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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Investor conviction has shifted decisively away from TAM projections and charismatic narrative pitching. According to Carta's Private Market Round Diligence Metrics, institutional closing timelines expanded by 45% as investment committees demand audited proofs: net revenue retention above 120% and gross profit margins exceeding 70% before term sheets are issued. The threshold to secure lead capital requires verifiable customer engagement rather than pilot commitments. This session convenes prominent venture partners to reveal the specific retention cohorts, contract architectures, and defensibility milestones that genuinely command high-conviction checks in the current market.

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.

Capital is on the move like never before. As geopolitical fault lines harden, monetary regimes shift, and private markets swell past public ones, the old channels for allocating capital are breaking—and trillions are being redirected in the process. Where money flows, who controls it, and how quickly it can be deployed are all being rewritten. This isn't a market cycle; it's a structural rupture. Learn how capital is being reallocated across regions, asset classes, and public-private lines, where the breakages in traditional deployment are creating risk and opportunity, and what it takes to move decisively in a fractured landscape.

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.

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.

Cheap venture funding has evaporated, leaving founders facing demanding structural terms. According to PitchBook deal terms data, over 25% of late-stage financings have priced flat or down, while Cooley's Venture Financing Report recorded liquidation preference multiples above 1.0x climbing to 22% in growth rounds. Investors holding dry powder are enforcing aggressive participating preferences, redemption schedules, and board vetoes that strip founder control. For leadership teams navigating single-digit runway, survival requires understanding which covenants preserve long-term agency and which turn founders into salaried operators on their own cap tables.