Asia-Pacific’s newest crop of entrepreneurs are rapidly turning to artificial intelligence, with founders both launching new AI startups and spending more on AI tools.
Spending on AI tools by founders rose 20% last year, according to an in-house study of over 37,000 regional SMEs by Aspire, a Singapore-based fintech firm.
“This signals a reallocation of capital towards efficiency,” Andrea Baronchelli, Aspire’s co-founder and CEO, tells Fortune. Usage of Anthropic’s Claude model grew by three times; usage of Cursor, an AI-coding tool, rose by 4.2 times. “This suggests that startups are now using AI to code and build their core products, not just for administrative tasks.”
Aspire’s study also reports a surge in AI startups. Thirty percent of new startups in Singapore were involved in AI, according to Aspire’s data. The figure is even higher in the Chinese city of Hong Kong: Two-thirds of new businesses onboarded in late 2025 came from the AI sector.
“There’s a high level of institutional readiness in both economies, as well as a new breed of founder who is leaning into a climate of intense global competition and disruption,” he says. “It’s great to see so many APAC businesses embrace disruption rather than resist it.”
