AI startups in Asia Pacific are growing faster than ever, but the real opportunity is just beginning. The next wave of growth will be driven by startups building deeply integrated vertical applications and intelligent, autonomous agents. These emerging opportunities, known as vertical AI and agentic AI, will represent a fundamental shift in how software is conceived, delivered, and monetized.

Recent data from Stripe showed that AI startups take a median of just 11 months to reach US$1 million in annualized revenue following their first customer sale, compared to nearly 15 months for SaaS companies. And they scale from US$1 million to US$30 million in Annual Recurring Revenue five times faster. This momentum is visible across Asia Pacific, where AI startups secured more than US$20 billion in funding across 1,845 deals in 2024.

Founders in Asia Pacific are already demonstrating they can build fast. The next opportunity is for them to build deep.

Building deeper: The vertical AI opportunity

Much as SaaS moved from horizontal to vertical (e.g. Salesforce to Toast), AI is following a similar trajectory. We started with ChatGPT, and now we see a proliferation of industry-specific tools. Some dismiss these startups as “LLM wrappers”. But that misses the point entirely.

Industry-specific AI tools are ensuring that LLMs can actually deliver value within the constraints, contexts, and workflows of real-world businesses.

Singapore’s UCARE.AI is creating AI tools for insurers and insurance platforms. JigsawStack, a Singapore-based AI company, is also pushing out a suite of custom, fine-tuned small models designed to streamline and automate complex backend tasks for different industries. Soundraw, a Japan-born music AI platform, offers royalty-free, AI-generated music tailored for creators producing social videos, podcasts, and ads—many of whom work in fast-growing creator economies like Indonesia and Vietnam.

Asia Pacific is uniquely positioned to continue to lead this vertical AI surge. It is home to some of the world’s most dynamic healthcare, real estate, and services markets and, increasingly, the engineering talent to serve them.

Autonomous by default: The agentic layer of the internet

If vertical AI is changing what software does, agentic AI is changing who it’s built for. We’ve long optimized online commerce for human buyers. But now, we’re beginning to do the same for AI agents.

With breakthroughs in reasoning capabilities, AI systems are transitioning from knowing to doing—from responding to queries to actually performing actions on behalf of users. Agents can now act autonomously: booking flights, sourcing supplies, and even buying coffee.

But it’s not just about buying things. These agents can also operate businesses. They can issue refunds, update payment methods, and change billing plans. ElevenLabs, a generative audio company, recently experimented with using AI agents to autonomously manage refunds and subscriptions. Perplexity and Payman are also using new agentic ways to spend and move money.

We’re building infrastructure that makes it secure and seamless for any business to build, deploy, and monetize AI agents. That means making checkout flows machine-readable, exposing product catalogs to agents, and enabling transactions via chat interfaces or autonomous frontends. It also means evolving fraud prevention and disputes to suit an AI-driven world.

This isn’t theoretical. Developers across the region are already bringing agentic commerce to life. More than 700 AI agent startups launched on Stripe in 2024 alone. Stripe’s agent toolkit, launched last year, is being downloaded by developers thousands of times each week. It allows agents to connect directly to the Stripe API, and enables them to spend, move, and collect money—critical building blocks for enabling agents to operate effectively in online commerce.

Asia Pacific, with its API-first commerce platforms and mobile-native user bases, is fertile ground for this transformation. Autonomous agents that shop, negotiate, or operate on behalf of users are not science fiction. They’re being shipped into production now.

Infrastructure as a strategic advantage

As these new opportunities emerge, the startups scaling fastest are those that make the right infrastructure bets early. This means more than just compute. It means onboarding, billing, localization, fraud detection, and identity verification—all working in sync.

Invideo, an AI-powered text-to-video platform founded in India, offers multiple pricing tiers that meet different levels of user engagement for its 40 million users globally—from hobbyists to professional content creators. By streamlining subscriptions and payments across Singapore and the U.S. with Stripe, Invideo has unlocked over US$1 million in incremental revenue.

Asia’s AI founders building for what’s next

Innovation in AI is just getting started. But if there’s one lesson from the boom so far, it’s this: success doesn’t belong solely to the fastest builders. It belongs to those who understand what customers need, move fast and smart to meet those needs, and choose systems that can scale with them.

Asia Pacific’s AI startups now have the opportunity to build the systems that define how AI actually works in practice—not just in labs or demos, but in hospitals, restaurants, and supply chains.

The real question is no longer “Should you build with AI?”. The question is: what kind of AI future do you want to lead?

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