GenAI Fund Backs First ASEAN Enterprise AI Accelerator with US$6M for Startup Pilots

GenAI Fund’s FastTrack accelerator pairs six AI startups with regional enterprises, aiming to turn pilots into scalable products within months.

GenAI Fund, which positions itself as Asia’s first AI-focused venture fund and corporate innovation platform, has launched what it calls ASEAN’s first Enterprise AI Accelerator, FastTrack, with a US$6 million allocation to six selected startups in its first cohort.

Unlike a typical accelerator that focuses on mentoring and demo days, FastTrack is built around enterprise co-development. Each startup is paired with large Southeast Asian corporates to build and pilot real-world AI projects with immediate go-to-market potential. Corporate partners in the first cohort include Coca-Cola Beverages Vietnam, a major Vietnamese bank, Tasco, and other regional enterprises exploring AI adoption.

The program responds to three key trends: enterprises are accelerating their AI adoption, regional AI talent is maturing quickly, yet early-stage AI startups still struggle to gain access to large organisations and real business use cases.

How FastTrack Is Structured

FastTrack is designed as a 12-week enterprise-focused accelerator. Beyond capital allocation, the program bundles several layers of support aimed at solving the most common pain points for AI founders selling into large companies.

Startups in the cohort receive:

• Up to US$1 million in GPU and cloud resources
• Access to technical experts to refine and scale their products
• Investment evaluation from GenAI Fund
• Proof-of-concept (PoC) opportunities with more than 100 large corporates across Asia through the GenAI Open Innovation network
  

GenAI Fund says its proprietary AI matchmaking platform has already facilitated more than 300 curated connections between enterprises and AI startups since late 2024. The six companies selected for FastTrack Cohort 1 are presented as the strongest outcomes of that pipeline.

The goal is ambitious but clear: pilot projects with paired enterprises within three months, giving both startups and corporates a fast path from idea to implementation.

Who’s in Cohort 1?

The six startups in FastTrack Cohort 1 are all building enterprise-focused generative and agentic AI products across sectors such as finance, healthcare, mobility and retail:

• Blaze AI – Voice AI infrastructure offering text-to-speech, speech-to-text and speaker diarization tailored for Southeast Asian languages, aiming to make voice interfaces more accessible and affordable in the region.
• Life AI – A DeSci (decentralised science) platform using AI to accelerate genomics and precision healthcare through data sharing and open collaboration.
• Ourteam – An AI recruiter that automates candidate screening to help enterprises cut review time and improve hiring quality and fairness.
• Presight – An “AI data analyst” that generates governed, hallucination-resistant insights directly from enterprise data warehouses.
• Revve AI – Builds human-like AI voice and chat agents for high-volume industries such as financial services and consumer brands, with a focus on scaling revenue without proportional headcount growth.
• Tribee – A behavioural AI platform delivering real-time insights and coaching to frontline sales teams, with reported performance boosts of more than 30 percent within a year.
  

Each of these six startups has secured paid PoC projects through the program and is under active investment evaluation by GenAI Fund, suggesting that the accelerator also functions as a deal-sourcing funnel for the firm.

What the Application Data Reveals About Enterprise AI

FastTrack’s first cohort attracted over 300 applications from more than 15 countries, with the largest share coming from:

• Singapore – 27%
• Vietnam – 23%
• United States – 11%
• Malaysia – 9%
• India – 8%
• Indonesia – 6%

The sector mix is revealing. The top areas represented were finance (43%), healthcare (37%), and retail (35%), followed by manufacturing, logistics and education. These are industries where AI can deliver fairly measurable outcomes—risk assessment, fraud detection, process automation, patient triage, sales optimisation and supply chain visibility.

Notably, around 92% of applicants were B2B-focused, highlighting how the centre of gravity for AI in the region is shifting toward enterprise use cases rather than consumer applications. For investors and founders, this suggests that enterprise AI is no longer a side theme—it is becoming the main commercial path for many AI teams in Asia.

Why This Model Matters for AI Founders

The press release is explicit about the pain points FastTrack is trying to solve:

• slow enterprise onboarding,
• poor product–market fit in real business settings,
• cash flow constraints,
• competition with well-established incumbents, and
• lack of sales resources and enterprise networks.

By embedding AI startups directly into enterprise problem statements and shared pilots, the program tries to de-risk several early-stage challenges at once:

1. Faster validation – Paid PoCs with real customers provide evidence of value earlier than typical enterprise sales cycles allow.
2. Sharper product focus – Co-building with corporates gives startups access to real workflows, data and constraints, improving product–market fit.
3. Clearer path to scale – If pilots succeed, startups can move towards regional rollouts with the same or adjacent enterprises, rather than starting every sales process from scratch.

From a venture perspective, this design helps GenAI Fund identify “breakout” companies not only based on technology, but on their ability to execute in complex enterprise environments.

Positioning ASEAN as an Enterprise AI Testbed

GenAI Fund positions itself as Southeast Asia’s first AI-focused venture fund and innovation platform, with a network of more than 2,300 AI startups and over 100 enterprise partners. FastTrack sits squarely within that strategy.

For the region, the program plays into a broader narrative:

• Enterprises are under pressure to adopt AI but lack internal capacity to build everything in-house.
• AI startups need distribution, reference customers and trust to win enterprise deals.
• Governments and corporates in ASEAN are increasingly open to partnering with specialised technology firms if it can accelerate digital transformation.

By pairing startups and enterprises early and structuring for pilots within three months, FastTrack attempts to make ASEAN not just a consumer market for AI tools, but a development and deployment hub for enterprise AI solutions.

Applications are already open for FastTrack Cohort 2, which will target another wave of global AI startups looking to scale with Southeast Asian enterprises..

————————

Quick Takeaways

• GenAI Fund has allocated US$6 million to the first cohort of its Enterprise FastTrack AI Accelerator, the first of its kind in ASEAN.
  
• Six AI startups were selected, each paired with major Southeast Asian enterprises for paid proof-of-concept projects.
  
• The program targets enterprise adoption within three months, not just mentorship or demo days.
  
• FastTrack received over 300 applications from 15+ countries, with 92% focused on B2B AI.
  
• Startups receive GPU/cloud credits, technical support, enterprise partnerships, and investment evaluation.
  
• Applications are now open for Cohort 2, aimed at AI startups looking to scale with leading ASEAN enterprises.