In November 2023, DTI Trade Undersecretary Rafaelita Aldaba told reporters the department’s goal was for the Philippine startup ecosystem to reach $10 billion in value by 2028, the end of the current Marcos administration’s term. It’s a number that has since become a kind of shorthand target across Philippine startup policy discussion, cited in ISA Committee materials and startup-week programming alike. With 2026 now the midpoint year between that announcement and its 2028 deadline, it’s worth actually checking the math against what’s happened since, rather than treating the figure as a settled ambition nobody needs to revisit.
The first thing worth being precise about is what the $10 billion figure actually measures, because it’s routinely conflated with two different things in casual coverage: annual funding raised, and total ecosystem value. It’s the latter. Startup Genome’s 2023 Global Startup Ecosystem Report, the baseline DTI’s own target was built against, valued the Manila startup ecosystem specifically at $3.5 billion, a measure of the aggregate valuation of the companies operating within it, not a measure of how much capital flows into the market in any given year. Getting from a $3.5 billion baseline to a $10 billion target by 2028 means nearly tripling aggregate ecosystem value in five years, which is a function of company valuations rising, new higher-valued companies being created, and existing companies scaling, not simply a function of more funding rounds closing.
That distinction matters because the funding-flow data available for 2025 and 2026, the leading indicator most likely to predict whether valuations are actually climbing toward that target, doesn’t currently show the kind of acceleration a tripling-in-five-years trajectory would require. Philippine startups raised roughly $120 million in tracked equity funding in 2025 and about $62 million through the first five months of 2026, both modest totals against Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia’s much larger regional funding pools, and neither showing the kind of compounding growth rate that would be needed to meaningfully re-rate the ecosystem’s aggregate valuation within the remaining window. Even Foxmont Capital Partners’ widely covered 2026 Philippine Private Capital Report, showing private capital deployment hit a record $1.5 billion in 2025, is measuring a broader category, private equity, infrastructure, real estate, family office capital, that only partially overlaps with the startup-specific valuation growth DTI’s target actually depends on.
None of this means the $10 billion target is dishonest or purely aspirational marketing. DTI has attached real, if modest, infrastructure spending to the goal: roughly 800 million pesos in historical R&D grants that DTI says has benefited more than 900 startups and incubators, the Marikina-based Philippine Innovation Hub that opened in April 2025 as a dedicated startup and MSME support facility, a planned Center for Artificial Intelligence Research, and, as of 2023, an active negotiation with the Asian Development Bank for a loan in the $200 to $400 million range specifically earmarked for a National Innovation Gateway, tech-innovation infrastructure spanning the AI research center and an Industry 4.0 pilot factory. It’s worth noting that a separate $400 million ADB loan approved in late 2025 was earmarked for a broader business-environment and ease-of-doing-business reform program rather than the innovation-gateway financing specifically, so whether the original tech-focused ADB financing ever closed on its own terms remains genuinely unclear from public reporting.
The target’s second, less-discussed component may be the more revealing one: Aldaba has also pushed for startups based outside Metro Manila to account for 20 percent of the ecosystem’s total value by 2028, up from a share so small in 2023 that DTI didn’t publish a specific baseline figure for it. Reading that goal against what’s actually happening in Cebu and Davao right now, a provincial Technology Startup Council signed into being in January, a regional fund still measuring its portfolio in the low tens of companies, a handful of DOST-backed incubators, makes clear that the 20 percent regional target depends on institution-building work that is, charitably, still in its early innings. Executive orders establishing coordinating councils are a necessary first step toward a functioning regional ecosystem; they are not, on their own, billions of dollars worth of startup valuation appearing outside Metro Manila within two years.
None of this is a case that DTI’s target is unreachable, five-year technology ecosystem forecasts are inherently uncertain in both directions, and a sufficiently large single event, a major acquisition, an IPO re-rating the value of an entire sector the way GCash or Maya’s planned listings could for fintech specifically, could move the aggregate number substantially faster than incremental funding-round activity ever would on its own. But the plain reading of the publicly available data as of 2026 is that the ecosystem is not currently on a visible trajectory toward tripling its 2023 baseline valuation by 2028, and the regional-diversification sub-target depends on institution-building efforts that only started producing concrete structures, like Cebu’s council, this year. A useful north star doesn’t need to be on pace today to remain worth keeping; what it needs is an honest accounting of the gap, something DTI’s own public communications about the target have not yet offered in detail.
Share this article