On November 4, 2025, Antares Ventures joined Cradle LIVE! ASEAN Startup Summit 2025 in Kuala Lumpur for a Beyond Carbon & Silicon session focused on deep-tech commercialization across ASEAN.
Held during Malaysia’s ASEAN Chairmanship year, the summit brought together founders, investors, corporates, and policymakers shaping Southeast Asia’s innovation landscape. The Antares session explored how the convergence of energy and computing is redefining competitiveness and sustainability across Asia’s growth markets.
The session opened with a keynote from Michael Gryseels, Founder & Managing Partner of Antares Ventures, followed by a panel featuring deep-tech founders building across grid technology, electric mobility, wastewater treatment, and building energy systems.
The panel featured Matthew Williams of IONATE, Irwan Tjahaja of Swap Energi, Kailash Nichani of Hydroleap, and Jayantika Soni, PhD of Resync. Together, they discussed how frontier technologies are being deployed across ASEAN, where grids, electric mobility, data centers, and critical infrastructure are already demanding new energy solutions.
The discussion focused on what commercialization looks like when science-backed ventures meet real-world infrastructure. In ASEAN, scale is not defined by market size alone. It depends on pilots, measurable outcomes, early partnerships, and the ability to integrate technologies into power networks, data centers, buildings, cities, and industrial systems already operating under constraint.
Deep-tech founders are no longer waiting for market readiness. They are shaping it through small-scale deployments, measurable performance, and partnerships with corporates willing to test and adopt new systems.
As highlighted by Michael Gryseels in his keynote, ASEAN now needs corporates and investors who can read those signals more closely, by looking for proof of integration and how technologies perform once they enter a power network, data center, or city.
At Antares Ventures, the value of sessions like this lies in seeing our investment thesis at work. What began as a view on the convergence of energy and computing is now visible in how founders are building around real economic and infrastructure pressures across Asia’s growth markets.
We thank Cradle Fund for opening that space and for engaging founders and partners shaping what deep tech scale now means in ASEAN.
The next phase of climate innovation in ASEAN will be shaped by what can move from technical promise into operating systems.
