ASEAN Tech

ASEAN Fintech Is Moving From Pilot to Platform — And 99% of Regional Firms Stand to Benefit

New data from the World Economic Forum and Money20/20 Asia show ASEAN's fintech sector has reached an inflection point: more than 90% of financial executives say social impact is now embedded in core strategy, while SME financing platforms like Funding Societies have disbursed over $4.38 billion to 100,000+ businesses.

3 May 2026 · 5 min read

Developer Tools

Cloudflare's New "Infire" Engine Runs Trillion-Parameter AI Models on Eight GPUs

Cloudflare has built a custom LLM inference engine called Infire that runs models like Kimi K2.5 — with over one trillion parameters — across just eight H100 GPUs, with 15–22% weight compression via its new "Unweight" system.

3 May 2026 · 5 min read

AI & ML

Google Renames Vertex AI and Goes All-In on Enterprise Agents at Cloud Next 2026

Google renamed Vertex AI to the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform at Cloud Next 2026. Here is everything ASEAN businesses and developers need to know.

3 May 2026 · 5 min read

Developer Tools

IBM Granite 4.1 Matches 32B Models at 8B Parameters — The Efficiency Race Is Reshaping Enterprise AI Costs

IBM released Granite 4.1, an 8 billion parameter model matching 32B Mixture-of-Experts performance. Here is what this means for ASEAN enterprise AI costs.

3 May 2026 · 5 min read

Developer Tools

Stripe Releases 288 New Features for AI Commerce — Including Agent Payments and Real-Time Fraud for Autonomous Transactions

Stripe's latest product release covers 288 new features and updates focused on AI-native commerce infrastructure — including payment rails for AI agents, advanced fraud controls for non-human transactions, and tools for managing subscription billing in agentic workflows.

2 May 2026 · 5 min read

Finance

Visa Launches "Agentic Ready" Programme in Singapore as Stablecoin Settlements Hit $7 Billion Annually

Visa has launched its Agentic Ready programme with 13 Singapore issuers to prepare banks for AI-agent payments, while its stablecoin settlement pilot has reached a $7 billion annualised run rate across five new blockchains.

2 May 2026 · 5 min read

Developer Tools

The SaaS Business Model Is Under Threat — And Agentic AI Is Why

IDC predicts 70% of software vendors will abandon seat-based pricing by 2028 as AI agents replace human users. Here is what this SaaS transformation means for ASEAN businesses.

2 May 2026 · 5 min read

Finance

Robinhood Gets MAS Approval for Singapore — What It Means for Retail Investors

Robinhood received in-principle approval from MAS to launch brokerage services in Singapore. Here is what this means for Singapore retail investors and the region's investment landscape.

2 May 2026 · 5 min read

AI & ML

Open Source AI Is Closing the Gap — A 7B Model Now Does What a 70B Model Did One Year Ago

The latest AI trends data shows open-weight models from Meta, Mistral, and Alibaba's Qwen are matching or exceeding proprietary systems on key benchmarks, while a 7 billion parameter model today matches the capability of a 70 billion parameter model from 2025.

1 May 2026 · 5 min read

AI & ML

Claude Sonnet Leads Real-World Web Agent Benchmark — But Only Completes 1 in 3 Tasks

A new benchmark called ClawBench tests AI agents on 153 real tasks across 144 live production websites — booking appointments, completing purchases, submitting applications. Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads at 33.3%, revealing how far autonomous web agents still have to go.

1 May 2026 · 4 min read