Each April, the World Economic Forum names its class of Young Global Leaders — a cohort of under-40 innovators, executives, and changemakers selected for their impact across industries and geographies. The Class of 2026 carries a notable concentration from Southeast Asia’s technology ecosystem, and for Insignia Ventures Partners, the recognition is especially meaningful: six founders from the portfolio have been named to this year’s class of 118.

They span verticals — commerce, mental health, voice AI, fintech, child development, and sustainability — and geographies: Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia. But they share something more important: they came on the podcast and showed their thinking before the world knew their names. What follows draws on those conversations, and on what we have since watched them build.

Steven Wongsoredjo — Super

BUILDING THE WALMART OF INDONESIA, ONE TIER-3 CITY AT A TIME

When Steven Wongsoredjo first came on the podcast in 2020, Super was a young social commerce platform operating in tier-2, tier-3, and rural cities — places that the mainstream e-commerce boom had largely bypassed. His thesis was simple and ambitious in equal measure: 60% of Indonesia’s GDP is driven by private consumption, the vast majority of the population lives outside Jakarta, and the digital infrastructure to serve them simply did not yet exist.

The agent-centric model — ordinary people in underserved areas becoming resellers, eliminating last-mile friction through trust and physical presence — was the operational answer to a structural problem. Over the years since, Super compounded that distribution advantage with private-label products, building ownership over both the channel and the shelf. By 2024, the company was the first Indonesian social commerce platform to achieve ISO 9001:2015 certification and was serving more than 240 million Indonesians across rural tier-2 to tier-4 cities.

“There is already a strong nationwide local brand that dominates the first-tier cities, and that is clear. What we want to do is win in second-tier cities and rural areas… We want to build world-class FMCG brands that are designed for second-tier and third-tier cities. We are now in 45 cities, and there are around 300 more cities that look like the markets we serve. We are going to go after those 300 cities.”
— STEVEN WONGSOREDJO · “AGAINST ALL ODDS,” ON CALL WITH INSIGNIA, 2024

Our most recent deep-dive on Super — the Season 6 On Call Recap published in April 2024 — traced that full arc: from the 2020 thesis call, through Steven’s 2023 conversation on building the groundwork for AI-driven retail in Indonesia, to the path to profitability across all metrics. It is a story of a company that kept building ownership at every stage of its growth.

AGAINST ALL ODDS · ON CALL WITH INSIGNIA, 2024  On Resilience, Rural Commerce, and Building Super — Steven Wongsoredjo

Theodoric Chew — Intellect

BUILDING THE MARKET, NOT JUST THE PRODUCT

Theodoric Chew has become one of the most recurring voices on the Insignia podcast — appearing across multiple seasons as Intellect grew from a consumer mental health app into Asia’s leading enterprise mental healthcare company. Most recently he represented Intellect at NYSE’s International Day “Southeast Asia: Going Global” series — and the thread running through every conversation is the same: Theodoric is not just building a product; he is building a market.

The framing matters because it explains everything about how Intellect has made decisions. In Asia, mental health care is not just underserved on the demand side — the supply infrastructure barely exists. There were not enough clinical professionals, not enough employer-side awareness, and no precedent for what paying for mental health benefits at an organizational level looks like. Intellect had to build the infrastructure before it could sell into it.

“We didn’t see ourselves as a local company, not just a Southeast Asian company. We were always built from the very beginning to become initially regional, but very much so a global company… Since day one, we are always building for global — from the brand to the way we build our operations, our network, and how we want to serve our clients.”
— THEODORIC CHEW · NYSE “SOUTHEAST ASIA: GOING GLOBAL” INTERNATIONAL DAY, 2025

By the end of 2024 — the subject of Insignia’s March 2025 case study on Intellect — the company had concluded its fourth annual Mental Health Festival, secured momentum with the Singapore government’s national mental health priority, expanded into the US through a partnership with healthcare provider Accresa, and was making headway in Japan, Australia, and Europe. The next task: moving from leading mental health benefits in Asia to becoming a global leader in hyper-local mental health care — using the localization template built in Asia as the foundation.

NYSE INTERNATIONAL DAY · SOUTHEAST ASIA: GOING GLOBAL, 2025  Building Intellect for the World — Theodoric Chew

Jennifer Zhang — WIZ.AI

FROM VC TO FOUNDER: BUILDING FOR THE WORLD’S MOST LINGUISTICALLY COMPLEX REGION

Jennifer Zhang came to WIZ.AI as a former VC — she had managed early-stage tech funds in both Los Angeles and Beijing before co-founding the company in Singapore in 2019. That unusual trajectory gave her a specific kind of strategic clarity. Where most enterprise AI companies were iterating on demos, WIZ.AI was filing patents on voice interface design and building language models tuned for Southeast Asia’s specific linguistic complexity — starting with Singlish, and expanding to 17 languages, accents, dialects, and colloquial forms across the region.

