Year after year, the same pattern shows up across Southeast Asia’s ecosystem reports. Even after a prolonged funding slowdown, e-commerce and fintech remain Southeast Asia’s most dominant startup verticals.
The latest e-Conomy SEA 2025 findings are hard to ignore as Southeast Asia’s digital economy is forecast to surpass US$300B in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) by 2025, with revenues projected to hit US$135B as profitability accelerates.
In 2026, e-commerce and fintech are still dominating because they stem from their alignment with repeatable behaviours in the region, namely commerce and payments.
Every day demand is still the most reliable growth engine
When capital gets selective, the market rewards startups that sit inside daily habits. In Southeast Asia, commerce is still the most dominant market.
The e-Conomy SEA 2025 report states that three in five people in the region shop online and over 60% of all payments are digital. Consumers in Southeast Asia are stuck in the loop of buying, reordering, topping up, paying bills and sending money more than they adopt new products. Frequency drives repeat usage, retention and revenue.
It is a distribution engine that compounds through repeat purchases, discovery loops and logistics density. When it works, it produces predictable transaction volume.
E-commerce and fintech continue to drive the growth of the digital economy
Southeast Asia is digitalising quickly, but unevenly. Infrastructure quality, device affordability and digital skills still vary widely across countries and within them. In markets like this, the startup categories that scale tend to be the ones that can operate despite friction.
Commerce and finance thrive in this environment. E-commerce adapts through hybrid logistics and local trust building, while Fintech adapts through QR, offline-friendly flows and embedded distribution inside platforms that people are already familiar with. That is why digital economy growth remains anchored in these two sectors, while newer sectors increasingly form around them rather than replacing them.
Why other startup verticals still orbit commerce and finance
While Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem has expanded into climate tech, health tech, AI tooling, logistics software and B2B SaaS, most of these categories remain structurally dependent on e-commerce and fintech rails. Very few operate as standalone demand engines. Instead, they plug into transaction-heavy systems that already exist.
Climate and EV startups, for example, still rely on digital payments, lending and insurance layers to monetise. Health tech platforms may innovate around access and diagnostics, but retention often comes from subscriptions, reimbursements and embedded payments. Even AI-first startups in the region are more likely to succeed when they optimise pricing, fraud detection, credit scoring or merchant productivity rather than attempt consumer behaviour change at scale.
This is a pattern unique to emerging digital markets. In Southeast Asia, startups that require users to adopt entirely new habits face higher friction, slower trust-building and longer payback cycles. As a result, innovation gravitates towards improving how people already buy, sell, lend and pay rather than replacing those actions altogether.
In this sense, e-commerce and fintech do not crowd out other verticals. They act as the economic base layer. Most successful new startups in the region are not competing with these sectors, but quietly embedding themselves inside them, using commerce volume and financial flows as distribution, data and monetisation engines.
Evolving from growth plays to prioritising monetisation
The change we foresee in 2026 is not the dominance of these verticals, but the mindset inside them. Founders are being measured on unit economics, margin structure and efficiency.
The e-Conomy SEA 2025 data reflects this shift. E-commerce GMV and revenue are projected to reach US$185 billion and US$41 billion in 2025, with video commerce accounting for roughly a quarter of total GMV. Meanwhile, private funding has ticked up, but it is concentrating into later-stage companies with proven models, with digital financial services drawing about half of the total deal value over the past 12 months.
The new winners look like systems that can profit per transaction and improve contribution margins over time.
What this concentration reveals about Southeast Asia
The unwavering attention in e-commerce and fintech also reveals market realities. Southeast Asia is fragmented and consumers are multi-platform, price-sensitive and quick to switch. One e-Conomy SEA 2025 insight notes that 87% of users juggle multiple e-wallets, while traditional banks still hold a significant trust advantage.
In a market like this, flashy features do not last long. The real winners are the startups that can master the basics, such as getting deliveries right every time, giving merchants better tools to work with and building payment systems that can handle the messiness of cross-border rules without the user feeling it. Infrastructure gaps make this even more prominent. Teams that can connect the offline and online behaviour are the ones that grow most over time.
A bright future for fintech and e-commerce
E-commerce and fintech’s dominance in 2026 is less about the lack of innovation but more about where the real, repeatable value is still being created at scale. In Southeast Asia, the biggest opportunities still revolve around buying, selling and moving money, because those are the behaviours that occur every day.
E-commerce and fintech in Southeast Asia continue to dominate because they are rooted in daily needs, run on transaction-led revenue models, and solve the region’s structural realities such as fragmentation, infrastructure gaps and the need for trusted payment rails.