Southeast Asia’s startup story is usually told through ride-hailing, fintech, and e-commerce. But a quieter, stranger, and potentially more consequential sector is taking shape in the region’s labs, farms, and hospitals: biotech.
Founders are using fermentation to turn waste into biomaterials, growing seafood and fat from cells, building AI tools for cancer care and heart scans, engineering crops for tougher climates, and developing diagnostics designed specifically for Asian populations. It is not an easy sector to build in; biotech demands patient capital, deep technical talent, complex regulatory navigation, and long commercialisation cycles.
Also Read: Asia’s biotech boom: Innovation, investment, and a new era of discovery
Yet the sheer breadth of companies now emerging from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines suggests the region’s life-sciences ecosystem has moved well past the experimental stage, and is beginning to challenge assumptions about where deeptech gets built.
Below is a list of 27 biotech firms that are redrawing the region innovation map:
RWDC Industries (Singapore)
RWDC ferments used cooking oil into PHA, a fully biodegradable biopolymer that’s meant to replace single-use plastic in straws, cutlery and packaging.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Roland Wee and Dr Daniel Carraway | 2015 | Series A (2018, 2019) and a headline-grabbing US$133 million Series B (2020) | Vickers Venture Partners, WI Harper Group, and Temasek |
Protenga (Singapore/Malaysia)
Protenga runs “Smart Insect Farms” that turn organic waste into black soldier fly protein for aquaculture, animal feed and pet food.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Leo Wein | 2016 | Seed round, 2020 | SEEDS Capital, Roslin Technologies |
Engine Biosciences (Singapore/US)
Engine Biosciences combines AI with wet-lab biology to map gene interactions and speed up cancer drug discovery.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Jeffrey Lu, Timothy Lu, Daphne Teo, | 2015 | US$10 million seed (2018), Southeast Asia’s largest institutional seed round at the time, followed by Series A (2021) | 6 Dimensions Capital, DHVC |
Us2.ai (Singapore)
Us2.ai uses AI to automate the reading of echocardiograms, cutting a process that takes cardiologists many minutes down to under two.
Founders: James Hare, Dr Carolyn Lam, Dr Yoran Hummel and Paul Seekings
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| James Hare, Dr Carolyn Lam, Dr Yoran Hummel and Paul Seekings | 2017 | Pre-seed (2019) and Series A of US$16 million (2022) | Sequoia Capital and EDBI |
AMILI (Singapore)
AMILI runs Southeast Asia’s first gut microbiome bank, building an Asia-specific database to power diagnostics and personalised nutrition.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Dr Jeremy Lim and Dr Jonathan Lee | 2019 | Series A, US$10.5 million (2022) | Vulcan Capital, SEEDS Capital, and Emtek Group |
KYAN Technologies (Singapore)
KYAN applies “small data AI” to match cancer patients with the most effective drug-dose combinations, developed with NUS and UCLA.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Dean Ho and Chih-Ming Ho | 2016 | Seed round (2022) and a subsequent pre-Series A | Undisclosed |
ImpacFat (Singapore)
ImpacFat cultivates omega-3-rich fish fat from stem cells, aimed at alt-meat, cosmetics and supplements.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Mandy Hon and Dr Shigeki Sugii | 2019 | Pre-seed round, 2022 | Big Idea Ventures |
Qarbotech (Malaysia)
Qarbotech makes QarboGrow, a carbon-quantum-dot photosynthesis enhancer that boosts crop yields without genetic modification.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Chor Chee Hoe, Prof Suraya Abdul Rashid and Amirul Merican | 2018 | Seed round, US$700,000 (2023) | Khazanah Nasional, Temasek Holdings, 500 Global |
NLYTech Biotech (Malaysia)
NLYTech develops biodegradable, plastic-free packaging materials made from natural ingredients as an alternative to single-use plastics.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Yee Tee Law | 2019-20 | Seed round, 2020 | Undisclosed |
Vulcan Augmetics (Vietnam)
Vulcan builds affordable, modular robotic prosthetics designed to click together like building blocks.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Rafael Masters | 2019 | Pre-seed/angel round, 2019 | Undisclosed |
Teora (Singapore)
Teora develops biologics that manage disease in agriculture and aquaculture without relying on chemical pesticides.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Rishita Changede | 2020 | Seed round, 2022 | Entrepreneur First, Plug and Play APAC, Investible |
KINNVA (Singapore)
