Capital Rewiring

Hard Decisions behind Companies that Last.

Capital. Customers. Control. Growth. Exit.The rules have changed. What must a company get right to keep building in 2027?

The founder playbook is being rewired. Capital comes with harder terms. Enterprise buyers can build, wait or buy. AI can make a product look brilliant - and make it easier to copy. Growth no longer guarantees a path to liquidity.

Rewiring the Founder Playbook brings founders, investors, enterprise leaders and policymakers together for the conversations that usually happen behind closed doors: how to protect equity when financing gets hard; what evidence earns a term sheet; whether a customer will share risk; what makes a moat real; and when an acqui-hire or asset sale is the smartest decision a founder can make.

Across the three days, the Founders Stage will be anchored by flagship Founders Peak talks - the personal stories behind the pivotal decisions - alongside candid, future-facing practitioner conversations on the capital, customer, policy and exit choices that will determine who is still standing in 2027.

These are not retrospective success stories or generic startup panels. Each session asks one question: what must be true in 2027 for this company to earn the right to keep building?

Rapid advances in foundation models and automated engineering have flattened traditional competitive moats. McKinsey's 2026 State of AI report found nearly a third of enterprises now choose to build functionality in-house with AI agents rather than buy it, the clearest signal that a product-level moat alone no longer holds. Defensibility is consolidating around regulatory licenses, proprietary data integrations, and entrenched distribution. This session challenges investors to evaluate the structural integrity of modern technology moats: which advantages endure, and which are eroding under platform pressure. Source: McKinsey & Company, The State of AI 2026.

Enterprise software procurement has reached an impasse where buyers are actively delaying third-party purchasing decisions. McKinsey's State of AI Survey reveals that while corporate adoption has expanded to 72% of organizations, less than a third have realized material bottom-line cost reductions, driving IT leaders to build custom internal workflows or freeze deployments. With internal developer efficiency rising, buying commercial software requires clear justification. This session brings enterprise procurement chiefs and CIOs together to uncover the cost benchmarks, integration constraints, and security liabilities that determine whether they buy, build internally, or wait.

While early-stage seed activity persists, growth capital across Southeast Asia remains intensely concentrated and selective. PitchBook's 2026 Southeast Asia Private Capital Breakdown recorded VC deal value falling 33.9% in 2025, driven by tighter diligence and reduced cross-border participation. Investors holding dry powder are enforcing higher performance hurdles and stricter profitability milestones before committing follow-on capital. This session addresses how regional GPs are deploying funds, what alternative capital stacks are stepping into the void, and where funding will genuinely flow.

China built the world's most pervasive mobile payments system on a black-and-white square. But when nearly every transaction runs through a QR code, where does the next leap come from? With the e-CNY pushing into wallets and cross-border rails like mBridge testing new models for settling value between central banks, the architecture of Chinese money is being redrawn. The panel unpacks which layers (digital currency, embedded finance, AI-driven credit or cross-border settlement) will capture the next wave of value. It also looks at what interoperability means for incumbents and foreign players, and how China's choices could set the template for payments across Asia.

Rewiring the Founder Playbook is where founders, investors, enterprise buyers and policymakers confront the decisions reshaping the next generation of financial companies: who gets funded, what buyers will pay for, which moats survive AI, and when growth should become an exit. Flagship Founders Peak talks reveal the personal stories behind those decisions.

Corporate technology leaders are increasingly rejecting per-user subscription licenses that divorce vendor fees from measurable client performance. Research from Deloitte’s Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey indicates that 58% of enterprise procurement executives are prioritizing shared-risk, outcome-contingent commercial contracts across new software implementations to curtail budget creep. However, structuring these arrangements without triggering legal disputes requires objective measurement standards. This session explores how enterprise buyers and vendors structure verifiable performance baselines, downside penalties, and margin-protected upside mechanisms to deploy sustainable, outcome-based software engagements across mission-critical enterprise systems.

ASEAN offers significant opportunities for regional growth, but its diversity means that success in one market does not readily translate to another. For Singapore-based FinTechs, the challenge is not simply where to expand, but how to sequence that growth: build credibility with a major customer at home, or enter another market early to test whether the business can travel. Firms must also decide what to own, what to localise and where partnerships can provide faster access to customers, infrastructure and regulatory capabilities. AI may sharpen market insights and support experimentation, but its value depends on sound use cases, trusted data and effective governance. These choices ultimately determine whether expansion creates regional scale or merely complexity.

