.jpg)
We're excited to share Iterative's Summer 2026 batch, our 13th since starting in 2020. I say this every batch and I'll keep saying it: this one feels like our strongest yet.
As always, we kicked things off with orientation in Bali. 15 founders from across the region flew in, spent a few days together, met our General and Visiting Partners, and had their first office hours. More importantly, they started building relationships with each other that will last well beyond the program.
This was also one of our most competitive batches. We received over 900 applications and spent hundreds of hours interviewing founders. Out of that, we picked 10 startups we're really excited about.
- Circle Asia (Vietnam): Vietnam's first credit-led neobank
- Clouted (Singapore): AI engine for viral marketing
- CrewRun (Singapore): Admin work on autopilot, for service businesses
- Gowajee (Thailand): AI voice agents that run lending operations
- LearnKata (Singapore): Duolingo for college exams
- LocalPay (Vietnam): A financial home for people who live abroad
- Simaia (Hong Kong): Get recommended by AI in every local market
- Wovenstack (Singapore): AI that makes hotels more money per room
There are two other companies we invested in - an AI bookkeeping roll-up and an interactive gameplay platform - but they wish to remain in stealth mode.
If you're an investor, watch their pitches on our Demo Day website here.
Why We Invested
Circle Asia
Company Description: Vietnam's first credit-led neobank
Founders: Arnab Ghosh, Marco Breu, Rahn Wood
Even though Vietnam's middle class is growing quickly, only about 5% of the population holds a credit card. Founder Arnab's read on the gap is sharp: Vietnamese consumers see a card purely as a borrowing product, and banks have sold it that way for years. Circle aims to give the power back to the consumers' hand and help them make smarter and informed credit decisions - they're building Vietnam's first credit-led neobank.
Having previously led Home Credit, Arnab has already launched and scaled credit card businesses past one million cards at two major Vietnamese banks. That track record is how Circle secured a partnership with VPBank, the country's largest card issuer, which brings a license, a credit line and access to roughly 15 million customers. We think this is only the beginning for Circle, and we're excited to see what comes next.
Clouted
Company Description: Clouted is the AI engine for viral marketing
Founders: Justin Enrique Banusing, Adriel Yong, David Constantine Viray
The creator economy market reached $200 billion in 2024 (and it's only going to increase), and brands increasingly reach buyers through creators. The hard part is distribution: getting the right content in front of the right viewers across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and X. That's where Clouted comes in.
Clouted takes in a brand's strategy and content library, then plan and run campaigns across clipping, fan pages, influencer seeding and paid ads. The founder, Justin, has spent more than a decade inside the creator economy as a DJ and festival producer; he was also previously the founder of AcadArena, which Iterative backed in its early days. If you follow Justin on LinkedIn, he's refreshingly honest about why AcadArena didn't work out. Now, as a second-time founder and alongside co-founders Adriel and David, he's ready to take on the problem space with a renewed sense of approach.
They seem to be on the right track. Since October 2025, Clouted has generated more than one billion views across 250+ campaigns and a network of 100,000+ creators. Slow Ventures led its $7M seed round, and we're glad to back Justin again.
CrewRun
Company Description: Admin work on autopilot, for service businesses
Founders: Lorin Bejleri
Having worked in his father's electrical company at 14, founder Lorin has since built software for more than 30 service businesses. Before writing any code for CrewRun, an AI admin that owners run by talking to it, he spent 30 days inside a Singapore air-conditioning business - he wanted to see whether real owners would pay for the service. They did.
That's because most trade business owners are non-technical, and are constantly required to be on-site in the field. This means they become their own bottleneck. Jobs are lost because messages are often missed, invoices end up being wrong, and the current solutions in the market are either still error-prone (an admin) or don't fit how business owners really work (legacy softwares). CrewRun does. We backed Lorin because few founders know their customer this closely, and we're excited to see CrewRun become the default way of working for business owners.