The company’s growth since our Season 4 conversation has been a consistent demonstration of that underlying technical depth. In 2023, WIZ.AI was the first AI company in Southeast Asia to launch a generative AI customer engagement product — TalkGPT — and followed that with a foundation Large Language Model for Bahasa Indonesia, trained on 10 billion Indonesian tokens, outperforming mainstream LLMs on the Hugging Face Open Leaderboard for Bahasa Indonesia. By our March 2024 founder profile, the company was serving over 300 clients in 17 countries, with Fortune 500 companies and unicorns making up 60% of its client base.

“Especially in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and some other areas, they’re growing quite fast. And once they grow, their first choice actually is not to follow the previous infrastructure… They actually want to use something easy to adapt.”
— JENNIFER ZHANG · S04 CALL #26, ON CALL WITH INSIGNIA, 2022

The most recent chapter is global expansion into South America — particularly Brazil, where a large majority of enterprises already view AI as central to their strategic outlook. The pattern is consistent with how Jennifer has always thought about WIZ.AI’s growth: build the technical architecture first, then follow the markets that are ready for it.

FOUNDER STORIES · INSIGNIA BUSINESS REVIEW, MARCH 2024  Does one ever stop being a first-time founder? Stories from WIZ.AI’s Jennifer Zhang

Huy Nghiem — VNSC by Finhay

VIETNAM’S FIRST FINTECH TO ACQUIRE A SECURITIES BROKERAGE

Huy Nghiem grew up in Hanoi’s Old Quarter surrounded by small business owners, built companies in Australia, and returned to Vietnam in 2017 with a thesis about what financial access could look like for people who had never owned a unit trust. Finhay — now VNSC by Finhay — became Vietnam’s largest digital investment and wealth management platform. In 2023, it achieved something no Vietnamese fintech had done before: acquiring a securities brokerage license, transforming from a wealthtech startup into a comprehensive digital investment institution.

The full story was told in Insignia’s three-part “Against All Odds” series — beginning with Huy’s origins in Hanoi, through the 2020 inflection point, to the culminating chapter on the brokerage acquisition published in April 2025. Competing with cash-rich real estate companies for a brokerage with the regulatory standing they needed, then navigating an 18-month restructuring period of system integration, compliance work, and regulatory negotiations — it was institutional-building of a kind that most fintech founders never attempt.

“We want to be a digital investment institution where audiences can get access to all-in-one investment options or financial services. At Finhay, we set the high bar for other FinTech players.”
— HUY NGHIEM · AGAINST ALL ODDS PART 3, INSIGNIA BUSINESS REVIEW, APRIL 2025

Insignia’s 2025 fintech year-in-review named Finhay’s arc as the clearest example of that year’s defining trend: the maturation of fintechs from disruptors into institutions. VNSC by Finhay now has more than 2.7 million users — a platform that began by giving Vietnamese millennials access to micro-investing and is now the infrastructure through which they access the full securities market.

AGAINST ALL ODDS · SEASON 7, APRIL 2025  Behind Vietnam’s first fintech acquisition of a securities brokerage — with Huy Nghiem (Part 3 of 3)

Dr Mesty Ariotedjo, Sp.A, MPH — Tentang Anak

FROM A PEDIATRICIAN’S INSTAGRAM TO 80 MILLION CHILDREN

Tentang Anak — “About Children” in Indonesian — was born from a gap that Dr Mesty Ariotedjo, Sp.A, MPH experienced as both a pediatrician and a new parent during the pandemic. Indonesia has fewer than 5,000 pediatricians for over 80 million children. Good-quality parenting information in Bahasa Indonesia was almost entirely absent online. When Mesty began sharing guidance on her personal Instagram, the response was overwhelming — tens of thousands of parents hungry for trusted, expert-backed child development content. That demand became the founding thesis for Tentang Anak, which she co-founded with Garri Juanda in 2020.

“We know that 90% of brain development happens in the first five years of life. If Indonesia wants to catch up to places like Singapore, we really need to focus on early-childhood growth and development… We want children to have grit and curiosity, which are essential for building a better future workforce for Indonesia.”
— DR MESTY ARIOTEDJO, SP.A, MPH · ON CALL WITH INSIGNIA, CALL 175, JANUARY 2025

In our most recent call — Call 175, published in January 2025 — Mesty and Garri described a company that had grown from social media platform to a 5-star-rated app to top-selling product brands reaching more than three million children across Indonesia, entirely without advertising spend. The app offers free growth tracking, healthy recipes, expert Q&A, and educational resources. The commerce layer — expert-curated skincare, vitamin D, and other children’s products meeting health and safety standards — turned parental trust into a distribution advantage. The app maintains a 5.0 rating. Its growth is entirely organic.