The venture doctrine equating organizational headcount with enterprise valuation has permanently broken down. After Klarna leveraged AI automation to trim its workforce from 5,000 toward 2,000 employees, its annual revenue per employee surged over 70% alongside a return to profitability. Meanwhile, ultra-lean software firms like Linear capped their full-time team under 50 while scaling past tens of millions in ARR. This session explores the operational balance of deep workforce restructuring: identifying which functions to automate permanently, where human domain expertise is indispensable, and which specialized hires must be recruited immediately.

With conventional IPO pathways narrowed and growth-stage liquidity constrained, many companies must re-evaluate what a successful outcome looks like. Crunchbase's 2026 M&A Outlook recorded 36 unicorn M&A exits worth a combined $67B in 2025, and EY-Parthenon reports teams under 100 people landing $100M+ acqui-hire exits. An early acqui-hire or IP sale can preserve talent and technological value, but requires careful negotiation. This session outlines the operational indicators and timing indicators founders need to weigh a structured exit against continuing to build.

The first decade of fintech was about proving that technology could disrupt financial services. The next is about building companies that can survive scale: navigating regulation, capital intensity, increasingly crowded markets, global expansion and the shift from payments products to full financial platforms and/or geographic expansion. Five founders and CEOs who have built fintech businesses across Asia and beyond debate what really separates a fintech that gets big from one that becomes indispensable.

A new map of opportunity is being drawn. As geoeconomic fault lines harden, monetary regimes shift and private markets outgrow public ones, trillions are on the move. Valuations are resetting, new corridors are opening and high-growth companies are seeking partners to scale. The advantage lies with those who move early, backed by trusted cross-border networks and well-regulated markets that give investors confidence and growth companies a clear path to raise, list and expand.
 
Drawing on securities regulation, banking and fintech investment, this session asks where the strongest returns lie, how markets and regulation can help growth companies scale, and how Artificial Intelligence is changing the way deals are sourced and financed. Learn how to turn uncertainty into opportunity and lead the next wave of growth.

Rewiring the Founder Playbook is where founders, investors, enterprise buyers and policymakers confront the decisions reshaping the next generation of financial companies: who gets funded, what buyers will pay for, which moats survive AI, and when growth should become an exit. Flagship Founders Peak talks reveal the personal stories behind those decisions.

Every quantum conversation drifts toward the 2030s. This one stays in the present tense. Quantum builders explain what their machines and methods are doing this year for financial institutions: what is in production, what is in pilots, where classical computing remains essential, and what an institution can test in the next quarter. A bank moderator keeps the discussion commercially and technically honest. 

Venture survival depends on cash distributions, yet public listing routes remain narrow for Southeast Asian tech firms. Bain & Company's SEA Venture Capital Report highlights that while public IPO pipelines remain stalled across domestic bourses, secondary transactions, corporate consolidations, and private equity buyouts generated over $6 billion in regional exit value. With institutional LPs demanding realized DPI over unrealized paper gains, fund managers are redesigning liquidity timelines. This session analyses how leading allocators and founders are engineering secondary sales, structured earn-outs, and strategic trade sales when public capital markets stay constrained.

Emerging markets have built some of the world’s most innovative models for financial inclusion. This panel explores what Africa and Asia can learn directly from each other — from digital public infrastructure and payments to regulation and public-private partnerships — and whether a new South–South playbook can accelerate the next phase of financial inclusion.

Adding conversational wrappers and light automation layers over third-party models provided quick early ARR, but enterprise buyers are cutting through the veneer. Carta’s State of Private Markets analysis reveals that software companies driven by signed enterprise workflow contracts trade at a median 11.8x revenue, whereas startups reliant on pilot or usage-based AI features clear at just 5.2x. Furthermore, McKinsey’s enterprise AI research highlights that fewer than 20% of adopting companies report bottom-line EBIT impact. This session equips founders to construct defensible domain data integrations and proprietary workflows that survive upstream platform commoditization.

The boom-era playbook of subsidizing unprofitable top-line expansion with venture equity now leads directly to insolvency. Industry data from Bessemer Venture Partners shows the benchmark efficiency metric—net new ARR divided by net burn—has shifted from a tolerable 0.5x in 2021 to a mandatory 1.5x+ for top-quartile financings today. Investors are actively penalizing management teams that burn cash on vanity marketing campaigns and premature geographic expansion. This session brings institutional venture allocators to detail the exact operating controls founders must implement immediately, alongside the growth habits they must permanently eliminate.