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A growing roster of vertical AI startups is emerging in Southeast Asia to serve sectors ranging from seafood to finance. Singapore-based venture capital firm Antler<\/a> recently made a bet on 37 of them, investing $5.1 million in total for pre-seed deals. This included a strategic partnership with Khazanah, Malaysia\u2019s sovereign wealth fund, which invested into seven startups.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look at the rest of the world, there\u2019s lots of horizontal AI and it\u2019s becoming insanely competitive,\u201d Antler co-founder and managing partner Jussi Salovaara tells TechCrunch. \u201cWhat founders are increasingly looking to solve in this part of the world are practical problems in different industries.\u201d<\/p>\n He adds that even though Southeast Asia doesn\u2019t have the talent pool to build something like OpenAI yet, they can take a customer-first approach to AI apps, solving pain points unique to different sectors and markets.<\/p>\n Within verticalized AI, different trends are emerging in each country. For example, Vietnam has a large pool of technical talent. Founders there who are working on a consumer startup usually focus more on the domestic market at first, but B2B startups are more globally-oriented from the beginning, Salovaara says. On the other hand, Indonesian startups tend not to target international expansion because their domestic market is so large, but Antler hopes to see more of them expand internationally.<\/p>\n One of Antler\u2019s investments is BorderDollar<\/a>, which is building an invoice financing platform for cross border logistics. Since funding structures are different in Southeast Asia than the rest of the world, BorderDollar used their own training data to build a credit scoring system.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t really take something from the West and then just plug it in here and use that,\u201d says Salovaara.<\/p>\n Another member of Antler\u2019s portfolio is CapGo<\/a>, which Antler backed in large part because of the founders\u2019 backgrounds: CTO Chen Yu worked on machine learning at Grab and CEO Yichen Guo earned a Harvard MBA and worked at Citi, Almanac and VIPKid as a product manager. CapGo automates data acquisition for market research, a pain point Salovaara is familiar with because he used to work at an investment bank.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s super unclear why you would throw endless amounts of human hours into researching a market when AI can do so much more effectively and efficiently,\u201d he says, adding that CapGo\u2019s competitive moat is its ability to build data sources that are tailored first for Southeast Asia. It plans to expand into the rest of the Asia Pacific region.<\/p>\n Both Zolo<\/a> and Seafoody<\/a> were created to solve problems in Southeast Asia\u2019s food supply chain infrastructure. Based in Malaysai, Seafoody was founded by Eleen Kee, Samantha Ooi and Zach Leong. Kee, its CEO, comes from a family that has worked in the seafood industry for several generations. Seafoody is focused on using AI to eliminate middlemen in the seafood supply chain and sell directly to businesses. Zolo, meanwhile, is also simplifying the food supply chain by using AI to shorten the order management process, which usually entails a lot of back-and-forth between suppliers and restaurants on WhatsApp.<\/p>\n