The Singapore-based artificial intelligence (AI)-focused venture fund and corporate innovation platform GenAI Fund announced Thursday a $6 million allocation for six AI startups.
The fund said in a statement that the six startups – Blaze AI, Life AI, Ourteam, Presight, Revve AI, and Tribee, were selected for ASEAN’s first Enterprise FastTrack AI Accelerator “FastTrack” Cohort 1, which have been paired with leading Southeast Asia enterprises to co-develop and pilot AI projects for immediate go-to-market.
The startups represent a diverse group of innovators applying generative and agentic AI to transform industries including banking, healthcare, finance, mobility and retail.
The FastTrack Cohort 1, which attracted more than 300 applications from AI startups globally, aims to fast-track promising builders toward enterprise adoption, scalable impact, and investment readiness through GenAI Fund’s network of corporate partners across Asia.
Corporations onboard FastTrack Cohort 1 include Coca-Cola Beverages Vietnam, one of Vietnam’s leading commercial banks, and Tasco alongside other enterprises driving AI adoption across Southeast Asia.
The FastTrack AI Accelerator program provides startups with up to $1 million in GPU and cloud resources, access to technical experts, investment evaluation from GenAI Fund, and enterprise proof-of-concept (PoC) opportunities with more than 100 large corporations across Asia through the GenAI Open Innovation network.
“Since late 2024, we’ve facilitated more than 300 curated connections between enterprises and AI startups through our GenAI Open Innovation programs powered by our proprietary AI matchmaking platform, now emerging as the go-to-market engine for AI startups across Asia,
“By intelligently matching enterprise challenges with startup solutions, the platform helps these innovators scale with over 100 enterprises that are ready to adopt and deploy AI,” said Kai Yong Kang, Partner at GenAI Fund.
“The six startups in this first FastTrack cohort represent the strongest outcomes of that ecosystem — proof that Southeast Asia is shifting from AI experimentation to real deployment,” he added.
Each of the six selected startups has secured paid enterprise PoC projects through the program and is under active investment evaluation by GenAI Fund.
Blaze AI, co-founded by Trung Huynh, a former software engineer at Google and Palantir and a graduate of the University of Oxford, is making high-quality, affordable voice AI accessible to Southeast Asia.
It offers text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and speaker diarization models optimized for regional languages.
Meanwhile, Life AI, co-founded by Dr. Tuan Cao, a former Google engineering leader with a PhD from Cornell University, is a decentralized science (DeSci) platform accelerating genomics and precision healthcare through AI-driven data and open collaboration.
Ourteam, co-founded by Yew Wai Kong, one of the core founding members of regional scale-ups including Groupon, Fave, and OVO, is Asia’s leading AI recruiter, helping enterprises automate candidate screening and improve hiring quality and fairness, reducing review time by up to 50 percent.
Presight, Co-founded by Ben Pham, previously serving as a Data Scientist at Microsoft, is the AI data analyst for enterprises, delivering trusted, hallucination-free insights directly from existing data warehouses with full governance and compliance.
Revve AI, co-founded by Trung Vu, a Y Combinator alumnus who previously exited his startup to Niantic (the creator of Pokémon GO), builds human-like AI voice and chat agents for high-volume industries such as financial services and consumer brands, helping teams scale revenue without increasing headcount.
Tribee, Co-founded by Paweł Górski, a long-time Vietnam-based operator with over a decade of experience in sales enablement and team engagement technologies, is a behavioral AI platform providing real-time insights and coaching to frontline sales teams, boosting performance by more than 30 percent within the first year.
GenAI Fund’s FastTrack Cohort 1 received more than 300 applications from more than 15 countries, led by Singapore (27 percent), Vietnam (23 percent), United States (11 percent), Malaysia (9 percent), India (8 percent), and Indonesia (6 percent).
The top sectors represented include finance (43 percent), healthcare (37 percent), and retail (35 percent), followed by manufacturing, logistics and education – industries where AI is delivering measurable business impact.
Nearly 92 percent of applicants were business-to-business (B2B)-focused, underscoring the growing role of enterprise AI across the region.
“We target for Cohort 1 to unveil their pilot projects with their paired enterprises within three months, in light of their co-development and close collaboration from the get go,
“This will then help GenAI Fund double down on the breakout startups and back them with capital and partnerships to 10x their growth in the next phase,” Kang added.
He also said this strong response gives them impetus for the next iteration.
“We are now accepting applications for FastTrack Cohort 2, where we are seeking a new wave of global AI startups wanting to scale with leading enterprises across Southeast Asia,” he added.
GenAI Fund’s FastTrack AI Accelerator program is specifically designed to address the typical challenges faced by AI start-ups including slow enterprise onboarding, low product-market-fit, cash flow management, competition with established players, and lack of sales resources.
The program therefore provides opportunities for AI builders to develop specialized solutions for niche markets and leverage local expertise to create tailored AI applications.