digital-economy
(5)
Sidec: from online shops to silicon chips
Selangor’s digital economy company began by helping merchants sell online. Its next wager is harder: give Malaysian businesses the people, tools and connections to design what the world buys.
Quest Ventures bets on the space between markets
From a shared workspace in Singapore to $50,000 startup cheques in Kazakhstan, Quest Ventures has made a business of connecting founders to their next market. Its wager is that introductions, local knowledge and patient capital belong in the same package.
Upland
Upland (Uplandme, Inc.) is a blockchain-based metaverse game that maps virtual properties onto real-world addresses, letting players buy, sell, develop and trade digital real estate as NFTs. Founded in 2018 and launched in 2019 on the EOS blockchain, it blends Monopoly-style property trading with city building, a player-driven economy, and its own tokens (UPX and the ERC-20 Sparklet). Backed by $27M in funding led by Animoca Brands, the Mountain View company has grown to 3M+ registered wallets and partnerships with brands such as FIFA and the NFL Players Association.
Workhelix
Workhelix is an enterprise AI-measurement company that breaks jobs down into individual tasks - hundreds of thousands of them per client - and scores each one for how much generative AI can actually help. Founded by economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, and Daniel Rock alongside CEO James Milin, the company pairs proprietary task-scoring software with data scientists to tell C-suite leaders where to deploy AI, how it is being adopted, and what return it is producing. It raised a $15M Series A in February 2025 and counts Wayfair, Coursera, Accenture, and BAYADA among its customers.
Linden Lab
Linden Lab is the San Francisco company behind Second Life, the user-built virtual world it launched in 2003. More than two decades on, the platform still runs a multimillion-dollar creator economy where residents design avatars, sell virtual goods, host live events and trade in Linden Dollars - a quiet, persistent metaverse that predates the word itself.