KINNVA is a synthetic-biology company using fermentation to turn waste streams into biochemicals for food, feed and cosmetics.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Brian Reddy | 2019 | Pre-seed round, 2019 | Hatch Singapore |
Sinhke (Vietnam)
Sinhke builds AI-powered hardware that measures shrimp larvae health before farmers commit to large-scale cultivation.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Ngoc Phuong Hoang Nguyen | 2024 | Pre-seed round, 2024 | Antler |
Virdalis (Singapore)
Virdalis is building a cultivation and data platform around duckweed, the world’s fastest-growing flowering plant, as a soy alternative for animal feed protein.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| JM Aujero | 2025-26 | Pre-seed round, early 2026 | Undisclosed |
Allozymes (Singapore)
Allozymes runs an ultra-high-throughput microfluidics platform that screens millions of enzyme variants a day, effectively an “enzyme discovery engine” for pharma, food and chemical industries.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Peyman Salehian and Dr Akbar Vahidi | 2019-2020 as an NUS spin-out | Seed (2019) and a US$15 million Series A (2024) | SOSV, Entrepreneur First, Seventure Partners, Xora Innovation |
FathomX (Singapore)
FathomX is an NUS/NUHS spin-off building AI to improve the accuracy of mammograms, particularly for dense breast tissue common among Asian women.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Prof Mikael Hartman and Prof Mengling Feng (CEO: Stephen Lim) | 2019 | Pre-Series A, SGD2.24 million (2022) | Undisclosed; backed by SMART, NHIC, Enterprise Singapore programmes |
REVIVO BioSystems (Singapore)
An A*STAR spin-off building “organ-on-a-chip” 4D human skin models to replace animal testing for cosmetics and pharma compounds.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Dr Massimo Alberti and Bert Grobben | 2019 | Seed round, 2020 | Evonik Venture Capital |
Advanx Health (Malaysia)
Malaysia’s first consumer DNA-testing company, offering genetic reports on health risk, nutrition and fitness traits.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Yong Wei Shian and Chew Yen Ping | 2017 | Angel/pre-seed round, 2018 | Undisclosed |
KosmodeHealth (Singapore)
An NUS Food Science spin-off extracting proteins and fibres from food-processing waste to formulate functional foods and biomedical bio-ink.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Florence Leong and an NUS Food Science & Technology professor (co-founder) | 2019 | Angel/pre-seed round, 2019 | Rapzo Capital, NUS, BLOCK71 |
Imagene Labs (Singapore)
A subsidiary of Asia Genomics offering saliva-based DNA testing for personalised nutrition, skincare and fitness products across Asia.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Dr Mun Yew Wong | 2016 | Series A (undisclosed amount) | Formation 8 |
Meatiply (Singapore)
Meatiply is a multi-cell-type cultivated meat company that produced Asia’s first cultivated smoked duck breast.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Dr Elwin Tan, Dr Benjamin Chua, Dr Jason Chua and Prof Teh Bin Tean | 2021 | Pre-seed (2022) and US$3.75 million seed round (2023) | Wavemaker Partners, AgFunder, SEEDS Capital |
Singrow (Singapore)
An agri-biotech firm that cross-bred and gene-edited the world’s first tropical-climate strawberry, grown in an indoor vertical farm.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Dr Bao Shengjie and Xu Tao | 2019 | Seed round and a US$4.5 million Series A (2025) | AgFunder |
Dendrotonics (Philippines)
Develops biodiversity-restoration technology to make degraded land ecologically and commercially productive again.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Ephraim Cercado | 2023 | Pre-Series A/Bridge round, 2023 | Undisclosed |
QuikPath (Singapore)
Built a self-administered RT-PCR Covid-19 screening technology designed to scale rapid, accurate infection monitoring.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Janelle Ang | 2020 | Angel/pre-seed round, 2020 | Undisclosed |
ETBio (Singapore)
Harnesses microalgae to build next-generation air filtration solutions.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Blaz Bakalar | 2019 | Angel/pre-seed round, 2019 | Undisclosed |
Ternion Biosciences (Singapore)
Provides high-throughput cardiac safety screening assays used in preclinical drug development.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Poh Loong Soong | 2017 | Angel/pre-seed round, 2017 | Undisclosed |
CloudSeq (Singapore)
CloudSeq runs an NRF-backed cloud platform built to handle big data for healthcare and agricultural genomics.
| Founders | Founding year | Funding | Investors |
| Dadabhai T. Singh | 2016 | Seed round, 2016 | National Research Foundation Singapore (grant-backed) |
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