Gowajee
Company Description: AI voice agents that run lending operations
Founders: Pisuth (Ren) Huang, Pongsatorn Nitithammawoot, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich
Automating call operations in English have seen rapid improvement over the past few months, but the same can't be said for non-English languages. Global voice AI companies often build English-first, and local players never had speech models good enough to replace human agents. Gowajee is changing that.
Gowajee builds Thai-language voice AI agents that run enterprise call operations, from collections to appointment confirmations and lead qualification. Gowajee built its own Thai speech recognition and synthesis, reaching about 97% accuracy at half-second latency. Founder Ren has been building AI since 2014 and has a prior exit, and co-founder Ekapol, the MIT-trained chief AI scientist, leads the speech model work.
Monthly revenue grew eightfold in six months, and Gowajee's largest customer grew its call volume more than 40-fold in three months across 20 use cases. This was Ren's third application to Iterative, and we're excited to back his expansion across Asia.
LearnKata
Company Description: Duolingo for college exams
Founders: Ryan Loh Yong Rui, Alfred Ben
There are plenty of AI study tools in the market, but they're unlikely to help students build real understanding. That's because most AI study tools answer with generic content that drifts away from what was actually taught in class. After paying close attention to how students studied, founder Ryan believes that learning should start from the student's own notes.
That's exactly how LearnKata work: it turns a student's own lecture notes into study plans, concept breakdowns and practice questions, where it cites every answer back to the student's materials. Co-founder Alfred brings B2B edtech experience from Learna Lab, and together, they're a powerhouse in building and shipping fast - in just two months, they got more than 50k users. Schools have started coming to them, including one deal that pre-sold several hundred seats. During the program, weekly active users grew 5.3x, beating the company's own targets. We're excited to back Ryan and Alfred in their mission to help students learn faster and smarter.
LocalPay
Company Description: A financial home for people who live abroad
Founders: Mike Egorov, Anna Nguyen
Long-term travelers and remote workers in Southeast Asia often can't open a local bank account, which locks them out of the QR payments that daily life in Vietnam runs on. Founders Mike and Anna know this all too well as digital nomads, and they built LocalPay. The solution: a non-custodial stablecoin wallet that turns USDT and USDC into local QR payments, backed by OTC and fiat partners in Vietnam. The surprising part? Many of LocalPay's users are not crypto-native.
Fun fact: we invested in LocalPay before the program, in what we called the Fellowship. It's an 8-week program where we help them get a better sense of what they're building, and who they're targeting. We were so impressed with their level of execution — they shipped fast (when one of our partners floated a merchant idea on a Thursday, they had a merchant on board by Sunday), talked to users every week, and revenue grew 87% during the Fellowship program - so much so that we backed them again for the core batch program.
Simaia
Company Description: Get recommended by AI in every local market
Founders: Ryan Wan, Monesh Lalwani
Most buyers are increasingly turning to AI models for answers - a client of Simaia lost 90% of its organic traffic, and they're not the only ones. Simaia aims to solve this. It's an AI-native GEO marketing team, and it put these companies back on the map and cited by AI models.
And customers love them. During the program, Simaia grew its paying customer base by 42% with very little churn. Founder Ryan is someone we've backed in the past, and now an experienced third-time founder, he knows the lay of the land: he stays close with their customers and understands what keeps them up at night, thinks in bets, and constantly validates their hypotheses. We're excited to back him again, alongside his co-founder, Monesh.
Wovenstack
Company Description: AI that makes hotels more money per room
Founders: Caesar Indra, Doan Lingga
Hotel groups run revenue, finance and guest operations across a patchwork of legacy systems, and the work around them is painfully manual. What it often looks like: hiring six people just to manage 20 of its 100 properties (an actual use case).
Wovenstack is an AI operating layer that connects to the property management systems and finance ledgers hotels already use, and runs those operations on top of them. With Wovenstack, that same company above can cover all 100 properties on a single platform.
Founder Caesar spent eleven years running Traveloka's accommodation business across Asia Pacific, and co-founder Doan built the AI and data systems behind the product. We backed two insiders who know exactly which hotel systems are broken, and we're confident they'll go far in revolutionising the industry.
