Malaysia's respond.io Raises a $62.5m Series B to Take Its AI Messaging Platform Into North America and Europe
respond.io, the Malaysia-founded customer-conversation platform, closed a $62.5 million Series B led by New York's Camber Partners, with participation from Endeavor Catalyst and existing investors. The company manages business messaging across WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, Telegram, WeChat, email and voice from a single interface, increasingly orchestrated by AI agents.
The round lands on unusually strong unit economics for a Southeast Asian software company: $35 million in annual recurring revenue, 169% year-on-year growth, a 30% margin, and roughly 2 billion messages processed each quarter across more than 10,000 businesses in 180-plus countries. Management framed the raise as offensive rather than necessary — the company is profitable — with proceeds earmarked for expansion into North America and Europe, which it expects to become its largest combined market within a few years, and for acquisitions of complementary technology or teams.
The US Development Finance Corporation Anchors a $3b Energy Infrastructure Platform Across South and Southeast Asia
I Squared Capital and the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) launched a $3 billion platform to build critical energy infrastructure across South and Southeast Asia, split evenly at $1.5 billion each. The DFC described it as the single largest project investment in its history. The mandate centres on expanding liquefied natural gas and petroleum import, storage and transportation infrastructure, explicitly to widen access to US LNG and related energy exports in the region.
The framing is geopolitical as much as commercial. DFC's Conor Coleman cast the deal as "strengthening allies, opening markets, and building a more secure and resilient Indo-Pacific," while I Squared's Sadek Wahba called energy security "one of the defining infrastructure challenges of our time." It builds on a relationship dating to 2016, through which the two have already mobilised roughly $2 billion for infrastructure across South and Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Galaxy Data Center Secures $250m to Build Gigawatt-Scale AI Campuses Anchored on Singapore
Galaxy Data Center, a London- and Singapore-based developer of hyperscale AI data-centre infrastructure, secured $250 million in an initial strategic financing round from an unnamed international investment institution. The capital funds platform development, project execution and high-density deployment, with the company planning gigawatt-scale AI data-centre campuses across Southeast Asia, using Singapore as its regional hub. The announcement emphasised green-energy integration and operational efficiency rather than disclosing specific capacity figures or country sites.
Chief executive Arthur Yang pointed to "rapidly evolving requirements from AI and cloud service clients" around capacity, delivery certainty and energy efficiency — the recurring bottlenecks as AI workloads outgrow legacy facilities. The raise lands the same week as the I Squared–DFC energy platform, underscoring that capital is flowing simultaneously into compute and the power that feeds it.
Eyes on the Day Ahead
Watch the deal flow out of TNGlobal and DealStreetAsia over the next 24–48 hours for follow-on detail: respond.io's named acquisition targets, the first country allocation under the I Squared–DFC platform, and any disclosed site or power commitment from Galaxy Data Center. On the policy side, keep an eye on Bank Negara Malaysia's Digital Asset Innovation Hub timeline — clearer stablecoin and tokenised-deposit rules are flagged for later in 2026, and any interim guidance would reset the region's digital-money roadmap.
Layer 7 Ventures is a research-driven firm focused on AI and cryptocurrency in Southeast Asia. Views expressed are those of the firm and do not constitute investment advice.
