By Joanna Tan

AIAPAC.ai has launched LaunchPad Ventures, a new venture-building programme on its LaunchPad platform, and opened submissions for AI ideas from across Asia-Pacific. The programme targets a gap that has widened as the region’s AI economy matures: strong capital and policy support, but too few ventures built from the ground up for APAC’s own markets.

Capital and policy are in place. Region-first ventures are not.

Across APAC, the conditions for building AI companies have rarely looked stronger. Governments from Singapore to Indonesia, Korea and India are funding national AI strategies, compute and skills. Enterprise budgets are shifting from experimentation to deployment, with agentic AI now firmly on boardroom agendas.

Investors, meanwhile, are looking for AI businesses with defensible positions in specific markets rather than thin layers on top of global models. Yet much of the AI on offer in the region is still built elsewhere and adapted later. That leaves real opportunity for solutions designed around local languages, regulation, payment systems and customer behaviour, particularly in ASEAN’s diverse and fast-growing markets and more broadly across APAC.

A programme built on the LaunchPad platform

LaunchPad Ventures sits within LaunchPad, AIAPAC.ai’s platform for taking AI from idea to market in Asia-Pacific. The new programme focuses on the earliest and riskiest stage of that journey: finding strong AI ideas, testing them against genuine market need, and shaping the most promising into ventures.

The intake is deliberately broad. Founders and early-stage teams, industry operators who know a workflow ripe for AI, corporate innovators with ideas that could stand alone, and researchers looking to commercialise applied AI work are all invited to submit. No finished product, full team or pitch deck is needed at this stage; a clearly defined problem and a credible AI-led solution are the starting point.

What the programme is looking for

Submissions are open to every sector, from financial services, healthcare and logistics to agriculture, education, retail and the public sector. The strongest ideas will typically:

• solve a specific, well-understood problem the submitter knows first-hand
• put AI at the core of the solution, not bolt it on
• be designed for APAC markets, languages or regulatory settings from day one
• show a credible path to customers in the region

How to submit

Submissions are accepted through the LaunchPad Ventures online submission form. Applicants set out the problem, who experiences it, the proposed AI solution and how far the idea has progressed.

Every submission is reviewed, and shortlisted applicants are invited to a first conversation with the LaunchPad Ventures team. All submissions are treated in confidence.

The bigger picture

For APAC to capture the value of its own AI growth, more of the region’s AI companies will need to be founded here, by people who understand its markets from the inside. LaunchPad Ventures is AIAPAC.ai’s bet that many of those founders are already out there, and simply need a structured route to begin.

Submit your idea through the LaunchPad Ventures online submission form.