Global Mobility Service Inc. (GMS) is a Tokyo-based FinTech and mobility company that gives people locked out of traditional credit a path to vehicle ownership. By pairing its proprietary IoT device, MCCS, with a cloud platform called MSPF, GMS lets lenders remotely manage and, if payments stop, safely disable a financed vehicle - turning driving behavior and payment data into a new form of creditworthiness. The model has extended auto loans to gig drivers, taxi operators and delivery workers across Japan, the Philippines, Cambodia and Indonesia who would otherwise be rejected by conventional screening.

Dr. Arne Jeroschewski is the Founder and CEO of Parcel Perform, a Singapore-headquartered AI-powered delivery experience platform serving e-commerce enterprises across 950+ logistics carriers globally. A serial builder with a PhD in Regulatory Economics and McKinsey roots, he co-founded ZALORA — Southeast Asia's leading fashion e-commerce player — before pivoting to solve the data chaos behind every shipped parcel. Since 2016, he has grown Parcel Perform into a data-first SaaS platform processing 100+ million parcel updates daily, backed by Cambridge Capital, SoftBank Ventures Asia, and Wavemaker Partners, and now championing the AI Commerce era where delivery performance data becomes a brand's most powerful competitive asset.
Everest Education (E2) is a Ho Chi Minh City-based edtech company founded in 2011 that prepares Vietnamese students from Grade 1 to Grade 12 for international academic environments. Combining its own classroom-management software with in-person learning centers, it offers Math and English enrichment, test preparation, private tutoring, and college-admissions consulting through a blended-learning model. The company has recorded more than 12,000 enrollments and raised roughly $5.4M, including a $4M Series B led by Hendale Capital.
RateS was a Singapore-born, Indonesia-focused social commerce platform that let anyone - housewives, students, small shop owners - start an online business with no inventory and no upfront capital. The app sourced products directly from suppliers and handled warehousing, logistics, payments and financing, while its network of micro-entrepreneurs handled sales through their social networks. Spun out of the foreign-exchange startup RateX, RateS grew to more than 500,000 resellers across Indonesia's tier-2 and tier-3 cities before being acquired by e-commerce enabler SIRCLO in 2023.
Xendit is a Southeast Asian payments infrastructure company that lets businesses accept, process, and disburse money across Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and the wider region through a single API. Founded in 2015 and the first Indonesian company backed by Y Combinator, it handles virtual accounts, e-wallets, cards, QR codes, payouts, and fraud prevention for startups, marketplaces, and global enterprises expanding into the region.

David Foote is the Founder and CEO of zennya health, a mobile-first on-demand healthcare platform operating in the Philippines that delivers medical and wellness services to people's homes in under 30 minutes. A serial entrepreneur with 25+ years building technology companies, Foote came to the Philippines for scuba diving and stayed to build a virtual hospital infrastructure that has completed over 600,000 services. Based between San Francisco and Manila, he leads a company of 110 employees with ~$31.3M in annual revenue backed by $1.2M in seed funding.

Tom Pepinsky is the Walter F. LaFeber Professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. A specialist in Southeast Asian comparative politics, democratic backsliding, and political economy, he is best known for his viral 2017 essay 'Everyday Authoritarianism is Boring and Tolerable,' which warned Americans that authoritarian erosion looks mundane from the inside. Fluent in Indonesian, he has written five books spanning Indonesian and Malaysian politics, COVID-19 partisanship, and global democratic challenges. His Substack newsletter, launched in 2025, continues his two-decade tradition of public-facing analysis at the intersection of academic rigor and accessible political commentary.