MatchCAP Asia 2026 Wrapped: 350+ Meetings, Real Conversations, and the Ideas That Stayed With Us

Singapore, May 17–19, 2026

It started, as the best things in Singapore often do, over drinks.

No decks. No name-dropping keynotes. Just a room full of founders, investors, and operators at One&Co on a Sunday evening, talking the way people talk when nobody is performing for an audience. By the time the night wound down, most of the important conversations of MatchCAP Asia 2026 had already begun.

That was the idea.

Day 1 – May 17 | Opening reception at One&Co Singapore

There’s a particular kind of energy that builds when the right people are put in a room together with nowhere to be. That was One&Co on the first night. Informal by design, the reception was less an opener and more a slow burn,  the kind of evening where you find yourself still talking to someone an hour after you meant to leave.

For many attendees, this is where the agenda for the next two days quietly took shape.

Day 2 – May 18 | The Main Stage at Microsoft Singapore

The heart of MatchCAP Asia 2026 played out at Microsoft Singapore’s offices, anchored by two panel discussions and a full afternoon of structured 1-on-1 meetings.

Panel 1: “Built to Last: Designing Startups for Uncertainty”

The first panel didn’t traffic in abstractions. This was a conversation between people who had been through it: Nitin Mathur (Privy), Jun Hasegawa (Omise), and Henry Chan (ShopBack), three founders who had navigated real downturns, made hard calls, and still had companies to show for it. Om Bhatia, who has worked alongside Grab, Nubank, and TikTok across their various stages at Chubb APAC, moderated.

What emerged wasn’t a playbook. It was something more honest than that.

The panel drew a clear line between chasing short-term metrics and building for the long haul. Real resilience, they argued, isn’t something you bolt on when things go sideways. It’s woven into the decisions you make long before a crisis arrives. On culture, the room was in agreement: it’s not a perk or a poster on the wall. It’s infrastructure. It’s what holds an organization together when the market stops cooperating.

Panel 2: “Building a Global Company from Southeast Asia”

If the first panel was about survival, the second was about ambition, and the particular difficulty of holding onto both at the same time.

Southeast Asia has produced fast-growing companies. But building one that can actually compete on the world stage, that earns credibility in rooms it wasn’t originally invited into, remains one of the harder things a founder from this region can attempt.

Rohit Agarwal (Peak XV), Justin Hall (Golden Gate Ventures), and Kshitij Jayakrishnan (QED) brought the investor perspective, in conversation with Cecily Ng from Databricks, who has spent years at the intersection of enterprise technology and high-growth companies.

The structural barriers SEA startups face – access to international capital, cross-market talent, and the perception gap in Western boardrooms, were all addressed directly, without the usual diplomatic hedging. The panel’s consensus: the barriers are real, but they’re not ceilings.

What cut through most was the point of storytelling. SEA founders, the panel noted, often build products that are genuinely impressive — and then struggle to explain why someone in London or New York should care. That gap isn’t a product problem. It’s a narrative one.

Justin Hall, who has spent years watching Endeavor find and back the region’s most compelling companies, captured the underlying logic well:

The 1-on-1 Sessions: Where the Real Work Happened

This wasn’t speed networking.

Over 350 structured meetings were held across the afternoon. Each was carefully matched, each lasting a full 60 minutes. For many participants, this ended up being the most valuable part of the three days.

The difference was preparation. Founders came knowing who they were meeting and why. Investors came genuinely looking. That combination, rare at most events, produced conversations that went somewhere. Not every meeting turned into a deal. But many turned into something more durable: a relationship with real context behind it.

Day 3 – May 19 | Closing at Airwallex Singapore

The event closed with a networking evening at Airwallex’s Singapore office. After two intense days, the atmosphere was more relaxed – a chance to follow up on conversations started earlier, exchange contacts, and think about what comes next.

What MatchCAP Asia 2026 Got Right

A lot of startup events promise connection. Most deliver proximity.

MatchCAP delivered connections by keeping the attendee list curated, the format structured around depth rather than volume, and the agenda honest about what founders and investors actually need from each other. People weren’t shuffled through a program. They were given time and the right conditions to actually talk.

For the Southeast Asia startup ecosystem, events like this matter beyond the deals that may follow. They matter for the conversations that shift how founders think and how investors see the region: the slow, compounding work of building trust across a geography that still too often gets treated as a monolith.

See you at the next one.

MatchCAP Asia 2026 was organized by Endeavor.

About Endeavor

Endeavor is the leading global community of high-impact entrepreneurs. Operating across 50+ markets, Endeavor selects, mentors, and invests in founders who are building companies that create jobs, inspire the next generation, and drive economic growth in their home markets and beyond. Since 1997, Endeavor Entrepreneurs have generated hundreds of billions in revenue and created millions of jobs worldwide.