We’ve been asked in both panels and media interviews this past month about our views on today’s listing environment for Asia tech and prospects for venture-backed exits.

As much as there are more initiatives from exchanges to attract international and tech listings from Southeast Asia, like the recently announced SGX and Nasdaq partnership and TSE’s Asia Startup Hub to name a few, the key to evolving Southeast Asia’s exit landscape is ultimately to have quality companies on the path to IPO.

This quality, put simply, can be defined by predictable, scalable, and recurring revenue.

While it may seem too simplistic, developing the ability to maintain such revenues as a public company requires strong corporate governance (predictable), a multi-market and/or multi-product growth trajectory (scalable), and a defensible business model (recurring).

As formulaic as this may seem, there are many paths to delivering on this quality and attracting the right buyers.

(1) It can mean becoming a market-creating leader, as in the case of Groww, a company from India we met back in 2017 and made a single digit millions investment in their seed round, in spite of not being from Southeast Asia. The company made a bet to disrupt retail investing in the country and grew with its customers to eventually IPO at more than US$7B+. More on what we learned from Groww and how it has shaped our investments into similar disruptors in Southeast Asia.

(2) It can mean developing a platform at such a scale it can guarantee mental healthcare in 1-2 business days, and implement enterprise solutions within 6-8 weeks across 100+ countries, as in the case of Intellect, as their Head of North America and VP of Strategy Eric Hoang shares on NYSE Floor Talk.

(3) It can mean being able to marry the opportunity of rapidly growing a digital bank in the Philippines with the interest of mainstay banks in a market like Japan seeking high growth partners for their international expansion, as in the case of Tonik, having leveraged their partnership with Mizuho to great effect in the last three years, as Greg shares on our podcast.

(4) It can mean being able to transform a multi-market platform into a brand, as YouTrip has done over the years, redefining the way consumers interact with fintechs and leveraging this strong relationship with its users to unlock new business lines, as CEO and founder Caecilia Chu shared on stage at Singapore Fintech Festival.

(5) It can mean being able to build a platform that is highly diversified across products, markets, and licenses, enabling the company to effectively manage risk while continuing to scale across 10+ markets in the last 7 years, as Surfin has done.

(6) It can mean being able to redefine enterprise AI adoption in Southeast Asia and Latin America, one where strong partnerships and relationship building can be defining moats beyond the product and technology itself. WIZ.AI has done this to great effect over the years, and as much as they have accumulated patents for their conversational AI technologies, they never lost sight of the importance of partnerships in AI adoption as opposed to just letting product drive its own growth.

As much as the AI hype has drawn in unprecedented levels of capital and valuation spikes, AI is not only way (nor can it be the only way) to become a quality company and find a valuable exit. 

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