A Philippine Corporate VC Just Backed a California AI Startup. That’s Not a Contradiction.
Kickstart Ventures joined a $9 million Pre-Series A round for California-based Sprouts.ai, part of a deliberate 2026 strategy of selective…
Category: Philippines
A Filipino AI Company Skipped the Funding Round Entirely and Opened Its Own Innovation Hub
NMBLR.ai, profitable since 2024, opened a Makati AI training and development hub without a venture round behind it, a rare…
Salmon Just Raised $100 Million. The Structure Behind It Matters More Than the Number.
Salmon Group closed a $100 million equity-and-bond round in April, the largest single funding event for a Philippine startup in…
DTI Wants a $10 Billion Startup Ecosystem by 2028. Here’s What Would Have to Be True.
DTI's target of a $10 billion Philippine startup ecosystem by 2028 requires nearly tripling the 2023 Startup Genome baseline, a…
A Philippine VC Firm’s New Report Says Private Capital Grew 34 Percent Last Year. Here’s the Catch.
Foxmont Capital Partners is targeting up to 4 billion pesos for Philippine startups and reports private capital deployment hit a…
The Philippines’ Agritech Grant Pipeline Actually Works. It’s Also Barely Funded.
A government grant window and a new agri-focused startup competition are surfacing real Philippine agritech ideas, but the entire sector…
A Filipino-Owned Startup Is Already Doing What the Global Stablecoin Hype Promises
BCRemit and Coins.ph are moving OFW remittances through USDC stablecoin rails at roughly 1 percent cost against a 6.4 percent…
The Philippines Built a Front Door for AI Research. The Real Test Is Who Gets Through It.
DOST's newly launched National AI Center for Research and Innovation consolidates the country's fragmented compute and research infrastructure, and is…
Manila Just Got Its First Systematic HealthTech Accelerator. The Sector Needed One Badly.
Speed2Seed Manila launched the country's first structured healthtech-specific accelerator in a sector where only 4 of 372 tracked startups have…
It Took Seven Years, But the Philippines’ Largest VC Fund Finally Has a Real Exit
SlashNext's acquisition by Varonis is the first realized exit for Kickstart Ventures' $180 million ACTIVE Fund, a reminder of how…