Mesty’s Johns Hopkins MPH training frames how Tentang Anak situates its broader purpose. Indonesia’s human development indicators fall below the global average, and the platform is as much public health infrastructure as consumer business — a point Mesty made clearly on the call when explaining why free, high-quality early childhood development content was not a cost to minimize but a foundation worth building deliberately.

ON CALL WITH INSIGNIA · CALL 175, JANUARY 2025  From social media education to top-selling brands for 80M+ children — with Dr Mesty Ariotedjo, Sp.A, MPH & Garri Juanda

Liyana Sulaiman — Pollen

BUILDING ASIA’S LIQUIDATION OPERATING SYSTEM

Liyana Sulaiman is a serial founder and product leader who has spent her career at the intersection of technology, community-building, and enterprise software. She ran the Girls in Tech Singapore chapter for four years, served on steering committees at the Media Development Authority and Science Centre Singapore, and has mentored startup ecosystems across Southeast Asia and the US. At Pollen, she is building Asia’s first cross-border B2B liquidation marketplace: a platform helping brands clear slow-moving and obsolete inventory (SLOB) that would otherwise end up in landfills.

The business model is structurally elegant. Brands carry enormous quantities of unsold inventory on their balance sheets — a problem that is simultaneously a financial cost, a logistical burden, and an increasingly visible sustainability liability. Pollen creates a structured secondary market for that stock, connecting brands with buyers across markets and turning destruction into recovered value. The sustainability case is not a marketing layer; it is the reason the business exists.

“This time I’m definitely working on my life mission — reducing business waste… Being half Dayak, from Sabah, Borneo, Kalimantan, we are very nature-conscious people. We really care about the environment. We feel like we’re custodians of the environment and therefore it is our duty to not contribute waste to it and to protect it.”
— LIYANA SULAIMAN · VULPES VENTURES FOUNDER SERIES, APRIL 2024

As CPTO, Liyana is building Pollen beyond a marketplace into a full inventory intelligence layer — an AI co-pilot that helps brands manage aged stock from detection through to clearance strategy. The YGL recognition puts that sustainability-first mission on a global platform at exactly the right moment.

What this class tells us about Southeast Asia

The WEF Young Global Leaders programme has named Southeast Asian founders before. What makes the Class of 2026 different — at least from where Insignia sits — is the breadth of what these founders are actually doing. This is not a cohort defined by a single hot vertical. It spans rural commerce and enterprise AI, mental health infrastructure and pediatric public health, financial inclusion and sustainable supply chains.

Each of these founders identified a problem that was considered too hard, too local, or too niche to attract early attention — and built institutions around it. Steven’s rural supply chain. Theodoric’s mental health infrastructure. Jennifer’s voice AI and regional language models. Huy’s retail investor platform and securities brokerage. Mesty’s child development ecosystem. Liyana’s liquidation operating system. None of these businesses started obvious. All of them required the kind of conviction that comes from founders who know their market from the inside out.

ABOUT THE WEF YOUNG GLOBAL LEADERS PROGRAMME

The Forum of Young Global Leaders is the World Economic Forum’s flagship community for exceptional under-40 leaders across government, business, civil society, media, and the arts. Members are selected based on demonstrated impact in their fields and commitment to improving the state of the world. The programme has been running since 2004. The Class of 2026 — comprising 118 leaders from 55 countries — was announced in April 2026.

For these founders, the YGL designation is a recognition — and an expansion of platform. The programme convenes a global peer network, and for founders building from Southeast Asia into the world, the relationships it opens with policymakers, global institutions, and fellow builders in markets they are expanding into carry real strategic weight.

Insignia has been privileged to invest in these founders early, to document their thinking across dozens of podcast conversations, and to watch them compound insight into institution over time. The world is catching up to what we have been watching build for years.

“Intellect, over the last five plus years, has grown from just being a Singapore company to a really global firm. We serve millions of lives today, hundreds of Fortune 100 customers. We’re really glad to be part of this global movement.”
— THEODORIC CHEW · NYSE “SOUTHEAST ASIA: GOING GLOBAL” INTERNATIONAL DAY, 2025

That line captures what this recognition means — not arrival, but acknowledgement of distance already traveled. Six founders, six problems that were once considered too local or too hard. The world is catching up to what we have been watching build for years.

All podcast references in this article are from Insignia Ventures Partners’ “On Call with Insignia” podcast and the Insignia Business Review. Full episodes and transcripts are available at review.insignia.vc.