pace of change is accelerating—and the implications are only getting bigger.
HOT NEWS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
🇲🇾 Maybank x CP Group – Maybank backs Altervim, the renewable energy arm of Thailand’s CP Group, with its first green loan in Malaysia.
🇸🇬 Timah Partners – Newly launched permanent holding company for SME succession planning raises USD 50M Series A from global investors including Danaher and 3G Capital figures.
🇻🇳 Galaxy Education – Vietnam-based edtech platform secures nearly USD 10M from East Ventures and others, marking a top edtech raise amid tough market conditions.
🇲🇾 3cat – Malaysian secondhand electronics platform raises undisclosed pre-Series A from AEON, The Radical Fund, Iterative, and more to scale across Southeast Asia.
🇲🇾 First Move – AI-focused VC firm First Move adds Jelawang Capital as a new LP to back AI-native startups in the region.
GLOBAL PULSE: AI & TECH
AI is getting serious: platforms are monetizing, models are evolving—and the race for control is heating up.
WhatsApp rolls out AI message summaries, ads, and paid channel subscriptions—putting privacy back under the spotlight as Meta finally starts monetizing its 3B+ user base.
Samsung is moving away from Google’s Gemini—reportedly preloading Perplexity into Galaxy devices and considering a strategic investment—AI search is now hardware-native.
AI hiring explodes: LinkedIn reports a 6x spike in AI-related job listings and a 20x surge in profiles listing AI skills. The workforce shift is real—and fast.
Rakuten slashes dev time by 79% using Claude Code, proving enterprise-grade productivity gains are no longer theoretical.
The AI talent war escalates: top PhDs are now commanding million-dollar offers from labs and academia alike.
xAI’s Grok is getting a full overhaul after repeated hallucinations and “garbage” output—showing even hype-backed bots need rework.
Meta’s rapid AI acquisition spree—from PlayAI to others—has seen mixed results, with internal challenges in integration and alignment.
Anthropic adds long-term memory and “Artifacts” to Claude, turning it from a chat assistant into a workspace-native AI platform.
China says it expects over 100 DeepSeek-level AI breakthroughs in the next 18 months, as state-backed labs ramp up national efforts.
HPE introduces GreenLake Intelligence, featuring autonomous agentic AI for IT ops—pushing AIOps toward the mainstream.
Sam Altman hints that ChatGPT could introduce ads as OpenAI looks for sustainable revenue amid rising compute costs.
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Quick hits of knowledge—because learning should never stop.
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💬 That’s a wrap for this week!
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