There is an assumption common to many deep-tech investment theses: that the path from laboratory to market, although long and technically demanding, follows broadly similar routes regardless of geography. Validating the science, navigating regulatory pathways, assembling the team and finding the first customers are all treated as universal requirements, even when the geographical context changes substantially.
I spent three years commercialising deep-tech inventions and intellectual property in Singapore, followed by two years building a women’s health and medtech venture in the UAE. The technology stacks, founding teams and sectors were different, but the structural contrast between the two ecosystems revealed something consequential that many investment theses neglect: the infrastructure that makes a technology investable is itself a product of geography, and it is distributed profoundly unevenly.
What Singapore taught me: infrastructure precedes investability
By Southeast Asian standards, Singapore is a striking anomaly. It possesses advanced institutional infrastructure that took decades to build and that some of its neighbours have yet to develop. A*STAR provides research funding that can move at a pace approaching commercial relevance. The structures governing spin-offs from the National University of Singapore (NUS) are sufficiently developed to be intelligible to institutional investors. The government is willing to take early, non-dilutive positions in technology companies, helping to mitigate the risk of failure during the pre-revenue phase. English is the operating language of commerce and regulation, supported by a strong and reliable legal system and a stable currency.
Some might attribute these advantages to Singapore’s status as a small, wealthy city-state, but they did not arise automatically. They are the result of deliberate policy choices, decades of calibration and sustained institutional investment. When I founded ScaleHub to commercialise deep-tech IP in Singapore, I was operating within, and benefiting from, that accumulated infrastructure. The research partnerships were complex but governed by frameworks that all parties understood. Grants were not “easy money”; the application processes were demanding, but they were legible. The investors we approached understood and recognised the institutional signals—the NUS provenance and A*STAR endorsement—and adjusted their risk assessments accordingly.
The rest of Southeast Asia presents a different proposition. Countries such as the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam each possess significant scientific talent and genuine technological ambition, but often lack some of the connective tissue that converts that ambition into investable ventures. The business environment is generally less frictionless than Singapore’s. Regulatory pathways can be opaque or inconsistent, while government grant programmes, where they exist, frequently operate on timescales that bear little relationship to the capital requirements of an early-stage company. University technology-transfer offices vary enormously in sophistication. The legal infrastructure for equity investment is present, but it is not always calibrated to the specific requirements of deep-tech investing.
The result is that technology emerging from science of comparable quality can face a materially different commercialisation pathway depending on whether it originates in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Manila or Jakarta. This is not a judgment on the quality of those ecosystems, but an observation about the current distribution of infrastructure and its implications for investors who prefer to treat geography as a secondary consideration.
What the UAE taught me: ecosystems can be built in real time
The United Arab Emirates presents a different but equally interesting challenge. Unlike Southeast Asia’s relatively mature but uneven landscape, the UAE is constructing an ecosystem at speed, supported by institutional will, sovereign capital and a clarity of strategic intent with few parallels elsewhere.
The result is an unusual commercialisation environment for a deep-tech founder. Infrastructure that took Singapore decades to assemble is being designed and activated in the UAE within a much shorter period. The University of Sharjah and Khalifa University have both been encouraged to demonstrate impact beyond academic publication and are actively seeking commercialisation partnerships in pursuit of that objective. Government-supported institutions such as the Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park possess fabrication and prototyping capabilities that would otherwise be difficult or prohibitively expensive for an early-stage company to access, and they are making those capabilities available to qualified startups as part of their wider institutional mandate.
Yuthera, a medtech startup I recently founded, is currently benefiting from partnerships with both universities. When I drove to them unannounced and proposed research partnerships for Yuthera, I was not making as extraordinary a request as it might have appeared. I had arrived at a moment when those institutions were actively looking for founders and companies with whom they could work.
In the UAE, the challenge differs from Singapore’s. The issue is not an absence of infrastructure, but its relative novelty. The strategic intent behind medical-device regulation is clear, but parts of the framework are still being operationalised in practice. The country has sophisticated healthcare systems, yet the pathway from regulatory approval to clinical adoption still requires founders to engage with stakeholders and build relationships through processes that are not fully institutionalised. The investor community is growing, but deep-tech fluency remains concentrated in particular pockets rather than evenly distributed across the ecosystem.
The investment implication: geography belongs in the risk model
For investors, the structural contrast between these geographies leads to a single uncomfortable conclusion: the capital requirement of a given technology cannot be treated as fixed. It is partly a function of how much infrastructure the company must provide for itself because the surrounding ecosystem does not already supply it.
A deep tech company operating in Singapore can often rely on government programmes to absorb some pre-commercial risk, universities to provide research infrastructure and a functional grant system to extend runway and moderate the burn rate. It can also expect institutional investors to recognise the signals those mechanisms generate. The same may not be true for an equivalent company in Manila, Bangkok or Lagos. There, the company may need to replicate much of that infrastructure internally or proceed without it, carrying a burden that is not merely financial but also temporal, organisational and psychological.
Investment theses that treat geography as a secondary variable, evaluating technology as though mature infrastructure were constant across ecosystems, systematically misprice the commercialisation risk of frontier companies operating in infrastructure-sparse environments. This represents both an inefficiency and an opportunity, but only for investors who understand the actual cost of the infrastructure gap and are prepared to provide more than capital to close it.
The connective tissue that we, at Entropia Capital, often describe as unevenly distributed is not simply a market condition to be acknowledged and accepted. Producing that connective tissue is part of the work investors must undertake if they intend to capture value from frontier technologies across Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The investors best positioned to do so will not be those who have merely learned to tolerate unevenness, but those capable of building the missing infrastructure themselves.
Great article @ Foghor!
Love the comparison between SEA and MEA, thanks Foghor