[Roundtable] If It Existed, We’d Fund It: Filling the Gaps in SEA’s AI Frontier

​Who It’s For:
Builders, founders, and innovators looking to understand where leading investors, community leaders, and international partners see the biggest opportunities in Southeast Asia’s AI landscape.

​Description

​What are the biggest opportunities in Southeast Asia’s AI frontier — the ones no one has built yet, but everyone wishes existed?

​This roundtable brings together builders, investors, and corporates to map the missing pieces of the region’s AI ecosystem — from foundational infrastructure and open datasets to industry-specific applications waiting for innovation. But this isn’t a top-down wishlist. It’s a co-created conversation: builders bring ground reality, investors share what’s fundable, and corporates reveal the real problems waiting to be solved.

​Together, the group will explore:

• ​The gaps that matter most — where capability, capital, and need don’t yet align

• ​What’s holding promising ideas back from scaling in SEA

• ​How builders, corporates, and investors can collaborate to fill those gaps

• ​What the region could uniquely lead the world in over the next decade

​The outcome: a shared map of opportunities — and the beginnings of the partnerships that can make them real.

​Goal

​To move beyond observation into collaboration — giving builders a voice in defining the region’s AI frontier, and uniting investors and corporates around the ideas and capabilities that Southeast Asia can uniquely create.

​Speakers:

• ​Lizzie Tan - Cleve, co-founder

• ​Lyn Ong - Cradle Fund, ASEAN & Global Unit Manager

• ​Farah Rafik - Cradle Fund, Head of Investment Unit

• ​Joel Neoh - First Move, Founding Partner

• ​Andre Teow - Build With AI, Founder

• ​Joshua Lim - January Capital, Investor

​Outcome:

​The points from this track will be distilled into a "request for startups", which will also be used as tracks for the CursorMY Hackathon.