Bootstrapping abroad: a costly lesson

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• The reality of bootstrapping across borders
• This startup offers a free AI consent registry for creators
• Meta plans another hefty AI investment

Hello [subscriber],

I’ve never wanted to start my own business. I’ve seen my parents and brother struggle with theirs, and I’m not keen on putting my own savings at risk.

Covering tech hasn’t changed that. AI might help a non-technical person like me build something, but it’s no magic button.

That probably explains why I find stories about struggling founders more compelling than those about success. They make me feel better about being an employee.

Guest writer Yahya Hmida’s account of bootstrapping his AI startup abroad is a good example. A non-technical Tunisian founder based in Da Nang, he worked with a freelance team for a little over two months and got a chatbot in a dashboard, not the enterprise AI product he’d imagined.

He then bought out the team members’ contracts, restarted the build, and is still working toward his first revenue.

Hmida’s story shows that being careful with money takes more than just keeping the bills low. Affordable developers and free AWS credits might have stretched his budget, but they left two expensive questions unanswered: Does the team understand what it needs to deliver? And would a customer pay for it?

Personally, I’d want those answered before spending my savings. In another life, maybe.

Glenn Kaonang, journalist

What a failed first build taught me about bootstrapping abroad

Image credit: Timmy Loen and Ulla

What would Hmida do differently if he were to start over? Smaller deliverables and more explicit acceptance criteria for the developers’ work, he writes in his piece.

He says he’d also start talking to prospective users sooner. After all, you have to know your customers if you wish to give them something they actually want.

Forrest Li on scaling Sea, building smarter bots, and founder grit

Sea Limited founder, chairman, and CEO Forrest Li / Photo credit: Stripe

This article from August offers a rare look under the hood of Forrest Li, the founder, CEO, and chairman of Sea Limited. The man behind Southeast Asia’s biggest tech success story rarely speaks publicly, so it’s worth paying attention when he does.

More recently, Li’s thoughts on the company’s plans to list its financial services unit Monee via an IPO, as well as launch an AI enterprise platform business, have been released.

Interestingly, our August article hinted at why Monee may be ready to go public. At the time, Li said about 50 million people had outstanding credit with the unit, and Monee’s second-quarter revenue grew 58.9% year on year to US$1.4 billion, outpacing both Shopee and Garena.

Protecting creator voices from unauthorized AI training

Photo credit: Sparkonomy AI

With AI penetrating every part of the economy, flaws are cropping up. Take how brands increasingly use AI chat tools to find social media creators to hire for campaigns. However, the models often misrepresent the very creators they’re meant to find.

Sparkonomy, a Singapore-based startup, is building a free public registry to set the record straight.

• The gap: Sparkonomy’s study of 50,000 queries across five models found that less than 1% of 10,000 creators are described accurately by all five. Creators also have little legal recourse when their face or voice is used to train AI without consent.
• The fix: The startup offers the Open Creator Graph, a free public record where creators consolidate their cross-platform identities. Creators choose whether AI can use their name, face, and voice, and the platform makes that easy to read for search engines and AI tools.
• The pitch: Founded by Google, Microsoft, and PayPal veterans, the bootstrapped, pre-revenue startup launched last month. It plans to monetize through optional paid AI business services and is preparing to raise funding.

This article is part of our Startup Spotlight series. To get your startup or portco covered, fill out this survey.

1️⃣ Meta plans $95b stock sale to fund AI infrastructure

Shares of the tech giant fell 1.6% in morning trading after the announcement, with the fundraising following investor concern about Meta’s capital spending.

2️⃣ Indian EV maker Ather turns profitable as revenue rises 63%

The company says demand exceeded production capacity, with its Hosur plant in Tamil Nadu reaching 98% capacity utilization during peak production.

3️⃣ Singapore’s Stryv raises $11.5m to expand in Asia

The personal care and home wellness company plans to enter Taiwan and expand in Malaysia and Hong Kong.

4️⃣ Microsoft offers buyouts to 60,000 staff as AI spending rises

The figure reportedly represents some 27% of the company’s worldwide workforce.

5️⃣ Singapore commits $117m to AI materials research

Called Marvel-AI and led by public-sector research agency A*Star, the program aims to combine AI models and self-driving labs to discover, synthesize, and test new materials for industrial use.

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